My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. The week before Christmas, my brother died suddenly. The death certificate says the cause of death was pneumonia, but this was only the result of a lifetime of cigarettes, alcohol and prescription drugs (read more about my brother’s death at Life and Death: A Tale of Two Children.) We’ll talk about how prescription drugs can undermine your health in general, the side effects of the specific prescription drugs Bradley was taking at the time of his death, and what he could have done naturally instead of taking these prescription drugs. I can’t help but think my brother could be alive today if he had made better choices. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

• Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?
• Evaluating A Study and Testing a Test
• Seven Deadly Drugs
• The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally
• What We Can Do About Cancer
• The Power of pH
• How to Protect Your Health From Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings
• Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage
• Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help
• How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements
• How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use—And How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and into Health
• How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals
• Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
• See More Clearly with Natural Remedies
• Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs
• Different Types of Detox
• Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies
• Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
• Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
• How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
• You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
• Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
• It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
• How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
• Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
• Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
• Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved a Life

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: January 14, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

But actually, we’re actually – I can’t talk this morning. Actually, this show is going to be about a sad subject, which is that the week before Christmas, my brother died, my little brother. He’s younger than me and the death certificate says that he died of pneumonia, but my opinion is that he died from a lifetime of taking prescription drugs.

I have on the show today as my guest, Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. She’s been on the show many times. She’s on every other Wednesday. You can listen to the back shows if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.

She dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs, but she knows all about prescription drugs and what they can do to your body. I just want to do this show today in honor of my brother and of other choices, so that if you have loved ones that are on prescription drugs, that you can know what the possible outcomes might be and offer them another solution.

I know that sometimes, that’s hard to do because obviously, I’ve known and my brother all his life and he knows all about my work and I have tried to help him many times to do things a more natural way. The last time I talked to him – he lived clear on the other side of the country, so we didn’t see each other all the time. The last time I talked to him before I got the phone call (the week before Christmas), that he was on maximum life support.

The last time I talked to him, he was telling me about all the drugs that he was taking and how despondent he was about being addicted to them, but that he couldn’t get off of them. I offered to help him get off of them and he said, “I can’t go through that.”

I want to do this show today because if you have loved ones that are in this situations, loved ones who are taking these kinds of drugs (and we’re going to be talking about them today), please, please, please do whatever you can to help them because this is the end result. And Pamela, registered pharmacist is going to talk to us about that today.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, Debra. I’m really sorry for your loss. This is really important that we do this show and that people know about some of the dangers of the medications that he was taking, which are commonly prescribed medicine.

DEBRA: Yes, I’m going to let you do a lot of talking because I find myself sitting here being quite emotional since it’s only been a month. It’s only been a month.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, it’s not too long, but we need to just kind of look at some of the medicines. We’ve discussed this. I have a list in front of me, the things that he was on. He was taking dextroampethamine, which everyone knows as Ritalin. He was on oxycodone, which is a very strong narcotic. He was on Ketorolac, which is an anti-inflammatory; Methadone, which is another narcotic; Valium, which is an anxiolytic; and he was on Lasix, which is a diuretic. He was also on Synthroid and some stool softeners.

So this, I can tell you just working as a pharmacist that this is pretty typical. A lot of people are prescribed these medications. And some of the things that people maybe weren’t aware of, but I’m going to explain a little bit about the scheduling of medication because three of the medicines he’s taking are schedule II.

Schedule II is the most highly addicting besides schedule I. Schedule II is what’s recognize in the prescription realm as being the most addictive and the most problematic. So the FDA assigned this scheduling system quite a long time ago to try and categorize different medicines, so people knew what their – and the categories are one through five based on potential for addiction and dependence and abuse.

So schedule I (and I think this is important for people to know about these schedules because it shows you how dangerous the medicines are), schedule I, there are no schedule I drugs available in pharmacies here in the United States. Schedule I is heroine and LSD, marijuana – which of course, different states are legalizing it above and beyond what the federal government has mandated – ecstasy and [inaudible 00:06:05]. People, they’re smoking these kinds of things.

These medicines are not considered – schedule I’s, there are no schedule I’s available in regular pharmacy practice in the United States. In Europe and in England, there are some schedule I’s that are available through research. They do have heroine and so forth. That’s different over here. In the United States, schedule I is not available.

Schedule II – and I want to really focus on this, schedule II. This is from the FDA site itself describing schedule II, “…substances or chemicals are defined as drugs with high potential for abuse, less abuse potential than the schedule I drug, with use potentially leading to severe psychological and physical dependence. These drugs are also considered dangerous. Some examples of schedule II drugs are…” – there’s the methadone, there’s the oxycodone and there is the Adderall and the Ritalin.

So the three of the drugs that he was taking are considered schedule II. I was reading right from the FDA website the definition of a schedule II drug.

So this should make people pause and concerned that schedule II drugs, the FDA is saying they’re potentially leading to severe psychological and physical dependence. “These drugs are also considered dangerous.” That is a sentence, period.

We know that these three medicines that he was taking have high tolerance, high dependence and the fact that most of these people that are put on these – especially the narcotics, in particular, the oxycodone, maybe even more so than the methadone. But we know that taking schedule II narcotics, patients have a higher risk of what’s called morbidity and mortality. They have a higher chance of dying at a younger age from complications from the narcotic usage.

DEBRA: Now, I want to ask you a question. So Ritalin, when I put together this list, a friend of mine who went to get my brother’s effects (because I wasn’t living close by in order to do that), he was reading to me over the phone what was written on the bottles. And so I didn’t realize that he was taking Ritalin and Valium because I was just looking at the medical names for these.

But Ritalin, I mean, school children are given Ritalin?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, this is the problem, yes. It’s highly addictive and has psychological dependence and problems. We know that kids have ADD, ADHD, these sort of diagnoses where they have inattentiveness. I have different theories about that. I mean, that’s probably a whole other show in itself. I really am against using medications for small children. I think it’s really dangerous. We have a high percentage of children – I think I was reading in New York City like one in four kids is on a psycho-stimulant. It’s a lot.

DEBRA: It’s a lot.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s a lot of children. I don’t agree with it, but I understand why society is leaning towards using these medicines in small kids and in people because people are demanding it. Most parents are not going to take the time to spend a lot on parenting skills and get the kids to be attentive to school. Most people are just basically surviving, running around trying to get everything done. I think it’s just an easy solution to maybe a complex problem that requires lots of lifestyle changes that they’re not willing to do. I mean, that’s a personal opinion.

DEBRA: Well, I think my brother has been taking these drugs for a very long time because I remember like 40 years ago – that’s a long time – 40 years ago, when we were young adults, I sent him a Christmas present. He called me up and he just screamed at me over the phone about, “Why are you sending me a Christmas present? Don’t you know that I have to go down to the post office and pick it up and I just can’t do that? Why are you bothering me?”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, no!

DEBRA: He just totally flipped out because I sent him a Christmas present. I recognized that’s not him, that’s not my brother. It was the drugs. That was going on like 40 years ago.

We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about prescription drugs and safer alternatives with my guest, Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. She actually practices – say the words of what you practice because I’ve got it right here. Pharmacognosy! That’s the word. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And there is a term for that. It’s actually a field in itself called ‘pharmacognosy’, which is the study of medicinal plants. And I’ve said before on other shows with her that I love this word because it’s pharma, which is drugs and cognosy is intelligence. And plants are healing substances with intelligence coming from a live thing instead of being synthesized in the lab.

Any time we’ve talked many times before about how taking plant-based substances for healing will actually heal your body, whereas drugs might alleviate your symptoms, but they don’t have healing factors. You just keep taking them and taking them and get addicted to some of them. That’s what we’re talking about today, addiction to some prescription drugs and how they can lead to not living as long as you might. As I’ve said at the top of the show that my brother died the week before Christmas and he was taking quite a number of drugs which we’re discussing today.

Okay, Pamela, let’s talk about the first drug on the list, Ritalin.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So the Ritalin, we know that most of the time, people are given Ritalin because of inattentiveness, ADD, ADHD, that type of thing. Ritalin is a psycho-stimulant. And of course, especially in younger people, when they start on this medicine, there is some data that shows that it’s a gateway to other drugs. It opens the potential for alcohol abuse, marijuana, cocaine, things that are illegal drugs.

So we have to look and think that when the body gets conditioned – and you have to understand that these receptors in the brain, that’s how these drugs work – there are receptors in the brain that are stimulated and when they get stimulated, the body likes this. That’s why they’re considered addictive. Using psycho-stimulants to get attentiveness instead of looking at behavioral issues themselves really needs to be addressed.

I know for a fact that I’ve used these with adolescents before and adults that people that have ADD, instead of using Ritalin, they can get away with using pro-DHA, which are the common focus in fish oil, the DHA, the EPA of 4.5 to 1. And a lot of people really respond to low dose zinc, 15-30 mg. a day because zinc is a co-factor for over 200 enzymatic reactions in the brain and a lot of people with inattentiveness, children and adults alike, they can benefit from having more of the zinc.

Actually, zinc is depleted when people eat lots of preservatives, refined food, high fructose corn syrup, a lot of things that are just hidden in our diet. If they’re not eating a really clean diet, which most people aren’t, the zinc depletion as far as these co-factors in the brain is pretty significant. Just doing those two things there, many times, people notice a big difference in their attentiveness and they can possibly avoid being on this drug.

DEBRA: Well, I think that we’ve talked about it so many times, but it bears repeating here. The two things that are probably the biggest things that are contributing to health problems today are number one, exposure to toxic chemicals and number two, lack of nutrition.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!

DEBRA: Most people are so malnourished that if they would just take the right vitamins before they ever consider taking a drug, a lot of their symptoms will go away.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s exactly right. So what I’m telling people is that these drugs, not even looking at them as gateway drug, but when you’re drug naïve, you haven’t been on these medicine and you’re kind of standing in front of opportunities (because life is full of opportunities and knowledge is power), instead of putting these things into your body, you can stand there and say, “Okay, I see that I have a problem. I need something for pain or I need something for attentiveness” and look for tools that can help you instead of doing to the medicines first because the medicines, it’s kind of like you open the door and you can’t close it. You’re on them forever. Very few people will take – especially pain medicines, we’ll take patients off of these things.

So it’s kind of like all-or-nothing. It’s like you’ve got the gambling table, all or nothing. I don’t really think that that’s the best way to approach people’s issues. The best way is to try some other things first. Natural products do work very well. Maybe they won’t work for 100% of people, but I see this from personal experience that because I actually transitioned people off medicines many times, I tell people, “Before you actually take that initial step, you really need to look at what we can use.” A homeopathic detox takes the chemical out of the body. Use a calming, focusing fish oil to try and focus the brain.

Also, Huperzine, which is an herb has very, very good data that it works as an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. I’ll explain what that is. When the brain and the synapse, when people have Alzheimer’s or memory issues, they use a drug called Aricept. Aricept is very expensive and Aricept has very limited use especially in Europe because it’s so expensive and they find that it just really kind of staves of the memory problems for maybe six months. But it’s used quite widely in the United States.

What this does is it allows more acetylcholines to make memories in the brain and it kind of stops the enzyme that breaks it down in the synapse. So generally, what it does is acetylcholine is a memory and when you make a memory, acetylcholine goes and it puts it in a certain place in the brain and then that’s your memory. You can retrieve it or put it away.

So Rx-Brain or Huperzine (Huperzia serrata) is a plant that shows the exact same activity as Aricept with none of the side effects. I even use it for people that come and say, “I need more attentiveness. I’m going back to school, I’m reading.” Instead of reaching for the Ritalin, these supplements run like $10 to $15 for a month, very inexpensive and very, very effective.

There’s tons of data on the Library of Medicine. If somebody wanted to say, “I need memory improvement, I need attentiveness improvement,” for $10 or $12 or something like that, you are really looking at enhanced memory. And there are studies that show that this works just like the drug.

DEBRA: Wow! I think that it’s just – we talk about this show after show. I think we’ve done ten shows or something like that now, but we keep talking about this show after show, about how it seems like any drug that you would be taking that’s a prescription drug or even an over-the-counter drug, that there’s a natural substance that can be used instead, which doesn’t have side effects, which is less expensive. We just should be reaching for those first.

We should be reaching for those first because you could stop taking them whenever you don’t want to take them anymore and you’re not addicted to them for life and they cost so much less. So in this country, we just need to have a reorientation to know that there are safer things that we can choose.

We needto go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is registered pharmacist, Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about some prescription drugs that my brother was taking the week before Christmas when he died and what you can do instead that is far safer for yourself and for your loved ones. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

Pamela, we haven’t mentioned yet today that people can call you and how you can help them. So why don’t you tell everybody about that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. I’ve been 20 years in business here in Clearwater, Florida. My store is Botanical Resource Pharmacy. It’s all homeopathic and natural products. Consultations are free. I also do consultations on adults, adolescents and children and pets as well. You can reach me here at the pharmacy at 717-442-4955. I would be very honored to help you or your family member with anything related to medication, avoiding medicines. If you want to know medical homeopathic products that we have here, they’re not typically available in health food stores, they’re medical grade that I can prescribe for you if you have any issues with blood pressure, cholesterol or whatever and of course, pain, which is what we’re focusing on today.

DEBRA: And the way I met Pamela was actually a friend of mine went to her. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I live. A friend of mine went to her because his mother was on a number of prescription drugs and Pamela not only got her off the prescription drugs, but his mother is doing much better now. Even his other’s doctor commented on how well she was doing.

So Pamela really knows her stuff. She’s very well-regarded here in Clearwater, Florida. So if you have any health problems that need some help, if you’re on any prescription drugs, if you have loved ones on prescription drugs, I highly recommend that you call Pamela and let her help you with this because she really has things that work.

Alright! So let’s talk now about Valium.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So Valium is a schedule IV. They consider it low-risk for dependence, but actually, I don’t really believe that’s the case because most people that start on Valium, there is a lot of tolerance and dependence and people do become addicted to it.

And so when you look at people taking anxiolytics especially this particular class called benzodiazepines, benzodiazepines work in the brain and they work on the benzodiazepine receptor. When a drug binds into the receptor, it has this calming effect on the person.

