Tag Archives: children

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Audiocast Volume 11 Issues 40 and 42

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Audiocast #40 – Epigenetics

Humans, like most organisms on earth, grow and maintain their biological systems through a complex interplay between the environment and their genes. Epigenetics is the study of the ability of environmental signals to silence or activate these genes, thus effecting cellular function and species survival. I was once given an analogy, by Dr. Randy Jirtle, that your genes are like a computer hard drive. They do nothing until the software inputs change activity. The environmental signals like food, chemicals, stress and much more are the putative software inputs for us. Good lifestyle inputs have been epidemiologically proven to reduce disease risk.

Audiocast #42 – Stress, Psychiatry and the Intestinal Microbiome

Humans develop disease from many different routes including toxic exposures, genetics, poor nutrition, injury, microbial exposures and much more. One of the biggest risk factors for the development of disease is mental stress. Specifically, chronic stress of the psyche is traumatic to the cellular machinery of the body like the protective telomere tails of DNA strands or the functioning intestinal microbiome.
Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #6 – Dr. David Rakel, Stress and Optimal Woman’s Health

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Podcast #6
Dr. David Rakel, MD is a nationally recognized leader in integrative medicine. He is the Chair of the department of Family Medicine and Community health at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He is an expert in mind body stress and human health.
Dr. Rakel obtained his undergraduate degree from Colorado College and graduated from Baylor College of Medicine in 1991. During his time at the University of Wisconsin–Madison he founded the Integrative Medicine Program (now known as the Integrative Health Program) and received the Gold Foundation’s Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award, the school’s highest honor for excellence and compassion in care. His team worked with more than 50 clinical systems within the Veterans Health Administration to implement changes to make care more personalized, proactive, and patient driven.
An author of both academic and popular writings, David Rakel says one of his missions is to communicate medical information in a way that is accessible to people of all backgrounds. He has published 11 books, including the Textbook of Family Medicine, Current Therapy, and Integrative Medicine, as well as peer-reviewed research on the impact of measures such as mindfulness meditation and the power of the therapeutic encounter. He serves as editor-in-chief of Practice Update, a website devoted to commentaries on primary medical care research. His 2018 book The Compassionate Connection focuses on how relationship-building can influence health outcomes.
Today we will take a deep look at maternal and child health as it relates to stress.
I hope that you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Rakel,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Audiocast Volume 11 Issues 36 and 38

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Audiocast #36 – Vision and Breathing
What are the connections between breathing and vision? Dr. Huberman, a Stanford Neurobiologist has been researching this topic for years and his findings are fascinating.
From a 2020 Scientific American article: “But Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University who studies the visual system, sees matters a bit differently. Stress, he says, is not just about the content of what we are reading or the images we are seeing. It is about how our eyes and breathing change in response to the world, as well as the cascades of events that follow. Both these bodily processes also offer us easy and accessible releases from stress. For more: https://www.salisburypediatrics.com/patient-education/dr-magryta-s-newsletter/999-volume-11-letter-36
Audiocast #38 – Type II Diabetes and Covid in Kids
The pandemic has taken an amazing toll on human health. According to two new studies that are not yet in print, the pandemic caused a doubling in diabetes in children. This is not a trivial matter as insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome in general are the diagnostic diseases associated with increased risk for cancer, coronary artery disease and early death from issues like COVID. The antecedent triggers have been well studied and discussed in this newsletter. Sedentary behavior coupled to a high fat, high refined carbohydrate diet are the main drivers of disease and the pandemic forced many a child’s hand. They were less likely to exercise and move during the poor quality zoom events. Physical education classes were non existent. Food quality plummeted from a poor school based place to a worse home based place. For more: https://www.salisburypediatrics.com/patient-education/dr-magryta-s-newsletter/1007-type-ii-diabetes-and-covid-in-kids
Best,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #5 – Dr. Victoria Maizes, Fertility and Optimal Woman’s Health

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Dr. Victoria Maizes is executive director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, chief of the UA Division of Integrative Medicine and a professor of medicine, family medicine and public health. Internationally recognized as a leader in integrative medicine, she stewarded the growth of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine from a small program educating four residential fellows per year to a designated “Center of Excellence” that trains more than 500 residents and fellows annually.

