August 26, 2025 • 48 mins
Leading nutritionist & radio show host, Nancy Addison talks with Dr. David Brownstein, a Board-Certified, family physician and author of 17 books, including: "Salt Your Way To Health", "Iodine, You Can’t Live Without It", "Overcoming Thyroid Disorders". He is practitioner of holistic medicine and the Medical Director of the Center for Holistic Medicine in West Bloomfield, Michigan. They discuss salt, iodine, thyroid disorders, lab tests, viruses, adrenals, and more. www.drbrownstein.com
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Organic Healthy Lifestyle Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Organic Healthy Lifestyle is broadcast live Tuesdays at 3PM ET Music on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com Organic Healthy Lifestyle is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Organic Healthy Lifestyle Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Any health related information on the following show provides general
information only. Content presented on any show by any host
or guests should not be substituted for a doctor's advice.
Always consult your physician before beginning any new diet, exercise,
or treatment program.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome beautiful people too, organic healthy lifestyle And I'm Nancy Addison,
your host, and I love to start off my show
with a prayer. I feel like it just frames it
in the perfect kind of situation that I would like.
So everybody, take a deep breath and just let out
any kind of stress you've been holding in your body
(00:58):
this morning. And and I ask you to join me
in whichever way you would like. And I just ask
our divine creator to please allow your love for us
to extinguish any fear that we may have, enable us
to become quiet and focused on your spirit of divine love.
May we feel the waves of peace washing over us
(01:19):
in the earth and clearing away any kind of anxiety
or negative situations. We claim and declare your grace, love
and promises, and gratefully accept your gifts of strength, compassion, fortitude, flexibility, wisdom, insight,
and perfect health. Bring peace to our souls. That passes
(01:41):
all worldly understanding and make us a light for others
to see your strength. And I ask us in the
highest good of all concerned for everyone listening now and
for everyone listening in the future. Well, I just wanted
to make a quick announcement that I was notified that
I one the Dallas Awards for Excellence of Healthcare Business
(02:06):
twenty twenty five. That's seven years in a row and
I am now in their Hall of Fame. So thank
you Healthcare Dallas or Dallas Awards. Thank you for recognizing
me and appreciating holistic health. You know that's always a
(02:26):
really nice thing. So today we have one of my
favorite heroes on a holistic medical doctor, doctor David Brownstein.
He's a Board certified family physician. He is one of
the foremost practitioners of holistic medicine and is the medical
director of the Center f Holistic Medicine in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
(02:51):
He's the author of fifteen books, including Salt Your Way
to Health, Iodine, You Can't Live Without It, and Overcoming
Thyroid Disorders. He's lectured internationally and he frequently speaks about
hormones and nutritional therapy. He is a graduate of the
(03:13):
University of Michigan and Wayne State University School of Medicine.
He's a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians
and International College of Integrative Nutrition, where he is a
board member. And some of those books Hormone Imbalances, Chronic Illness,
Immune Disorders, arthritis, Bibermialgia, adrenal fatigue, Headaches in Migraine, and
(03:41):
his website is dr brow nstei n dot com, doctor
Brownstein dot com. And I actually cite his books and
his research in my books, my sixth health and nutrition
books that I've written, like Diabetes in Your Diet and
(04:03):
how to be a Heavy Vegetarian. And I cite his
work in my chapters on salt and how important it
is for you, and also in the Thyroid and Aine
and doctor David Brownstein, welcome to the show today.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Thank you for having me. Nancy Well.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I am greatly honored. You have been one of my
best teachers in the last forty years. And I read
your books and I frequently. I don't think a week
goes by where I don't refer someone to your books
and say you need to read these. For a medical doctor.
(04:44):
You make the information so understandable and actually enjoyable to read.
And I think that's a real gift in itself.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
You know, my feeling has always been if you don't
understand what I'm writing, then I failed, And so I
try and make everyone to be able to understand it,
and that means I understand it. I can do that.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Well, I have to admit it's changed my life. Your information.
