Collagen and Mushrooms to Heal Inflammation? Dr. Melissa Gallagher Breaks It Down

Medical Director, Holtorf Medical Group

Functional Medicine ND | Chief Content Officer at Natural Health Resources | Naturopathic Medicine Advisor at Organixx
Collagen and Mushrooms to Heal Inflammation? Dr. Melissa Gallagher Breaks It Down
Kent Holtof, MD with Dr. Melissa Gallagher
Full Transcript
Introduction to PSP and Mushroom Peptides 0:00
And the interesting part with the peptide, the polysaccharide peptides, we call it PSP that actually we've identified research that supports shows that the PSP supports rejuvenating genetic material. So we look at epigenetics, you know, our environment and our genes. If you're dealing with, you know, maybe not the healthiest genes or gene defects, and you've identified some areas within your genes that might have you be more likely to have X, Y, and Z illness, then we can utilize the PSP, these polysaccharide peptides, to support cell turnover, to minimize tumor growth.
If there's any, pre-cancerous cells. And these mushrooms seem to be very much like thymic peptides. And they're very immune modulatory. They'll increase that that one t ray lower that T2TH 17
Podcast Intro and Guest Background 0:58
which we, you know as we age or we have stress or chronic infections or inflammation and all those mushrooms do all that. Welcome to Doctor Talks the podcast where every episode leads to a healthier you. Join us as we navigate the world of optimal health, uncovering groundbreaking strategies to conquer chronic disease. In each episode, we'll bring you the latest insights from leading health experts, medical innovators, and wellness warriors. If you're seeking to transform your health journey, or if you're looking for answers to burning questions, you've come to the right place.
Get ready to unlock the secrets of lifelong health and vitality. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Hello, this doctor Kenton. Hold talk. Hey, we have the pleasure to have Doctor Melissa Gallagher, and, she's naturopathic physician, and, she's, trained, as lymphatic specialist practicing in Dallas Fort Worth for the past 15 years. And, she's been working with individuals addressing digestive disorders, hormone balance, detoxification therapies, and primary and secondary, lymphedema, which I think is totally undertreated.
And really not many people know much about it. And also Casey of lymphatic, decongest, treatment, she believes the majority of disease is rooted in digestion, which I totally agree with how we eat, what we eat, food preparations, and how the body reacts to food as it travels through the digestive system. A malfunctioning digestive system can cause imbalance in the body, and we all know about, you know, the gut, brain access to brain gut access and how that just everything's a vicious cycle, with hormone imbalances, allergies, arthritis, joint pain, autoimmune disorders, gout, eczema, you name it.
All these illnesses, the gut is is part of it. And so we talk about a number of supplements today and, also immune and Myanmar dietary supplements as well. And, she has clients, often come to her, after they've sought traditional resources and then very frustrated, overwhelmed. And, and her and I think that's kind of the story of so many so-called alternative practitioners that, get people better when their standard doctors don't. So, welcome. Thank you so much for being on the summit, Melissa. Oh, thank you so much.
I'm so excited to be here. Great, great. So, I don't get kind of about your background. How did you initially get involved with, you know, basically, this type of medicine is crazy type of medicine and, and also with or organic the supplement company and and that. Sure. Excellent. So I, like many of the viewers of the summit, had my own health crisis. I was in my early 20s when it happened, and I was basically between my undergraduate, degree and then it propelled me my own health crisis propelled me into getting a master's in nutrition and then a doctorate in naturopathy, like medicine.
And really, what what drew me to this line of work was, finding my mentor, who I sought out when I had a severe case of Epstein-Barr virus and just had, you know, complete, wiped out, been wiped out by the virus and overwhelmed with stress. And, you know, I was in my early 20s and starting, a career and trying to improve myself and kind of burning the candle at both ends, as many 20 somethings do. And my mentor, I was recommended to see a doctor of Chinese medicine, and I remember leaving my office and going to her clinic, and it was just a totally change.
Just an energetic change, just a feeling of calm and peace. And there was just some draw to the line of work. She was doing. But I was not interested in needles or, doing acupuncture at that point. And, I just remember saying out loud, I think the second or third visit saying, I want to do what you do. Like, I'm so inspired by this because I had really been very responsive and receptive to the therapeutics she had put me on. And, you know, we did acupuncture and, she actually went out to, Bastia to, learn.
