In this episode, Dr. Ron interviews Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD. They discuss Dr. Dean’s path to integrative medicine, her extensive expertise in Magnesium and nutritional medicine, and some of the myths surrounding thyroid health.
Dr. Carolyn Dean is a medical doctor and naturopath. She’s the author of over 35 books including the best seller The Magnesium Miracle along with IBS for Dummies, Hormone Balance, Death by Modern Medicine, and 110 Kindle books. In 2011, she launched RnA ReSet and brought her 50 years of experience into her proprietary, unique formulations that give every individual at any stage of wellness or illness the necessary building blocks for sustained health, vitality, and well-being.
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Products Mentioned in this podcast: ReMag and ReMyte
Episode Transcripts
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Intro: This is the Real Health Podcast brought to you by Riordan Clinic. Our mission is to bring you the latest information and top experts in functional and integrative medicine to help you make informed decisions on your path to real health.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, welcome everyone. This is Dr. Ron Hunninghake and it’s another episode of the Real Health Podcast from the Riordan Clinic. And it’s our delight today to have Dr. Carolyn Dean on the air with us. Carolyn welcome.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Thank you and Aloha.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Aloha.. Hi, you’re in wonderful Hawaii. What’s the weather like over there?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: It’s always the same. It’s always beautiful
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Just boringly. Beautiful, huh? That’s great.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: I Am so blessed. I can’t tell you. And actually I’ve become involved with supporting an organic biodynamic farm here. So that’s been really, really important to me because as you know, the soil is so depleted. So I get to do that here because you know, I just coined up the mountain a few miles and there’s the farm.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Wonderful. I should tell our audience who you are. So Dr. Dean and I go back, she was a speaker at our 2016 IVC symposium. She is one of the world experts on magnesium and has written the miracle of magnesium third edition. Is that correct?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: It’s pretty much the third. They call it the second, but yeah 2017, The Magnesium Miracle.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah, there we go. So how many enzymes now are affected by magnesium? Because the count just keeps going up.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: I say it’s a thousand because I have references. A doctor named Workinger he said that 80% of known metabolic functions require magnesium. So when you look at the number of enzyme processes in the body and you take 80% of those that turned out to be a thousand enzyme processes. So make it, I mean, I both 80% of known metabolic functions. I mean, that’s huge. Yeah, yeah. Head to toe. But as you know, magnesium is kind of pushed to the side.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Well, that’s kind of been the case of nutrition in general. In the, in the, in the modern medical training, there’s very little education. I went to Kansas university, graduated, let’s see here about in 1976 and we had one and a half hours of nutrition. Now that’s not college hours. That’s one afternoon we talked about nutrition and the final word was, don’t worry about this because you won’t see any problems in the United States.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Right? Right. Same with me. I graduated the 79 or was that my internship? And my biochemist training was I think 150 hours. So we got a little more, you know, not necessarily nutrition, but we saw the enzyme pathways and we saw the Krebs cycle. And I like to tell everybody about the Krebs cycle, which makes our ATP energy molecules, eight steps in the Krebs cycle. Six of them require magnesium. Yeah. Wow. So there you have it, you know, someone comes into the doctor, they’re fatigued, they’re rundown. What do you? You give them magnesium? What to allopathic doctors do? they give them an antidepressant. So we’ve got a major disconnect rate from our biochemistry.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah, no, we were, we had biochemistry, but the, it seemed like the message was just pass the test and then we’ll go onto more important things. And so but no, all the I was going to ask you, we do a lot with vitamins and nutrition, you know, amino acids and whatnot in your ranking of importance, do you put minerals above vitamins or, I mean, are I, maybe it’s just that vitamins and amino acids don’t work without minerals? I don’t know.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: All are definitely synergistically working together. But I put that question to Tom Levy. Dr. Thomas Levy, who we all know a genius about so many things. And I said to him on my radio show, so what, what do you think is more important? What, what has more, you know, bang for the buck in the body? Magnesium or vitamin C and he said magnesium.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. Yeah. He’s he’s a very good friend of mine. And I, I was very surprised when he started saying that, but no, he’s, pretty much convicted on that. And so, yeah. But well today we’re so glad you came on the show and we, we wanted to pick your brain a little bit about the thyroid, because I know now you’re both an MD and a naturopath. And so maybe before we get into thyroid, tell us a little bit, how did, how did you get down both paths? Because that’s really pretty cool.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: All right. Well, back when I was a teenager, I got interested in nutrition and my then boyfriend now, husband of 52 or so years, we traveled to California. We got involved with the health movement, not the drug movement. And I just got really turned on to health, nutrition and lifestyle. When we came back to Nova Scotia, the boonies and Canada, I tried to tell people how you should do this. You should do that. They wouldn’t listen to me. So I went back to school and just said, well, I’m going to be a doctor and then you’ll have to listen to me. So I went in with all the knowledge of prevention, you know, I read all the books and there weren’t that many back then you could read them all, right. And after my MD they didn’t beat it out of me.
