Rick: Welcome to the Tuesday webinar series “Chiropractic Economics Webinar for Doctors of Chiropractic.” I’m Rick Vach, Editor-in-Chief Chiropractic Economics. And today’s webinar, Integrative Solutions for Complex Pain is sponsored by EuroMedica. And as always, our program is being recorded and will be archived at Chiropractic Economics website, chiroecho.com/webinar for one year.
Our experts are on board here today to speak to you, and when their presentation is complete, will follow with a Q&A period. You can submit questions throughout the presentation by clicking on the appropriate icon on the right side of your screen. Our presenter today is Cheryl Myers, Chief of scientific affairs for EuroMedica. She is an author and an expert on Integrative Health and natural medicine. She is a nationally recognized speaker who has been interviewed by “The New York Times,” Wall Street Journal, and “Prevention Magazine.”
Her many articles have been published in such diverse journals as Aesthetics Surgery Journal and Nutrition and Complementary Care. And her research on botanicals has been presented at the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and North American Menopause Society. She’s a well known advocate for bridging the worlds of mainstream and natural medicine, a graduate of Purdue University, go Boilermakers. She’s been clinically certified in oncology, in gerontology, and an additional degree in psychology, focusing on physiological brain function. And as the head of scientific affairs and education for EuroPharmica Incorporated. Thank you for taking the time to participate in our webinar and for sharing your expertise regarding integrated solutions for complex pain. Before we get started, can you please give us a brief background of your work with EuroMedica?
Cheryl: Well, yes, and thank you so much for the invitation. The company I work for is called EuroPharma, and that’s confusing, but EuroPharma is the parent company, and EuroMedica is our professional brand. So the brand that’s sold in clinics, formularies, hospitals, etc., is called EuroMedica. I’ve worked in the natural health industry for about 22 years. And prior to that, I worked in mainstream health care. And I believe that the most optimal health outcomes occur when we weave together all that the world of clinically validated medicine has to offer.
And I think that as long as it’s scientifically investigated and shown to have an enormous benefit, it should be treated with the same respect as any other kind of medicine. So I’m particularly interested, and this is one of my favorite subjects is to talk about complex pain. Because for one thing, you know, nobody likes pain, pain is an unpleasant experience. But also, I worked in hospice care for several years and was a pain control specialist. And so I can see the ravages and the quality of life destruction that you have when you have chronic pain. So interested in sharing this information today.
Rick: Thank you very much. And now we’ll hand it over to you for the presentation.
Cheryl: Thank you so much. Well, we’ve already had a little bit of an intro. And as I said, I’m the head of scientific affairs and education for EuroPharma, which is the parent company of EuroMedica. And that means that I act as a liaison to researchers who are either using our products in their studies. I also do technical literature review to backup claims and to answer medical questions. I also do some writing, I have a couple of columns that I write every month. And so I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, or should I say a Jill of all trades.
So let’s talk a little bit about chronic pain. I honestly, as huge as this number is, I think that this is an underestimate. They say that over 20% of the adult population, so one in five adults that you run into is experiencing chronic pain. I actually think those numbers might be higher than that. Pain in America is an epidemic. We seem to be set up for a lot of different pain. We have pain because we live in a world of inflammatory triggers and nutrient challenges that can set us up for failure. When you look at the drugs that are available for pain, well, number one they work if they didn’t help with the pain, they wouldn’t be the multibillion-dollar industry that they are.
Let’s just look at ibuprofen. Ibuprofen use doubles the risk of heart attack and triples the risk of stroke because it impairs kidney function and drives up blood pressure. Acetaminophen, one brand name you may be familiar with is Tylenol is the number one leading cause of acute liver failure in America. Now, I would jokingly say I would think that would be Jack Daniel’s, no, that’s chronic liver failure. But acute sudden onset liver failure, number one cause in America, is the use of acetaminophen.
There’s been an over 70% increase in opioid overdoses. There are 16,500 documented deaths annually from the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. So you’ll see me say NSAID a lot, but that stands for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. And that’s the class of drugs that are not steroids but still lower inflammation, like ibuprofen, Motrin, Aleve, ketoprofen, Orudis, you know, naproxen sodium, some of the prescriptions out there like your Celebrex, celecoxib, and such. All of these do reduce inflammation, but at tremendous cost and loss of life.
So, why is pain so painful? Seems like a little bit of…oxymoronic, right? But it is an important stimuli, it gets your attention, doesn’t it? If something hurts, you’re gonna change something in your life or protect the wounded area, or scare away from whatever is causing the pain, whether it’s a stove, or an accident, or an animal attack, or whatever it may be, you want to pull back from that. You know, there are people that have a congenital insensitivity to pain, they don’t feel pain. It’s called pain asymbolia.