Now it's more popular. But she was training in PRP and was using PRP, my own PRP at that time and doing exactly what PRP is.
From Personal Health Crisis to Naturopathic Medicine 5:55
I think most people know. But yeah. So it's, platelet rich, plasma. And it is a very powerful way to utilize your own body's natural healing, capabilities to tap into that. And so basically what she did, she did a small blood draw, and then she centrifuged it. And the kind of middle point is when you when it's when the blood spun, you can actually identify the plasma. But there's this middle space between the plasma and where she was using those and the acupuncture points. She was it was really unique in and it took me I mean, I and I it was it was phenomenal life changing.
And I told her I wanted to do what she did and just like, well, you don't have to get your masters, you know, is a liberal arts major and, I had thought I wanted to be an attorney. And so she said, oh, my gosh, what a difference, right? Oh, yeah. Totally change the course. So you don't need any more attorneys now. Now. So she, she definitely inspired me. And that work. You know, fast forward 20 years later, PRP is is now a leading rejuvenate of medical treatment. And we're seeing it more in anti-aging and, regenerative medicine.
But, I mean, I was I was at her guinea pig, and I was I told her I'm committed. I have all sorts of money and just heal me. But in that journey of healing, I dove right on into everything I could read. Any conferences, books. You know, this is pre like, webinars and digital courses and things like that. So, yeah, big day. Different time in that I don't know. You're bombarded and you got a filter you know then you had to go to the damn medical library, find your damn journal, put it on the copier.
Yeah, absolutely. Oh yeah. I remember, like, my first visit from her office was to a GNC, and I think I spent like, two hours there. I was reading like, oh, I had all their books. I was like a reference library. But that was really the turning point for me. And and really shifting my life's focus. And, so I was able to put myself through school and, and continue down my healing path. And then there was a point with my, my doctorate where I had to make the decision of actually entering this field on my own and, starting a practice.
And, and that's where I really honed in on, you know, we are what we eat. So our nutrition, what we feed on. Right. You did you have a PhD at this point. So with her, I didn't, but, you know, seven years later, I had my master's and I had completed my doctorate work up in New England. And I did clinical work in, the associated with, Harvard's, Harvard has a really unique program where they have, public health and they have a lot of research happening at some of all of the Massachusetts, and Boston based hospitals.
But I was able to get into, a very large alternative wellness clinic, where I was exposed to lymphatic work and some of the trials that they were performing and, and, studies for Dana-Farber, their cancer Institute. And that just opened up like a whole new pathway. So I was all about lymphatics and cancer. I usually don't think of those together. Yeah. No. Yeah. So I that was a huge that was another turning point. You know we can consume as much. We can limit, you know, toxins and and try and really go as clean and and nourish our bodies.
But our detox pathways how are we supporting our core immune and detox organ, our lymphatic system, was something I didn't hear about in school. And, you know, we had a little bit of it in anatomy and physiology. But when I go back to my books, it was like, that much is maybe too little paragraphs of ten sentences. Yeah. And so I just thought, okay, what's going on with the system? Why are we talking about this? I want to learn more about that. And so, I kind of blended all of that together. All right, so you're diving deep into peptides and longevity on this podcast.
And we're right there with you. Integrative peptide stands out trusted by over 10,000 doctors to deliver real results for their patients. These premium peptides are your key to unlocking vitality recovery and a longer, stronger life. Visit Integrative peptides.com and use the code Pod life for 10% off your first order. Again, integrative peptides.com. Use the code pod life for 10% off. It's time to elevate your journey starting now. Wow. That's just that's awesome. And and so you got hooked up with with organics who.
Well they've been around some, some great products and, what what are some of your favorite products with organics that really fit into your way of treatment? Yeah. All right. Well, first of all, I love all of their products. I, there there are several, potent, products that they have. So, you know, today, I know we're going to talk a little bit about. Oh, sorry. We're going to talk a little bit about they have collagen, they have a clean source collagen, which is pretty amazing. So I'll show you what it looks like here.
And this is really unique because they have more than just type one and type three.
Collagen Peptides and Recovery Benefits 11:28
So you're going to get type 1 to 3 five and you explain all that like yeah. So there there are different forms of collagen. And they have different effects on certain parts of the body. And what I find in prescribing or recommending, college and to my patients is when we take an assortment of sources so marine and bovine. So. Yeah. Animal, both are animal based. And we blend those together. You're able to pull in a multitude of the collagen sources. So a lot of collagen we're going to see on the market are just bovine only.