I quite literally carried my salt with me everywhere I go,
and I always use the mineral right salt that I
know that you recommend and frequently. I have to admit
I think I've saved some people's lives by simply having
(05:27):
that salt on hand.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
It's really neat, isn't it. And you know I call
that part of doing the basics just falts so important
for the human body. That's the second most major, second
most common nutrient in the most common item in the
human body of salt, next to water. And drinking adequate
amounts of water and getting adequate amounts of unrefined, nutritionally
(05:51):
supportive salt in the diet is a huge help for everybody.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Well, I have to admit it changed the way I
like to a lot of nutritional ingredients after I read that,
because so much misinformation was out there about oh, you
shouldn't have salt in all of this type of thing.
And I'm seventy now. I never get sick, but I
(06:18):
follow a lot of your suggestions along with the organic
eating and having iodine in my in my diet and
things like that. And I even do it for my animals.
You know, our molecular structure is the same as theirs.
(06:38):
And I find that the things I do, I do
the same thing for my animals, same quality and everything,
and they thrive on it as well. Doctor Brownstein, could
I get you to start with just a really short
reason why you went into medicine in the first place
and how you became so involved in natural holistic healing remedies.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Well, I went into medicine. Medicine was always in interest
to me, even when I was a little boy and
I was sickly as a child. I had asthma, severe
asthma back in you know, when I was growing up
and saw numerous doctors, numerous trips to the emergency room
for asthma attacks, and I liked science and I found
(07:25):
it fascinating as I was the patient, and so I
decided when I was little, I wanted to be a doctor.
And I saw my family doctor a lot for my asthma,
and you know, I was getting all these viral infections,
you know that would trigger my asthma. So I wanted
to be a family doctor. And so when I went
to the reigning, defending undefeated national champion University of Michigan
(07:48):
Wolverines for undergrad I geared my training towards getting into
med school. When I went to med school Wayne State
in Detroit, I geared my training towards getting into a
family practice residency. And because I wanted to be a
family doctor, I wanted to I wanted to care for families.
I wanted to know. I wanted to know the whole family,
(08:10):
and I wanted to know the person, and I wanted
to just be a part of that family thing. And
so I remember when I was going to family practice,
everyone said, you know, I shouldn't do that. My advisor
was telling me go into something else, the least paying specialty,
and I'm like, well, that's why I went to med
school for so but I had no interest in anything
alternative or holistic. I was straight by the book. I
(08:31):
grew up in a conventional household. We went to the
doctor when we were sick. We took whatever the doctor
told us to take. We didn't question anything. And I
didn't take a vitamin. I didn't eat a certain way.
I ate whatever I wanted to date, which was a
lot of McDonald's and you know, a lot of coke,
a lot of whatever I wanted to eat back in
the day. And you know, I went. I did my
(08:54):
residency and family practice and then started working as a
family practitioner in a suburb of Detroit, you know, near
right near where I grew up. And I thought, I
thought world was my oyster, this was my calling, this
is what I wanted to do. And then six months
into that, I had a little change. So right up
(09:16):
until the sixth month time frame, I was happy. I
was going to be a partner in this practice, making
more money than I ever thought I could make, and
I was doing what my calling was. And then I
started to lose sleep for an unknown reason. And it
was three days in a row I did not sleep much,
and I you know, after the third night, the anxiety
(09:37):
crept up a little bit that morning, and I remember
my wife and I were getting ready to go to work,
and I blurted out, I don't want to be a
doctor anymore. Now. Allison and I met when we were
a freshman at University of Michigan, first day of orientation,
been together ever since. The only thing she knew for
me was I wanted to be a doctor, family doctor.
There was no plan B. And I never voiced any
(10:00):
concerns to her about any concerns to the other ways
about that. And so here we were, six months into it,
She's seven or eight months pregnant with our first child.
You know, we have one hundred thousand dollars in student
loans that were pretty much all mine back then, and
you know, we're getting up, getting ready to go to work,
and she says, what's wrong. He says, you've got to
(10:20):
be kidding. She goes, what's wrong and I said, I
don't know. She goes, well, what are you going to
do about it? And I said, I have no idea,
but I can't do this for the next thirty years.
