Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies

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. In our last interview, we talked about my brother’s death from prescription drugs. Today we’ll talk about how natural remedies can act as a bridge to move away from taking prescription drugs and their 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

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO

Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd

Guest: Pamela Seefeld, P.Ph.s

Date of Broadcast: February 11, 2015

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. It’s Wednesday, February 11th, almost Valentine’s Day. It’s February 11th, 2015.

We have a beautiful, early spring day here in Florida. My office is what’s called a Florida room here, which is a room that has big windows. It’s got 17 ft. of windows. I think it’s 17 ft. or something like that. And as I do the show, I just look out the windows into my beautiful backyard with oak trees and birds flying by.

In the spring time, I have this whole bank of beautiful azaleas right under my window and they’re starting to bloom. They’re just starting. So for the next two weeks, we’re going to have beautiful azaleas. And so spring is starting to be here. Even if you’re in the snow in Florida, it’s starting to be spring.

So 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. She’s been on many times before. I have her on every other Wednesday because she has so much information and prescription drugs. Even over-the-counter drugs have so many health effects.

The last show we did – actually, two weeks ago, we did a replay because I didn’t do any live shows last week. But a month ago, we did a show about how prescription drugs just undermine your health over a lifetime of taking them. We did that because of the recent death of my brother from prescription drugs. So if you haven’t listened to that show, you might want to take a listen to that one.

But today, what we’re going to talk about is how to get off prescription drugs and also other types of drugs that are over-the-counter or even recreational drugs or psychiatric drugs that often, you can’t just quit. Natural remedies can be used as a bridge between taking these drugs and being off of them.

So welcome, Pamela.

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

Debra: Thank you. It’s always nice to have you on. I always like talking about this. You are a – wait a minute, I have to find the word. I keep forgetting it. What’s the word? It’s pharma—

PAMELA SEEFELD: Pharmacognosy.

Debra: Pharmacognosy! That’s right. I have it here in the description somewhere. There it is right there. So I always love giving that word because I’m very happy to know that there is a whole field called pharmacognosy that is just about the healing power of plants.

The word itself, pharma-, that’s a drug, but cognosy means information, intelligence. It really describes what a plant does. A plant has its own intelligence. It can work with your body and all of the nature intelligence that happens between different kinds of natural things. it’s so different from what a drug is.

So with that said, let’s start talking about how people can get off prescription drugs with natural remedies. Let’s start with psychiatric drugs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I just kind of picked a few different things and then we can just expand upon that. Anti-depressants, we’ll go through that category first. So if a person has some depression symptoms, they go to the doctor and the doctor give them most commonly something called an SSRI, which is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. These drugs include Zoloft, Paxil and Prozac. They’re very commonly prescribed.

And in fact, many times, in most cities here in the country, they test positive for these in the water supply because there’s so much of it.

It’s in the tap water now.

Debra: That’s just amazing!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s in most municipalities – that and cholesterol lowering drugs and estrogen from birth control pills and from women taking estrogen. Those three things are found ubiquitously in water supplies around the country.

Debra: Another reason to get a water filter.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Well said.

So let’s say that somebody has depression and they go on these medicines. And then what happens is the original instance that they were depressed about maybe passes (maybe they lost a loved one or something like that) and then they end up staying on these things for long periods of time.

So to avoid this, basically, most of the time, the physician won’t re-evaluate at any point coming in the future. They’ll basically just stay on it and maybe even the person thinks that they need this medicine because they’ve gotten so accustomed to it.

The neurons, when you start taking these medicines away, there’s a process that takes place and it’s called neuronal retreat. What it does is the neurons start to retract from where they’re branched out. And so that’s what explains the transient amnesia for some people, the anxiety, the sleep problems, all these things that gets them anxious and make them think that they can’t get off the medicine

So there’s a physiological change in the brain that takes place taking these things that needs to be addressed before you take them away.

So a lot of the times when we look at the brain and we talk about taking away anti-depressants, first and foremost, we need to say, “Okay, what’s going on in the frontal cortex where we do our thinking and reasoning?”