And when we look at those individuals, their lifespan doesn’t tend to be very long, because they can get a wound and not even notice that they have a wound of some sort until it becomes infected. They’re constantly injuring themselves. If a person with the syndrome were to break a bone in their leg, they will keep walking on it, and what kind of tissue damage will that foster?
So pain is important, it’s a signal. And we should never try to mask the pain, we should always strive for addressing what is causing pain in the first place. And that’s why I don’t like the prescription opiates. Because very often they use them for inflammatory pain, and opioid medication have no anti-inflammatory activity whatsoever.
And it’s usually in the base of acetaminophen. One brand name is Tylenol, and that has no anti-inflammatory activity whatsoever. So they’re treating inflammatory conditions with things that mask the pain. So those are just some of the reasons that I think we need to focus on better ways to help people deal with this pain.
Now, taking a little review on going back to school, from what… If you recall, there’s several different types of pain. There’s nociceptive pain, which tends to be tissue bone, soft tissue, organ pain. It’s generally a controllable pain. Neuropathic pain is pain…is either damage, impingement, and/or inflammation of the nerves. That’s a hard one to control. That’s a harder one to get on top of. And then there’s inflammatory pain. So let’s say it happens at the cellular level, it’s an immune response. It’s generally uncomplicated. And when it’s uncomplicated, it’s very controllable. However, chronic inflammation, you have to be aware you can have inflammation and not have pain, and it’s still as serious to address.
Principles of pain management… I stole this cartoon, I love it. It shows a snake, a turtle, a flamingo, and an elephant. They’re all at the store window, saying, “One size fits all,” the principles of pain management. Of all the things that you do, and I’m sure everything you do is a highly individualized treatment plan, this is the one area that needs often the most attention because pain is such a personal subject that I was taught in school, and I still believe this. Never judge anyone in pain. If they say…if you ask them to rate it from 0 to 10, and they’re up walking and talking to you, and they rate it at a 9, that’s their perception. It’s about as much as they can stand.
So we always go to where the patient is with regards to report of their pain. So what happens when we fail? Well, some of the things that happen is you can have memory and focus disorders. Have any of you ever been in severe pain, and then when you get treatment…let’s say you broke a leg on a biking accident, the memory of the events around it sometimes get pretty fuzzy. Because when all of a sudden you’re in a lot of pain, that’s all you can focus on. And the same is true of people with chronic pain syndromes. They tend to miss a lot because most of their focus is distracted by the pain.
Another consequence of pain management failure is addiction so addictive disorders to opioid analgesics. Because these opiates are not fixing anything, they’re masking and because your body gets used to them, you just have to keep increasing the dosage and the higher the dosage goes, the higher the addictive risk. Relationship disruption, it’s hard to have a fun romantic evening with someone who’s in chronic pain. It can really interfere with quality of life and with relationships, and that’s including with your children as well. If mom has chronic pain of some sort, she doesn’t wanna go out and ride bicycles, or make mud pies, or snowmen, or whatever it is that she would normally want to do to reinforce that relationship with her children.
It can lead to job loss. It can lead to personality changes. Some people become very weak and dependent when they’re in pain all the time because they feel helpless to do anything. Some people become very angry and belligerent when they’re in pain all the time. But yes, definitely personality changes can come along with that. Sleep disorders. You know, if you’re in pain all the time, you’re not gonna sleep normally.
Adrenal changes. Pain causes your adrenals generally to fire. Obesity and adverse BMI changes chronic pain. In an attempt to self-medicate, some people claimed that little tiny bit of endorphin rush when they eat something tasty and sweet. So you’ll start to see sometimes an increase in unhealthy foods. And then worst of what could happen with failed pain management is self-injury and suicide. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the natural botanicals that can make such a difference with pain.
So let’s talk about internal support. We’re gonna spend some time today on curcumin, Boswellia… Oops, I’m sorry, this seems to be a very sensitive today. I have to try to go back up to the… There we go. Someone’s toying with me, curcumin, Boswellia, black sesame seed oil, Boswellia, collagen, Glucosamine, Chondroitin blends and protocols. And topical support would be with a PA paralysis and alkaloid free comfrey. These are natural compounds that don’t mask pain, they actually dig in and get to root causes and help ameliorate pain that way.
So starting with curcumin, which is I’m sure something you’ve heard a lot about. In my opinion, and I think there’s a lot of experts that agree with me, curcumin is the most anti-inflammatory herb on the planet. It truly is magnificent. I think there’s over 17,000 studies on curcumin published in PubMed, or collected in PubMed, which is the electronic database of the National Institutes of Health and growing every day.