She goes, what, you can't do what? And I said,
I can't treat people with drugs that most of them
don't need, that aren't treating the underlying cause of their problem.
For the most case unless they had an infection or
something like that. And then I was treating the side
(10:42):
effects from those drugs with other drugs. And most importantly,
most people weren't getting better on these drug therapies. I
was just managing symptoms. And she said, well, why don't
you do another residency, and I said that I don't
want to do. So we left, went to work, and
that day patient saw me who was bothering me to
meet his chiropractor. Now, at that point in my medical career,
(11:05):
I never met a chiropractor, never talked to a chiropractor.
Never didn't even know anything about him. I didn't know
what their philosophy was. I didn't know anything really. Never
once went as a kid either, but I used to
tell people, don't go, they were dangerous, and that's what
we were taught in medical school. So he was bothering
me to meet his chiropractor because his chiropractor helped him
more than just adjusting him, he helped him with nutrition.
(11:26):
So in that and I had put him off for
months that I didn't want to do this, and so
in that lack of weakness, he gave me the chiropractor's
phone number again that day, and I called him set
up on a dinner meeting for the following week. And
that day comes around and I remember getting home from
work and I still wasn't sleeping great then, and I
told Allison when I got home from work, I'm going
(11:47):
to cancel this dinner meeting. I'm tired and I want
to go. What's a chiropractor going to tell me? And
a waste of my time? She said, it's too late,
he's probably already there. You need to go and hold
me to be nice on the way out the door.
So I go there. His name was actor Rapper Radkey.
He was about ten years older than me. He was
doing he was doing chiropractical nutrition. He had a big
nutrition practice with patients. And he started telling me stories
(12:09):
that patients were getting better on diet and you know,
correcting imbalances, and you know, so either he's lying to
me or there was some other therapies that I really
didn't knew nothing about. And doctor Radkey was a nice guy,
Robert Radkey, he was a really nice guy. We hit
it off as a friendship, became really close friends, you know,
(12:29):
like brothers. From that moment on talked to him most
days after that, and we shared a lot of patients,
so at that meeting he brought me a book, Healing
with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright, an allopathic physician. I came
home from that meeting late because we talked late, and
I read that book until the middle of the night.
And I get up the next morning after a couple
(12:50):
hours of sleep. But this time I wasn't tired. I
was excited, and I called my dad and I said,
can you come in the office. I want to draw
a couple of blood tests on you, And based on
what I talked about with doctor Radkey, based on that
book that I read to the middle of the night,
I drew two blood tests centem a testosterol level on
his thyroide hormone levels, the whole panel that I'd never
drown driven, never drawn before. My dad had his first
(13:11):
heart a ticket forty, his second heart a ticket forty two.
In the intervene. In the next twenty years, he had
continual angina, always have chests pain no matter what he did.
He was popping nitro glycerom pills like there were candies.
He was on twelve medications for cholesterol, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes.
He looked awful. He looked like he was going to
die at any moment. I was actually waiting for the
(13:33):
phone call thatd he you know, something happened, and so
he came in the office. I drew his blood a
couple of days later, get the results. His TESTOSTERL level
was below detectable limits no one had bothered to check it,
and his thyroid levels were in the reference range, but
in the lower part of the reference range. I put
him on two things, natural testosterone and natural thyroid hormone.
(13:55):
Within seven days, his twenty year history of angina melted away,
never to return. Within thirty days, He's lost weight without
changing any of his bad dietary habits. He went from
pale and pasty to pink looking, you know, healthy looking.