The problem with this is that there’s psychological and physical dependence when you take benzodiazepines. People typically need more medicine. They stay at it for a long period of time. And when you start taking benzodiazepines, Xanax, Ativan, Valium, these different drugs that are very, very, very commonly prescribed, it takes probably less than 10 days and after that period of time, you start to develop intolerance.

So these medicines, it’s one of those things that I was talking about that when you start them, you’re going to be on it for a long time. You’re going to have a hard time getting off of it. It’s really a bad road to go down.

If you’re looking at natural alternatives, Passion Flower, medical grade Passion Flower is a partial agonist or has activity in a partial manner towards the receptor. So what’s interesting about this is that if your brother had been taking Passion Flower instead of Valium, he would be in a much better situation because the Passion Flower binds to the receptor – and I use this sometimes when I’m trying to take people off these medicines because the body can’t tell if it’s the drug on there or the herb. Passion Flower has this affinity for it and Passion Flower, it has anti-depressant activity and it has some anti-pain activity as well.

So it’s maybe more all-encompassing than the Valium and it’s very safe and you can’t overdose on it. So I really would suggest that if people are contemplating going on a benzo or looking at getting off of benzo, Passion Flower is a very helpful tool.

DEBRA: And I’ve taken Passion Flower. Pamela gave it to me to help me sleep. It did help me sleep. And then after a couple of weeks of taking it, I just decided not to take it one night and I’ve just been sleeping just fine ever since. So it certainly is something that can be used safely. She told me I could just take as many of them as I needed to in order to sleep. I did and it worked just fine. It worked very well.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. These medicines, benzos are highly addicting and like I said, the problem with tolerance and dependence is that a lot of times, you have a physical dependence where you’re craving the drug, but you also have psychological dependence because you start thinking that you need the drugs and you can’t live without them.

That’s the problem. You really want to start embracing and looking at are there things we can do other than that because anxiety is a pretty universal problems and it affects people in different ways especially stress. So we need to embrace other things that can be used in a safer manner and more effective manner and also safer for the long-term.

The medicines that he had here, the narcotics, the Ritalin, the psycho-stimulants and then also the anxiolytics or the Valium, these things all have higher risk associated when the people are taking them versus the person that are taking natural products and using some other alternative therapies in place of these medicines.

DEBRA: One thing that I want to mention is that my brother wasn’t taking like recreational street drugs. He was just – I’m going to say “normal” person. I remember my brother when we were younger before he started taking these drugs, as a child even, he was interested in cooking. He used to watch the Galloping Gourmet on TV and he got my mom to buy all the cookbook. He couldn’t wait to make chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. He wanted to.

He had loved airplanes. He was always bugging my father to take him to the airport. He just wanted to watch the planes take off and land. I remember, his happiest moment was when – I think he was about 10 or 12. He so wanted to fly that my parents bought two plane tickets, one for me and one for him. I had never been on an airplane either. They put us on the airplane in San Francisco and we got to fly down to Monterey, which is a very short flight, 30 minutes or something. We flew and they drove…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Ah!

DEBRA: They met us down in Monterey.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s really sweet.

DEBRA: It was so sweet. Bradley was just so jazzed. This was like the highlight of his life so far, to fly. And as soon as he became old enough and started working and started making money, the first thing he started doing was flying around the country. And then he flew to Europe. He just loved to travel and he was very sophisticated and he liked to eat in nice restaurants and go to nice places and do nice things. And he got on these drugs because he went to the doctor and he believed the doctor.

The same thing with my father. My father died at age 77, but as he was having greater health problems, I was going in and saying, “Here’s a natural remedy. Here, drink this juice. Do this natural thing, do this natural thing” and he wouldn’t do any of it. He just said, “I’m going to do what the doctor tells me to do.” I would like people to see that there are other choices. There are other choices.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. She’s here helping us all understand about some prescription drugs that my brother was taking most of his life and at the time of his death at age 56, the week before Christmas. His death certificate says ‘pneumonia’, but I know that these prescription drugs and maybe others he was taking were taking a toll on his health.

Pamela, before we talk about another drug, you mentioned about how prescription drugs can reduce your life span.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. A lot of the data is really with elderly people because there’s a lot of controversy about giving elderly people these medicines. The whole idea is that your brother was on these medicines for a long period of time. And then eventually, if he wouldn’t have passed away, he would be an elderly person on these medicines.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So we looked at these, especially the narcotics. The narcotics, to oxycodone and the methadone are statistically significantly correlated with higher morbidity and mortality in elderly people – and even in middle aged people. We know that when a person’s drug are narcotics, the actual problem, what they had, the pain problem, the initial reason why they were prescribed the medicine, it’s not solved.

And this is important for people to know. The pain medicines that we use, there’s really two ways to approach it. One is the narcotics, we call them ‘centrally-acting’, which means they act in the brain. And when they act in the brain, they block the signal down to where the pain took place.

I’ll just give you an example. Say your brother had a back injury. He picked up something wrong, a car accident or something like that. This is very typical. He has a back problem, he goes to the doctor, they hand him the narcotics. They don’t tell him, “You’re going to be on this forever. You’re going to become addicted to it.” Really questions aren’t really brought up in the initial conversations.

So what it does is it blocks the signal from the brain.

DEBRA: Wait, wait. Wait, wait. I just want to interrupt you for a second because…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Please…

DEBRA: …I think this is an important point. You said the doctor hands them the bottle or the prescription and they don’t say that they’re going to be addicted to this for the rest of their life.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No! It really does not enter the conversation, correct.

DEBRA: And then it’s going to cost you hundreds of dollars a month. I think that my brother told me that he was spending $500 a month on his prescriptions.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s insane!

DEBRA: $500 a month, it is insane. And I will tell you that – and I don’t like to say this about my brother, but at the time that he died, he was just staying at somebody’s house and all of his possessions where in his car. He wasn’t homeless because he was staying with somebody. Fortunately, he had people that he could stay with, but he couldn’t afford to have his own place to live.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, because he’s spending it all on drugs.

DEBRA: Because he’s spending it all on drugs, I know! He got to a point where he couldn’t work anymore. It wasn’t that he was a bum. He worked all of his life. But it got to the point where his physical condition was that he couldn’t work anymore.

And so he was staying with friends. He had his things in his car. He was eating in diners. I mean, this is not my brother. This is not what he would’ve chosen. But that was the end of his life. I’m just stunned by this whole thing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, we know that he made the choice of going to the physician. The physician is not the bad guy here. I don’t want people to think that.

DEBRA: No, I don’t want them to think that too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m not against that. I’m a regular pharmacist too. What I’m saying is that I think it’s empowering and important to individuals to realize that at any one time in our life, we probably are going to have an injury that we’ll need to see the doctor and we’ll need some kind of pain control. That is an absolute fact. That’s an absolute fact. He had an initial injury of some sort and he went to the doctor.

What we see that the data shows that when we look at an injury and if we treat this injury with a steroid burst, which is like maybe a Medrol Dosepak or some amount of steroids, steroids bring the inflammation down quickly in the body and allow things to start getting back into normal. A steroid burst and taking a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent like Advil or Naprosyn, something like that (there’s tons of them in the market), Ibuprofen and taking it in a scheduled manner, not like when you think you have pain, these peripherally acting or the ones that don’t work in the brain are much safer. They don’t have the addiction and the tolerance. S

So when a person has an injury (especially for back injuries), the data shows give some steroids and give them some anti-inflammatory on a scheduled basis, maybe one pill with each meal for a weak so you get the inflammation down and start healing the body. In those cases, it locks pain signals in the periphery called eicosanoids. It will just let that area start healing, maybe some physical therapy and things like that.

Those are the real ways to have positive outcomes. It’s negatively correlated when people get narcotics on the first forefront, they give them narcotics because basically, they’re going to be on it forever. And then the bad part about it is when you are on a centrally-acting narcotics, you’re on the oxycodone and he’s on the methadone, when you’re on these medicines, it blocks your perception of the pain, but the injury is still there. So what this means to you and I and to your listeners is that your injury actually can continue to get worse because you start exerting yourself and you’re moving around and you’re not cognizant of the pain.

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So that’s the problem.

DEBRA: The thing I wanted to say and failed to say just recently here is that when a doctor gives you – I don’t want it to sound like I’m against doctors because I’m not.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, I’m not either.

DEBRA: I think that a lot of doctors do a lot of good in the world. But the thing is, any one of us, when a doctor gives us a prescription can go online and look up the prescription and find out what it is. And instead of just taking it blindly, we can find out if it’s addictive, what schedule it’s on. All these things, all the information is there.

And then we can see for ourselves – like when I used to take Synthroid, I was having side effects and everything (a lot of people do). I went and I looked up Synthroid and I said, “Well, you know what? Let’s look for something else. I looked for something else. I went to a different doctor and I found a natural form of thyroid supplement. It opened the door for me to say, “Well, I don’t have to always take this prescription drug.”

And so I’m just encouraging people to find out what your choices are and then make a choice. We don’t have to just do what the doctor says. You can decide for yourself if that’s the road that you want to take. And if you want to do what the doctor says, okay, but just know that there’s other choices.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, that’s exactly right. And also too, I mean, I have thousands of clients, but I have a lot of clients right here locally. If they have a prescription, they’ll come bring it to me first before they’ll go fill and say, “Do I need this? Is there something I can take?” And there’s a lot of times, I’ll say, “No, this is what you really need. This is what you have. Go fill it. But these are the side effects and this is what you need to look out for. Don’t combine it with food/combine it with food” or whatever. I’ll give them all that information.

Or I’ll say, “Look, I have something here. You can try this first. I think this is going to work and it’s comparable to what they wrote for you” and most of these people will embrace the natural products first especially the medical homeopathy, which is designed and developed by physicians, not herbalist.

So it’s really important that people know that there are really high-functioning products that can take the place of medications. And you have to look, two-thirds of all medicines were found in plants. This isn’t new information.

DEBRA: Yeah! Right, right. Yeah.

Pamela; The medicines that you’re using were found in the dirt or in plants or some place in the natural realm.

DEBRA: It all started with that. And then now, they isolate the active ingredients and duplicate them. In many cases, they duplicate them in the laboratory synthetically made from coal tar and things like that. So what you’re offering is the plant version, the plant version.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: Anyway, we’re getting to the end of our time together. It’s gone by so fast, it always does. But I want you to give your phone number and tell people again how you can help because it’s so valuable, what you’re doing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. So I do homeopathic and alternative medicine in pharmacy. I would be very happy to help with any of your concerns. Today was just kind of a microcosm of what we’re doing as far as looking at narcotics and medications, but we do have natural alternatives, homeopathic and alternative medicines that are plants and supplements that I can write out for you free of charge and mail it to you.

I’d say two-thirds of my business is really mail-outs, so you can call me from any place in the country. It’s a 10-minute conversation. I can go over what you’re doing and help you, guide you as far as what choices you want to make if you want to get off of prescription. If you don’t want to be on certain medicines, if you’re having some life issues that you need to deal with stress –

And I do a lot of mental health. So if you have anxiety or depression issues, severe stress, I’m very, very good at that and I would be most honored and would be glad to help you and your family. You can reach me at my pharmacy at 727-442-4955, I would be so very glad to help you see what alternatives you might have as far as for you and the future. I think choices are very important and knowledge is power. So I want to empower you, to let you know that there are things you can do other than medicines if you chose.

DEBRA: That’s right. And you do such a good job. I know I keep saying that, but I mean, Pamela has helped me so much in terms of helping me with some physical conditions that I’ve had for years. Even though I’ve detoxed and changed my diet and get nutrition and stuff, there’s still things that you want to do. Sometimes, your body just needs a little help. She knew exactly what to give me and my body has been so much better since she’s been helping me.

And so anyway, we’ve only got a few seconds left, so I just want to thank you again and thank all of my listeners. Just having somebody so close as a brother not be here anymore, I appreciate you all. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about insomnia and natural things you can do at home to get enough sleep. According to National Geographic, less than one-third of our population in the USA get enough sleep. Since sleep affects our mental state, the aging process, our immune system, and our body’s ability do detox toxic chemicals, it’s very important to get enough sleep. Pamela will tell us about phases of sleep, sleep hygiene, dangers of using prescription hypnotic drugs and how they lead to psychiatric problems, plus natural substances to help you sleep that target similar areas of the brain without the side effects. . Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

• Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?
• Evaluating A Study and Testing a Test
• Seven Deadly Drugs
• The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally
• What We Can Do About Cancer
• The Power of pH
• How to Protect Your Health From Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings
• Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage
• Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help
• How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements
• How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use—And How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and into Health
• How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals
• Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
• See More Clearly with Natural Remedies
• Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs
• Different Types of Detox
• Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies
• How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life
• Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
• How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
• You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
• Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
• It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
• How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
• Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
• Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
• Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld PhD

Date of Broadcast: December 3, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Wednesday, December 3rd 2014. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And in fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs.

I have her on every other Wednesday because she has so much information about the negative health effects of taking prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs and so much information about simple, natural things that we can do to help our health that I just want her to tell you everything that she knows. I learn from her every time I talk to her.

So today, we are going to be talking about insomnia. Are you having trouble sleeping? Well, it’s winter time, there’s hibernates, so I thought we should talk about sleep since this is a natural time for us to be getting more sleep and rejuvenating our bodies and that you absolutely need to sleep in order for your body to detox toxic chemicals. This is an extremely important subject today and so let’s just get started.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. It’s always great to have you. So what did you tell me about National Geographic said one-third, less than one-third of our population in the United States get enough sleep?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! And they just had a special on that just this last Sunday talking about the dangers of sleep deprivation and how the majority of the people are really driving around with insufficient sleep and as a result of it, are basically impaired.