I still knew that nutrition was the way to go. In fact, the third year medical student interview of the, of the prospective new students, they didn’t think that I should be a doctor cause I had a Pollyanna attitude that I could help people. So, but by then I knew the Dean of students and we got along. So, you know, the rest is history, but after my internship up in Mount Sinai in Toronto, I met up with a group of chiropractors who started the first naturopathic school up in Ontario, Canada. And I thought, oh, I can learn some more good stuff. So by the end of my internship, I had, I had my, some training in naturopathy. You know, I did get my degree and I just operated as a naturopath with an MD license, which allowed me, for example, to go into surgery with my patients and make sure that, that the surgeon didn’t take out the wrong organs. I saved a lot of organs in my time.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Wow. Yeah. You’re, it’s interesting. I was an MD that I wanted to learn more about health and really didn’t have a chance until I ran into Dr. Riordan. And when I first started working here, we had a weekly lecture, lunch and lecture every Thursday. And as it would have it, he was almost always out of town on Thursday and say, he would say, now you do it. You, you do the lecture. So by doing all these lectures on minerals and nutrients and vitamins and everything that, and then beginning to work with patients and actually measuring those levels and correlating them with their chronic illnesses and how that all fit together. That’s how, in a sense, I was an MD acting as a naturopath. So, and so we actually have two naturopaths on staff now, and our daughter did a one year of naturopathic school before going to chiropractic. And so, so anyway, it’s funny how our paths finally get to where we think we should be.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yeah, well, I thought back when I was doing my naturopathic and actually Dr. Sinatra, Stephen Sinatra said that I was the doctor of the future. I mean, we both felt that by now every medical doctor would have naturopathic training. It’s just made so much sense to us. But instead, you know, doctors kind of took the other road, you know, went for the dark side and we got more and more drug oversight. It, it never went to natural medicine and now we’re all paying for that because we have a culture that demands drugs, they take drugs, they’ve got comorbidities. And along with cormobidities, they’ve got six to 10 drugs and all those things weaken the immune system and we’re, we’re just ripe for harvesting. It’s really terrible.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. Yeah. Just to give a little bit more on that. Thomas Edison was the one that said that the doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest patients in the care of the human frame, in a proper diet and in the cause and prevention of disease. So yeah, this is, and what we’re finding as the pandemic goes through its ups and downs, is that we seem to be getting busier here at the Riordan Clinic. It’s like, people are realizing that, wait a minute, we’re not being saved by these miracle drugs. We need to learn how to take better care of ourselves. And we better go to someone who knows about this, that can teach us and guide us.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Right? The same in my world. I decided at a certain point that I wanted to have nutrients that worked highly absorbed nutrients. So I went into creating an online dietary supplement company, as you know, and we have been swamped with the same thing. People have finally realized that that they have to take care of themselves, that nobody else was going to do it. And nobody else telling them to do it. They’re every, we’re on our own because we’re not allowed to say anything that looks like we’re helping people with disease. If I say my ReMag magnesium can treat 65 different health conditions, which it can, if I say that in literature or on my late product labels, I’m excused of practicing well, practicing medicine without a license, but saying that, that my magnesium is a drug because only drugs can treat disease.