But one of the things I always have to deal with with patients is to help them understand the difference between turmeric and curcumin. Because turmeric is a plant and it’s awesome, and it’s a great spice. It’s also a natural colouring agent. So they use it on fabric sometimes and in dyes. So turmeric is great. The coloring agent in turmeric is called curcumin. So curcumin is a coloring agent, I mean it’s what gives the…it’s a pigment, it’s what gives turmeric its brilliant orange yellow orange color. And isn’t that the way it often is, is that pigments are extraordinarily healthy. So what makes tomatoes red? Well, that would be lycopene, and you’ve probably seen a lot of the research on lycopene and prostate issues. What makes carrots orange? Well, it’ll be beta carotene and there’s a reason why they say eat your carrots for your eyesight.
So very often the compounds that give the plant their color are some of the healthiest compounds in the plant. And that’s the way it is with curcumin. But only 2% to 5% of turmeric is actually curcumin. So when you’re trying to deal with a food… Eat all the turmeric you like but if you’re trying to use it as a medicine, you have to step up the curcumin, or you can’t even come close to replicating some of the serum levels seen and published in the human clinical trials.
So how does curcumin work? Well, we all know that it’s a potent anti-inflammatory, but one area is it decreases the activation of the NF-kB. That’s a transcription factor that’s associated with inflammation. This NF-kB amplifies inflammation and it also stimulates secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines like TNF alpha Cox-2, 5-LOX. It reduces pain sensitivity via some unusual brain receptors. So not only is curcumin alleviating pain, because of its ability, this beautiful ability to touch every single inflammatory pathway in the body, but it also has a connection to certain receptors in the pain…
And when I say receptor, I don’t think an on and off switch, I think a rheostat or a dimmer switch. I bet you’ve got one in your house, I’ve got one in my dining room, where I can turn the little wheel on the switch… Well, first I can poke the little wheel, and boom, the light turns on and off. But if I wanna adjust the brightness, I can turn it up, I can turn it down. Those are dimmer switches. I’ve heard them called rheostats, whatever. That’s exactly what’s going on in the brain.
So when we talk about how these things interact, is this process of either dialing down or dialing up, it’s usually not a process of turning off. So via those certain brain pathways, it can also really help with the brain’s perception of pain. There’s also some evidence that curcumin may improve nutrient delivery because of the reduction of inflammation that helps to promote healthy circulation, especially microcirculation to those hard to reach portions of the body. Whereas, if you have a lot of inflammation on board, sometimes those get completely clouded off.
Now another ingredient that’s very useful in pain formulas and pain protocols is called Boswellia. And the one that has the clinical studies specific to our topic is the Boswellia Serrata tree. There’s actually over 20 different species of Boswellia tree out there. And it’s been used for thousands of years, different aspects of this tree. So for those of you who remember the stories in the Bible, the baby Jesus was brought the gifts of Frankincense. Well, but Frankincense is another nickname for Boswellia. Frank incense means the best incense, the best aroma.
And so when we look at Frankincense as an essential oil, or something that you use in perfumes, or sabs or incense, the Catholic Church still uses certain sensors filled with Frankincense for certain church ceremonies. But when you’re dealing with it from like more of an Ayurvedic perspective, as an internal medicine, then it’s generally called Boswellia and not called Frankincense as much.
Now the way that they make this is they scrape the bark of a Boswellia tree, and then there’s a resin that collects there after the bark is scraped. They come back and collect the resume. In that instance, you can do one of two things, you can put it through an essential oil extraction, or you can do an oral extract as it’s used in Ayurveda. The Boswellia that we use is very ethically and sustainably harvested because it’s a tree. And if something happens to the tree, there goes the Boswellia supply, and trees don’t grow very quickly. So they actually GPS-mark the trees that they use for Boswellia resin collection, so that they are not over harvested. And they can just pull it right up on their computer and say, “Which are the trees that have gotten to a perspective where they can be harvested again?”
Now, I talk a lot about other kinds of inflammation, but I wanna mention 5-LOX. 5-LOX is… As you know, there’s many pathways in the body that have to do with inflammation. And I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole, information on enset blockable 5-LOX 1 and LOX 2. Well, LOX-2 is a pain and inflammation pathway as well. 5-LOX was really difficult to treat. It’s this little wiggly area of inflammation. There’s no over-the-counter drug that treats 5-LOX inflammation. There’s one class of prescription drugs that deal with 5-LOX inflammation, those are called steroids. Well, steroids will save your life in the short run and kill you in the long run. Ongoing use of steroids is always life compromising.
So when we look at places where we see a lot of 5-LOX inflammation, number one, it’s asthma. So does the internist tell the person having an asthma attack to go take two ibuprofen and call them in the morning? No, it’s not that kind of inflammation, ibuprofen doesn’t touch an asthma attack, ibuprofen doesn’t touch the breathing problems associated with people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or emphysema.