And we see this quite a bit. If you look at the rate of car accidents and the rate of just accidents in general, it’s highly associated with lack of sleep. Most adults are going to need between seven and nine hours of sleep at night. The majority of the people in this country are probably getting six or less.
DEBRA: I think that that’s probably true. So what would sleep deprivation look like?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it can go in different phases. Chronic sleep deprivation will definitely age the person for one thing. Inattentiveness, these people tend to compensate by trying to drink lots of caffeine and coffee. And also, if you look at the very severe side effects of it, if someone goes several days without sleep, psychosis can set in and can really make this person end up in a hospital.

Sleep deprivation tend to really cause hallucinations. A lot of different things that are psychiatric symptoms that maybe if they’re people that see a psychiatrist as a result of sleep deprivation that’s been severe enough for a long enough period of time, these people might be misdiagnosed with depression and then placed on medication as a result of it.

So it’s really important to say that the brain needs this time to basically mop up and clean out the remnants of the day and get started fresh for the next day.
And what we also find is that people who have had chronic sleep deprivation – it doesn’t really have to be like you haven’t slept two days in a row. It can be six hours of sleep and that’s not what your body needs.

What we see is that it’s kind of like the brain is on fire and putting this in terminology, ‘inflammation markers’ in the circulation go up. And that’s why we know that weight gain is associated with not sufficient sleep. We find that this actually can have effects in memory and cognition and a lot of it is related to circulating cytokines that come in and out of the brain.

So it has some very, very serious health effects by not having decent sleep.

DEBRA: Great! Well, tell us about what are the different phases of sleep.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! So most people know a little bit about some of this. I’ll kind of go over some basic things. There are two types of sleep. There’s non-rapid eye movement and there’s rapid eye movement, which is REM sleep. REM sleep is known as ‘active sleep’ or ‘paradoxical sleep’. So this is the time when your eyes are actually moving underneath your eyelids.

So at the beginning of sleep, you’re kind of relatively awake and alert. The brain produces beta waves. But as the brain slows down, slower waves called alpha waves are produced. You’re not quite asleep at this time, but this is when you can have vivid hallucinations and ‘myclonic jerks’ where all of a sudden, you feel like your muscles move or your legs move suddenly. That’s what’s happening during that phase. That’s to be expected. We actually have a lot of that going on at night, but we only remember it maybe once in a while.

So stage one sleep is the beginning of the theta wave. And then stage two lasts about 20 minutes and then the brain activity called ‘sleep spindles’ and body temperature and heart rate slows. So this is asleep. Stage there is delta waves and deep sleep. And stage four is dreaming or REM sleeping brain activity.
What I thought was very interesting is that you actually go through this pattern where you start in stage one, you go to stage two and three, then you go back to two and then you go to REM and this gets repeated four to five cycles per night – and then the average REM time is 90 minutes.

So this is pretty interesting. When you have to go through these different phases, setting an alarm – I know a lot of people have to wake up by an alarm, but if you think about it, you’re kind of jolting yourself out of sleep, right?

DEBRA: Yeah, right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So depending on where you were at that time, what I see in most people is they can try and get themselves to a point where the alarm isn’t suddenly waking them, where they’re actually getting to bed at a reasonable time so that if they need to have an alarm to get up for work, that it goes off and they’re really through most of their sleep cycle, that makes a huge difference.

But if you think about most people, they go to bed late, they procrastinate, then they set their alarm and they get up really early, they’re not going through all these phases of sleep. And then they get in the car and drive. And also, a lot of these people end up taking prescription hypnotics. We’ll talk a little bit about that, how this really changes the chemistry of the brain in an unfavorable way.

DEBRA: I know for myself when I used to go to school when I was a child, my mother would set the alarm and I’d have to be forced to be awakened every morning so that I could get to school by 7:30. I hated that. I just didn’t like that all.

And so now, it’s really important to me that I allow myself to fall asleep when I want to fall asleep. And then I wake up when I want to wake up. I think that that makes a huge amount of difference in terms of just allowing your body to do what it needs to do.

Sometimes, I think I should get up and work and then I think, “No. You know what? I’m just going to let myself sleep” and having that extra hour of sleep or whatever, just going back to sleep in the morning. It just makes a huge difference in how well I’m able to function for the rest of the day. You think, “Oh, I’m going to get an extra hour of work done if I get up early,” but I actually get more done if I sleep.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah, correct because what happens is the consolidation of memory – well, we want to just use simplistic terms, the mopping up of the brain. But basically, what the brain is doing during this sleep process – and you think about the rest of your body too. In the beginning, you were introducing about cleaning up toxic chemicals. The body during sleep basically gets ready for the next day. This is preparatory work that takes place in our sleep cycles. It’s cleaning up the brains. It’s getting rid of remnants of things from the day time that really are non-consequential.

And basically, what the brain is doing during this time is categorizing whether they need to save something or not. So all these little memories and things that we had – that’s why I think when people are studying for a test, studying just before you go to bed and really making an imprint on that will enhance your studying capacity when you take your exam in the morning.

So there’s a reason for studying just before you go to sleep because the consolidation, the memories, it’s going to start putting these memories, which are made of acetylcholine, it’s going to start compartmentalizing them in the brain. And the things that are non-consequential and not important is going to clear that out.
Also, if we’re talking about this from a detoxification point, the kidney start removing all of these excess remnants of metabolism from the day time. And that’s why when you go to sleep at night, you keep going to the bathroom. People get up and go to the bathroom when their bladder is full. The reason why is your center of gravity when you’re lying down changes. So during the day, your center of gravity is at a different location. It’s more central. But when you sleep at night, the center of gravity changes to the back of the kidneys.And this was designed intentionally so that the fluids of the body that are containing waste products will go to the kidneys during that time and leave.

So actually, when you think about it, your first void in the morning really contains all these things that have accumulated during the day that really were not processed at the time that you actually were drinking water and going to the restroom then.

So it’s really amazing the way the body decides that this is a time to restore, re-nourish and clean up things that can lead to diabetes, intellectual problems or cognitive delays. All these kinds of things are basically mopped up during this process.

DEBRA: Wow! I haven’t thought about it quite that way, but I think that you described it really well, that it really is not about being lazy or anything like that. It just really is that time for us to rejuvenate, for our bodies to rejuvenate and to have that rest.

We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about sleep and natural ways to sleep better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

She has very successfully gotten people off drugs. She helps people replace drugs that they’ve been taking with natural substances that can do the same thing. But the thing that really seems most important to me (having been somebody who has taken prescription drugs and also natural things) is that when you take prescription drugs, it might alleviate your symptoms, but they’re not healing your body. Pamela can replace those drugs with substances, natural substances that actually are repairing and healing your body. To me, that’s a huge, huge, huge difference. It costs less too and you end up with a better result.

So Pamela, I know that you are happy to talk to anybody on the phone about what they’re taking and what they could take instead. So what’s your phone number?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. I would be very happy to help any of you, even your children if they have any issues as far as medications or any behavioral issues. You can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s Botanical Resource.

And I really do everything all-encompassing. So cholesterol, blood pressure, mental health. I do a lot of mental health. So if you want to get off these prescription medications or you want to know some alternatives for depression or anxiety, for sleeping, I would be most honored to help you and your family.

DEBRA: And she’s really wonderful. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I am and I found out about her and invited her to be a guest on my show because she has such a great reputation here. Everybody loves here. Medical doctors recommend her. My medical doctor, when I told him that I was taking some things that she had given me said, “Oh, just take whatever Pamela tells you to take.”And that was the end of the conversation.

So I completely trust her. I have had wonderful results from what she’s advised me to do. If you’re having any kind of health concerns, I hope that you will call her and get some help too.

Alright! So as long as we’re talking about prescription drugs and getting off of them, why don’t you tell us next about the dangers of using prescription hypnotic drugs for sleeping pills?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Great, great. Great subject. So what happens is that someone will go to the doctor, they’re having some sleep disturbance and insomnia, maybe some stress going on in their lives and the doctors, the first thing that they’re going to normally prescribe for a lot of people is then benzodiazepines. That’s a class of drugs that includes Xanas, Ativan, Valium.

These medications have two problems with them. They have addiction; they have tolerance and dependence basically.

Tolerance means you need more medication to get the same effect. And dependence means, of course, that you’re dependent on it. And the dependence with these medicines is physical and it’s psychological, which is bad. It’s both aspects.

So when people go on these medicines, they need more medicine over time to get the same effect. And then when they try and take it away, they can have panic attacks, severe anxiety. And people are on long term benzos, it’s really very problematic. And most of these people, I’m sure given the opportunity, would have chosen not to be placed on them.

A good example of a hypnotic that’s been used forever really (probably, I don’t know, 34 years) is Restoril, which is Temazepam. It’s an old benzo drug. And if you look at these drugs – and I still see people coming in on those – the studies show after about threeweeks, it doesn’t work anymore. So say somebody that’s on 15 mg…

DEBRA: Only three weeks?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah! It doesn’t work. So they need more medicine and it’s that quick. In fact, they’d tell somebody that’s even using a benzo on a part-time basis or short period of time for an anxiety disorder, you’ve got a window of maybe nine to twelve days of taking it consistently, then after that, you can’t really be without it. It’s pretty quick.

So I don’t think people realize that tolerance and dependence show up rather fast. I don’t know if they’re necessarily warned about that.
And you have to be careful too because when you take these prescriptions, there’s cognitiveproblem associated with this – and memory. Remember we were talking about memory consolidation, this kind of messes with your head.

So people that have these and take these prescription hypnotics, there can be some hang over sedation. And especially with Ambien, which is a very common prescription hypnotic, when someone is given Ambien, there are lots of cases where people are sleep walking, they get up in the morning and they don’t remember the commute to work. There’s a lot of problems with memory and cognitive impairment as a result of taking Ambien.

And what scares more than anything is that you have a large of population in this country that are taking these every night and then they get up and drive a car to work. This is really frightening if you think about.

Now, the benzos are kind of going out of favor because of the tolerance and dependence, but I still see quite a lot of people that are on Ativan and Xanax for sleep especially older people where they’ve been put on that a long time ago and basically, now,they don’t have a choice, but to be on that.

So really, just kind of to regroup, there’s different drug classes of these anxiolytics, but they can be use for insomnia, for hypnotics. Taking these drugs definitely has some other aspects as well especially even looking at elderly people.

And we should really focus on that because we have a lot of elderly people that have sleep disturbances. Our sleep changes as we get older. It’s a more lighter sleep. And not only that, when you think about you and I, we run around all day, so when we go to bed, we’re tired. But the older people, they’re more sedentary.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right? So when I go to sleep, I fall into bed. They probably because they’re doing activities of daily living, they’re doing some shopping, they’re watching TV. I mean, they’re not really doing a whole lot.

So I think, my theory really, I think most people need to be tired to sleep.

DEBRA: Well, I think so too. I mean, I had noticed that recently (like maybe in the last month or so) that I had been a lot more physically active, that I’ve been doing things where I’m walking more, I’m not sitting at my desk so much, I’m not thinking so much, as much as I am out doing things. I noticed that. And I’m also working longer hours. So I have activities in the evening as well as during the day.

And by the time it gets to be 10 o’clock, I am just physically tired whereas I know before, there had been time in my life where if I wasn’t working long hours or I wasn’t intensely getting a lot of things done in the time period that I have, that I wasn’t as physically tired and it was harder to sleep. But now, it’s just like, “Oh, thank you. It’s bed time!”

I mean, we live here in Florida. Wesee a lot of older people and…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: They just sit around all day. I don’t want to say all older people sit around all day because we certainly have active seniors, but a lot of old people just sit or watch TV all day or they talk to each other or they play checkers or whatever it is that they’re doing. They’re not physically engaged in life to the degree that younger people are.

We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more about sleep, sleeping pills and what we can do naturally to sleep better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

So Pamela, let’s talk about some things that people can do to sleep better. First, I wanted to say that many, many years ago when I started researching toxic chemicals, one of my first, most exciting discoveries was that formaldehyde causes insomnia.

At the time, I really had insomnia. It was excruciating for me to go to bed at night because I would not sleep and I would just toss and turn for hours. It turns out that formaldehyde is the major chemical in permanent press finish and that if you have permanent press sheets on your bed as you’re lying there at night, you’re going to be sleeping in a cloud of formaldehyde, particularly if you just take the sheets out of the package and put it on the bed.

But even after you’ve been washing and sleeping, there still is formaldehyde. It’s lessening amounts, but still, for a very long time, the sheets are still emitting formaldehyde.

I had to put that together. Nobody had put it in a book yet that I had see. I had to find out in one book that formaldehyde caused insomnia and find out in another book that formaldehyde is in permanent press resin on bed sheets. And when I put those two things together, I said, “Oh, my God!” I went right down and found the only – at that time, there was only one brand of untreated cotton sheets. I managed to find it, put those sheets in my bed and I slept. I slept.

It was just like so wonderful to sleep after all those nights, months, years of not sleeping well because of the formaldehyde on the bed sheets. And now, for the past 30 years, I have only slept on cotton flannel sheets every night – not that there aren’t other types of cotton sheets, but I just love cotton flannel sheets. And even though I live in Florida, I would think it’s too hot for flannel sheets, but it’s not. It’s very comfortable to sleep on them year around.

So that’s my two cents worth on how we can sleep better, change your sheets.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re right. Chemicals affect a lot of what is going on in our lives. Let’s face it, people have those artificial candles burning in their houses. It reaches your eyes, your eyes water. Formaldehyde coming offof the mattress, coming off of the sheets, coming off of the carpeting, you are exposed to these things continuously. And that’s why when people, you go into a store to buy, that new mattress, no that’s formaldehyde offgassing.

So it’s pretty prevalent. A lot of people are very sensitive to it. And this can explain a lot of people’s sleep disturbances. Environmentally, their room is just not equipped for them to get a restful sleep. So that can even be part of sleephygiene.

Sleep hygiene, really, the study show a dark, cold room. You don’t have a lot of ambient light coming in from outside. You want to have comfortable clothes, comfortable sheets. Sometimes, they believe that protein or a carbohydrate snack. Make sure you have some food in your stomach. I’m not talking about a meal, but if you go to bed with your stomach hungry and it’s growling all night, you’re not going to really have some decent sleep. So you shouldn’t be hungry when you go to bed, you shouldn’t be full either. And then limiting alcohol consumption just before you fall asleep.