He was able to do things. He was able to
do yardwork now. He was able to you know, he
liked being in the art, He like being gardens. He
(14:15):
was able to do it now because he couldn't do
it before because he would have chest pain. And friends
were asking my mother and my mother's friends were asking her,
you know, what's happening with Ellis? He looked so much better,
and they wanted to do that for their husband. So
once I saw the changes in my dad.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
The other thing was thirty days later I drew his
cholesterol levels. His cholesterol was with the three hundreds. My
dad a terribly smoked, was overweight, never exercised the day
in his life, still doing the bad things in life
because he never changed any of the bad things. The
only thing he would take our supplements and hormones. After
thirty days of taking natural disaserum, natural thyroid hormonous cholesterol
fell below two hundred without changing any bad habits, the
(14:53):
way he looked, the way he acted those blood tests.
I didn't want eighty in my practice. I went to
the partner and said, I don't want to be a
partner anymore. I said I want to I'm going to leave.
And I was on good terms with them, and they
said what's wrong? And I said, I want to do
holistic medicine And they said what's that? And I said,
I don't know, but I'm going to go figure it out.
Why don't you do it here? And I said, now
I need a holistic office where the people answering the phones,
(15:14):
people filing the charts, the nurses, the other doctors were
all on the same page. And so I left now
at that point, Allison's nine months pregnant, the first baby's coming,
one hundred thousand dollars in student loans, and you know,
said to her, I'll work the emergency room, you know,
and moonlight if I have till which I did to
make ends meet. And she was all supportive of it.
(15:34):
And here I am thirty five years later. You know,
I have seven partners now. My daughters are two of
the partners who are practicing with me, both physicians and
every patient since that time with my dad, every single
patient I've ever seen. It's a full hormonal nutritional evaluation
and you know, getting to the underlying cause of problems
and helping people, you know, clean up their their nutritional
(15:58):
deficiencies and rid of their toxicities. And the best thing ever.
Medicine is still a calling for me. It was the
best thing I ever did, and I wouldn't do anything
different going back in time that maybe learn about nutrition
a little bit earlier. And you know, I love my
practice and uh, you know, grown old with my patients
and just just the way I envisioned it.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
Well, what an amazing story. And you're so insightful, and
I think courageous branching out like that, and we had
someone in the chat room asking, you know, why would
what is your turning point to understand that medicine is
not actually medicine? As Oscar asking that question, asking the.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Question what I would say, I'm gonna I'm gonna tackle
those first two questions, Askar and Beth. My turning point
was understanding that, and Beth asked, why would someone need
twelve with the same medicine at once? For Beth, that's
conventional medicine. People are put on cholesterol lowering medications, diabetic medications,
hypertensive medications, and you know, I frequently as people get older,
(17:05):
they're they're on six to ten to twelve to fifteen medications.
And there's been no studies that show taking these medications
together are safe or not. But people are doing doing that.
That's the norm out there right now. So my turning
point came when I saw my dad, you know, the
improvement he had, and I realized, Hey, this natural stuff
really worked, and that's what I want to learn about why.
(17:26):
And you know, so I basically went back to my
biochemistry books and started looking at biochemical pathways. Why would testosterone,
thyroid hormone lower cholesterol from the three hundreds below two
hundred without changing anything else. And when you look at
the pathways, you can you can see it. You know,
you understand why cholesterol's metabolize better, why the liver functions better,
(17:46):
because we can get rid of high cholesterol levels. And
you know, so every patient I see, I think of
my biochemistry pathways, and I in my office, I have
a big biochemistry chart I frequently refer to when I'm
thinking about my patients and how to improve and optimize
their biochemistry.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, one of the things I learned from you, doctor Brownstein,
is how were unreliable some of the tests that these
mainstream medical allopathic doctors give people. And I was just wondering,
you know, have they improved the thyroid tests, because you know,
when I read your book, you were saying that the
thyroid test really is not very good and that you've
(18:29):
been trying to get them to change it for years.
Were you ever able to get them to change it?