Another place where we see a lot of 5-LOX inflammation is gastrointestinal, irritable bowel, Inflammatory Bowel, Crohn’s disease, all the colitises, high levels of 5-LOX. Again, if you’re having a bout of colitis, mucus colitis, the doctor does not say take two ibuprofen and call me in the morning because it’s not that kind of inflammation.
5-LOX also plays a role in certain cancer promotion pathways. And we see a mix of different kinds of inflammatory pathways when we’re dealing with joint pain, of which an important one is 5-LOX. So the reason I’m going on and on about this one strange little pathway is because Boswellia is the most potent 5-LOX down regulator that’s thus far been investigated.
So while curcumin touches every avenue of inflammation, it’s a little weak in the 5-LOX department, and that’s where Boswellia shines. Now some other problems with 5-LOX or the Arthritises that are based on disease like psoriatic or psoriasis arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, gout, some of these unusual joint issues and joint pain issues respond beautifully to the combination of both curcumin and Boswellia.
So here’s a little bit of a technical representation of what I just said, where we’ve got the…this happens to just be the arachidonic acid pathway. And we see that curcumin touches both pathways, but Boswellia really shines in the 5-LOX area. So when we look at the different kinds of inflammation, curcumin touches all the different kinds of inflammation and does so potently. That’s why it’s addressing the underlying issue and not masking the problem, except for that area of 5-LOX where curcumin does have some modest benefits, but Boswellia really shines.
So when we look at inflammation if the disease has an -itis in it, It’s inflammatory, arthritis, tendinitis, sinusitis, pancreatitis, conjunctivitis, nephritis, that’s kidney inflammation, dermatitis, cystitis, diverticulitis, tonsillitis, et cetera, et cetera, -itis means inflammation and you can use the combination of curcumin and Boswellia on any of these issues.
Now, here’s a study looking at the combination of curcumin that has enhanced absorption. You know, the early studies on curcumin, you had to take 20 to 24 capsules a day to get any kind of therapeutic amount in the bloodstream. Well, number one, unless they’re dipped in Godiva dark chocolate, most people are not gonna wanna take 24 capsules a day. The other thing is, can you imagine buying a 60 count and running out in three days?
So the race was on to try to find a better way to boost absorption. There are some Frankenstein products out there, that’s not the way we chose. We chose to use a clinically studied blend of curcumin with turmeric essential oil in which each flake of curcumin is impregnated with turmeric essential oil so that it boosts absorption about 700%, 800%. That combination, that patented combination of curcumin with turmeric essential oil, is the most clinically studied enhanced absorption curcumin in the world, I think they’re up to 72 studies 20…no 31 of them which are human clinical trials.
So in this study, they did this combination of that unique curcumin unique Boswellia twice daily, and they compared it to celecoxib. And celecoxib is sold under the brand name Celebrex and it’s the number one prescribed drug for osteoarthritis of the knee in America. So they did this study for 12 weeks, and look at what they found. So it had three times the improvement in the joint pain area. That curcumin Boswellia combo, then Celebrex or celecoxib significant differences in joint line tenderness, significant differences in walking distance.
So very often an accusation that is hurled towards our industry is well. It’s not like these things are clinically studied. Well, of course they’re clinically studied. The reason you don’t see as many as perhaps I would like is because you don’t have the big pockets behind it like the pharmaceutical industry. So supplement studies continue to be a little bit more modest. But the other thing that I’ve often heard is well, it’s not like it’s been compared to prescription drugs. Oh, contraire. Here’s a study comparing that curcumin and enhanced absorption curcumin and that specially standardized Boswellia in partnership, where it worked on every parameter better than the prescription drug.
So let’s…well, kind of remember I said there are some unique forms out there. So if you’re choosing a curcumin, I always say please find one that’s clinically studied, it has published human trials, and it has an enhanced absorption system. The system we chose is the one with turmeric essential oil in [inaudible 00:22:37.339] because this is patented, and that you won’t find this in any other curcumin. But this one it’s 500 times more powerful than turmeric. You would have to take up to 500 capsules of the same dose of turmeric to get the amount absorbed as one capsule of this curcumin produced with solar energy and no toxic solvent.
So this is the curcumin I’m most familiar with, and the one that I promote. There’s also though… Boswellia has some parameters that you need to pay attention to. Boswellia has a lot of different compounds in them and they call it the boswellic acid family. Now like most families, you’ve got your overachievers and your underachievers, right? The overachiever in the boswellic acid family is called AKBA, A-K-B-A, Acetyl-11-keto-β-boswellic acid. And these compounds are the ones that are most responsible for all the heavy lifting that Boswellia does.
It’s not the only one but it’s the best one. Unstandardized Boswellia can have as little as 1% AKBA [inaudible 00:23:40.919] has a minimum of 10% which means that based on that standardization alone, they’re 10 times more powerful than unstandardized Boswellia. But they go an extra step. Remember I said there’s some bad boys in this? Well, the bad boys in Boswellia are called beta Boswellic acids and they’re somewhat pro-inflammatory. So about 20% of the boswellic acid family is composed of things that are pro-inflammatory. So researchers wondered what would happen if they purify it to reduce virtually all the BBAs, and the answer is that they created an incredibly powerful, very useful, very anti-inflammatory Boswellia.