And screen time. A lot of people know that looking at the screen – and I tell a lot of people too, get your cell phone out of the bedroom because there’s constantly little emails and dings and those noises wake you up.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So really, it’s important to look at that. And the formaldehyde issue, I think that most people aren’t really cognizant of it. You and I know about this sort of thing. But remember, we weretalking about the kidneys and the mopping up of the body, what happens during that process is if you’re exposing yourself to these chemicals while you’re sleeping, you’re not really realizing why it’s interfering with the way you feel and function.

DEBRA: Well, you know, it’s – I forgot what I was going to say.Okay, go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Even the mattress, I know for myself, the mattress that I have at my house – I mean, I bought this quite a while ago. It’s an organic mattress and it’s made with wool or organic latex…

DEBRA: I have a wool mattress too, Pamela. Another common…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I know! The whole frame is not made with any varnishes. I love it! It’s green sleep. I’ve had it for – I don’t know, probably ten years. That’s the best thing I ever bought. And it’s just completely chemical free.

DEBRA: Yeah, I have a wool mattress and it’s the best thingI ever bought. I just love it. I just love my wool mattress.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Look at us. Look at this, the two ofus. People who are probably listening to this thing, “Oh, they planned this.” I mean, I didn’t know she does what she has done.

DEBRA: No, we didn’t.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And here I am, I had to order from Canada. It came down from Canada. It came down from Canada. I had to custom order and it came from Canada.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s really a great investment in your sleep and your comfort.

But I kind of want to talk a little bit more about the medication and the fact that when people are having sleep disturbances, they need to realize that perhaps stress an anxiety during the day are affecting your sleep too.

So let’s look at it from a mental health perspective. We address the chemicals and the comfort and the dangers of some of the prescription (and we can talk about the dangers of the prescriptions for hours), but I want people to realize that when you go to sleep and you’ve done all the sleep hygiene things, but if you have a lot of stress in your life and a lot of people really, you have overwhelming stress –

This is what I find in my business, that the people come and the first thing if I say, “Are you stressed?”, they just lose it. They’re like, “Yeah.” It’s just that a lot of people work full-time and they have to take care of their home, they have children, maybe they have elderly parents. The stresses of life perhaps have gotten more extreme I think in recent years for a lot of people especially with the economy in some places.

So I’m a big advocate of using calming fish oil to calm the brain and some of the racing thinking that’s associated with not being able to turn the brain off. So there’s a product by Nordic Naturals, it’s called ProDHA. They have two of them, their professional line, ProDHA and ProDHA 1000, which is the higher octave of that and is much stronger.

ProDHA, I take that myself, has a calming effect on the brain, but it’s not making you sleepy. So what it does is it turns off a lot of that subconscious worry that people have. “I need to add something to the list of things to do,” you know what I’m talking about, these constant thinking in the back of your head.

I also noticed with the higher docosahexaenoic acid that are in those products, you have a lot more vivid dreams. You can remember your dreams. And I really put this together because DHA is very active in the brain. Customers, I remember, were coming back to me after they’ve taken it and saying, “Does this make you dream vivid dreams?” and I said, “Well, DHA has a lot of activity in the brain and it would make sense that that would be the case” and then I started noticing myself when I switched to that product as well.

So if people has sleep disturbances and they’ve done all these other things or cause from stress, you would want to be on omega 3’s anyway, customizing your product that would be specifically towards more restful and relaxing sleep, but also that you’re not kind of being spontaneously upset about things during your daily life, during the day. I’ve noticed that this has really taken the edge of being stuck on traffic, things don’t go your way. Things that normally could be aggravating for most people, I think that this would be highly helpful.

DEBRA: Yes, it’s so interesting about how you can take natural substances and have them affect how you think and how you feel and your ability to do those two things. When I see that from taking a supplement, I start thinking about how – oh, I hear the music, so we have to go to break. I’ll finish my sentence. Sometimes, I get so interested in what we’re saying, I don’t even look at the clock.

Anyway, let’s go to break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’ll be back in a moment.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

I mentioned before, Pamela that you talk to people on the phone and can help people get off their prescription drugs and also recommend natural substances to people for virtually any conditions, so why don’t you give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So you can reach me at my pharmacy here. I’ll be glad to help you with any particular need you have about a supplement or a question about the drugs you’re taking or to remove those medicines from your life.

The number here at Botanical Resource is 727-442-4955. I would be very happy to help you or any loved one in your family or even a friend, anybody you know. My business is really word-of-mouth. I’ve been doing this for 20 years probably. It’s really very positive and I think you’ll find your results to be very good.

DEBRA: Very good. And just give your number just one more time.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So it’s 727-442-4955. And as I’ve said previously, I would really be honored and happy to help you or your loved one.

DEBRA: Great! So tell us about natural substances that people can take that will help them sleep better.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Alright, good. So there’s lots of different products in the market and I’m going to talk about some of the ones that actually can work.
So a lot of people use theonine. There is limited data on that as a hypnotic and sleep. I personally don’t use it. So I’m going to go through the pros and cons of the products I like. I don’t really think that that works as well. It does work for some people, but not for the vast majority.

Now Valerian is very popular. Valerian does have components that put you into deep sleep, but it has a really nasty smell. And if you’ve ever smelled it, it smells like dirty, old socks.

DEBRA: I’ve never smelled it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it does, it does. It smells like dirty, old socks and I’m not kidding you. If you buy a bottle and you open it up, you’ll know exactly what I mean. So some people can’t get past the olfactory problems associated with that product.

My personal favorite is passion flower. The reason why I like passion flower is that it works like the benzodiazepines receptor products – the Xanax, the Ativan, the Valium – but it’s a partial agonist to the receptors. So when you take these benzodiazepines, the agonist has an affinity towards the receptor. The receptors are proteins and cells and that’s how drugs work.

So when you take Xanax, which a prescription that has addiction and tolerance, it binds to the receptor and it changes the chemistry and the cell and that’s how you get calm or that’s how you sleep. What the passion flower does is it has partial activity. So it goes on the receptor, it goes off the receptor. It goes on the receptor, it comes off the receptor. And when you’re doing this, you have some pharmacological advantages because you don’t have tolerance and dependence, but you have a highly effective product because it really binds right to the receptor pretty reproducibly.

I use that to get people off the medicine. By using that and few other little supplements, we can kick the drug off and the body is kind of faked off. It doesn’t know if the drugs are on or the supplements are on. So if someone really has pretty bad insomnia, passion flower is going to be the strongest product that you’ll probably be using in the natural realm.

DEBRA: I was taking passion flower. You gave me some passion flower and it worked very, very well. And then there was a day – I took it for about a month or so. I still have a bottle of passion flower in my nightstand.

After about a month, I thought, “Well, let me just see what happens without it.” And since then, I just haven’t even needed to take it because I still get my seven to eight hours of sleep every night. It got me through a period of time when I wasn’t sleeping very well. And then I know that I have it right there in my nightstand. If I’m not sleeping, I can just take some.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah. That’s the best way to use that. I mean, somebody that has chronic insomnia and they’re not responding – and you’re on a few supplements too that we were just balancing the chemistry of the body. So the sleep disturbance would eventually go away. That’s what we would expect. But the good part is that we’re looking at trying to use the chemistry of the body and what we know about pharmacology to use these products in a responsible manner so that you’re not having these tolerance and dependence and these addiction properties.

And so passion flower is really a liberating product because you can use it for a certain period of time and like in your situation, sleep eventually started to come on a normal cycle and was much more reproducible and much more serene so to speak. You got better sleep, so you didn’t need it anymore, whereas if you had gone to the doctor and he had given you a benzodiazepine, you wouldn’t be able to stop it.

And that’s the beauty of using herbal products that work in a pharmacological basis. When you decide to target things based on the receptor on the brain and you’re trying to get a therapeutic outcome using the drugs, you might get an outcome, but you’re also going to have a negative outcome in the fact that you’re eventually going to need it to sleep every single night. And that’s not what we want for people. We want people to be able to make a choice.

DEBRA: Right, right. Absolutely.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So also too, there’s a product called Perfect Sleep that I like a lot. It’s a liquid tincture. So sometimes, people don’t want to swallow a capsule, they want to hold it underneath their tongue. That’s by DesBio. That works really, really well.

And that has some things that also help our hormones as well especially if someone has menopausal issues or so forth or depression, it has some other serotonergic activity as well. It might help for the person that maybe has sleep disturbances as a result of depression. So that product works really well.

There’s a homeopathic product (especially for children and for adults too). It’s called Neurexan. It’s from Heel. It’s a German company. Neurexan has a lot of data behind it. And what’s nice about Neurexan, it says clearly in the label it’s for overactive minds.

It really probably can be used in tandem with the Pro DHA for people that are having this obsessive thinking, worrying about the day, all these pressures that are on people today. The idea that we have to just fall into bed and turn everything off is very difficult for most people. They really can’t do it. So that’s a really good tool.
I want to mention one more thing and we’re going to talk a little bit more some of the natural stuff quickly. But there’s a higher incidence with elderly people using prescription for sleeping, hypnotics that they have a higher co-morbidity and mortality. They have a higher chance for a severe fall or fracture. And when we know when elderly people have fall and fractures, there’s a lot of co-morbidities that is caused, problems that all of a sudden, they end up with an infection, they’re in rehab, they’re not doing well and then they die.

So if you’re young or even if you’re older, if you want to try and preserve your health and your quality of life, reaching for the prescription hypnotics first before you tried some of the natural products and used the correct dose – because sometimes people, I’ll say, “Try this passion flower” and they’ll say, “Well, I’ve tried that, it didn’t work.” Well, it depends what product you’re using, what dose you’re using. And Debra, that’s really what it’s about. I select that for you for free. I tell you what to take. You’re not just going to randomly grab something.

DEBRA: No. I really want to really emphasize this point because you can go to a natural food store and look on the shelf and buy passion flower or whatever, but the difference is Pamela understands about dose because she’s a trained pharmacist and she has all these decades of experience. And so she can tell you exactly how much to take. She understands exactly how dosing works in a way that we who are not trained don’t understand this at all.

You can’t just look on the back of a bottle and say, “Take one pill.” She knows exactly how much you should take, she compare you with exactly the right product. And the products that she carries in her pharmacy are products that she personally has been using with her clients for years and she knows what works and what doesn’t work. She can help you make that decision instead of spending hundreds of dollars on products that you won’t know whether they work or not just because you’re trying them because you read them on a magazine article.

She really will give you a very precise recommendation based on her knowledge and experience. That’s one of the reasons why she’s just so incredible.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. And that’s important to realize. I really respect people’s time and money…

DEBRA: And she really does.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I really want the best for everybody. It’s not about, “Okay, I want to mail you something.” It’s not about that. The things that I suggest like the passion flower product that I ended up deciding on ultimately, I probably used five different ones with different people and I just kind of decided to looking at what is actually in there, how it’s standardized, how many milligrams, what’s actually working as far as feedback.

I’ve been doing this long enough. I know if people are coming back and saying, “It’s not working,” a particular product, “I just don’t want to use it anymore,” I move on to something else. There’s a lot of products that are very popular, that there’s a lot of advertising around, but I found that they just don’t work very well for people and they’re expensive and I just don’t carry them here.

So it’s really about selecting something that’s appropriate for the person. Especially if they’re drug naïve or not drug naïve and they haven’t had anxiolytic prescriptions, but especially the person that’s tittering on the edge and needing to have prescription therapy and the doctor or the practitioner is pushing for it, you really need to look and see if there’s some other things you can do instead.

And this encompasses not just the sleep that we’re talking today, but your blood pressure, your cholesterol, all these different things. Depression, anxiety, ADD, ADDHD, OCD, all these things can be helped very effectively with the right supplements, the right dose and just a few simple things.

DEBRA: Yes, they can. Now, we only have less than a minute actually, so I just want to slip one more thing in here and that is to say that being a registered pharmacist, Pamela can order and sell natural supplements at professional prescription grade that they cannot sell in the natural food store.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: And so you’re getting a completely different kind of supplement when you go to her than if you’ve been in a natural food store.
Okay, so we’ve got 15 seconds left, so give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, yes. It’s 727-442-4955 and as I’ve said previously, let me help you with any of your questions. I would be glad to answer those. I’m here full service for you.

DEBRA: Okay, great. And Pamela will be onagain in two weeks and every two weeks after that for an undetermined period of time. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about back pain and how you can help alleviate it using natural things you can do at home. There are more than 200,000 back surgeries in the USA every year and a lot of these are due to chronic pain. We’re going to talk about chronic pain, some of the causes beyond the injury itself and how to control pain instead of surgery. Doctors offer only surgery and drugs, but there are other natural solutions, some surprisingly simple. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

• Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?
• Evaluating A Study and Testing a Test
• Seven Deadly Drugs
• The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally
• What We Can Do About Cancer
• The Power of pH
• How to Protect Your Health From Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings
• Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage
• Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help
• How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements
• How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use—And How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and into Health
• How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals
• Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
• See More Clearly with Natural Remedies
• Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs
• Different Types of Detox
• Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies
• How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life
• Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
• How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
• You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
• Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
• It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
• How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
• Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
• Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
• Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: November 19, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Wednesday, November 19th 2014 and it’s still cold here in Florida. I’m still cold. I’m still waiting for my heater that I ordered to arrive that I have finally turned out the central heat for the house. So it’s warming up slowly, but boy! It’s cold here.

Anyway, my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday. She was on two Wednesdays ago and she’ll be on two Wednesdays from now again and every other Wednesday thereafter because she’s got so much to tell us about how we can not take prescription drugs, but instead handle things that are going on with our bodies by using natural means.

She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And today, we’ll be talking about back pain and what you can do to alleviate it using natural things that you can do at home.

There’s more than 200,000 back surgeries in the U.S.A. every year and a lot of these are due to chronic pain, so she’s going to tell us what to do, some of the things that cause pain beyond the entry itself and how you can control pain instead of surgery.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. You know, I have to tell you that yesterday, I got an email that said, “Debra, I love your show and especially Pamela.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, that’s wonderful. Thanks for the great feedback.