And then others are just, focused on the like eggshell. You might see, an eggshell kind of, membrane as listed. So that has a different type of collagen based on that inside membrane that's feeding, a chick that might develop. And then we see marine based collagen, adding another assortment of collagen that complements. When we put it all together, we're able to see the max benefit of, rejuvenation of, cell tissue. We're able to see greater strengthening of our elastin fibers. And so those are the horizontal vertical structures of our skin.
We see, faster wound healing. I do a lot of post-surgical work elective and and required non elective surgeries. So for, you know, patients that might be dealing with hip replacement or you know, the Brazilian butt lifts or, you know, post cancer or mastectomies. Collagen has a broad, scope in terms of helping heal the incision site. It helps the skin seal, faster so we can get to a kind of white, clean, very, minimal scar versus accumulated kind of chunky. And so when you take this orally, you'll see effect, on the skin.
Yes, yes. Generally what we see is within two weeks, you will notice a significant difference in wrinkles on your face. So the face tends to be where people get more of the compliments when they start taking collagen. But we will see, you know, fine lines and wrinkles starting to fill in because there's a suppleness and it is one of these accumulative type of benefits where, you know, you take it for two weeks, people are going to start saying, what are you doing? And then keep taking it and you're taking it every day.
It, you know, we're talking about peptides. There are peptide, an assortment of peptides in collagen. And we actually see the marine and the, bovine sources be very plentiful. An assortment of, peptides that are going to help send signals for cell rejuvenation. And we will see a greater increase in anti microbial peptides. So that's another kind of thing where we can look at if we're looking if we're dealing with a patient that has an autoimmune dysfunction or in many cases now with Covid cytokine reacts we can see peptide immunotherapy by way of food based, peptides really come into play because we're more open to the bioavailability of of those peptides.
So I always kind of go food first. How can we do it in there? I think there's only so. And I think even you know, it was thought that you take collagen. It's going to break it down to individual amino acids. Right. But it's not true that it actually absorbs in different variable, you know, lengths of amino acid chains, you know, actually the di peptides, you know, would actually absorb faster than a single. Yeah. And there are some larger, you know, chains that absorb the whole, which, which was thought wouldn't happen, you know.
Yes. Yeah. You can tell. Yeah. We see that the, the penta peptides and the hexa peptides and yeah that takes me back to, you know, the organic chemistry and all that good stuff, all those like chains and bonds and stuff like that. But yeah, our body what I've witnessed, just clinically with, with patients, it's been phenomenal. The capacity for them to max their healing, but also I work with high performance professionals. I have several professional athletes that I work with, and collagen is approved, and so that's really exciting because a lot of the associations, are very limiting, you know, the Olympics and, you know, the professional associations, they are very conscious of, any synthetics that might, lead to, you know, doping or enhancing performance unnaturally well with collagen, we can also see some of the repair and recovery.
So for, patient who is, semi-pro or is the fitness enthusiasts that's doing the Alta, marathons and things like that, they have tears, labor, tears and things like that. We can actually use the collagen, in those peptides to help send those signals and to help the healing process. Yeah. And I think it's interesting. And you talk about the different forms of, of collagen. And when you look and it breaks it down, it actually has these other peptides in there. And so do you think evolutionarily that makes sense because you're traveling on these animals or whatever it is or and you get it and you break it down to these peptides that are immune modulatory there, healing there.
You know, basically, you know, increasing growth and, and, you know, all these, mitochondrial function, immune, modulatory, and anti-inflammatory. Sorry. It's interesting what this collagen strand has because they're pretty big. And you chop them down, you get peptides. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's, you know, it's almost like, you know, we're at right now, it's it's we're kind of heading into the cooler months and it's a winter season. And my son loves those, hot chocolate bombs. And so it's kind of like the hot chocolate bomb.
It has this beautiful, great chocolate on the outside. And then there's all sorts of goodness on the inside. And so you can tap into, all of those really, really healing, the healing power of, of collagen. But what's really unique is with, you know, going back into the peptide world, every organism has peptides. And so we see it in the plant kingdom, we see it in the fungi, kingdom, and we see it in, the, the human, in the mammal, kingdom. And I think it's very it's totally true. And you look at, you know, all these peptides were using were, you know, basically you, you, break down whatever organ it is and find the fundamental peptides.