Now the next thing I’d like to speak about is black sesame oil. And this is… I’m sharing this more as an enhancer versus a standalone. Because black sesame seed oil has been doing…they’ve been doing some clinical testing, where they whip this oil into a froth to suspend curcumin and Boswellia, and that special emulsification speeds how quickly it gets into the bloodstream and speeds how quickly you get pain relief. So this is a patent-pending process, using as a substrate black sesame seed oil that has been whipped, and something like an emulsification process to improve dissolution and speed the results.
So here’s a study looking at that unique delivery system. Curcumin, Boswellia, this was in comparison to acetaminophen. So not a lot of difference between perceived time to relief. Look at the reductions and pain scores, they were about even as to extra strength Tylenol. However, there’s some places where it really shown, one is adverse effects, far fewer adverse effects in the herbal group versus the acetaminophen group. But also in something called the emotional aspects of pain. So when you have a pain experience, you have the physical and then you have the perceptive.
So if you have physical pain, and you’re talking…your patient’s talking to you, they may say it’s crushing, or it’s burning, or it’s aching, or it’s stabbing. They’re telling you what the physical sensation feels like. But the second half of that, when you do a thorough pain assessment has to do with how the pain feels to the person. Is it overwhelming? I’ve heard that a lot. Is it punishing? Is it sickening? It’s so much pain, I’m sickened by it. Is it exhausting? Yeah, chronic pain is terribly exhausting.
So that’s your emotional response to pain. And those two factors combined together give you a more full assessment of the patient’s pain status. And what they found is this combination is eight times better at addressing those affective or emotional aspects of pain. So when we look at this combination of curcumin Boswellia, with black sesame seed oil that speeds relief, it was 800% or eight times better at dealing with the affective aspects of pain for better perception of pain relief and improved quality of life.
Now, when we talked previously about pain and addressing underlying inflammation, and maybe a little bit of work on what happens in the brain with different brain receptors or dimmer switches. Well, now I wanna talk a little bit about restructuring because a lot of the work I know that you do is with individuals who are struggling with their bones, their joints, their ligaments, or tendons, not doing quite like what they ought to be.
So I’d like to spend a few moments to talk about collagen, glucosamine, and chondroitin. So we’ve already addressed the inflammatory aspects, let’s look at the building block or the repair aspects. So when you wanna deal with joint health, there’s a three prong approach. Number one is reduce inflammation. So Boswell is particularly good for that, or the curcumin Boswellia combination. You wanna restart normal joint metabolism, and that would be native type II collagen and we’ll talk for a moment in a little bit about the differences between collagen.
And lastly, you wanna rebuild the joint. And that means that you have to put the raw materials in that the joint uses for self-repair and for lubricative factor, so glucosamine chondroitin and hyaluronic acid. Now when we look at 5-LOX activity, and leukotriene levels in arthritic joints versus healthy joints…
So look at the left side is that little green bar goes up to about 30. And that is the amount of leukotriene levels in the healthy joint. But look at the arthritic joint, it’s up to 160. That’s a huge difference when we look at what’s going on in arthritic joints. So Boswellia is, as I said, the best one for inhibiting the 5-LOX pathway that leads to these excessive leukotiene’s that interfere with joint inflammatory gout, psoriatic arthritis, etc.
Now, here’s the other thing that’s way cool for those of you who are a little bit science geeks like me. So we have these compounds our body makes called glycosaminoglycans, the unfortunate nickname for glycosaminoglycans is GAGS. And so it’s like not a very pretty name, but you get the point. So when a person is normal and healthy, their glucosamine or their GAG level is about 133, 132, 133. But when you take a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, you drive down the glycosaminoglycans that the body is making. So ibuprofen suppresses GAGs. Naproxen sodium, that’s what’s [inaudible 00:29:26.687] suppresses GAGS. Celebrex suppresses GAGS.
So you are actually interfering with the creation of the compound that’s necessary to rebuild the damage or to rebuild the erosion of the joint. When you look at Boswellia, when you take Boswellia not only is it addressing the inflammation, but it actually raises the glycosaminoglycan levels that the body is creating somewhat. So just another reason to focus on intelligent pain control by using compounds that are achieving what you want instead of, as I said, people taking ibuprofen probably have no idea that they’re dramatically cutting the creation of compounds that their body uses to heal.