The brain is folic acid and it’s made of omega 3 fish oil. So what I normally do for people if they’re trying to come off of these, what we normally would say is that, “Okay, to avoid these electrical impulses in the brain, this foggy thinking, the anxiety, all these side effects that happen when you first try and take the medicine away, what we want to do is we want to refurbish the brain. And at the same time, we really want to use Body Anew, a homeopathic detox to just clean out all the stuff in the body that might be contributing to it.”

So really, the hallmark of taking away an anti-depressant would be first and foremost is to say, “With the depression that you had,” you kind of go back and look, “was that issue resolved?” If there’s an underlying depression, that can be a problem.

But what clinically is shown (and there’s been studies with this) is that if you used a product called OmegaBrite – OmegaBrite is a fish oil, it’s a 7:1 ratio of EPA to DHA. It was developed by Dr. Andrew Stole. He’s a Harvard psychiatrist. He did a double-blind placebo-controlled trial with Zoloft, which is the anti-depressant we are discussing. And in the trial, it was actually better for depression than Zoloft. That’s very, very important for people to realize. Think about that.

There is a fish oil developed by a psychiatrist. He’s a doctor he lectures worldwide. He’s very famous. He’s at Harvard University. This is his product. He has a patent on it. He did the study, the clinical data that show that this works better than Zoloft. That’s very important for your patients and the people that are listening to this show. Don’t you agree?

Debra: I do. So explain why it’s better to take this natural remedy than taking the Zoloft. Why is it better for your body to do that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: So omega 3 fish oil, I’m sure there’s somebody perhaps listening to this on the computer or on the radio and saying, “Well, I take fish oil. I know about fish oil. I take that every day.” Well, there different concentrations of EPA to DHA. The 7:1 ratio that Dr. Andrew Stole has patented and he did the studies on is the one that shows to be the most advantageous for depression.

The reason why you would want to use a natural product instead of the anti-depressant is that the fish oil itself does not have these long-term side effects and you would want to be on omega 3 fish oils anyway because we know fish oil turns on over 300 different genes in the body, it works effectively against cardiovascular disease, cancer, anti-inflammatory. So it’s doing all of these other heart-healthy things.

We look at heart disease being the no. 1 killer in the country. We know that this is something that is really, very important. In fact, isn’t this American Heart Moms? They wear red…?

Debra: I think it is. I was thinking we should be talking about heart, but I wanted to talk about this…

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is! These all coincides with it because you only want to know that omega 3 fish oils, it’s imperative for the brain function, but also, it’s so significant for the heart.

In fact, when people do studies on omega 3’s and they radio-label it, so they can see it lighting up in the body and they do PET scans, in the very beginning, if you just started taking omega 3’s and maybe you haven’t been taking them in a long-term basis, the heart takes up quite a bit of it. It concentrates and it’ll light up. So it’s really important to know that sometimes you have to saturate these areas.

Debra: We’ll talk more about this when we come back. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacognocist, which is a special field of the study of medicinal plants. She’s also a registered pharmacist who can dispense drugs, but she likes plants better. She’s telling us today about how you can take plants instead of drugs. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =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, please tell the listeners how they can reach you. Pamela has a business and website called Botanical Resource at BotanicalResource.com, but the best thing to do is to just call her up on the phone and she will talk to you about whatever drugs you’re taking and tell you what you can do to get off of them.

She can also help you with any physical condition you have or your children or your pets and she’s happy to do that free. So give her a call. Pamela, tell everyone how they can reach you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The number here is 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I would be greatly honored to help any of you or your family member with any questions you have about your medications. Perhaps you want to get off of medications or you know it’s coming and they want to prescribe you something. I would be most happy to help you with that selection and prescribe something that’s natural for you that would be very effective.

Debra: She’s very good and she’s very well-known here in this community where I live in Clearwater, Florida because she’s helped so many people here. All the doctors know who she is. All the doctors I’ve ever talked to know who she is and she’s just very well-regarded. So take advantage of the help that she can give you.