DEBRA: You’re welcome! So anyway, let’s talk about backs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So what happens is, like you said, there’s 200,000 back surgeries in the U.S. every year and that’s probably even a low estimate. What we find is if we go to an allopathic doctor and we have a chronic back problem – and a lot of people do have chronic back problems either because of an injury or dehydration (and we’ll go to that in a minute), what does the doctor offer you? They offer you surgery, they offer you opiates (pain relievers) and they offer you muscle relaxants.

So a lot of times, I tell people that especially surgery, the outcome sometimes is not so good. I’ve seen quite a few of my clients that things just did not turn out the way they perceived they would be. So it’s really a dicey situation.

And what we want to look at is that back pains (especially lower back pain, which is probably the most common type of back pain), there’s two components to back pain. So when you look at natural substances and what we want to do in place of surgery, in place of being addicted to narcotics (because that’s typically what they offer), lower back pain, the component you look at are muscle spasm. That’s 80% of the cause of back pain. So the muscle around the area are contracting in a way that’s very, very painful.

And secondly, there’s disc degeneration. So it puts strain on the tendons and the ligaments that are on the spinal column.

These two processes are really what’s causing the pain. Both of these are caused by chronic dehydration. I mean, I have met people that treat back problems pushing fluids. Water will take these areas. And if you think about the vertebrae, they have these cushiony areas between the vertebrae and what happens is chronic dehydration sets in and sets in motion all of these types of back problems.

DEBRA: So let’s talk about dehydration for a minute because I think that most people don’t understand what dehydration really is. I think that people understand that it’s not enough water, but what is the definition of how you would be dehydrated besides having back pain? How would you know that you’re starting to be dehydrated and how much water to drink?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. Well, that’s a very good question. It’s going to vary for different people. I use the sauna a lot, I do 30 miles on a stationary bike every day. I need to drink a lot more water than somebody perhaps isn’t doing all the exercise because I sweat a lot. So these things are components that need to be looked at – the daily exercise and how much you sweat.

But most definitely, you can tell a person is dehydrated, I always tell people to look at your skin. Your skin gives away a lot of what your dehydration says. And of course, when you use the restroom, if your urine is really dark and concentrated – outside of taking vitamins because when people take B vitamins, riboflavin gives you that kind of fluorescent, yellow urine color. That’s a metabolite. It doesn’t mean that you have expensive urine.

I always hear people say, “Well, you know, you’re peeing out all these vitamins.” That’s not what it is. It’s the metabolite, the riboflavin. So people can correct them that that’s what it is. It shows that it’s actually being metabolized and utilized by your body, so actually, it’s a good thing.

So you need to look at those things, people’s skin. But really, it depends on activity level more than anything especially here in Florida, we’re going to be needing more fluids when it’s hot out than a person perhaps maybe up in Canada where it’s cold and they’re not sweating so much.

So I always say that it’s a broad question, but it would be inter-individual on the person. You’ll know when you’re dehydrated.

A lot of times, people with dehydration, the symptoms that show up most frequently are headaches. That’s what I find for most people. A lot of headaches are from chronic dehydration because a lot of people drink a lot of coffee and they drink a lot of alcohol. Those tend to be dehydrating by themselves.

DEBRA: People who are drinking coffee all day long (like sitting at work, drinking coffee all day long), they’re not actually hydrating their body. They’re dehydrating their body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. That’s a big culprit.

DEBRA: What we really need to be doing is drinking water. I actually drink water all day long. I’m drinking – let’s see, how much water am I drinking now. I’m drinking at least a half a gallon of water a day. It’s got all of these things that I got from Pamela. So I’m like sipping all these nice nutrients all day long in homeopathic.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great!

DEBRA: But I read a book many years ago – it’s an excellent book and I highly recommend it – called Your Body’s Many Cries for Water…

PAMELA SEEFELD: My favorite!

DEBRA: Good! Yeah, I really love that book. When I read that book, I went, “Oh, my God! Everything that could be wrong with your body could be dehydration” and I think that that’s really true. I just started drinking more water and it explains in the book about how your body needs water and that people are drinking soda or they’re drinking juice or iced tea or whatever and what you really need is water – water, water, water.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re right. I’m telling you, water is the no. 1 healing property that you can bring into your body. We look at the things that cause epigenetics, what turns on genes, what helps the body heals – water, sleep, plants, consuming plants. All these things matter, but water is one of the most important things because our bodies are mostly made of water.

And we know that the joint surfaces, the cartilage, it’s the padding that separate the bone structures and the joints. The cartilage contains a lot of water.
So when we get the stability that we’re having all these dehydration, the cartilage starts to dry out and the sliding surfaces between the cartilage and the joints, all of a sudden, there’s friction there because there’s not enough lubricant. And as a result of it, you start getting knee problems, hip problems, back problems. They’re all interrelated.

DEBRA: And it’s all dehydration.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s right. I’m saying, it’s so simple. Water is free!

DEBRA: Yeah, it is. It’s something that everybody can take and I would just say that you want to make sure that you drink filtered water, so that you’re not getting all those chemicals that are in tap water.

But aside from that, you’re not going to drown by drinking too much water. Your body needs more water than you probably think that it needs. I feel just a lot better. When you drink a lot of water, your skin looks really good too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Almost definitely. I’m telling you, people are always coming to me, “I want anti-aging skin secrets. I use medical skin care and vitamins here,” I’m like, “Look, you need to start pushing fluids.” When people are dehydrated – especially here in Florida, a lot of people have boats. They’re out in the sun. They’re doing house work outside, yard work, you get dehydration set in very easily even for active people.

DEBRA: Yes, yes. So how much water do you drink? How much water do you drink?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I mean, I drink probably a gallon or a gallon and a half.

DEBRA: Yeah, but you’re execising so much and you’re sweating.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The exercise, yeah, exactly. You know what? I’ll tell you. If you drink alcohol in a daily basis and you’re drinking coffee, you need to probably double up what you’re normally drinking now. That’s what I tell most people. Those things are naturally going to dehydrate the individual quite severely.
And also, too, don’t forget, you need to have salt. A lot of people are on these low salt diets. Salt needs to be with water.

DEBRA: That’s a very important point.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. Personally, I like rock salt. That’s one of my favorite. People have their personal favorite, but rock salt on the Himalayan especially has all the minerals and it has iron in it.

DEBRA: I only have two kinds of salt. I use real salt and Himalayan salt.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Me too!

DEBRA: Me too!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly all I have in my house.

DEBRA: Yup, that’s all I have in my house too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Real salt and Himalayan, yes, those two things. But it’s really interesting because we know that especially the Himalayan, when it’s pink, it has a lot of iron and it’s really great for the body especially for heme and for oxygen-carrying capacity. You’re getting quite a lot of it. It’s very bioavailable when it’s located in the salt itself.

DEBRA: That’s great. We need to go to break. We’ll talk more about back pain and dehydration and other things that we can do to handle these pain in our bodies when we come back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

Pamela, before we go on about back pain, tell people what you do and give your phone number so that they can reach you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh! Okay, great. Yes, so my background is clinical pharmacy, but I’m also a pharmacognosy consultant (and that is an expert in plant medicine). I have a homeopathic and natural pharmacy here in Clearwater, Florida called Botanical Resource. It’s been in business for 15 years, but I’ve been a pharmacist for almost 25.

I would be most glad to help or your family with any condition, not just back problem, but any sort of condition that you might be interested as far as natural remedies and alternatives to prescription.

My consultations are free and the number here at Botanical Resource is 727-442-4955. I would be very honored and pleased to help you or any other individuals in your family with any need you may have.

DEBRA: And please call her if you have any need. Really, she does want to talk to you and she’s happy to talk to you for free. I know she has a very good reputation here in Clearwater, which is how I found out about her in the first place. It’s because of so many people who are saying so many good things about her including medical doctor, including my own medical doctor.

She is just every day taking people off of prescription drugs and putting them on plant-based natural kinds of remedies and their conditions improve. So she knows what she’s talking about in terms of viewing it from a pharmacist’s viewpoint and dose and how the body works and all these kinds of things. She’s really made a difference in my health, really helping me with the things that I’ve been trying to work on for years and not getting through. I’m now such a difference. She can tell you. Pamela, tell them how much better I am.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re doing great. You’re doing wonderful. Really, it’s a tremendous turnout for you and I think I’m just really pleased that I could help you so much. I really have done this a long time. I’d be the first to say that if someone needs a prescription, they need to stay on what they’re doing, but I do have alternatives, homeopathic medical alternatives that are not available at the health food store that I can sell with counseling that will take the place of prescription. I can even order things out of Europe as well.

So it’s truly all-encompassing. I teach this. Your health is just paramount. You’re doing phenomenal and you’re off a lot of your stuff. And really, we were going over that, for eight years, you were going to all these doctors and nothing really was changing. But in a short period of time, we got you on the right track and everything is great. I’m very, very happy I could help you.

DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Okay, tell us more about back pain.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, great. So this is interesting. During the break, I pulled out The Body’s Many Cries for Water, the book that we both love so much. It’s talking about the importance of the 5th lumbar disc and this is the part in the book that they were talking about why people end up with so much lower back pain with dehydration setting in.

What he’s saying (and this is something I tell my clients a lot of times), 75% of the weight of the upper body is supported by the water volume that is stored in the disc core on the 5th lumbar disc.

So that dehydration in that 5th lumbar disc – and if you look, a lot of times, people, L5 and L4 is where they’re having a lot of problems as their lower back. And sure enough, it’s because of the dehydration.

If you think about it, your upper body, the core, it has to be held, the weight of this upper body has to be held by these small disc in this very concentrated area. So dehydration setting in is really a big problem.

Also, I want to bring up about alkalinity. When you have dehydration, you become more acidic. And so as a result of that, that changes the pH of the fluid around the cartilage. And as a result of it, it ends up in more denegeration. And of course, then it leads to more pain.

I’m a big fan of using alkaline boosters. That’s really an easy way to get the alkalinity of your water up. You can do it by becoming a vegan too, but a lot of people do not want to do an extreme diet change and I don’t necessarily recommend that. But pH boosters are great because they’re drops you put in the water.

I like AlkaLife. Personally, I’ve tried several of them. That’s the one I consistently have stayed with. I test the water.

And typically, most water, from a filtered water or from bottled water, it’s going to be probably between let’s say pH 2 or 3 to 7.5, something like that. I’ll tell you, the worst bottled water as far as pH is Dasani. That tested out to be like a 1.

DEBRA: Because I think that’s tap water.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s the same pH of Coke.

DEBRA: Isn’t Dasani tap water?

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is, yeah.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s very acidic. So when I see people, they go to Costco or someplace and buy bottled water, I say, “Don’t get the Dasani if you’re going to do anything. That’s really extremely acidic.” I mean, you can change the pH of that water with it. But basically it’s just water from the tap that they put in a bottle. It’s really a poor choice.

So I use my regular filtered water. But when you do Ph drops, a lot of times, it’ll boost it up to 13. That’s a great, easy way, inexpensive. You can use baking soda. But sometimes, that has too much sodium. For some people, if they have blood pressure problems, I’m not going to recommend doing that. But just in a pinch, you can take baking soda and put that into just sodium bicarbonate and put that into your water and it will change the pH pretty effectively.

DEBRA: Yeah, alkaline booster is something that Pamela gave me. And so I take it as part of my – what she does frequently is she gave me some tablets and capsules and things, but not very many. Mostly, what she gave me is in liquid form. And then she tells her clients to just have a bottle of water and put all the things in the water and sip it over the course of the day, which is exactly what I do. It works beautifully, it just works beautifully.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great. Because you know what it is? It’s like getting an IV. When you take sips of the medication all through the day, every time you take a sip, you’re getting a little hit of the medicine into the tissue. So that’s going to be more reparative and more restorative than taking single relief pill. When you take a pill or a capsule, depending if there’s food in your stomach, but most of the time, it’s going to take about 20 minutes to dissolve. You’re going to get a peak in the bloodstream and then about five minutes later, it’s gone. So it’s inconsistent dosing. Putting it in the water, you’re going to get a much better outcome.

DEBRA: Well, I really see that for myself. I mean, the change has been remarkable. It was fast. This week too, I just felt like something kicked in. You start feeling better. But then there’s a point where you just go, “Wow! Things are different. I’m in a whole new level.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m so excited.

DEBRA: That happened for me this week. Really, it’s like I’ve been sleeping better so much, but it was just like my energy level and the way my body is shrinking in terms of losing weight, but also just in terms of losing puffiness. I’m just more trimmed and energetic and all those things that I always wanted to be.
Anyway, we need to go to break again. When we come back, we’ll talk more with Pamela about back pain. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses natural things instead of prescription drugs. She has a business, Botanical Resource. She has a lovely spa here in Clearwater, Florida. You can call her, she’ll talk to you on the phone. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about back pain. So tell us more about some of the natural remedies that you can use for back pain.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Perfect! So we’re going to do this little comparison like what will the doctor give you, what am I going to give you.
DEBRA: Good, I love that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: We’re going to play that little game here because most of these people, let’s face it, a lot of people that are listening maybe have had back pain or have back pain and they know it, what normally are being prescribed.

So when you have muscle spasms, you go to the doctor and he’s going to give you a muscle relaxant like Flexeril or Zanaflex. There’s a bunch of different ones. These muscle relaxants, they relax the muscles, but they also make you loopy and tired and these are highly sedating. There’s a lot of cognitive impairment with these. You’re very sleepy.

So what can we use in the natural realm that I think personally is just as effective as these. And this is what I normally use when someone comes to me and say, “I really don’t want to take these. I’m scared driving. I have to go to work.” There’s a product called Spascupreel, which is made from Heel. It’s a homeopathic product and it’s very strongly effective. It was Rx for a long time, a while ago. The FDA has made it OTC now.