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: You can’t make a claim. That’s what they say. You know, there’s a wonderful website called vitamin D Wiki, and down the whole left side is 125 health conditions that are improved by proper dosing of vitamin D. And after each condition, there are the number of studies that support that. It’s not really a claim, but it’s just the number of studies that go into that testing. And so COVID-19 when we, when that first came out, there was no COVID 19 vitamin D studies, but fairly quickly, there were a hundred then 200. Anyway, today there are 600 studies on vitamin D and COVID, and yet you sure don’t hear that mentioned on the news these days. Right.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: But, you know, what’s very important about the vitamin D and Henry who runs the vitamin D Wiki. I, we started the dialogue years ago about the fact that vitamin D does not become activated either through that, through the sun or through a supplement without magnesium, magnesium is involved in most of the steps of vitamin deactivation. So some of the studies the vitamin D studies will show, oh, well, we don’t know it’s if yes, no, maybe. And it’s because of the magnesium factor, which is not put into the mix. So again, your synergism comes into play.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Yeah. Dr. Riordan, when he did lectures, he had this, we called it a trick question. It really wasn’t, but he would ask the audience, what’s the most important nutrient besides magnesium and vitamin C. And people would hold up their hands and name out certain things. But after a while he said, no, no, the most important one. And then he was pointed at someone and say, it’s the one you are lowest in. And the one you were lowest in, and each person can have their own biochemistry, their, their own epigenetics, their own dietary factors, stress factors, sleep factors, all of these things can affect the levels. And that’s why he was a, he was a big proponent of measurement and finding out just exactly where each person stood,
Dr. Carolyn Dean: But I would take it, you know, kind of a sidebar that, it’s what you aren’t absorbing.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : There you go.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yeah, because you can give this whole list, then all you need all 20 of these and, and people will take them. They’ll swallow, swallow, swallow, swallow. But if they’re synthetic vitamins and if they’re mineral compounds, instead of what, what I’ve been working on is stabilized ions of the actual elemental minerals. I mean, yeah. Think of this, Dr. Ron, the magnesium threonate studies, they talk about magnesium threonate. It’s the only one that gets into the brain, et cetera. It was a rat study. The rat of the magnesium threonate did 7% better in increasing cerebral spinal fluid magnesium compared to I think citrate. And with that evidence, they said threonate is the only one that gets into the brain, which is monumentally, not true. So it made everybody think I have to get threonate, when you look at magnesium L-threonate, a thousand milligrams, I think it’s something like 80 milligrams is the elemental amount of magnesium. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s so much disinformation about supplements now because it’s become such a, a big a big portion of people’s health. You know, it’s become an industry and nobody’s talking about what works. They’re just talking about what looks good on the label, et cetera, but you know, all this.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : And this is why I think one of Dr. Riordan’s greatest contributions was the idea that when a practitioner is with the patient, we are, co-learners, we’re working, we’re working together because we’re trying to learn what the uniqueness of that individual is. But at the same time, we have a body of knowledge that we are responsible to help shepherd them into the optimal way of using these supplements. Because yeah, it’s, there’s a lot of misinformation there too. So, Hey, how let’s talk a little bit about thyroid. That was kind of a, an interesting area for me because when I arrived at the Riordan clinic 32 years ago I was pretty tired. I had a lot of chronic fatigue and various things, and one of my early discoveries was Dr. Broda Barnes in the use of natural thyroid and the, the temperature test and all that. And so I didn’t, I didn’t know was that you you’ve done a lot with hormone therapy as well or hormone investigation. Certainly the the fact that most hormones probably need magnesium for them to work as well.