And they really stimulate that, that organ and usually exclusively it's, it's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It is it's a, it's an exciting, way to tap into rejuvenated medicine for me. I feel like as a practitioner, it's more natural in it's alignment with, you know, I'm food for for food first natural. And, you know, one of the things that I, I like with organics is that they, they ferment, for instance, they have their mushroom blend. It's called seven in plus. And then they not only have the potency of an assortment of mushrooms which are in that fungi, Kingdom they for ferment it.
And so there's kind of when we look at how do we tap into the power of,
Functional Mushrooms and Immune Modulation 19:38
the peptide world, you know, fermenting it is one of the multiple ways to, harness the power, the bioavailable, bioavailable power. Yes. It's key potency. Yeah, yeah. So that's really, I think, where I align really well with organics because they are food first, very natural in orientation and bioavailability is at the forefront, which is critical because you can take a ton of things. But if they're not going to actually be potent and be able to be absorbed and utilized by your body, it what's the point now?
It's very true. And you look at the studies on these mushrooms and they're I mean, there's tons of studies. Yeah. And if it were a med it would I mean, it's just weird to be handled so much differently. You know, it'd be the miracle med. You know, everyone would be on it and and so this is really interesting. The, if we look at the pharmaceutical world, oh, almost 50% of the pharmaceuticals that are manufactured, their base comes from a fungus. So we look at penicillin, that's a fungus. It's is a, it is a dye peptide.
Yes, exactly, exactly. So, you know, there that's where we can really harness functional mushrooms and, you know, medicinal mushrooms. That is definitely a big popular topic right now. Big. You know, obviously this has been the ancient civilizations all across, all the continents have consumed mushrooms. It's nature's medicinal, medicinal cabinet, if you will. And so what's exciting is we now have technology, we've got research. We can pair it up and look at how can what can we eat that is out there in the natural medicine cabinet?
That is going to be formulated in the most bioavailable form to tap into the peptides that they contain. So for instance, seven in plus, that's the one brand, the one product that I really love that has all of the mushrooms that are highly potent and going to contain things like polysaccharide peptides and turkey tails that the number one ingredient. So it's very forward with the turkey tail. And turkey tail has a ton of research on the ability for it to be, able to minimize cell damage. It's super antioxidant rich.
It helps your liver health, your gut health. And the interesting part with the peptide, the polysaccharide peptides and PSP that actually we've identified research that support shows that the PSP supports rejuvenating genetic material. So we look at epigenetics, you know, our environment and our genes. If you're dealing with, you know, maybe not the healthiest genes or gene defects and you've identified some areas within your genes that might have you be more likely to have X, Y, and Z illness, then we can utilize the PSP, these polysaccharide peptides, to support cell turnover to minimize tumor growth.
If there's any, pre-cancerous cells. And all these mushrooms seem to be very much like thymic peptides, and they're very immune modulatory, they'll increase that that one t ray lower that Th2 THC 17, which we, you know, as we age already have stress or chronic infections or inflammation and all those mushrooms do all that. Yeah. Yeah. And they, they do it obviously naturally. And you know, there are folks in the labs that are trying to have that, created, trying to create that from, a pharmaceutical perspective.
Yeah. They want to they want to take it, make a pharmaceutical. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you you look at the studies on everything from cancer, autoimmunity, I mean, you know, all these diseases of of chronic illness. Right. I mean, there's hundreds of studies on this that. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, even, you know, I, I've been to, I've done different, functional mushroom training and, and it's funny because, you know, a lot of a lot of my patients, I ask, you can see mushrooms, they're like, oh, yeah, button mushrooms or or or magic mushrooms.
Yeah. But there's some good studies coming out on the microdosing of the magic mushrooms. Yes, yes. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. I think we're going to see, big shifts in that in the next five years. Yeah, there's a big bet with big, even big pharma, you know, thinking that the, hallucinogenic mushrooms are going to be legalized. So, Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I think it the, the psychedelic mushrooms are on track where we saw THC. I feel like it's about seven years behind, but, Yeah, I'm surprised. I mean, that's a good surprise. The other surprise.