Dr. Maizes has pioneered multiple innovative educational programs including the Integrative Family Medicine Program, and Integrative Medicine in Residency, two national models for educating primary care physicians. As founding co-chair of the education committee of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine—the mission of which is to promote integrative medicine, she has led a team of educators in developing objectives for medical students in integrative medicine.

Her passion for women’s health makes her ideal for a discussion on fertility and the best path forward for a woman wanting to become a mother. Her book, Be Fruitful, is a road map leading to the best pregnancy and child outcomes. We discuss the root causes of infertility and maternal disease. Dr. Maizes teaches us the pathway to be followed for a mother to be in order to unwind the antecedent risk factors for infertility and disease.

I hope that you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Maizes,

Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #4 – Ken Cook, the Environmental Working Group and Your Health

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Ken Cook, President and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, is widely recognized as one of the environmental community’s most prominent and influential critics of industrial agriculture, U.S. food and farm policy and the nation’s broken approach to protecting families and children from toxic substances. Under Cook’s guidance, the organization empowered American families with easy-to-use, data-driven tools to help reduce their exposure to potentially harmful ingredients in foods, drinking water, cosmetics and other household products. These unique digital resources are searched hundreds of millions of times by consumers. 
We discuss the state of the nation with regards to environmental triggers of disease which can cause problems in mothers and children. It is a conversation that every parent needs to hear as it is loaded with news to use for a healthier life.
Please enjoy my conversation with Ken Cook,
Dr. M
Here are two links to the podcast:
Apple Podcasts
Women and Children First
SPA Podcast Page – will be loaded this week

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Audiocast Volume 11 Issues 37 Covid Update #43

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Delta is a pain in the BUTT, but our T and B cells are ready to wage war once we have either had natural infection or received the SARS2 vaccine.
Evolution of the SARS2 coronavirus may have reached a perfect level of fitness with the delta variant. It is incredibly effective at transmission while not being more deadly than alpha. Time will ultimately tell if it evolves again in a significant way. If you think of the evolution of humanity with respect to SARS2/Covid19 risk, it is clear to me that this virus would have been much less deadly 30 or 50 or 100 years ago before the invention of modern processed foods, chemicals and stress that have upended human immune health and lead to an era of metabolic diseases and disease. I have thought about this for some time and the reality is as such. We are here to some extent by our own doing and that is a tragedy of our time.
Some may say that modern medicine is saving countless lives and that is so, but how many would have never entered the hospital based on much better baseline health? Ah, these are questions that we cannot answer less we just hypothesize.
Read more for COVID #43….https://www.salisburypediatrics.com/patient-education/dr-magryta-s-newsletter
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #3 – Dr. Randy Jirtle and the Discovery of Maternal Risk

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Dr. Randy Jirtle joins the show today to discuss his groundbreaking research that ushered in the era of epigenetics. Time Magazine nominated him for person of the year in 2007 and had this to say about him: “Dr. Jirtle’s pioneering work in epigenetics and genomic imprinting has uncovered a vast territory in which a gene represents less of an inexorable sentence and more of an access point for the environment to modify the genome. His trailblazing discoveries have produced a far more complete and useful understanding of human development and diseases” — Time Magazine. This interview is ground zero for the Women and Children First Podcast as we discuss the underpinnings or mechanisms of disease risk for all humans as it relates to the environmental inputs of our lives that are driving health or disease at both the pregnancy and post natal periods. We look specifically at how maternal nutrition and later chemical exposure directly affected the health of the agouti mouse offspring. This experiment was the first of its kind and paved the way for a complete shift in human disease understanding. For parents, this podcast is really the beginning of everything that I am trying to convey regarding a healthy pregnancy and childhood. Without this interview, the following interviews will be more difficult to understand. The picture becomes very clear once his research is cemented in our minds.

His biography is as follows: Professor of Epigenetics at the Department of Biological Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, and a Senior Scientist at McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. He was previously professor of radiation oncology and associate professor of pathology at Duke University, Durham, NC, where he had been a faculty member since 1977. He graduated with a B.S. degree in nuclear engineering in 1970 and a Ph.D. degree in radiation biology in 1976, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His awards list is long but the key to Dr. Jirtle is that he is a curious thinker and we are grateful for this.

Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Randy Jirtle,

Dr. M

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