The next thing we wanna do is stop cartilage destruction. Now, I told you I was gonna talk a little bit about collagen. So collagen on its own, hydrolyzed collagen, so pre-digested collagen, because it’s not the easiest to absorb is a great raw building material. So a lot of people…a lot of athletes really pump up on the collagen, a lot of ladies that want pretty skin they really pumped up on the collagen. That’s raw material collagen. That’s not what this is. Native type II collagen is not pre-digested. It is not hydrolyzed. It acts as a signaling molecule. So while we’re all used to saying, oh, rheumatoid arthritis is a disease of the immune system, because it’s autoimmune when the body starts to attack the joint. But did you know that there is adverse immune system activity in osteoarthritis, which is far more common type of arthritis. Because the body starts attacking the damaged collagen that the arthritis is causing and then it becomes a self-defeating cycle.
So the immune system itself can start to attack the joint because it’s trying to clip off the damaged collagen and take it out of circulation. Native type II collagen is a signaling molecule. So if you recall, in your intestines, there’s an area called Peyer’s Patches. And I always think of Peyer’s Patches as hall monitors. Remember when you were in school, and there were two particularly good students who got to sit at the end of the hall. And they would watch and make sure nobody was pushing or shoving, or bullying, or running through the halls, or making too loud noise or whatever. They just made sure that the traffic flowed and that nobody broke the rules, right?
Well, that’s what the Peyer’s Patches do. Because if you take something into a body and it gets to your small intestines, and it’s dangerous, those Peyer’s Patches are gonna activate and your immune system is gonna go into full-blown mode. So when we look at using native type II collagen that is the most like what’s in the body. And by consistently exposing the Peyer’s Patches to this type of collagen you can develop oral tolerance, which turns off the switch in the body where the body is attacking the collagen in the joint.
I often say, and this is not a perfect analogy, but for patients…because this is kind of a complicated thought. For patients that are not doing so well with understanding how this works I always say, let’s say you’re afraid of spiders, you have terrible arachnophobia. I mean, like shaking, sick to your stomach, can’t walk into a room, if you see a spider. Well, how do you deal with that? Deal with it through desensitization, right?
So if a person doesn’t wanna live their life in fear of running into a spider, they see a therapist who works on them, and maybe they hold a picture of a spider 20 feet away. But the continuous exposure and working towards, you are safe, you are well, even when you see this picture and then maybe at some point, you see an actual spider. That’s how…one of the basic treatments for overcoming phobias. Kind of what the Peyer’s Patches do. After it’s seen enough of this native typeII collagen it down-regulates its negative activity on the collagen of the joint.
So let’s look for just a moment at this tolerance. So you take the Native type II collagen, it’s exposed to the Peyer’s Patches, and that increases the tolerance by the collagen fragments, and it decreases immune system activated and it also decreases joint destruction.
So that’s basically the difference between native collagen that go through a unique extraction process to keep it in a 3-D helical structure. So the body sees it as exactly what’s in the body, to act as a signaling molecule versus being used just as a building block.
So here’s a study. Again, it’s one of my least favorite drugs, that’s acetaminophen because as I said acetaminophen doesn’t do anything for inflammation and yet some doctors push it because they say it’s the safe pain reliever. Well, it’s safe because it doesn’t tear up your stomach. It’s really scary because of the other negative things it does like liver failure and emotional aspects of brain function it can interfere with. But this study they used…and it does nothing to alleviate inflammation. So in this study, they gave patients one side of them that Tylenol only the next got Tylenol plus type II native type II collagen.
So over three months, you see this monofin group 22% increase in pain. Well, that makes sense, right? Because they’re not addressing the underlying aspects of pain, no change and walking, so they still had pain when they walked. And the time it took them to walk a set distance impaired by pain did not change. But look at when they added in the type II collagen, a whopping 25% decrease in pain. That’s a 47% difference when you add together 22% increase with Tylenol, 25% decrease in pain when you add the type 11 collagen, 50% decrease in pain while walking and a 7% decrease in the time needed to walk a set distance.
So even though it’s kind of a technical explanation to help your patients understand how this works, it really can make a world of difference. Lastly, we wanna rebuild and repair the joint with a blend of Glucosamine, Chondroitin, and hyaluronic acid. So these three have been studied together in combination, as part of a formula. And again, just look at its increase in glycosaminoglycan synthesis. That’s what we want, we want more GAGS in the body, because that’s what your body uses to repair.
This is also…when you look at hyaluronic acid and human synovial sites exposed to low concentrations, you get some tremendous differences. Now, last but not least, I wanna talk about something topical that’s been around for a very long time, and that’s comfrey. Sometimes it’s called boneset and knitbone. Because back in the olden days before we had plaster casting, if somebody broke a leg, they would just splint it, right?