I can't believe where we are as a country and the suppression of medical. You know, truth is so bad, but, I won't get into that, so I'll keep going. But, Yeah. No, I think, you know, these mushrooms have been so under, promoted. I think, you know, for. For what? What they really do. Yeah. Yeah. They also the collagen with, you know, and they actually in Europe they come collagen peptides. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you, I've, I find that the brands, you know, I'm always looking at the label, so I always want to see, you know what.
Where are the ingredients? Where are they sourced? How are they labeling them. And I find it interesting in that I can distinguish a really good quality brand if they have it labeled as a collagen peptide. And it tells me more about how is it processed. You want the info on the label? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah. We want full disclosure. And if brands are not going to disclose that, we have to question why are they not being trans has a lie. Yeah. Now what is your typical patient you'd use these products on.
Sure. Well they they're applicable you know functional mushrooms collagen. It's applicable for individuals of all ages.
Lymphatic Health and Manual Drainage 26:18
But my kind of base of patient that I see generally has multiple diagnoses of autoimmune disease, cardiovascular disease, and even I have a large, practice of, of cancer drivers and survivors. And so what we're looking at is mitochondrial, impairment. We're looking at nutritional deficiencies. We're looking at, a slowed aging or an accelerated aging process. Our goal is to slow that down. And ultimately, what I'm trying to do with an assortment of my kind of cornucopia of natural resources for my patients is to really help them harness the youthfulness and the healing power of their body.
And so we'll use labs like, you know, other providers and kind of figure out, okay, you know, where are we dealing with where are the stress levels that where our micro, nutrient levels, where we have vitamin D, vitamin K, and then really digging into even epigenetics, neurotransmitter, levels to, to really look at the whole body. But it all comes back down to a few systems that are in balance. Gut health is always at the core of, imbalance. The liver being a big organ that tends to be, overwhelmed.
And their, their bodies, the lymphatic system is a huge, huge system that I really focus in on because of the dual capacity to support our immune system. And what what do you do about the lymphatics? Sure. So I with within my practice, I, and very hands on for my in-person patients. So I am trained to do manual, lymphatic drainage, which is a motivation of primarily it's a superficial lymphatic system that we're moving, but deeper. I pull in my naturopathy training. And so I look at how overall cortisol, the stress hormone, has a negative influence on our lymphatic system.
And all systems of the body are are overwhelmed by stress. So that's one thing we have to harness is control balanced cortisol. And then the next thing I look at doing is drilling down on the systemic inflammation within their body to lower the inflammatory response, system and to also help ease that lymphatic burden. So when a patient is inflamed, it's not always going to register as, you know, like let's say you have a little, you know, wrist pain or carpal tunnel. You might not always see that kind of swelling, but we're going to see that be presented as a symptom, brain fog or hormonal imbalance or, you know, gallbladder imbalances. So, it really is trying to help offset the burden the lymphatic system has and trying to alleviate cellular junk and debris and really help the body turn from being the core garbage disposal system to more of that immune immunotherapy.
So I, I, I created actually that is kind of how I got into video content. I found that an hour is usually the amount of time I spend with all my patients, but especially with my lymphatic patients, it's not a lot of time if I'm really trying to get all of the motivation in the body, and generally I see them several times a week, they're really progressed. But what I was finding is, you know, it's an hour of a 24 hour day, and if I saw a patient once a week, it's still not enough. And so I started creating videos on, I think it was like my iPhone three I did, you know, I couldn't even see like myself.
I just turned my phone and and so, you know, they leave and I think, oh, I forgot to tell them something. I recorded a little video thinking, okay, there probably other patients out there that can benefit. And so that kind of morphed into me creating my protocols of, okay, these are the things you can do when you're not seeing me because my goal is not to see you all the time. My goal is for you to be independent, to take care and manage this lifelong disease, and to reduce its impacts so that you're not coming to me when you're in a crisis or, you know, you had a wedding and you drank a little bit more alcohol and ate a whole bunch of salty foods, and now we have linked limbs circumference that has expanded out beyond your compression garments.
So that is really kind of where I, kind of shifted. I work with patients in person, but there's so much so now, so many more resources, especially with the advent of Amazon and, you know, rebounding, catching wind. I can equip patients with, lymphatic pumps and compression and put them on food regimen, a very specific lymphatic promote a food protocol with, your specific herbs and let's say one has lymphedema, you know, really just there. What where would you start? Or just kind of overview of that. Yeah.