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Right. I annoyed a lot of women when I wrote a book about hormone balance and I spent most of it talking about detoxification supplementing with your minerals, yeast overgrowth, all these things, instead of talking about bio-identical hormone replacement. Now I truly believe in it. I do take myself some bio-identical hormones that it’s not the first place to look. Right. And you know, what I also wrote about was the fact that the, the adrenals, the thyroid and the sex hormones all work together. Yeah. When I was massively stressed and in New York and Manhattan doing aids and chronic fatigue research in the early nineties, you know, my adrenals tanked at the same time that I went into early menopause and my fibroids started to go down cold hands and feet. Right. And it wasn’t till, you know, now only eight, 10 years ago, when I started looking at, at the minerals, I, I put the ReMag magnesium, the stabilized ion of magnesium, put that into place.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: And then I said, oh, I have to get a multiple mineral with the same thing, the ions that go straight into their shells, because they’re tiny enough and come to find out the minerals I chose for my ReMyte mineral combination. Nine of them are necessary for thyroid hormone. So, you know, I, I get the chemist to put it together. I started taking ReMyte and within six weeks, my hands and feet are warm again, I’m a little more hyper than usual. So I got off my 60 milligrams of Armour thyroid and have never looked back. And the same goes for many, many of our customers. So what, what happens with these minerals is, yeah, we know we need iodine, but we don’t need a ton of iodine. Because as soon as the iodine kicks in to, you know, do the T3, T4, T4 to T3, T3 all that round about the next thing that happens is selenium comes along to do the next step.
And then I don’t know the sequence exactly, but you’ve got zinc, molybdenum, manganese, magnesium, of course, copper, you’ve got all these minerals that have their little place in the production of thyroid hormones. So if you jam too much iodine into a body, you, you get a buildup of the next metabolic factor. And it’s too much, it overloads the system, it starts blocking receptors. And if you don’t have enough selenium to deal with it, you just get this buildup and you stop the, the hormone production process. I mean, that’s pretty simplistic, but when you think about it, nine minerals and we’re, we’re so deficient in all our minerals now, and, you know, isn’t, isn’t it worth trying something that that’s safe like that. Whereas what were we taught in, in med school and in naturopathic training that we had to wait for the thyroid to get so low, that we could give thyroid hormone replacement. And we thought we were doing such a great thing by using armor and desiccated thyroid, oh, we’re more natural and everything, but we had the same philosophy, wait till your thyroid completely punks out. And then we’ll replace it.
There’s a lot more to this conversation. And it’s coming up right after the break.
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Dr. Ron Hunninghake : Yeah, I think it’s, it’s more like it’s the expedited thing to do which unfortunately is the allopathic way is to jump in with a quick fix. And so what you’re saying is we need the synergism of the basic minerals to really save the day. Would you say that like magnesium is what I would call an orthomolecular mineral, whereas these other minerals are more balanced and you don’t need the big doses.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes. I mean, I keep telling people, you might not need big doses of vitamins and minerals. If you have the right ones and they’re well absorbed except for magnesium, because I think what there’s so many things about magnesium that are important than awesome. I think we can saturate our bodies with and we don’t have side effects because even, even with my ReMag, when I’m saturated and I take more than I need, I will get the laxative effect. Whereas with most magnesiums, I mean, we started with magnesium oxide. That’s only 4% absorb. Most of the early studies were done with magnesium oxide. And do you know why that is? It’s because of a brilliant owner of a oxide company, a woman, she gave samples to all the researchers. So they did their studies on magnesium oxide and it worked even at 4% absorption. So what we’ve done over the decades is we’ve drained ourselves of magnesium.
