Full Transcript Introduction to chronic illness and cell danger response 0:00 Medicine, especially current medicine, has usually been pretty successful at treating acute illness, right? 0:06 But it's largely failed to effectively treat complex chronic illness because it is using the wrong framework. 0:13 If you use the right framework, you're not going to find it. 0:16 And he points out that in the past 70 years, not a single chronic is curable using current medical paradigms unless it has a cause that can be bypassed, 0:27 killed, burned out or cut out and that's a quote from Dr. 0:31 Naviot. 0:31 Hi and welcome to The Balancing Point. 0:34 I'm Dr John Needers and I am here to make traditional Chinese medicine, functional medicine and integrative health simple, 0:43 practical and fun so you can restore balance, boost vitality and enjoy a healthier life every single day. 0:53 Hi there. 0:54 It's Dr. 0:54 John. 0:55 I'm back here with another presentation for The Balancing Point, and today is an incredibly important topic. 1:04 And it's really the root of why so many people suffer horribly from chronic complex diseases and it's a condition called cell danger response and so I'm 1:17 going to talk about that at some length today. 1:20 At a future presentation I'll go into more treatment options and how to go about bringing yourself back to good health. 1:28 So today I am going speak about cell-danger response. 1:30 Now this is part two. 1:32 I did part one a little while back looking at how different ways that traditional Chinese medicine can help restore health in people with cell danger response. 1:42 And this is really near and dear to my heart because the conditions we're going to talk about are things that I see every day that work. 1:49 So very, very important stuff. 1:52 This is based on the work of Dr. 1:54 Robert Naviot. 1:55 MD, PhD, who has done some brilliant, brilliant work on mitochondrial function, dysfunction, and this problem.
Dr. Naviaux and the mitochondrial disease framework 2:05 So the question is, what if chronic illness isn't a failure of your body? 2:10 And that's how a lot of people look at it. 2:12 It's like, oh, my body's failing me. 2:15 But just it's a failure of your body to finish healing. 2:19 Now there's whole healing cycle that has to happen, which I'll talk about a bit. 2:23 And if that gets interrupted, then you don't finish feeling. 2:28 Kind of a different example is prolo therapy. 2:32 So in prolotherapy, they inject a sugar solution typically, and they can do other things, but typically a solution into an area where there's say a damaged tendon. 2:43 And what that does, it reminds the body, hey, there is still work to do here. 2:48 We got to finish this healing process. 2:51 So it brings more of the healing chemicals, we call it the soup. 2:56 There are about 15 different things that have been discovered. 2:59 in that process of completing the healing. 3:02 And it's one of the reasons acupuncture works, because as soon as you put a needle in, it calls out to the body to bring that soup to start to really speed 3:13 up healing So what we're going to look at is cell danger response, What is it, and why is critically important? 3:20 So what's being overlooked with mitochondrial disease and disorders? 3:25 What's cell eugenesis? 3:26 A big word. 3:28 And what is Dr. 3:29 Navio considered to be so important about the second book of medicine, as he calls it? 3:37 So, Dr. 3:38 Navio founded the Naviolab at UC San Diego in 1994. And he originally focused on treating children with mitochondrial diseases. 3:49 Naveo was an absolute pioneer in mitochondria medicine, metabolomics, and systems biology. 3:57 Almost every cell in the human body is filled with my mitochondrion. 4:01 I mean, hundreds of mitochondry. 4:03 These are the powerhouses of energy production. 4:06 So ATP, adenosine triphosphate, is a molecule that creates energy when it breaks down into ADP, or adenosine diphosphates, 4:16 and then through a very complex process that happens inside the mitochondria. 4:21 There's the Krebs cycle, the citric acid cycle and the electron chain. 4:30 It's very complex, and if that complex chain gets broken, you don't produce enough molecules of ATP. 4:40 And so if the mitochondria are producing energy through the Krebs cycle, again, sometimes called citric acid cycle.