Spascupreel is excellent! And it works for any muscle spasm anywhere in the body and it’s non-sedating and it’s non-addicting and it’s very well-tolerated. So I would say figuratively, 90% of the time, someone comes to me and says ‘chronic back problem’, is on this prescription anti-spasmodics and really wants to try something different, Spascupreel does the job.

And it also can work for leg cramps like Charley horses in the middle of the night. It can work if your eyelid is twitching. It can work for any kind of cramps any place in the body. Basically, it’s kind of all-encompassing.

And these products tend to have a long shelf life. So it’s one of those things that you could use periodically or if you could use it every day if you need it to.

DEBRA: And that’s a homeophatic remedy, right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s a homeopathic product and it’s developed by MDs. It’s inexpensive. It works really well. They’re little sublingual pills. And like I said, you get away from the sedating properties that are very common with the prescription that a lot of people, if they have to go back to work and they have to go along with their day, these things really knock you out and make you extremely tired. So Spascupreel is an easy choice for that.

Remember we talked about the two components of the back pain. We have the fact that we have the disc degeneration and then we have the muscle spasm. This can take care of the muscle spasm.

Now, the disc degeneration, when you have stenosis or the spine is narrowing and it’s pressing on the nerve, we want to look to what’s happening in the area of the body. I usually recommend instead of going right away to surgery and doing all these very invasive procedures, costly procedures, but also high chance of disability, maybe more so than the person already is experiencing, there’s a product from DesBio called SpinalMax.

Now, there used to be a product I use from Heel that was very, very good, but they’re only making it in Germany now, so that one’s not available here so much. But SpinalMax has had excellent results. SpinalMax actually repairs the nerves coming off of the spine. I cannot explain how homeopathically this works because I was trained as a pharmacist…

DEBRA: Please do, please do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …because it moves the spine back into place.

DEBRA: Wow! Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing.

DEBRA: The thing that’s very interesting to me about homeophatic – I mean, I’ve known about homeopathy for many, many years. When I used to live in California, I went to a homeopath, but there’s homeopathy and there’s homeopathy. It didn’t do much for me at the time. But what you’re giving me – like I was on insulin and Pamela gave me a homeopathic remedy. The difference is that insulin is just making your blood sugar go down and is not healing your body and the homeopathic remedy is actually healing my pancreas.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!

DEBRA: And so the long-term effects of these two things, the outcome is very, very different. And so now, it’s been what? A couple of months I think…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: …since I haven’t been taking the insuling and my blood sugar is still the same today as it was the day I stopped taking insulin. So, my blood sugar has not increased over time. I feel like more sugar is getting into my cells and I have more energy and everything. And so I’m just getting stronger and stronger. That was not happening on the insulin.

So it’s pretty amazing. It’s pretty amazing, these homeopathic remedies, these particular ones that I’m taking in and some that Pamela is talking about. They are developed by doctors to be healing. And there are things that you can’t just get it without – I mean, Pamela can give it to you because she’s a pharmacist. You can’t just go to the natural food store and buy these.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very important to know, right because they want these products. In fact, I was looking at the disclaimers in a lot of the things that I sell, they can basically go ask you legally if you’re putting it on the Internet and people do click and ship. We don’t want that. We want these to be sold with directions and counseling and I personally select for you.

And I think what’s interesting with SpinalMax and any of these kind of products, when you go to a traditional homeopath, they do the constitutional make-up, they do all that kind of stuff. Personally, I use homeopathy in a pharmacological realm. I look at the ingredients that are in there and I decide how I’m going to use it for the individual based on how I know the dynamics of these properties of these different plants are in there.

That’s why sometimes I’ll even give somebody a product for a particular ailment and it doesn’t say that’s what it’s for. I say, “Look, I know what I’m doing. Just use it for this.” It’s really important to kind of sometimes think outside of the box. Well, this SpinalMax was actually designed in place of surgery, this particular product is.

But it’s important to use your God-given talents and your intellect, all these reading and all these learning. If, for some reason, you view a particular product that has ingredients and a make-up that might be particularly good for another ailment, it’s important to realize that. You’re able to challenge that and say, “Yeah, I think I’m going to use it for that” and it does work. That’s why we go to school, right?

DEBRA: Right, right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …to learn all these things.

DEBRA: Healing, you know, it’s not a static thing. It’s not something that you can just write a book on and say that applies to everybody, everywhere at every time. And so your experience and your intelligence and ability to put all these pieces together for an individual really comes into play here. I just think that you’re doing an excellent job. I can’t say that enough because I’ve known a lot of people over the year who do various kinds of healing things and I just see you helping people over and over and over. It’s really pretty wonderful.

We only have a few seconds left until we need to go to break, so why don’t you give your phone number again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, yes. If you’d like to call me at my pharmacy, it’s Botanical Resource, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, good. We’re going to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld.

She’s a registered pharmacist. And as you know from listening, she prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And in fact, she gets a lot of people off prescription drugs. She just does remarkable work.

So we’ll be right back and hear more about what you can do about back pain.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. She prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And Pamela, give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. And like I said, I would be really, really happy to help you or your family member with any issue you might have regarding prescriptions or avoiding them. We handle all cases.

DEBRA: Yes, she does. And she can even tell you what is going on in your body now that will lead you to need to take a prescription drug in the future and how you can handle that, so that you don’t have to get sick in the first place. She does so much, it’s amazing!

Anyway, let’s go back to backs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah.

DEBRA: So where were we? What would you like to talk about next?

PAMELA SEEFELD: We were talking about alternatives, the basis of what you would normally get from the doctor. You would get narcotics and you would get muscle relaxants. So we could treat all those things. So let’s talk about the pain.

For the pain itself, remember we’re talking about using hydrating, water to increase the fluidity of the joint.
[dial tone]

DEBRA: Uh-oh, did we lose you, Pamela? Uh-oh… I’m sure that – I have a message here. Okay! So my producer is calling Pamela back. So she’ll be back just right in a minute. Let’s see, what can I tell you about backs. I know a lot about back pain because my ex-husband had a lot of back pain, a lot of injuries.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m back.

DEBRA: Oh, good!

PAMELA SEEFELD: I lost our connection. I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened.

DEBRA: It’s okay.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, we’re regrouped. We were talking about water, lessening the friction and lubricating the joint. Now, let’s talk about the pain.

So if you go to the doctor, what he’s going to give you when you’re complaining of chronic back pain is he’s going to give you some anti-inflammatories, okay? He’s going to give you Mobic or Celebrex. They’re very common drugs – especially Celebrex.

Celebrex is a COX-2 inhibitor. It works on that particular pathway, that cascade of eicosanoids in the body. Those are pain signals. It blocks it. But of course, by blocking it, life is not like all or nothing. So when you block that, it has other problems. That’s why Vioxx had to be taken off the market because there’s people with heart problems and heart attacks. So it’s not a good idea to just completely block out a particular pathway.

I’m a big fan of using curcumin, which is turmeric. It works as a COX-2 inhibitor. It’s a natural COX-2 inhibitor. And that’s pretty easy to use and it’s pretty inexpensive. I also am a big fan of Traumeel. Traumeel is an excellent anti-inflammatory. And what Traumeel does – and it’s from Heel. It’s homeopathic. They come in drops, they come in tablets, sublingual tablets. It also comes in injections and cream. But I use the liquid quite a bit for people because you can put it in water like we were describing. When you drink it through the day, very specific.

But why Traumeel is different than using an anti-inflammatory, if you take an anti-inflammatory, that’s all you’re getting. Like a prescription anti-inflammatory, it blocks a certain cell signal, a pathway and there’s no solving.

So if we want to start solving the problem, if you’re doing this Spascupreel for the muscle spasm, you’re drinking more water, you’re doing maybe some exercises, some physical therapy to try and help the area with mobility and the SpinalMax to try and realign the spine, the Traumeel actually goes to where the injury is taking present and repairs small tears and damage in tendons, ligaments and the areas surrounding the tissue itself that’s injured.

So I like it because I think of it more as a reparative than just blocking out a cell signal. It’s more of a solving of an injury. And that’s what they really developed it originally for, for athletes. It solves where the injury takes place.

DEBRA: Yeah. Traumeel was one of the first things that Pamela gave me because I was having a problem with my foot at the time. When I went into her office, I was in so much pain I could hardly walk. She gave me Traumeel.

Later on, I had to go do other things and I was in pain. I was taking it, I was drinking it throughout the afternoon while I was sitting down. And then I had to drive myself home and I thought, “How am I going to drive home with all those pain in my foot?” But when I stood up, there was no pain in my foot after I had been drinking this bottle of water with Traumeel in it for several hours. That really shocked me. It works so well.

Pamela, are you there?

DEBRA: Yes, yes. I don’t know why I keep cutting out. I apologize. No, that’s what it is. When you’re drinking it in the water, specifically, what it’s going to do is it’s going to start releasing it gradually over a time period. And what you’re going to do is you’re saying to yourself is, “Okay, I’m actually looking for a complete solving of the issue instead of just blocking out a signal.”

All of these different prescrpitoin things that we use only block out a certain pathway and we really want to try and heal the area. So we say to ourselves, “Okay, in place of surgery, push fluids, SpinalMax, using some Spascupreel for the spasm, using some anti-inflammatory be it Traumeel or turmeric.”

And also, too, probably to some degree, eliminating nightshades in your diet because tomatoes, eggplants, some of the different vegetables that are nightshades, they do cause inflammation in some people. And sometimes, people have to try and eliminate those foods to see if the inflammation goes down a little bit.

But the hallmark of this whole talk today is to say all these people having all these back surgeries, if they did a few, inexpensive supplements (we’re not talking a lot of stuff here really) and water – like I said, the water costs nothing. It’s right there, it’s your filtered tap. If you start doing those simple things there, I’m sure that most of these people could avoid surgeries.

And I can tell you from experience and also just from listening to a lot of different lecturers, I’ve heard people, different doctors even profess that dehydration is causing a lot of the back problems. This is not new science. I can’t understand why when someone shows up with the initial, the beginning of some back problems, that water is not suggested first and foremost. I just really cannot understand that.

DEBRA: Because they don’t make money selling water. You know what? I think that back doctors, all the back doctors should all sell water filters in their offices and that way, they would make money.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I concur.

DEBRA: Yeah. I think all doctors should sell water filters. I just think that the first thing that anybody should do if they have anything going on with their body is drink more water, drink good water that is healing water and that will just hydrate your body. And then you should call Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, that’s true because we were talking about dehydration. When dehydration sets in in these discs in the spine, that’s the first place it’s going to show up because like I said, we have L5 holding a huge amount of our upper body weight. So if the dehydration alter the rest of the body, then it’s also going to start especially affecting that joint.

I’m telling you that most people could’ve reversed a lot of their back problems specifically with that SpinalMax bringing the spine back into alignment and repairing those nerves. And don’t forget to mention too that really, folic acid and omega 3 fish oil form the actual nerve themselves. Those can be excellent adjuncts to therapy to these things. I usually use those with it too because if you give the building blocks of the nerve, you’re going to have much better nerve repair off of the spine.

DEBRA: You know, Pamela, with my ex-husband, we went through years and years and years of disc problems. They wanted to give him surgery and he didn’t want to have surgery and all these stuff. And then there were chiropractor’s massage, we did something called VAX-D. There were exercises. Not one single person ever said to him these things that you’re saying now. Just having been through all that years of pain with him, I wish we knew you then.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s just really sad. These are like very elementary concepts too. Anybody that has any kind of – even a minor understanding of the human physiology would realize that the fluid and the water and how it is allowed to take waste products away from the area, how it’s needed in the subluxation station or the area where the cartilage is moving back and forth to protect the joint and lubricate the joint, these are rational concepts. They’re not like out there kind of concepts.

We know what the body is made of. We need to start remembering that we’re kind of like a chemical soup and the water is where all these ions and everything is moving around in. And if we don’t have that basis where things can be eliminated and the body can basically lubricate all these different joints and different areas, it’s going to be an uphill body for a lot of individuals – especially elderly people because their sense of thirst is altered as they age. And that’s why you see a lot of these older people with so many back problems. A lot of it is dehydration.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Alright! So we’ve only got about a minute left. We’ll just say drink your water…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Drink your water…

DEBRA: Call Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Call me for homeopathic anti-spasmodics. And also, the SpinalMax, I cannot say enough how many wonderful things I’ve seen. I’ve had people that were on Fentanyl patches and oxycodone and they’re completely off of it doing the homeopathy for the spinal repair. I told them, “Look, pain medicines aren’t going to solve the spine. We need to solve the problem so that you don’t need the narcotics.”

They’re very liberated and very, very happy that we were able to accomplish that. It can be done. I want to tell people that there’s lots of encouragement. If you’re on all of these medicines, I can help you, give you some kind of path away from these things. I think you’ll be very satisfied.

DEBRA: Yeah, I think that you will be too. So it will not be an intrusion for Pamela for you to call her.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, I do this all day long.

DEBRA: She does, she does. And she loves to hear from you. And so just if you’ve got something going on with your health or somebody in your family, even with your pets – she can help pets too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes!

DEBRA: …and so just give her a call. Give the number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you can reach me at 727-442-4955. As I’ve said previously, I would really be most honored to help you or your family member or your dogs or cats with any issues they may have. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve very successful at it and I really want to help people. So really, please call me if there’s anything I can help you with.

DEBRA: Thank you! And that’s it, we’re at the end of the show. Thank you so much, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.

DEBRA: Pamela will be back in another two weeks. You can listen to this show again or her back shows at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about how toxic chemicals cause free radical damage that ages your body, and which specific antioxidants to take to heal free radical damage in various parts of your body. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

• Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?
• Evaluating A Study and Testing a Test
• Seven Deadly Drugs
• The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally
• What We Can Do About Cancer
• The Power of pH
• How to Protect Your Health From Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings
• Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage
• Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help
• How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements
• How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use—And How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and into Health
• How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals
• Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
• See More Clearly with Natural Remedies
• Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs
• Different Types of Detox
• Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies
• How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life
• Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
• Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
• You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
• Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
• It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
• How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
• Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
• Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
• Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: November 5, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. We have an autumn day today, Wednesday, November 5th 2014. Today, we’re going to talk about how toxic chemicals aid your body and what you can do to stay young.