Alright! So let’s go on. We were talking about anti-depressants.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! So we were talking about using something that has effectiveness. Someone might say they want to take 5-HTP. I think it’s 5-HTP is good. It turns into serotonin. Maybe they want to take other kinds of natural mood boosters. That’s fine. But if you’re really trying to get off of a prescription, you want to definitely have some kind of meditation that is really going to work.

The thing that you need to do is use specifically and foremost the anti-depressant fish oil by Dr. Stole if you really want to come off the medication. So I would tell you that that’s the most effective medicine that you could use .

And with that, we know that folic acid works specifically to remyelinatethe outside of the nerves. High dose folic acid (and I usually use 5 mg.) is very specific to – it binds to serotonin. There are five serotonin receptors in the brain. It binds to four of them. So you get natural anti-depressant activity with folic acid.

Most people know folic acid as being something that’s used when they’re pregnant and they’re trying to protect against neural tube defects. Why do we take folic acid when women are pregnant? Because they want to prevent these specific birth defects that take place and those are in the brain. We know that it has high affinity for the brain and it’s very specific to refurbish those areas.

So you would be taking this for a cognitive boost, so to speak, preventing against neurological decline, preventing against dementia, preventing against Alzheimer’s, all these other things that maybe someday, you’d be concerned about and that you’d be taking these same products as well.

So I think it’s just all-encompassing to take the high dose folic acid. Take the OmegaBrite and you take these at the same time as taking the anti-depressant for about two to three weeks and then you start breaking, just putting the anti-depressants away. I’ve done this hundreds of times and it works very well.

Debra: That’s so great. That’s so great. Well, let’s talk about pain because there’s so many people that are in pain. Isn’t this one of the top reasons why people start taking drugs in the first place?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. Pain is a very important subject and I think we really need to spend some time on that. So what happens is somebody gets in a car accident, they lifted something to heavy, whatever happens with this train or they doing backyard work, whatever happens. All of a sudden, they’re injured, they go to the doctor, they give them a narcotic and they start becoming addicted to the narcotic. We know opiates have tolerance and dependence, so after a while, you need more medicine, you need to take it more frequently and you need to get higher dose.

So that’s the problem. I think sometimes when people have an injury and if they were to realize that eventually, it’s going to set them up to this long-term addiction, they really would have second thoughts of embracing the medicine in the first place. I really think that’s true of a lot of people.

Debra: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: But we look at it and we say, “Okay, there are different kinds of pain.” And actually, the new studies show that someone who has a back injury has a far better outcome if they use heat, physical therapy, massage and using anti-inflammatories, very specific doses for a period of time (maybe Ibuprofen or Naproxen). The trick with these kind of things if you have an injury is to take them three times a day with foods for let’s say five days, seven days or something like that.

This basically gets inflammation down. They found that the people that actually the anti-inflammatories on a scheduled basis for a short period of time have a far better outcome. They’re back to work. They’re feeling better.

We see a lot of this. I’m not against this. There are lot of workmen who gets comp, right, where someone gets injured. They go to the doctor and they get narcotics and there’s a high propensity for these people not to return to work. And so we lose a lot of productivity because basically, they’re not getting better, but then too, there’s an impairment issue with the narcotics, correct?

So they’re taking this on a long-term basis. It’s not going to be a week or two. They’re going to be on this for months, maybe years.

So if you have a back injury, I’m not saying you can’t be on narcotics. I’m sure a lot of people who are listening are maybe on pain medicines and want to get off of them, but you need to look and see where it’s working.

It’s working in the brain. It’s called a centrally-acting pain medication, right? And if you have a fresh injury and you want to have the highest outcome and get back to your regular schedule (you’re working out, you’re going to work), you really need to embrace some anti-inflammatories and maybe some muscle relaxants first and foremost before you ever touch a narcotic.