I say 80% of the population is deficient. They keep reducing the average levels of magnesium in the population, because that’s what they’re measuring. When I, a few years ago, when I started looking at magnesium testing and realized that serum magnesium wasn’t working, et cetera, et cetera, the RBC magnesium range was 4.2 to I think 6.8. And now it’s down to 3.8 to 6.5. So it’s lowered, you know, 0.5 points in just a couple of years as the population gets more deficient. And then people say, oh, that’s a normal a doo too doo too doo. It’s not optimal.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : It happened With B12 now they’re the minimum has gone down as more and more people are becoming more deficient in that particular vitamin. So it’s same, same phenomenon. So, yeah. Yeah. So let’s, there’s one other topic. Well, there’s a couple of topics here that I thought while we’ve got you to weigh in and I think it’s going to be, you know what, I think it’s going to be the same answer. There’s a big controversy about Hasimoto’s thyroiditis and the use of iodine. And, and so once again there’s, there are, there’s two sides of this debate as to which way to go. And, and certain people say, Hey, if you’re deficient in iodine, you need to load up. But what you’re saying is by loading up too much, too fast, you distort the body’s natural orchestration of minerals is it’d be like having one section of the orchestra being very, very dominant. And you can’t hear the rest of the of the music.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Exactly. And I think there are some reports of say, no, no, if you have selenium then that’s going to help metabolize the iodine for Hashimoto’s. And, but there’s more to it. There’s the nine minerals. And the whole thing about Hashimoto’s is, I mean, we know it’s auto-immune and my philosophy about all, all the conditions is that it’s mineral deficiencies, especially magnesium and yeast overgrowth. So with yeast overgrowth, you have a cross reaction of, of yeast and yeast toxins with thyroid that jams the thyroid receptors. And if you, if you don’t treat yeast, then you are going to keep having an inflammation, an irritation of the thyroid, it’ll be an itis. You’ll get antibodies that are supposedly attacking the thyroid and antibodies don’t attack a normal organ. There has to be something wrong with that. And, you know, I’ve, I, I’m in an ebook that I wrote about the thyroid.
I followed the, the work of Dr. Izabella Wentz. She’s a PhD pharmacologist. She’s written a book called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis because she had it now, why did she have it when you, when you listened to her story, it’s a step-by-step magnesium deficiency, yeast overgrowth, until they finally said your thyroid is out of balance. But if she had caught, you know, with her fatigue and irritability and insomnia and muscle cramps, that started her descent into actually what I call a total body meltdown. So she had magnesium deficiency symptoms, and then she started to get fuzzy, had allergies, gut problems. Yeast overgrowth because her immune system was tanking. You know, when we start getting people on the right mineral balance, their immune system kicks in so much that they start killing off their own yeast. And people will say after six, 10 weeks, oh my gosh, I’ve got a rash. I’ve got a coated tongue. I got vaginitis. I’ve got, you know, gut problems. What’s wrong. I thought it was going to be healthy. Oh, no, no. You’re, you’re killing off your yeast. It is amazing what the body can do when it has the right building blocks.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : Yeah. When I first started at the Riordan Clinic, I was, I was coming off of nine years as a busy family physician and was very, very tired and depressed and had horrible, horrible herpetic mouth sores. And I thought it was a, I thought it was a mercury toxicity. I think there, I think mercury toxicity is definitely an element in this, but I made the mistake of going to someone who took out 12 fillings very rapidly. And I became very mercury toxic, which probably made my yeast infection worse, probably made the gut leaky, everything that sets the stage for low thyroid.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Right. Then what I have found is that most sores, or, you know, you just bite the side of your, your mouth or you bite your tongue and you get a sore that won’t go away. They are definitely associated with yeast overgrowth. When I finally got my yeast under control, I just don’t have those problems anymore. And, and yeast that I I’ve been dealing with it personally. And with my you know, with patients and then telephone clients and our customers for decades, I would do the yeast antibody tests. I would do everything. And then we’d have to put people on this strictest of diets and nobody can do that. You know, we’d have to put them on Nystatin, and it was just horrible. Couldn’t find the right probiotics. So I don’t know if you know, my Flora Revive. I put Saccharomyces boulardii, gentle antifungal, along with soil based probiotics in the same formula, because I said to myself, I live in Maui. I’m going to eat fruit every day. I am not going to, I’m not going to restrict myself. So, you know, most days I’m using some of my Flora Revive and I, you know, I know it’s a gentle use killer and people say, well, you shouldn’t be using it all the time. I think we have to, because we’re growing yeast every minute, we’re highly stressed. And with a history of, you know, birth control, pill, antibiotics, et cetera, I think a lot of us are kind of set up for lifelong yeast overgrowth.