Well, in the area of the break, they would rub comfrey or do a pull test of comfrey leaves. And comfrey was just tremendous for wound healing and also for reducing pain. Unfortunately, comfrey has a dirty little secret, it has some liver toxins in it, which we’ll talk more about in a moment. So background uses, more than…you know, it dates back to 400 BC is the first time they found that literature. Its name is derived from the Latin word to grow together. As I said boneset, knitbone, wall wort and others. You can use it for sprains, and strains, and bruises, and cuts, and insect bites and muscle soreness, and surgical incision healing, and joint pain, and the list goes on, and on, of what you can use this for, arthritis, chronic neck pain. It’s a great topical for use in all those situations.
Now it’s not like…it’s not a menthol product. So it’s not like icy hot or it’s not like some of the other things that when you put on topically, it creates this really either hot or cooling sensation, which is a sudden increase in circulation. That’s not how it works. It actually absorbs and creates some synergy with the body in order to help things heal. So it’s analgesic, anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidative, so it’s gonna reduce the swelling and wound healing.
So there’s a reduction in wound area of people that had a certain type of wound where they measured it. By day two or three, look at the difference between the two of the reference point versus that comfrey cream at being able to facilitate healing. Now I hate to be reductionist, there’s a lot of comfrey that’s doing its super magic. But three things we know it’s doing is it has Choline, which improves circulation and it helps the body get rid of metabolic waste materials. Rosmarinic acid is also something that promotes circulation and helps to prevent fluid buildup. And Allantoin actually stimulate cellular proliferation and tissue regeneration.
So here’s a study that looks specifically on back pain, where people did not have that pain when they said that they had back pain if they stood up and walked around. So we had pain on active motion. Look at the difference between people who are medicated with trauma plant versus those who were not. That plant is just absolutely amazing. So I told you though, that comfrey has a problem with liver toxins and they’re called Pyrrolizidine alkaloids.
So back when people might take comfrey tea once every five or six years for some ailment, probably wasn’t a big problem. But when they started to use ongoing oral comfrey products, the FDA and the FTC took action, because they caused a lot of issues, a lot of liver damage. So PAs are bad. They are compounds that…they were high in the comfrey plant. So the company…there’s a company in Germany that developed the kind of comfrey called trauma comfrey. And trauma comfrey helps to…it does everything that regular comfrey does, except it doesn’t have liver toxicity.
So when they got one of oil comfrey products in the U.S., they allowed ointments and creams to stay on the market. But a lot of individuals were concerned with using them because skin has varying levels of permeability and how many of the PAs you’re getting in your bloodstream.
Wow, a lot of information in a short period of time, and I did wanna leave a little bit of time to have some questions. But just to go over quickly and recap. Curcumin and Boswellia target major inflammatory system pathways and their pain relief is usually via modulation of these pathways. Curcumin, as I said, that the one with the most clinical studies is that hybrid with turmeric essential oil. Boswellia should be standardized to have high levels of AKBA low levels of BBA.
The black sesame seed oil, it does have independent health activities. But the reason we talked about it today because it’s in a new patent-pending system to make pain relief faster. And comfrey, a general topical addition to pain relieving protocol, helps speed wound healing, inflammation, stimulates tissue regeneration. I have personal experience with comfrey. My youngest son plays the guitar. And he got a wart right in the center of his palm, and I irritated the heck out of him every time he played the guitar, and plus, he didn’t like the wart, who likes warts.
So we tried everything natural, nothing worked. It was the wart that wouldn’t die. Then we went…we tried everything over the counter, like salicylic acid, treatment topics, etc, nothing. Finally took him to the GP, the GP tried to freeze it off. Nothing, it came back. So the GP said, “You need to see a dermatologist.” So we went to the dermatologist and they used some kind of acid on the wart and they said, “If it’s not gone in 10 days, come back, we’ll have to do a second treatment.” Well, the wart wouldn’t die it was still there.
So 10 days later back to the dermatologist, and they put this acid on it. Well, I don’t know if it was a hypersensitivity reaction or they used too much of whatever, but my son, the palm of his hand, the entire palm turned into a blister. It was that bad of a chemical burn. Just the whole thing was one…the biggest blister I’ve ever seen. And he was walking around with his hand in the air going, “Oh my God, it hurts. It hurts. It hurts.” And I didn’t have any solution for him. If he didn’t calm down, I was gonna have to take him to the emergency room. And then I remembered I had these sample packets from Germany where they’re the ones who developed the PA-free comfrey. And I thought, “Well, I’ve never used them before, but why not right? I mean, I don’t have anything else to offer right now.”
So I opened one of the packets and he slathered it on his hand. And I said, “Well, just go relax and rest for a few minutes and let it do its magic. He came back 15 minutes later and said, “The pain’s almost gone.” And he could take his arm from hanging over his head because he couldn’t put it down because it throbbed, to put his arm down again. So we slathered it up again and the next day when he woke up, the blister had ruptured. And it was ugly, a crusty perimeter and oozing, and it was ugly, ugly. So I used the trauma plant again on the wound, and I bandaged it with just some kerlix tape, kerlix bandage and said, “Well, let’s see.”