Debra: Because a narcotic only decreases pain. It doesn’t do anything to help heal your body, right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And when you take a narcotic (you’re taking oxycodone or hydrocodone, Vicodin, Percocet, all these types of things), when you take that, there’s no solving taking place – none, zero. What is it doing? It just blocks your perception of pain in the brain. So you still have the injury, you still are sore, it’s still inflamed, but your perception or your thinking of it is gone.

Debra: So then you might go out and play a round of golf or whatever or whatever activities you like to do and you’re just aggravating the injury.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right.

Debra: …because you’re not having the perception. This is one of the reasons why I don’t take pain pills. If I have a cold or something, I don’t take drugs because they cover up awareness of what’s really going on with your body and I want to know if my body is getting well, I want to have a real perception of what’s really going on in my body so that I can do the right thing to help support its healing. And when you take narcotics, that all goes out the window.

We need to go to break again, but we’ll be back and talk more about this. We’re also going to be talking about sleep aides. We’re going to cover it today. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants at her business called Botanical Resource. That’s at BotanicalResource.com. When we come back, we’ll tell you again how you can call her and get her personal advice. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =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 dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances. Pamela, tell us again what your phone number is so that people can call you for free advice.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, just call me here at my pharmacy. All consultations are free and I’d be very happy to look at what you’re taking and see if there’s something else, an alternative. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. The number here at Botanical Resource is 747-442-4955. Please let me help you, I’d be glad to.

Debra: Yes. And tell her that you heard her on the radio, so she’ll know. So we were talking about pain killers.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. And your wording is really great, talking about you want to know and have the perception of the pain, so you know not to be reinjured or that you might be harming yourself. People really get their mind around that. Blocking out the perception of an injury is not the solution because what’s going to happen is first of all, you might become addicted to the medicine, which is highly likely. Secondly, you’re not really solving where the problem is because the pain reliever is blocking the signal from your brain to the injury.

So you really want to start using anti-inflammatories. If you don’t want to use Ibuprofen and Naproxen and these types of things that are over-the-counter, curcumin (standardized turmeric) works excellent. It’s a COX-2 inhibitor. It works like Celebrex. It’s a very strong anti-inflammatory. And don’t forget omega 3 fish oils. Taking these things on a scheduled basis three times a day, taking curcumin, which is a really great product with with boswellia and turmeric, these things work in tandem and are actually better than medication. You can do this.

Let me point out something else too with the narcotics. It’s not only with the addiction and the poor outcomes, which they see with an injury, also, if you’re losing lots of Ibuprofen (like a lot of these athletes are popping Ibuprofen for injuries because they have to keep in form, a football player perhaps), those have a high activity for damaging the kidneys and a lot of these people end up in kidney failure. So people need to realize these are not innocuous products.

Debra: No, but they do. They take them like candy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah.

Debra: But I also want to mention that particularly for pain, if there’s been an injury or even – I’m trying to think. I’ve been in a couple of car accidents. But just in the everyday wear and tear of life, you can end up having aches and pains (you’re sitting in chair wrong for two hours and things like that), I think massage is great and it’s not even something you take. It’s so helpful for getting rid of those pains and actually healing and moving things back to the right place and getting the tension out of the muscles.

And so we could think outside of the box altogether here when it comes to pain. That’s why I like to feel my pain. That’s why I like to feel my pain, because I know it’s gone.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah, exactly. The whole idea is that behind this, if you have an injury – you’re going to be injured at some point in your life, maybe not so severely, but you’re going to lift something heavy, you’re going to do something, you’re going to get in an accident. This is inevitable for everybody. Everyone’s got strains and pulls.

But it’s how you solve the problem and the methods that you employ and what you take, that’s where it’s going to improve your whole outcome. One time that you end up taking narcotics for a back injury or for something that happened, that may be could’ve been treated with some homeopathic muscle relaxants, with some fish oil, with some anti-inflammatories that have the same kind of data, that does show it blocks COX-2 or blocks eicosanoids that cause pain and doing this in a natural manner and having high effectiveness, there’s an empowerment to it as well. You’re not going to be addicted to these things and you’re not going to run the risk of having kidney failures as a result of taking too many of these what are called NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents) that are either prescription or over-the-counter.