How mitochondria produce energy 4:49 It actually has a newer name that I don' like. 4:51 So I'll stick with Krebes. 4:52 That's what I learned years ago. 4:54 In the electron transport chain, approximately 30 molecules are ATP are created. 5:01 If the mitochondria are not processing properly, there's a different pathway that's used to create only two molecules. 5:09 So as you can see, you'd have 15 times more energy in a cell if the ATP and Krebs cycle are working properly. 5:20 Now, why does this matter? 5:22 Navio argues over half of all complex chronic diseases have a common biological root. 5:29 So that's his argument, which I absolutely, absolutely believe in. 5:34 And it has implications for autism. 5:37 MECFS, which was more commonly called chronic fatigue syndrome at one time, Gulf War syndrome. 5:44 The soldiers that were overseas for the Gulf war, many of them came back with their lives simply falling apart. 5:53 And there was no single thing that they could point to as being the reason that things were lingering. 6:01 Then you've got long COVID. 6:03 We have dealt with so many cases of long COVID, and it's not an easy condition to treat. 6:09 It is treatable, but not easy. 6:11 And we've seen that both in people who had COVID and those who have had certain vaccinations. 6:21 conspirators that show up with Lyme disease like Babesia and Bartonella, Ehrlichia, et cetera. 6:27 And then Alzheimer's disease. 6:29 Alzheimer disease is really a disease of poor energy production in the brain and the mitochondria that then is the root for several other problems that arise. 6:42 He calls his work The Second Book of Medicine. 6:46 And he said the first book of treating illnesses was very successful for a lot of conditions. 6:51 Medicine, especially current medicine, has usually been pretty successful at treating acute illness. 6:59 So someone comes in with a fracture.
Cell danger response and the healing cycle 7:01 They come in an infection of some kind, et cetera. 7:05 Our medical system is pretty good at treating those, but it's largely failed to effectively treat complex chronic illness because it is using the wrong framework. 7:16 If you use the right framework, you're not going to find it. 7:19 And he points out that in the past 70 years, not a single chronic is curable using current medical paradigms unless it has a cause that can be bypassed, 7:31 killed, burned out, or cut out. 7:34 And that's a quote from Dr. 7:35 Navio. 7:36 By the way, traditional Oriental medicine has been much more effective at treating this second book type of illness than has conventional medicine. 7:49 So what is the cell danger response? 7:51 The CDR or cell-danger response is an evolutionary conserved metabolic response that, this is critical, protects cells from harm. 8:03 It is purposeful. 8:04 it is not an accident. 8:06 Uh, it can be triggered by chemical, physical, or biological stressors. 8:10 So that's things like infections, toxins, toxicants, trauma, and emotional stress can all be triggers. 8:18 So mitochondria actually act like the cellular canaries in the coal mine, the first responders to any perceived threat. 8:25 So those of you that are too young to remember, coal miners used to carry cages of canary into the mines. 8:34 And so when the carbon monoxide got too high, canaries would die before the humans. 8:40 When they looked over and saw a dead canery, everybody rushed out of the mine. 8:46 So what happens during the cell danger response? 8:50 Mitochondria shift from energy production, right, which is critical for growth, repair, and function, to a defense mode. 8:58 So cells leak something called extracellular ATP or small e, capital ATP, which acts as a universal danger molecule alarm signal. 9:10 And it then communicates with all the surrounding cells. 9:14 It says, hey, you've got to switch into danger mode and stop putting your energy into growth, repair, and function. 9:21 And so the mitochondrial metabolism pivots from oxidative phosphorylation. 9:26 That's one way of reducing oxidated stress. 9:33 So it switches from that, which is an effective form of energy, and glycolysis,which is used as an emergency fuel, sorry about that. 9:42 And the immune system ramps up and inflammation spreads systemically. 9:47 So your whole body can become inflamed if you're suffering from cell danger response. 9:53 The three stages of the healing process, when things are going good, the good cycle, cell danger response one, two, and three. 10:02 So CDR1 is inflammation and acute defense, right? 10:06 Something happens and your body goes into inflammation, which is a form of healing and a cute defense. 10:14 And so something called the M1 mitochondria, are pro-inflammatory. 10:18 So they, in this stage, glycolysis dominates and your body's really burning a lot of energy to create this inflammatory response. 10:29 CD2 is proliferation and cell growth and repair time. 10:34 That's when it begins. 10:36 The M0 mitochondria support the Warburg metabolism. 10:41 And if you ever want to take a dive into somebody, check out Otto Warburg. 10:47 This guy predicted the cause of cancer, pointed out the entire metabolism of the cancer in the 1930s, he's been proven true.