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : Even if you’re not on birth control pills, there are so many estrogen compounds in the you know, your pesticides and your, your printing the, the, the receipts, the ink on the receipts and things and plastics. These are all estrogen mimickers. And so I’m sure these have a role to play in that as well.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And I don’t know why more natural medicine doctors aren’t looking yeast. I mean, I worked with Dr. William Crook way back in the day. I worked with him on one of his books, yeast and the women and women’s health I think was called. So actually, what happened is 1986. He Dr. Crook came up to Canada to Toronto and he and I got on a 90 minute television show, which was a call-in show. 80,000 people called into that show to find out about, you know, this yeast because it just, it just rang so many bells. But what I’ve heard, and I think Dr. Crook kind of said this, that he went public with the information about yeast, he didn’t, he tried to do some studies. He went to AMA meetings. He tried to interest people. They weren’t interested. So he went public and he was blamed for going public. They, you know, they hammered him said it’s just a fad. So it, it came to be over the decades that doctors just thought, oh, it’s a fad. You know, there’s nothing to it. And yet, you know, I’m saying that most of our chronic illness is yeast overgrowth.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : Yeah. Do you think some of that’s just plain immune suppression, you know, a lot of people, their immune systems aren’t working very good. Do you believe in tongue diagnosis, can you look at a tongue and see yeast or do you, do you just assume yeast?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Oh, you see it on the tongue. I mean, I just get, you know, kind of freaked out when I watched singers on TV, you know, they’ll do a full throat and their white tongue is now, you know, that’s a short sign of yeast. And itchiness anywhere, you know, itchy eyes, itchy ears you know, a tickle in the throat, any sort of skin rash that you’re not quite sure of. There’s so many ways to diagnose yeast and actually Dr. Crook had that, the questionnaire, but it’s long and you know, it’s kind of overwhelming, but you can diagnose this by asking someone if they’ve had the antibiotics in the past, if they they’re affected by moldy smells like when you go into a basement or soap smells down, you can’t walk down the soap aisle in the grocery store. Yeah. Yeah. Because it affects the mucous membranes of your sinuses. Just like we have leaky gut, you have leaky sinuses because the yeast irritates it. And then you smell these things and the molecules of these perfumes and mold, et cetera, goes right into your system. So I mean, to us, it’s obvious what’s causing yeast overgrowth.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : You’ve helped me make a connection because one of the things I measure and just everyone is when I’m looking at thyroid function as well, we measure all the minerals. We measure the amino acids, the fatty S is everything just about one of our thyroid tests is a reverse T3. And I don’t know if you’ve used that very much, but it it’s, it’s basically a sign that the body is not well. There’s either stress, infection, inflammation, toxicity. And now I can add the fifth thing, yeast overgrowth. I’ll bet you I’ll bet you that would correlate with yeast overgrowth as well.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Absolutely. Cause he will produce a lot of inflammation and yeah, the reverse T3, it’s so sad. The way that’s become a thing. Whereas what, what common sense tells me when I read about it is that reverse T3 is a way of the body trying to slow things down. You know, you’re sick, you’re, you don’t want to burn off your nutrients for whatever reason your body is slowing down. And so this reverse T3 is like you know, the wrong key in the lock for your thyroid hormone receptors. So it’s blocking a thyroid activity.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : It’s actually competing for T3 receptors and it will fit in the keyhole, but it doesn’t activate the metabolism. So the more T3 you have, your metabolic rate goes down. And so yes, I tell people it’s an adaptive response on the body in the body, but it’s showing up everywhere now because so many people are tired. They’re stressed, they’re toxic. They’re not sleeping properly. They’re, they’ve watching too much news on TV and getting stressed out.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Allopathic and probably even natural medicine doctor sell, well, we’ll give more T3, but they just set up this battle. Whereas as we know in natural medicine detoxify, you know, get rid of the yeast, give the minerals and the nutrients that will allow the body’s own immune system to work. I mean, you think of the whole methylation problem, you know, the MTHFR or people thinking, oh my gosh, you know, I’m not, methylating I’m going to die. But when you give, you know, low dose methyl B’s, when you, in my case, one of our detox products has methionine and taurine, they’re both methylated or they’re both sulfur based. And the thiamine is methylated. So you put extra sulfur and methyl groups into the liver and you help the, the sulfur and methyl detoxification pathways. Yeah. I mean, it can be as simple as that.