And the next day, so one day after, I clipped that bandage off to change it, and I was stunned. The crusty exterior areas were gone and all of the flesh in the center that had been raw and oozing was now pink granulation tissue. So he didn’t need to have it wrapped up but I did wrap it up one more night with the comfrey cream. I was absolutely stunned that he could go from such a severe burn, to the point where he almost couldn’t stand it and was going to have to take him to the emergency room to utter healing. It was amazing for me. So I’ve become a very huge fan because of that personal experience. I think we’re all like that a little bit, aren’t we? We have a personal experience that makes a world of difference and we wanna share that with the world.
So we’ve got…we talked today about curcumin, Boswellia, comfrey. Phew. So thank you so much for attending. Before we move on to questions, I see I’ve got some in the chatbox. Our company is EuroMedica. If you wanna try one of our really unique formulas, we do have our trauma plant comfrey cream, if you’d like to sample that, or both. You can get our acute pain relief as well, which is a new formulation with curcumin, Boswellia and black sesame seed, to speed…that’s why it’s acute pain relief to speed the relief. So just email your name, your credentials and the address to which you want your samples mailed to info@euromedicausa.com and we will make sure and get those out to you. All right.
Rick: Thank you. That’s been extremely informative. It’s made me take a new look at my personal [inaudible 00:43:58.002] that I take. We’ve been collecting some questions. We have one, why is it important to have enhanced absorption for curcumin?
Cheryl: Well, it’s because… First off, there’s not very many curcuminoids in turmeric, so let’s just take turmeric off the table. But when you extract curcumin and turmeric to some extent, they don’t absorb very well. So when you look at the early medicinal studies of curcumin, they use 20 to 24 capsules a day to get a little bit of curcumin into the bloodstream, and that is not a sustainable dosage. So a couple of companies went ahead with a next-generation curcumin where they boost absorption, so you get the equivalent of those huge dosages but only have to take a couple of capsules. And the form that we use is, of course, with that turmeric essential oil where it is some…each flake of curcumin carries its turmeric essential oil with it.
Rick: Thank you. Another question. Is it possible to overdose or take too much curcumin?
Cheryl: Well, you could try. I often joke that the only way you’re ever gonna hurt yourself with curcumin is if you drop a capsule on the floor and you slip and fall. Curcumin is amazingly, amazingly safe. And you can titrate doses up and down and up and down, and you’re not gonna have to run any serious risks. I will tell you, there are integrative practitioners that use curcumin for helping with individuals that are struggling with cancer. And they may use very high dosages indeed. And when you do use, like maybe nine capsules a day of enhanced absorption, when you do go to that level, curcumin is very healthy for your liver. And when your liver is healthy, it makes more bile. And when you have more bile dumped into the gastrointestinal tract, it scoots the train out of the station a little faster.
So you may notice you don’t usually get liquid diarrhea, but you might get soft stools, and you might end up going to the bathroom four, or five, six, times a day with these small stools. So what integrative practitioners do is, if they’re dealing with a serious disease, they dose up to bowel tolerance. But that’s about as bad as adverse effects you can have, and it doesn’t even happen to everyone.
Rick: Thank you. And just a reminder, if you have a question, you can type it into the chatbox. We have another question. Is there a children’s pain protocol?
Cheryl: Yes, absolutely. I would much rather give children… If they need something for pain I’d much rather use like the combination of curcumin and Boswellia than some of the over the counters that are out there for children. Now, I say older children because I think up until you’re 2 or 3-years-old, the human body is very immature. The immune system is immature. And the gastrointestinal or the digestive system is immature.
So I don’t like to introduce things super young. Unless you’re working with somebody that’s specialist in integrative pediatrics, and there’s a unique situation. But once children are four, or five, six, years old, there should be no reason why they couldn’t use something like the acute pain formula or curcumin and Boswellia.
Another caveat, children should not be in pain. Actually, nobody should be in pain. But if you’re dealing with a child that’s in pain, I hope that the parents are doing the investigation necessary to see what’s…to make sure they know what’s causing the pain and it’s, you know… If they fell off their bicycle and they hurt all over, that’s pretty easy to figure that one out. But if they have, for example, chronic hip pain, or stomach pain, or back pain, they need to get that…they need to determine what’s causing it so that they can better address it.
Rick: Thank you. We’ve run through all our questions to this point. And at this time, I’d like to thank our sponsor, EuroMedica and Cheryl Myers for today’s webinar, and thank you for all attending. Remember, this webinar, including our speaker’s PowerPoint presentation have been recorded. We’ll alert you via email when the webinar is available online. Thank you again for attending and we look forward to seeing you next time. Have a great day.