So one of the things with lymphedema, they're multiple. There's different staging with lymphedema it is not one of the disorders that is going to happen overnight. So it tends to be a gradual progression. And unfortunately, it, it affects individuals in a way where it will appear that they're holding more excess of a lot of times they get kind of recommended it or referred to have, gastric bypass surgery where they'll say, oh, you're overweight. You just need to, you know, eat, clean and exercise.
And it that doesn't everything right. Yeah. Yeah. So with with lymphedema I stage them. So I do all my measurements and then I, get a sense either palpating or through imagery, you know, images and, scans and, and now we have ability to, as you know, have a dye test where they can identify how functional is the lymphatic system. Like some folks, not every lymphatic system in each body is, is the same. So your lymphatic system is different than mine. I might have 1200 lymph nodes and you might have 500.
And so that variance plays a big role. If somebody let's say a woman has had a mastectomy and now she's had 30 lymph nodes removed from the breast and underneath the arm and the axillary and all those lymph nodes drain the arm and the head and neck. And so what happens is there's this pooling because of basically lymph nodes. I kind of describe them as highway exits. And so if you cut off 30 highway exits in your town on your interstate, well, what's going to happen with all the traffic? It's going to back up.
So with lymphedema, and this plays into both the collagen therapy and using functional mushrooms we can utilize peptides to address five fibrotic tissue. So with lymphedema the fluid accumulates inside the lymphatic tissue. So we have lymph vessels capillaries. And it's just kind of this vacuum small Ole vacuum. It's just motivated generally by muscle movement or external pressure. And when that's dysfunctional because all these highway exits that are gone, the fluid doesn't have a good pathway.
So sometimes we're going to train the body to create new pathways, some alternate routes for removal of the fluid. But then we have to look at just over time if that fluids in a stagnant state, the lymph fluid itself is just, comprised of all different types of proteins. And so where we look at peptide therapy with these, this protein dense lymphatics, we can use the peptides to help break up some of the density. So for instance natto or natto kinase and Sarah peptides. These are high higher metabolic enzymes.
And the column proteolytic enzymes and those along with functional mushrooms we can use those to help the body literally help break up the protein and to help get that traffic flow moving better. Does it reverse lymphedema? No, no, I don't know. With the osmotic pressure or so. It's kind of too big to get to the vessels type of thing. Yeah. Basically I'll kind of give you a sense. The largest vessel, the largest duct is our thoracic duct. And it's no wider than a pen tip. And so that's not I mean, you think about like if you have a drain, a clogged drain, and, you know, we get frustrated, we put drain or whatever.
However you go snake your drains, they gets clogged. Well, there's no snaking process for the lymphatics other than enzymatic therapies. So we can use these enzymes and peptides to break up the density of the protein. But then most importantly is to have some sort of pumping mechanism. So a lot of times when we're looking at helping the fluid move, it's you'll see people that have compression garments on and really anything past stage one in, lymphedema, those individuals should be wearing compression for about 22 hours a day.
That doesn't happen all the time. For an assortment of reasons. Insurance doesn't cover it. They don't have a therapist locally. Or they don't even know that they have lymphedema. So generally, people kind of do searching and that's how they work. But a lot of times it's self-diagnosis. There aren't specialists, in terms of like a core, just a lymphatic doctor that you go see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a huge gap. But, you know, so compressions being compression, manual motivation like easy, easy to do is dry skin body brushing and anybody it's applicable for everybody.
If you want to motivate your lymphatics, you can do a dry skin body brushing technique to move the lymphatic flow to help detox cellular debris, have cellulite. How does that work for the lymphatic? Yeah. So, usually I have a brush where I demo, but, basically the brush itself, will give us the, the effect of a manual treatment. And so manual treatment is this kind of pumping mechanism, like we kind of have this type of technique where we're helping move through the channels of the lymphatics. But when we dry skin brush, people just basically take a natural bristle brush and put on their skin.