What keeps healing stuck 10:56 He predicted technologies to look at heavy metals and vitamins, et cetera. 11:04 intracellularly, which is where they need to be. 11:07 And he actually foresaw the invention of the oligo scan, we still use for heavy metal and vitamin levels in the cells. 11:18 Then you've got CDR3. 11:20 That's when things are going good. 11:22 You get differentiation and restoration. 11:25 It's anti-inflammatory. 11:27 The M2 mitochondria return and you get that oxidative phosphorylation returning and it's restored and the healing process is complete. 11:37 Now here's something that's critical. 11:39 This is the staging of the heeling process. 11:43 The steps cannot be skipped and they cannot reversed. 11:47 It has to go in exactly this order for healing to happen. 11:52 Kind of like the stages of development, right? 11:55 You got to be one year old and then two year-old and three year and four year. 11:58 You've got go through a process of growth, whether it's physical, mental, emotional, but it is a processes and you can't really skip any of the stage because 12:08 they all depend on each other. 12:11 So when the cycle gets stuck, so cell danger response was designed to be temporary. 12:19 You have a problem, you have an acute illness, You'd have acute attack from something. 12:24 And so, cell-danger response kicked in. 12:27 In complex chronic illness it gets stock and it never fully resolves. 12:33 So you stay in that healing, mess for months, years, decades, because the complexity of the mitochondrial production of ATP is never fully resolved or restored. 12:50 So the EATP continues to signal danger, even though the original three is gone, the original threat is going, okay? 12:59 It just keeps signaling, because it gets stuck, right? 13:03 You've got your foot on the gas pedal and you see a red light, but your car, your feet won't get off the pedal, you're just going to keep going forward. 13:11 And that's kind of here, although in this case, it's more like stepping on a brake. 13:16 The healing process has stuck. 13:18 So the body stays in lockdown mode, inflammation persists, Energy is diverted, the organs suffer, and you get severe fatigue that can persist for years. 13:30 And this is the common underlying thread in many and I would say most complex chronic illnesses. 13:37 So again, autism, ME-CFS or chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, dysautonomia, 13:49 long COVID, mold illness, autoimmune disease, and many, many others. 13:54 That's why it can take quite a while to heal any of those because you've got to really restore that whole cellular health cycle. 14:06 Okay, so what keeps the cell danger response stuck? 14:09 And there are four major blockers to healing. 14:13 These are really from Navio. 14:15 I think there's an additional one, but I'm not going to go into that right now. 14:19 So persistent or unrecognized infections. 14:23 You know, there are so many viruses that people have that they think they caught it and now it's gone. 14:29 Well, I'm going to talk about that in a minute, how many of these viruses never go away, like Epstein-Barr, HHV6, but it could also be Lyme disease, 14:39 Bartonella, Babesia. 14:41 A lot of people think they've gotten over Lyme disease and then they'll get like a COVID type infection and suddenly the Lyne disease gets reactivated. 14:50 Candida overgrowth is also a problem. 14:53 And then you get toxin and toxicant exposure. 14:56 So you have heavy metals like mercury, lead, aluminum, which all impede the healing process. 15:02 You get mold and mycotoxins, pesticide exposure, If you live within a certain distance from a golf course, your odds of developing Parkinson's disease 15:13 go up dramatically because it damages certain areas of the brain. 15:17 Environmental chemicals, plastics, et cetera. 15:21 Toxins are things that are naturally occurring generally.
HHV-6, nervous system dysregulation, and salugenesis 15:27 A snake bite. 15:30 What do you call those? 15:31 Spider bite, that's what you'd call it. 15:32 Things like that. 15:33 Those are toxins. 15:35 Toxicants are things that we humans have put into our lives, into the earth, and to our air. 15:43 And so those include the environmental chemicals, the pesticides, plastics, et cetera. 15:49 If you ever read articles on mycoplastics in the human body, if it doesn't scare you, You're in trouble because it should scare you. 15:58 And so then mitochondrial dysfunction itself can keep cell danger response stuck. 16:03 So you get the damaged energy systems that can't generate the resources necessary for the healing cycle. 16:12 visuals, pictures of the Krebs cycle. 16:15 You see, it's very complex. 16:18 There's a certain order that the acetyl-CoA then becomes something else, and it keeps going around in this circle. 16:26 And in order to have that occur, there are many, many necessary vitamins and minerals, magnesiums, critical, zinc, the whole range of B vitamins, 16:38 et cetera, all have to be present in the mitochondria for the energy cycle to complete. 16:45 And then the fourth thing that's often, often overlooked, particularly in a mainstream medical system are unresolved psycho-emotional traumas. 