And it’s common sense that drives us in natural medicine. It’s just, oh, that’s just common sense. So let’s just give the body, the building blocks that it requires. And yeah, I was very concerned over the years about people talking about these big purging detoxes, because the body, the body will detox when it feels it’s the right time, the body, you know, the female body won’t get pregnant If it’s toxic. You have to detoxify the body knows. And then when you, when you give it the building blocks for detoxification, it will detoxify. The body is able to withstand the dumping of toxins, you know, how careful you have to be when you give DMSA to sort of try to see if a person has mercury, you know, some people that, that have come my way have said after DMSA which purges mercury from storage, they get worse because that mercury then just circulates and goes to the brain, et cetera. So we have to be so careful with these big purges, these big detoxification programs.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : So what I see happening a lot in functional medicine is and, and sometimes in integrative medicine, and maybe even in naturopathic medicine is there’s an attempt to be allopathic in the approach. Whereas maybe we need to slow down and tell people, Hey, you know, you didn’t get this way in a, in a day or a month, or maybe even a year. You know, this may be a long-term process, but are we live in a society, like make me well yesterday. And so it’s tricky, but it’s really a good thing. So no, I’m, I’m, I’m so happy to see you again and you’re looking well. The idea here is just not to age, right. I mean, aging is for the birds as far as I’m concerned.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Oh yeah. I mean, I’m in my seventies now and I feel healthier than when I was in my thirties because when I was in my thirties, I was totally magnesium deficient. I mean, I didn’t share that card. I, you know, I had the heart palpitations and Charlie horse leg cramps and neck pain and insomnia and headaches and the whole ball of wax. And it wasn’t until I was working in, in Manhattan doing the research. And random house asked me to write a book on magnesium, just kind of out of the blue. And it was a real eye-opener because I was the poster child. So it really set the stage for me, finding out about my own health and realizing that all this business about aging it’s calcification. Yeah. You know, in part it’s toxins, but it’s calcification. And what are we doing in our society?
We’re putting calcium in, in foods, you know, to supplement calcium, we’ve told women to take 1200 to 1500 milligrams of calcium, most of which does not get absorbed. And it makes you constipated. And it deposits in, in soft tissues, including your arteries and your kidney arteries, your heart arteries, your carotid arteries. And then people just say, whoops, well, what are we going to do about that? Whereas magnesium will dissolve calcium in soft tissues where it doesn’t belong and direct it to your bones and teeth. So if you’re saturated with magnesium, you won’t calcify and you won’t get old. Yup.
Dr. Ron Hunninghake : Yup. Nope. Couldn’t agree with you more, you know what we’re, we’re probably could go on like this for another five hours. But we, we we, we, we only have so much time, but Carolyn, thank you so very much for being with us. And once again, enlightening us, I, I always need hear that message that use minerals in a balanced way and you’ll get your best results.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Exactly. Perfect
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Except for magnesium. Use Orthomolecular magnesium.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Oh, I know. It’s lovely. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Ron. Wonderful speaking with you. You
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Too. Stay well and enjoy and forest and ocean.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Oh, Aloha
Dr. Ron Hunninghake: Aloha. Thank you. Bye now.
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Very helpful info. I appreciate that both doctors stayed on topic and didn’t fill up the time with chit chat like many web events.