And we start, where we open up kind of there's a whole process where we open up all the kind of channels and then move the fluid, but basically you just press, you just put the, brush on your skin
Lymphedema Care, Compression, and Self-Treatment 37:18
and without any pressure, you just do circular, circular pattern and you can sweep up or you can do circles up the arm or up the leg, but the heart's the level plane. So the thoracic duct is right here, right near the heart. And so if we're moving lymphatics, let's say an individual wakes up puffy in the morning. I have a ton of video. Or you can do these like techniques on yourself. But there are ways for you to drain the lymphatic. So the head and neck. But we're draining towards the heart. And then everything below the heart, we're draining up towards the heart.
And so there's that technique where you just moving towards the heart, so does the skin stimulate the lymphatics that. Yes. So that that pressure and, you know, again with dry skin brushing, it's so gentle, the roughness of the brush is enough to give us that pumping movement that we need. And so we just follow the channels of the lymphatics. And basically we have lymph nodes, all throughout our body, they, they kind of end at our, lower, you know, the, the extremities. So your hands, you're going to have lymph nodes like, here in the wrist we have lymph nodes down in the ankles.
And then every organ has clustering of lymph nodes. You know, so if you think about it, if individuals have any system that is imbalanced or not having, you know, their slow cell turnover or, pain and it has inflammatory, condition, motivating the lymphatic system is going to be very, very beneficial to not just that core organ or area of the body, but it's going to benefit the overall lymphatic system. So the lymphatic system is less bogged down by garbage and more capable of being an immune responder to be able to send signals and to communicate the immune needs of those organs or tissue that might be, plagued with.
And so cool. And I guess, yeah, we didn't think there was any lymphatics in the brain, but we found that there is. Right? Yes. Oh, it's it's, you know, works when you're sleeping, right? Yeah. Well, there's lymphatic therapists. We all we all knew that. Just where we know we have lymph nodes and the way the structure is, but the. It's amazing the advancements even just yesterday, there's, new information about, lymphedema and the genetic, connectivity to, the lymphatic system being not fully equipped to process.
And so some people are living with this impairment, but it takes a cancer diagnosis or surgery to tip it off and to have them end up dealing with is, in fact, don't pay attention until it's really bad. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, you're doing some some great work. And thank you for sharing. And, basically the website, if you could spell that out and tell everyone to get those, the two main ones that you like. Yes. Well, is the mushroom the 7 a.m. right. Yeah. So seven and plus and so organics is spelled organics X, so you just type in organic Scott.
And you can find that there. And then, this is the college. It comes in a packet. And what, what I tell my patients like this packet is a scoop and you have about 20 scoops in, a packet. We have three of us in our family that are consuming this. So we go through this for about 7 to 9 days, and so how does it taste it? You know what it has? They they have not added anything that makes it, taste terrible, but it doesn't taste it doesn't have a flavor or a water or put it in something. Yeah. So you can do they actually have a recipe they have a keto brownie recipe where you can put it in.
These are the kind of recommendations I have. So I have a lot of folks that consume coffee that's kind of like their staple. So I if if they're consuming coffee or keto coffee, you can add collagen. It's still a keto coffee. I recommend you add it to coffee or tea in the morning so you can add it to a hot liquid. You can also add it to smoothies so you can add it in just like you add your protein. And then you can also bake with it. So we do a lot of home interesting, gluten free products. And, you know, like I have, you know, some of my raw protein balls where I'm using a cashew butter, I add collagen in, and so you can really
Product Recommendations and Closing Remarks 42:08
fortify a lot of your foods with collagen in ways that you don't always think like. You can add it to soups. So, for instance, you know, with holidays you can add it to dressing, you can add it to a gravy, you can add it to stuffing, you can add it to, you know, if you're using sweet potato. I think I like that because I don't love taking that stuff every morning. Yeah. Yeah, it is, you know, and that's, that's the great thing about a lot of the, the products, especially with organics, it's so clean.
Even the seven and plus I have folks that will open up the capsule and add that into their coffee. Or like my son, he can't swallow capsule six. But I open it up and I put it in his, not yogurt that he consumes in the morning. So I'm sneaking in a lot of stuff, and you can even do, you know, put the mushrooms in, you know, baked goods that you have as well. Awesome. I think all of that is great. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise. And, I think it's some, some cool, cool things. And, I really think, yeah, lymphatics is is huge.
And, you know, some good products that people can get on and start feeling better. So I want to thank you. Thank you. Yes. Thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure. Great. Thanks so much. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website w ww di Doctor talk.com.
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