16:55 So the nervous system keeps broadcasting danger, danger Will Robinson, and it keeps overreacting to the healing signals, 17:05 or I'm sorry, it keep overriding the signals. 17:09 So the HHV6 connection often overlook cause of cell danger response. 17:16 A landmark Navio lab collaboration done in 2020 showed that this is an amazing number. 17:23 Over 90% of ME-CFS patients had serum that had fragment mitochondria tied directly to HVH6 reactivation. 17:34 So if you have HB6, immune system gets shut down a little bit by a cold or whatever or stress, and then the HHV6 gets reactivated. 17:45 It can cause major injury to many areas of the body because the mitochondria are fueling everything. 17:52 So the virus triggers a two-edged sword. 17:55 it gives you antiviral protection at the expense of energy production, right? 18:00 So it stops the viral response from going to the surrounding cells, but then all the cells shut down and stop producing enough energy. 18:14 And that study was done at the University of California, San Diego. 18:17 It's pretty easy to find. 18:19 That was just one activated virus that they tested. 18:23 it's likely, easily likely that there are also reactivations and cell danger response to other of this very, very large herpes family of viruses, 18:35 even herpies one and two. 18:37 These viruses stay in the body and they can be reactuated by a number of factors, right? 18:45 You look at shingles or reactivity of chickenpox viruses and that can be triggered by exposure to the sun. 18:54 You know, you get a sunburn or stress is one of the biggest or you can have another illness and then that becomes reactivated. 19:02 So the nervous system as the gatekeeper or why am I hitting a wall in my recovery? 19:09 Chronic activation of sympathetic nervous systems, right, that's the fight or flight system, keeps the EATP signaling cycle elevated. 19:19 It tells your body there's danger, there is danger. 19:23 And this is actually a nervous system issue that is happening without any problems occurring like viruses, bacteria, et cetera. 19:34 So another quote from Navio from 2023, the absence of parasympathetic autonomic signals leads to hypersensitivity to local progenic danger. 19:46 Don't worry about that word, but hypersoncitivity the local danger signaling and slows healing. 19:54 or their practitioners who treat only physical triggers, pathogens, toxins, et cetera, without addressing nervous system dysregulation often get a wall 20:05 in recovery. 20:06 So in our practice, There are several different devices that we recommend that can work with the vagus nerve system and reset this parasympathetic nervous
Why chronic disease keeps rising 20:19 system so that your body gets out of that sympathetic nervous state. 20:25 We also have a variety of programs that recommend, several of which are free to help people get through trauma. 20:39 Salugenesis, this is a cool word that I had never seen before, before I was checking up on Dr. 20:47 Navio, and how we reframe how think about healing, right? 20:53 Why pathogenesis alone isn't enough, modern medicine is built on pathogences. 20:59 You find the cause, you remove it, or you kill it. 21:03 Right? 21:03 You poison it or cut it out and the patient recovers. 21:08 So, for example, insulin doesn't cure diabetes, although it does keep the patient alive longer. 21:14 SSRIs don't care depression, right? 21:17 They kind of balance it while you're taking them. 21:20 In some, oh, about a third of cases it works. 21:23 Blood pressure drugs don' care high blood pressure, they control it. 21:26 All of these are helpful, but none of them are curative. 21:32 The rising tide of chronic illness in the 1980s, approximately 5 to 15% of children suffered from chronic disease. 21:40 Now, in the 50s, it was much lower than that, much low. 21:43 But in 80s we have a little better record keeping, and it's 5-15%. 21:48 Now that sounds horrible, but today 54% percent of US children have at least one chronic When you get older, 65% of adults under age 65 have one or more 22:05 chronic diseases. 22:06 And 90% adults over the age of 65, have at least one chronic disease. 22:13 So the annual cost of chronic is 4.1 trillion. 22:19 trillion dollars. 22:21 That's 90% of total U.S. 22:23 health care costs. 22:25 Now, that's about all I'm going to say about cell danger response for this podcast. 22:31 In a coming podcast, we'll spell out exactly what to do to treat cell-danger response and mitochondrial function, so stay tuned. 22:40 And thanks for tuning in today. 22:42 This is Dr. 22:43 John saying be happy, be healthy. 22:47 Thank you for joining me on The Balancing Point. 22:50 If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. 22:58 Feeling out of balance? 23:00 Most approaches just manage symptoms. 23:03 Here we get to the root. 23:05 So real healing, real clarity and balance can begin. 23:10 Visit alamedaacupuncture.com. 23:13 That's alamedaacupuncture dot com to learn more, explore our supplements or book a call. 23:20 We'd love to hear from you.
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