These are real risks. People need to realize – even myself from a pharmacist’s perspective, I really have to question whether all these people really need these things and they wouldn’t have done better with some natural products in the beginning.

Debra: Yes, I agree. I totally agee. Okay, good! So should we move on to sleep aides?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, I think that’s good. So, sleeping and anxiety. We just picked up two common problems that people have and that they might reach for a medicine during these issues.

Sleeping, a lot of people have sleep issues. That’s a pretty common thing. I still think people should rule out sleep apnea. Sleep studies are really important. The doctor can address that. Some people do not breathe consistently when they’re sleeping and as a result, they don’t get to REM sleep.

But say the person is pretty healthy, it doesn’t look like they have a sleep issue besides the sleep apnea and they want to go on something for sleep. They’d go to the doctor and he gives them Xanax or Ativan or Valium. The person is taking this drug (it’s called a benzodiazepines) and maybe they’re even taking some during the day for anxiety. When you’re taking these medicines, we know that these medicines have tolerance and dependence just like the narcotics. So sometimes, you need more medicine. After a while, you become addicted to it. There’s a physical and a psychological addiction. You think you need it and you also physically need it. I tell people, “Before you go down the road of taking benzos, you need to realize that this is a long-term game.”

You really can get away with using a medical grade passion flower, which is a partial agonist to the receptor, the benzodiazepine receptor. So when you have agonistic activity on there, it actually can take the place of drugs and it can actually take the drug off.

Say we have somebody that’s been on a benzo and they want to come off of it, what we’d normally use is a high dose folic acid to start repairing the brain. We would also use a calming fish oil. I normally use Pro-DHA and Pro-DHA 1000 because that’s going to start taking some of the anxiety away and it has a calming, focusing effect on the brain.

Those products typically are DHA to EPA, 4:1, some place in that range. And when we do that, with the passion flower, what it’s going to do is it’s going to start actually repairing the brain itself as far as the areas where you go into sleep. But the drug and the passion flower, they’re going to both hit the receptor and as a result of it, it kind of fakes out the brain and the brain is not going to know which medicine is actually on it. And that’s the beauty of it.

So you can take passion flower and tolerance and dependence are not side effects with it and you get the same outcome as in taking a benzo.

Debra: And I’ve experienced that because you’ve given me passion flower and I wasn’t taking any kind of sleeping pill drugs before that, but my ability to sleep is sometimes better and sometimes worse, but it’s getting better and better.

When I took the passion flower, I noticed that I just went to sleep right away and I slept all the night and then I woke up and I felt fine. And after a while, I just forgot to take it – and a while was maybe two or three weeks…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

Debra: I just forgot to take it and I just kept sleeping. So something shifted by taking that for me. I think its’ a really good idea for people to get off sleeping pills.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is.

Debra: Yeah, yeah. Why don’t you tell us again your phone number? We’re coming right up on the break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if you’d like to reach me here at my pharmacy, please call me at 727-442-4955. I can do any type of medication, not even limited to the ones we’ve discussed so far today.

Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of drugs. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

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 dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drug.

Pamela, since this is National Heart Health Month or whatever it’s called, let’s talk about what kind of medicines are people taking for heart problems that maybe they shouldn’t be taking and what they can take instead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, elevated cholesterol. That would be something that would be important to realize. Cholesterol lowering medications, especially statin medications (Pravastatin and Simvastatin, all these different medicines), they have very specific side effects. When I see a patient that’s on these, the two things you have to really worry about liver damage and you have to worry about something called rhabdomyolysis.

Rhabdomyolysis isa severe attack on the muscles and it causes muscle weakness. Sometimes people don’t realize they’re having it. They feel like they’re just a little sore, maybe they overdid it.