I don’t know if you’ve seen my pictures, I don’t know how old you think I am, but everybody tells me that I look younger than I actually am. I’m not going to tell you how old I am today, but I could guarantee to you, I am much older than my picture looks. People are just guessing all the time how old I am and I’m actually pretty old. I mean, you can figure this out because last Saturday, November 1st, I celebrated 30 years of having my books continuously I print. If I’ve been writing books and having them published for 30 years, then – I didn’t start when I was six years old.

But I think that I look so young because I’ve been away from so many toxic chemicals so much. Obviously, it’s impossible to stay away from 100% of them in today’s world. There’s so many things that you can do to remove them from your home and your workplace and your body. And when you do that, then you’re not suffering from the damaging effects that we’re going to be talking about.

So my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday, so she was on two weeks ago and she’ll be on again two weeks from now. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. In fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs and uses medicinal plants and other natural substances in place of drugs in order to handle physical problems.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m so glad you’re here too. So, we’re kind of in this pattern of starting off your shows with me telling how well I’m doing from working with you and having you give me various supplements to do various things.

So last week, I think we were talking about weight loss and I was talking about my weight loss of 14 lbs. since I’ve been working with you. But the thing that’s happened in the last two weeks that has been really astounding to me is that I actually have so much energy that I want to exercise. I want to exercise.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is just so great!

DEBRA: It is because I’ve spent most of my life not exercising because it’ll just be, “Oh, I have to drag my body out of the chair?” or I get short of breath or something like that. And so I have this little rebounder. I’ve had it for a couple of years and I know that jumping on a rebounder is really good for you. But knowing that something is good for you and actually doing it are two different things.

When I started out, I could maybe ten bounces. I mean, that’s how out of shape I was. And so then, I got up to a hundred. And then a couple of weeks ago, I got up to 150. And this week, I’ve been doing sets of 200 bounces and I’ve been doing that two or three times a day.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is great!

DEBRA: Yes, yes. This is huge progress.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m just so very, very happy for you. You deserve it. Your health is just of the utmost important.

DEBRA: It is because really, if you don’t have health, you’re not going to be able to do anything else in the world. So actually, we’re talking about aging. As my body is getting older, I am getting stronger and healthier and more able. And so aging doesn’t have to be deteriorating. It could be restoring.

Anyway, let’s start out just by talking about toxic chemicals and how they damage your body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So there’s different categories of things that can be damaging to the body. We know heavy metals, lead, mercury and nickel, these things can accumulate in the body because they really don’t leave the body. It doesn’t have a really good process for eliminating it. What actually helps eliminate heavy metals pretty effectively are saunas.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Because saunas, most of these heavy metals are stored under the skin and they can come out in the sweat. So we know that’s a very good way to remove that kind of body burden so to speak.

But we also know that the chemicals, the pesticides has to be fat soluble to stay in the body. So I’ll explain what that means. From a chemistry standpoint, something that’s water soluble, if you’re in contact with this chemical and it’s water soluble, it is going to go into the urine and leave the body. But they’re more your really aren’t water soluble chemical that accumulate in the body, so those aren’t the ones we really concern ourselves with.

When you think about a pesticide, the reason why it’s fat soluble is because think about it, when they spread a field, how do these bugs die? You don’t see bugs that are burst apart, right? That doesn’t happen. They find them dead. And how they die is in the central nervous system. So these bugs are neurological toxins to these different insects and they have affinity to do that. That’s why they’re also neurological toxins for us. So someone that maybe sprays pesticide for a living will be at a higher risk for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, any of these neurological disorders.

So people need to kind of phrase these things in their mind, going like, “What are we trying to get rid of?” Metals are easily removed from the Body Anew, which is the homeopathic detox that I use. That’s going to work its way into the central nervous system in the brain too so that if someone ate a lot of fish at one time, that can remove mercury. But it’s important to say, “We want to remove fat soluble chemicals” and to do that, the body has to undergo moving the pesticides out of the fat, into the blood stream and changing them in the liver to make them more water soluble.

So it’s important to note that that’s how these things kill bugs and they also accumulate in us.

DEBRA: Yes! So then what do you do…?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I think it’s interesting. I don’t know if people really think of it that way.

DEBRA: Well actually, I think of it that way because I wrote several pages exactly on that process in my book, Toxic-Free. But I had to research that and I had to have a friend of mine who’s a doctor explain it to me. You explained it really, really well. But I only know this because I’ve been studying toxicology for 30 years.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! You’re an expert in the field and so you would know that, but the person listening, they might not have had it presented to them in that matter to understand how it works. I hope that that clarifies the different levels and the things we’re trying to remove out of the body.

DEBRA: Yes, and you explained that very well because the heavy metals have to be removed in a different way than how the pesticides need to be removed. Even fluoride needs to be removed in a different way.

This is what I’m finding out as I’m researching the whole subject of detox. You have to know what it is that you’re wanting to remove from the body in order to remove it. To just drink a green smoothie doesn’t necessarily remove what you want to remove. That’s why we need to be so careful about this one when we’re actually doing it.

Tell us about free radicals and how the toxic chemicals, that damage that occurs with toxic chemicals.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. Yes, absolutely. Great question. So free radicals, basically what is – and we’re going to talk a little bit about antioxidants coming up. Free radicals are basically an unpaired electron. It’s an unpaired electron and it’s allowing damage to take place.

So what can free radicals do in the body? If you don’t have anti-oxidants whether you’re getting them from food or from supplements (sometimes, I like to say you can get it from both), what they do is it can damage blood vessels and vasculature and allow for plaque and hardening of the arteries and atherosclerotic disease.
They can work specifically on the arteries, but also on the internal organs (the liver, the kidneys).

And a good example of free radicals that are damaging is macular degeneration. When these free radicals are damaging the eye and people start having issues where they start losing their sight as they get to be elderly.

DEBRA: Right! So I also wrote about free radicals in Toxic-Free. Actually, anybody who’s interested in how toxic chemicals affects your body and what the detox process is, there’s a real clear explanation in my book if you just get my book, Toxic-Free. But I’m going to explain something about free radicals because this is how I thought of it really easily.

What free radicals are is that they’re a natural byproduct of energy production. So our body is producing free radicals. What they are is they’re molecules, but they’re unpaired on their outer shells. And so it’s like if you were a single person, you would be like an unpaired electron and you’re looking to mate up with another electron.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: But what happens is instead of mating with another single electron, they go steal husbands and wives from other marriages and they destroy those marriages.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Aah, I like your analogy.

DEBRA: Isn’t that great?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I like that. No, I really like that. That’s simplistic because I mean, really, I’m sure most people in their mind don’t know how to picture an electron.

DEBRA: Right, right. But that’s exactly the function that’s happening. We need to go to break. When we come back, more about antioxidants and free radicals and unpaired electrons.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s funny.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld and we’re talking about how toxic chemicals age your body and what you can do to stay young. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. There’s actually a word for it, it’s ‘pharmacognicist’.

I always like to mention this ‘pharmacognocy’ because it means the study of medicinal plants, but the word root itself is pharma-, which is drugs and -cogno, which is intelligence. So plants are drugs with intelligence and I really like that because nature has its own intelligence and it gets transferred to the plants into our bodies and then that intelligence helps heal us. Yes, is that correct? Hello?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is correct.

DEBRA: Okay, good. So let’s go back to anti-oxidants and free radicals. Alright! So then the free radicals, when they mate up with husbands and wives instead of another single electron, then there’s damage. It just destroys that. And so then what happens with the antioxidants?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So the antioxidants go and they stop this process. They’re basically donating electrons. So what’s important is there’s different levels. We think of vitamin E and vitamin C, those are very strong antioxidants. Vitamin C is the water soluble antioxidant, so that goes into the blood and the tissues that have water affinity and vitamin E is the fat-soluble antioxidants. So that goes to the brain, to the cellular membranes, things like that.

The problem with free radicals is they are not taken care of and ‘neutralized’ so to speak, you end up with damage to tissues. So antioxidants are really an important way to circumvent that. The vitamin C and E are really good. I did some searches in the Library of Medicine because I have some particular favorite antioxidants that I like.

I like Resveratrol quite a bit. Resveratrol has anti-cancer activity. It decreases your lipid, your circulating lipid (so your cholesterol, your triglycerides) and its anti-aging effects are really great because it encompasses anti-aging properties in the inside of the body, but it also stops hyperpigmentation and aging in the skin, which I thought was really interesting.

So it works inside and outside. And really, that’s what we’re all kind of concerned about, right? We want to look young, but we also want to feel young too.
So this has high affinity for the plasma membrane.

DEBRA: What is Resveratrol? What plant does that come from? How does that get made?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Resveratrol, it was originally located in red wine. It’s kind of like the going joke you need to drink lots of red wine for getting your Resveratrol. But you’d have to be drinking quite a bit, which probably wouldn’t be good either intoxicated people walking around all day. And we do find these components in wine, but it’s to a very small extent.

So the capsule, they’re relatively inexpensive. They work really, really well and they’re well-tolerated. There’s also some data, I think this is quite interesting, that this has really high penetration to the brain. And they have some studies that they’ve shown with mice that they make them both alcoholic mice. That’s the particular mouse that they breed. And then they made sure that these mice had cognitive impairment as a result of it. They couldn’t find their way around the maze.

And then they gave the one group a placebo and the other group, they gave Resveratrol. And within a month, the Resveratrol group actually overcame their cognitive decline and could run the maze like mighty mouse. So we know that it really does help to change tissue in the brain too in a favorable sense.

So there’s tons of different antioxidants. I can go to a lot of the different ones, but Resveratrol might be the one you really want to try because it does prevent the aging of the skin, which that’s been shown to be statistically significant especially the hyperpigmentation and the sun spots that you get. And then also, the internal organs and the circulating lipids and the anti-cancer and anti heart attack capacity that it entails as well is really important.

DEBRA: That’s really good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would tell you too green tea.

DEBRA: Yeah?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s good. Green tea is excellent as well. Green tea contains epigallocatechins, over 300 of them. I would tell people not just drinking the green tea because when you do a green tea teabag, you’re only doing the water soluble components of the plant, right?

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So drinking green tea is great for you, but I prefer to tell people to actually consume the capsules because when you consume the capsules, you’re getting all the tea. You’re not just getting the water soluble components, but you’re getting the fat soluble components.

So remember, fat soluble is where all the problems are. You want something that’s going to target into these membranes, into these tissues and the anti-cancer – like especially for breast cancer with green tea, it’s highly efficacious.

So I would tell people that green tea capsules. And not only that too, you get the added benefit that green tea capsules are great for weight – weight loss, I should be more specific.

So I know I do that. When I exercise in the morning, I take four small green tea capsules just before I start working out with my detox bottle. That way, it really helps to burn a lot more fun. There are studies that have shown that the increase in fat-burning is quite significant. So those two supplements are something that most people should really be taking.

DEBRA: That sounds good to me. I actually take a green tea extract. So would the fat soluble be in the extract or should I switch to capsules?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. So yeah, if it’s an extract that’s in glycerin or in alcohol, yes, it would because glycerin and alcohol (especially alcohol, maybe more so) extracts those components out. When you do a water soluble extract (with basically, the hot water over the tea bag), you are still getting components, but you’re not getting all the epigallocatechins that are in there because you really want the 300 different components that are in there.

An extract would have that. I like just taking the capsules, which is pretty easy because they’re tiny, little capsules. The good part about it is that I don’t do real well with caffeine and the capsules – and I think you should notice it for your extract, they don’t make you jittery.

DEBRA: Yeah. No, it doesn’t make me jittery at all.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! Whereas if you can get it from coffee, I don’t tolerate it very well.

DEBRA: I don’t tolerate coffee well either even just a cup of coffee in the morning. I only drink it like if I’m in a different timezone and I have to be awake.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s the way I approach it. I don’t have coffee in my house.

DEBRA: I don’t either.
PAMELA SEEFELD: But if I’m working as a pharmacist and I’m filling prescriptions and it’s late in the afternoon, I take maybe a few sips. I’m probably getting 2 mg., just something just to make sure that I’m not getting tired.

This is really good too because we’re like parallel lives.

DEBRA: We are, we are.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, exactly. And green tea is a great way to get those components – so Resveratrol and green tea. I want to mention too just eating vegetables in your salad. If you have vegetables that have all these different colors, if you put olive oil on them, you’re going to absorb all of these flavinoids and polyphenols directly out of the vegetables. That’s why you’re eating food in the first place, to nourish the body.

DEBRA: Let’s talk more about that after the break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: Yes, we need to go break. So we’ll talk more about that when we come back.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, very good.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about how to stay young even in a toxic world that cause the damage and aging to your body. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

And Pamela, we haven’t given your phone number yet. Pamela will talk to you on the phone for free about whatever your physical condition is that you’re concerned about and make some recommendations. So tell us more about what you do and what your phone number is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, very good. So my background is clinical pharmacy, but also, of course, pharmacognocy, which we discussed. I have a pharmacy in Clearwater, Florida. I do natural products. I’m a natural product pharmacist technically. We do homeopathic medicine, full service of vitamins.

And basically, I can even look at your blood work. I can tell you what’s going on in your body, not necessarily what’s normal range and out of range. And we can customize a program for you if you want to get off of particular medications. I do specialize even in mental health. So it’s all encompassing.

I also veterinary homeopathy for dogs and cats. So if there’s a particular ailment that your favorite friend in the house is suffering from, I’d be happy to help you with that.

So my number for the pharmacy is 727-442-4955. I would be really honored to help any of you that might have some issues about the medications you’re on or avoiding medicine. Everything we do here is all-encompassing. We keep a chart for you and all services are complimentary. So that’s basically the gist of it.

DEBRA: Yes. And she’s extremely effective. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I live. I found out about here and started having her on the show and started working with her myself because I was hearing from so many people how well they were doing after visiting Pamela.