I have clients of mine that used to like to golf all the time and they can barely lift up their arms now because the rhabdo, people don’t understand that in some cases, in many cases sometimes, the muscle damage is permanent.

What the medical establishment has done (and I understand their thinking behind that) is that when they put someone in a statin to monitor their liver enzymes, they see them every three months, they take a blood test to see if the liver enzymes have elevated. So most people have that comfort level that’s, “Okay, they’re checking my liver enzymes, everything is fine,” but actually, that’s not fine because by the time they catch the problem, sometimes the liver enzymes do not come back to baseline.

I don’t know if people realize it. There are two very important side effects with this medicine. I have seen people come in that are having severe muscle weakness and I told them, “You know, it’s probably your statin medication. You need to take what they call a ‘drug holiday’. Take a few weeks off from it and see how you’re feeling” and all of a sudden, the pain goes away.

So this is really important to realize that it can be overlooked sometimes and your healthcare practitioner might not cue into that because you might shake your pain with lots of housework, athletic activities and things like that.

So for cholesterol, most people know about red rice yeast. That’s really a very common medication. And that actually works. It’s a small dose and it works like a statin just like Mevacor, but it’s a very, very lose dose. But if somebody has a history of liver problem with the regular prescription cholesterol-lowering medicine, red rice yeasts, these are not candidates for that. And I’m not even a big fan of lowering cholesterol anyways.

Debra: Why is that? Why, why?

PAMELA SEEFELD: The reason why is because – and actually, there was a study I just read today that said that the different associations in this country are not recommending eat a low cholesterol diet. They found they don’t need to be taking cholesterol out of their diet.

The reason why is that cholesterol is made by every cell in your body. And if somebody has uncontrolled inflammation and their cholesterol level is elevated, then sure, they’ll have risks of cardiovascular disease because the inflammation allows the cholesterol to stick to the side of the blood vessel.

So if inflammation is controlled, then you really don’t need to be lowering the cholesterol because what’s happening is it’s an inflammatory process. Most people don’t realize that.

And also, too, a lot of people, blood sugar being mildly elevated (it could be in the 90s or even close to a hundred), it still says ‘normal range’. When they pull their blood draw, the doctor doesn’t really acknowledge the fact that the sugar is turning into cholesterol. So you have to look at two things. If you really think cholesterol is a problem, it’s not. The problem is uncontrolled inflammation or elevated fasting blood sugar and both of those things being present can put you at risk for a cardiovascular event.

People are looking under the wrong rock. We’ve got several rocks there. We’ve got the rock of the sugar. The next rock is is your cholesterol elevated and is there inflammation. For the heart to be healthy, we know that very specifically, we want to do some kind of physical exercise. I don’t care what it is. Walking is pretty good. And eating halfway decent. Mediterranean diet is what they’re really proposing most commonly now because they know there’s the nuts, the vegetables, the fish. All these things have heart healthy implications.

And really inflammation is the key. If people’s inflammation is not down (and fish oil can bring the inflammation down and turmeric can bring the inflammation down), what I would tell to see that you have the healthiest heart and have the best outcome, whatever you’re taking, make sure that your doctor, when he does the split draw orders some inflammation markers – a c-reactive protein, oestrogen, sed rate. There’s a bunch of them. You can just ask your doctor, “Please, can I have some inflammation markers on my blood draw.” And if you see that they’re elevated , you know you have to do something about it. That is very, very important.

And in fact, the doctors (or the cardiovascular doctors at least) are doing c-reactive proteins pretty routinely, but your regular doctor might not do it.