And even my medical doctor, when I told him that Pamela was giving me some things to help some of the things that had been long-term conditions for me, he said, “Just do what she tells you to do.” And so she’s very, very, very highly regarded.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, that’s great.

DEBRA: Yeah, she’s very highly regarded here.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I teach this. I’ve done this a long time. I’ll be very glad to answer any questions that you might have about the supplements you’re taking, the medicines they’re taking. I know both very well. This is something that I can help you with tremendously.

DEBRA: Yeah, she really can. And another thing I just want to add about what she does is that she’s looking at supplements from the viewpoint of a pharmacist. The dose that you’re taking and what you’re taking it with. All are intertwined with how effective it is instead of just going and saying, looking at the shelf in the natural food store and saying, “Well, what should I take?” or reading an article.

Have someone who really knows what they’re doing help you choose what your supplements are. It really makes a difference, it really does because then you’ll be spending your money on something that’s really working.

When I first went to Pamela, one of the first things that she said was, she looked at my blood work and she said, “You know, whatever it is you’ve been doing, you haven’t been making progress for the past eight years.” And then she gave me some things and I made progress in two weeks.

So that’s the difference. And so if you have something that you’ve been struggling with, please, please, please call her because she’s helped so many people.
Anyway, give your phone number and we’ll go back to talking about antioxidants.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, thank you. So the number here at my pharmacy is 727-442-4955. I’d be very honored to help with any of you with any issues you might have.

DEBRA: Yes, call her. Anyway, so antioxidants. We were talking about food before the break and you were telling us that we should eat salad and put olive oil on it. Explain about why the olive oil.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! So fat on these vegetables. And it doesn’t have to be a lot. It can be half a teaspoon even. When you have fat on the vegetables, what it does is it allows to carry these components, which are fat soluble and that’s what you want, these antioxidants because we were saying that the areas that are most susceptible in your body are the ones that have cellular membranes and that is made of fat, so the fatty acids.

So what we want to do is we want to have this peak in the blood stream be very high. So a lot of these people that are dieting and eating lots of salad, but they’re not having olive oil with it, they’re getting the peaks in the blood stream. That explains why people, when they go on extreme diets, so they’re switching up just eating lots of salads in trying to lose weight, if they’re just putting vinegar on their salad…

DEBRA: The lemon juice.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …they start losing hair. The reason why, it’s not just the idea with the little calories, they’re not absorbing anything. That’s the real problem. So by not absorbing things, it’s causing these particular types of problems.

So the vegetables are really important. But also too, the supplements. I was talking about the Resveratrol and the green tea.

I want to mention, kind of an honorable mention of curcumin, which is turmeric. Turmeric is really interesting. Before the show, I did a Medline search in the Library of Medicine to see some of the different studies and turmeric, actually, we know it protects heart disease and cancer, it reduces incidence of type II diabetes, but its antioxidant effects are extremely effective for protecting neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s.

It has a high affinity for the brain. And as a result of that, if you’re really concerned about cognitive decline, this would probably be something that you would really want to take.

DEBRA: So how…

PAMELA SEEFELD: But studies also show that it really…

DEBRA: Go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Go ahead.

DEBRA: Well, I was going to ask…

PAMELA SEEFELD: …macular degeneration, which I thought was interesting.

DEBRA: That is interesting. I think I should take that. I’d been considering taking that just recently. And I want to ask you, so you just probably give it to people in capsules?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, correct. You can cook with it, but it just doesn’t quite give us the peak in the blood stream because you’re not getting the same amount.

And I would also tell you that this one is particularly sensitive to needing fat present at the meal to have it absorbed. So if you’re having an apple for breakfast, this is not going to be absorbed. I tell my clients when I put them in curcumin (which is also extremely effective for arthritis and for pain), you can use curcumin many times even in place of narcotics for people who have severe back pain or rheumatism because it works like a COX-2 inhibitor, which is like Celebrex. It works exactly the same. It blocks chemical signals. You’re also getting the effects to the brain.

DEBRA: So what you need if you’re going to take turmeric, you need to take it with fat. So if you were eating Indian food…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! You have to have that. Otherwise, it won’t absorb.

DEBRA: Yeah, if you were eating Indian food, it has a lot of turmeric in it, you would also be having the fat from the food. But you need to make sure if you’re going to take a capsule that you’re taking it with some fat.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very important because I see people that have tried turmeric for pain – usually, most people take it for rheumatism. And they’re like, “Well, that didn’t work.” And then I bring it to the fact that that’s why it’s important that people call me and I tell them, “If you eat this particular food with this particular supplement, you’re going to get the full 99% of the dose into the bloodstream.”

And we can target different supplement and different foods to deliver these things in a more effective manner. That’s what’s really important, understanding the physiology of your body and the chemistry of your food and making these things all work together in harmony, right?

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …because a lot of people, they’re not thinking of it in that sense.

DEBRA: Well, not only are they not thinking of it…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is very, very important. So why spend the money if it’s not going to work?

DEBRA: You’re the first person in 30 years of study on this subject that I’ve ever heard say this, but it makes so much sense. And you’re trained. You’re bringing a different viewpoint to it. I think that you have your whole pharmacy background and that you’re looking at all these interactions and it makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I’m so interested in this.

We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about antioxidants and other things that you can do to help stay youthful in a toxic world that is constantly aging your body. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about aging, antioxidants, toxic chemicals and what we can do to have more antioxidants in our body.

So what do you think about chocolate as an antioxidant?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I think chocolate is just showing very convincingly the data that chocolate has strong antioxidant activity. But what I would say is that unfortunately, the majority of the chocolate we see is combined with a lot of sugar and fat.

I personally like regular chocolate like everybody does, but you know what I’ve tried to do (and I can do this a great deal of the time) is have you ever tried Cocoa Nibs?

DEBRA: Yes, I have. And you know what?

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s raw chocolate pieces.

DEBRA: One of the thing that I found about it is it actually does taste like chocolate, but it has a real kick to it in terms of – it seems to have more of a caffeine kind of kick. It’s more like caffeine than eating regular chocolate. Somehow, eating a chocolate bar maybe doesn’t have as much chocolate in it because it’s got all the other stuff in it. But the Cocoa Nibs, they’re really good. I like Cocoa Nibs.

What I like to do is I like to take cocoa powder and then mix it with whatever I want to mix it with. And one of the things that I like to mix it with is I just mix it with grass-fed cream and put whatever natural sweetener I want to put in it…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Great ideas!

DEBRA: I’ll make a little fudge.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a great idea!

DEBRA: Yeah, one serving at a time like I’ll take a teaspoon, a heaping teaspoon of cocoa and then I’ll just put a little bit of, say, coconut sugar or honey or whatever and then put in the cream and just make a little paste and it’s delicious. It’s delicious and you can mix it with nuts or put mint extract or orange extract or whatever you want. That’s what I do when I want chocolate.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very smart. I mean, a lot of times if I want to make a little fudge, I’ll mix cocoa powder with a little bit of agave and almond butter.

DEBRA: Hmmm… that sounds good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You can roll them into little balls and put them in the refrigerator.

DEBRA: Yeah!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. I mean, you can be creative. There’s lots of different ways you can do it. So I think that the antioxidant activity in cocoa is hard to deny. It’s there and it’s really – life’s but enjoyment. The cocoa is good for you. We’re not saying, “Sit there and eat the whole bag of fun-sized sneakers” even though I was handing out candy on Halloween. I’ve had to bring it to the hospital to get it all out of my house because I’m like, “I don’t want to have that stuff sitting around.”

DEBRA: I know.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s so funny. Antioxidants some place else thinking that other people will eat it. But yeah, the antioxidant activity in chocolate is definitely there. We know that has high affinity for fat and water soluble areas of the body. That’s very important.

I was going to mention too, we’re talking about anti-aging exercise. What does the data show about exercise?

DEBRA: Oh, good. Tell us.

PAMELA SEEFELD: We know that the study show – and this is very interesting. This just recently came out. They took people that never exercised. These people were an average of 65, they never worked out before and they took a punch biopsy of the skin on their derriere. So that’s an area that normally doesn’t see the sun and so will have the least aging effects underneath the microscope as the rest of the body.

And then they put these people on exercise routine and they had them exercising for 45 minutes for four times a week.

After three weeks of this particular study, they went and resampled their skin and their skin in that time period from the exercise (and they don’t know if it’s the sweating or the exercise) actually look like a younger person’s skin.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: So the anti-aging effects of exercise are really important especially on the skin. The sweating process and also the capillary dilation during exercise allows more – this is my theory – allows more of the nutrients and the antioxidants that are present in your body to go to the cellular membranes and be much more effective. So it’s kind of up-regulating the area.

DEBRA: My theory is… go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: Well, I was going to say too…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I was going to say too white blood cell demargination. The white blood cells have a transient increase during exercise. So these cells were normally kind of hanging on to the side of the blood vessels. Because your heart rate goes up, they’re kicked off.

And so if you take someone’s sample of their CBC and looked at their white blood cells prior to exercise and then right after exercise, you get this transient increase. That’s why people that work out quite a bit don’t get sick.

DEBRA: Hmmm… well, I was going to say that my theory about why your skin looks better when you exercise is because when you sweat, you’re removing toxic chemicals from your body and so there’s less free radicals damage.

And I’ve also noticed that at times when I drink a lot more water (like if you go on vacation and you’re hot and sweating in some other climate where you aren’t usually), I notice that my skin just looks clearer and softer.

And so I really drink. I drink about three quarts of water a day, which I think is more than most people drink. I’m just sitting at my desk and I just drink and drink and drink pure water. I think that makes a huge difference.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it does. You have to realize your body is mostly water. So basically, when it comes down to it, your carbon and all these electrolytes (sodium, potassium and your hydrogen) – I mean, basically, your body is a chemistry stew and what’s holding it all together is water. So your skin, of course, when it’s hydrated, it’s going to make a huge difference as far as the way it looks.

And believe it or not, even from people going out in the sun and sun tanning, just being hydrated makes a huge difference in the texture of the skin regardless of whether the person had sunscreen or not because dehydrate steps in and it’s really common that this can happen.

So I would tell people that you’d want to really push fluids and also try and find room for exercise during the week, whatever you can do. Personally, I think that the best time to work out is in the morning because it kind of sets the tone for the day and gets your metabolism up. But some people do much better in the evening. It just depends if it affects your sleep or not.

I would also say too there’s another supplement that I’m interested in, collagen. If you take collagen or hyaluronic acid, that can work for the joints if you have arthritis.

Collagen also, of course, builds up the collagen under the skin. You can take oil collagen. It’s pretty inexpensive. I use a drink here at the pharmacy that I take myself and it kind of tastes like orange. You put it in the water and it brings you into a peak in the blood stream really fast (but you can take it in capsules too).

And collagen, what it’s going to do is it’s going to help the skin look much more youthful because collagen is kind of like the – I want to say the scaffolding under the skin that holds it up, makes you look useful. You can take it in a supplement.

And what you can find too is that collagen has high affinity for the joints. So a lot of people, as you get older, you start having mild arthritis in your joints, it reverses that. So that’s an easy, inexpensive way to get the anti-aging effects. But at the same time, also, be working on the joints because rheumatism tends to set in as people get older. So those are some really good things too.

I’m not sure, but what are you using on your skin right now?

DEBRA: What am I using on my skin. I don’t use a particular skin product. I’ve tried a number of different ones. I mean, people are always sending me skin products because that’s a big thing in the natural products industry, natural skin products. And so I’ve tried a lot of them, but I just basically wash my face with filtered water from my shower and just various kinds of soap, just soap. I know that I probably shouldn’t do that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You probably shouldn’t say that because your skin looks really good. Your face looks great.

DEBRA: Thank you. Okay! So Pamela, wait, I want to ask you a question. How old do you think I am? I think you don’t know my age. I think you don’t know my age, right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, I have no idea how old you are.

DEBRA: How old do you think I look? How old do you think I look?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Late forties? I have no idea.

DEBRA: Okay, that’s what people think. I’m older than that, I’m older than that. But see…

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, you look really good. And you know what too? And all kidding aside because people can’t see you (we’re talking on the radio), the difference since you’ve been doing the Body Anew and the few things that I’ve put you on, your skin and your body has transformed quite a bit. I mean, you looked pretty before, but now, you really glow when I see your face.

DEBRA: Thank you. I agree.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I can tell that things are just starting to fall into place.

DEBRA: I agree. Yeah, yeah. And you guys, you should see Pamela. You could go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comand see Pamela’s picture. I want to look like Pamela because she just radiates health more than anybody I’ve ever met. I mean, you cannot look at her and not say that she’s not the healthiest person in the room. She looks healthy in a way that I’ve never seen anybody look health and I’m going to look that way too. So there!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely! That’s the only way to be. I get stopped in the grocery store and they’re like, “You look really healthy” and I’m like, “I do because I am. Please call me. I’d love to help you too.” So it’s all-encompassing.

Let me tell you, your health is your wealth and you really want to take care of your body. You only have one body. Taking some of these simple supplements we were talking about – the Resveratrol, green tea, salad with olive oil, maybe some turmeric, some curcumin, vitamin C and E, of course, getting enough sleep (we’ve talked about this before, sleep and exercise are very important), all these things that you do, these body habits affect aging in subtle ways, but very significant as well.

And these are things that we can easily do. This isn’t really too difficult. Even if you have to take the stairs when you’re at work, little bits of exercise here and there make a huge difference in the heart disease, cancer and also the way the skin appears. Study is showing that with people exercising, it can change their skin to a younger person just from a few weeks. It’s really a testament that exercise is not just for the physical health, but the skin health and the mental health as well.

DEBRA: Well, I want to say that I have this rebounder I mentioned. It only cost me $40. I just have it in the corner of the room.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you!

DEBRA: And it takes me what? A minute or two to do 200 bounces. And so I can just take a little break from my desk and do the 200 bounces and come back. It’s not even time-consuming anybody can do this.

We’ve got only 20 seconds less, so give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if you can call me here at my pharmacy, the number here is 727-442-4955, I would be very glad to help you and your family with any questions you might have.

DEBRA: Great! This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!