Debra: Well, I’ve never had anybody do those. I’ve never seen that on a blood test that I know of. And in fact, I just want to say this just because this just happened to me last month. I get blood tests every three months and I go to the same lab every time and cholesterol is one of the things that I get checked. And all of a sudden, I thought, “You know what? The doctor didn’t say anything about my cholesterol.” I went and I look at the lab test because I always ask for my lab test – and you know, I had them back for eight years.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

Debra: I looked on my blood test and there was no cholesterol on the blood test. Now, I know my doctor ordered it and the lab just simply didn’t do it. So you need to make sure when you go in and get your lab test that all the tests that were ordered get done.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

Debra: That’s our tip for today.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good advice. And if you are concerned, you have heart issues in your family since these things run in families, but also if you have a high stress job and you’re anxious all the time (a lot of people, their anxiety levels are pretty high nowadays, just people trying to get everything done), stress definitely increases inflammation.

We know that when people are stressed out, they start putting on belly fat. It allows levels of fat to be deposited much more effectively. And it elevates the cholesterol, it elevates the blood sugar. Knowing your inflammatory markers and to see if they’re elevated, that’s a very, very important piece of information. And if they’re not doing that, you can call me here and I can talk to you a little bit more about what it entails.

But I think a lot of people are being poorly served in that sense. If we’re looking at the heart health, folic acid and fish oil are very important – good diet, exercise every day. All these are so important. But you need to know if you’re dealing with inflammation. That’s kind of like a stealth killer.

If you have inflammation that’s so high – and these markers are non-specific, but they’re very, very indicative of inflammation that’s taking place in the whole body, but we’re particularly concerned about the blood vessels because when inflammation is in the blood vessels, they become sticky and it allows all these different things to start sticking to them. That’s what really causes cardiovascular disease.

If you can treat the inflammation with some natural products and if you know you have elevated inflammatory markers, you have tools to do something with that. I think most people are missing that.

Debra: I think so too. So if people need to lower their inflammation, how would you do that naturally?

PAMELA SEEFELD: If somebody has an elevated CRP, I would tell them that I usually use an anti-inflammatory called Tramiel. It’s a homeopathic product and that’s really good because it works for the muscles, but it works more on a cellular level. Omega 3 fish oils are excellent at lowering CRP. If you have an elevated CRP and you wanted to get it down quicker, you need to do it more than once a day, maybe even like with each meal or something like that, omega 3’s. And I would say probably 5000 mg. a day to try and get that number down.

And don’t forget turmeric. I’m a big fan of turmeric. Turmeric is an excellent anti-inflammatory, very specific. It works just like Celebrex, which is a prescription. It’s a COX-2 inhibitor. And some products even has boswellia in there. But fish oil can do quite a great job on this particular problem. But like I said, you need to just probably take it three times during the day to really have complete effectiveness.

Debra: Yeah. Yeah, good. Well, we only have a couple of minutes left. That is such good information today. You always give good information. I always learn something when I have you on this show and I’m sure my listeners do too.

So tell us again how you can help them and what your phone number is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if you are interested in coming off of your cholesterol lowering medicine, your anti-depressants, narcotics or if you have any kind of an issue for you or your family or a loved one, I would be very helpful in helping you come off of these things and I’d be very grateful to be able to do that for you.

You can reach here at Botanical Resource at 727-442-4955. Let me help you look at your options and see what you can do. You can even email me your blood work and I’ll go over it with you and tell you if there’s something that I see coming now or in the future. You can triage these problems and avoid going on medicines altogether ever.

Debra: Yeah, this is a very interesting thing that Pamela does because she can look into the future, she can look at your blood test and tell you what is already developing. You might not see the symptoms right now, but you can see what’s coming in the future and what drugs that your doctors are going to prescribe for these things. She can stop these things with natural remedies before they happen by getting to whatever the disorder is in the early stages.

I think that’s really fascinating. I met someone else this week actually who can do that too by looking at blood tests. It’ s amazing what your blood can tell you.

She’s a wealth of information, a lot of help here. She also has a whole shop here in Clearwater. So she can ship to you whatever it is that you need if it’s not available to you locally. She can just take good care of you.

So we just have a few seconds left. So I’m going to just say thank you once again. Pamela will be on…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, thank you.

Debra: You’re welcome. Pamela will be on again two weeks from now. And you can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to past shows if you want to. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

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