And what would people do if they, you know, aren't
aren't able to lie to Michigan and hire you.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Well, of first of the first thing I would tell
people is educate yourself. I mean, one of the main
reason I started writing books back in nineteen ninety eight
was I got tired of having to explain the same
thing to every patient. So finally I would say to them, Hey,
I want you to read this. You're interested in this,
let's talk more. And if you're not, you're going to
let me know. And what I realized was that there
(19:02):
just wasn't much out there for patients to understand. Now,
my books can be read by physicians as well, because
I have a lot of physicians, because I make things easy,
hopefully I'm I'm not a complex guy, and I don't
think things need to be complex. They need to be
easy so we can all understand it and all learn
from each other. So you know, that's why I started
writing books. And as far as thyroid goes, my first
(19:25):
book was America Natural Hormones and what filed right on
the heels, So that was overcoming thyroid disorders because those
were the two major things I was doing after my
dad use of those two natural hormones, and what I
wrote about in Overcoming thyroy Disorders was in med school,
I was taught to just check a TSH tyroid stimulating
hormone test and that's it, and if that test was
out of the app out of the range, I could
(19:46):
treat someone with thyroid hormone. If it wasn't out of
the range, I couldn't. Well, that means I'm not talking
to my patients. I'm not examining my patients. I'm not
thinking about my patients. I'm just reflexively doing what an
algorithm tells me to do. And basically a monkey could
do that, and I realize that's not the best way
to treat people. Everyone's different blood tests provide a guide
(20:08):
on which way to go, but ultimately it's up for
the physician to make a decision whether that therapy is benefits,
out weigh any risk that might come with that therapy,
and whether that therapy is warranted or not. Now, in
med school, I was shot to check a TSH level
and that was it. I never checked T foreign T
three and active and active thyrate hormal levels. I never
checked a reverse T three, which is the most important
(20:30):
thyroid tests to do. When I make a point of
that in my book talking about that, I never checked
thyrate to anybody levels and very rarely did I ever
check that back in my conventional days. Now everybody gets
that full panel that I just mentioned, you know, one, two, three, four, five,
six thyroid tests where I was taught to do one
in med school. So I do think they can provide
(20:51):
a guide. But I have many patients who the thyroid
tests aren't giving the true picture because there's other conditions
like tired hormone resistance going on, where the tests are
all normal. You have the patients hyper clearly hypothyroid when
you do an exam and you do a history on them,
and they're suffering from that, and they're going to die
from that unless you can think outside the box and
(21:14):
you know, treat them with a little bit of thyroid hormone.
This is in the literature, it's been in the literature
for forty years, yet hardly any doctors and they don't
know about it, and be they just don't think about
it because they're just letting these algorithms decide, you know,
which way they're going to go, and you know, other
than you know, the way I was taught in med
school to treat a thyry patient was I don't have
to see them, I don't have to touch them, I
(21:36):
don't have to listen to them. I don't have to
do a physical exam. I don't have to think. All
I need is a TSH test. If the TSH test
it's above the reference range, I write a script for
thyroid homone. If it's below the reference range, I don't like.
They could pull up to a bank throw their blood
through the tube. I could send us prescripture back or
send a note back says get out of here, you
don't have it. And that's that's that's how medicines practice
(21:57):
these days, and that is a very poor way to
practice medicine. And that's how I was basically taught. And
that's cool to do it.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah. One of the things I've done over the years,
doctor Brownstein, is I tell people to buy your book
on Overcoming Thyroid Disorders, and I tell them, you are
going to find yourself in this book. You're going to
be in one of these descriptive chapters that he talks
about and the things that you found to be the
(22:26):
most therapeutic for helping that person. And I said, if
you have a medical doctor's book that documents this and
you take it with you to your doctor, they are
going to be much more likely to take your thoughts
on that subject than if you just show up and say, oh,
my nutrition polistic nutrition lady told me to do da
(22:50):
da da da da right, and so I have found
that to be an Actually have them have your book
in their hand when they walk in their office and go, no.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
How about this idea? Yes, my vote is go see
a holistic doctor with my book in your hand, who's
already knowledgeable about this, who's literate on this, and who's
ready to treat you, versus someone who is not. And
then you don't have to worry about it. But my
book in your hand will help you either way.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Well, you're so right, and that's an excellent suggestion. But
I will tell you some people's doctors are I mean
they think of him, are the most worshiped. I'm almost
like they're a god or something. But it's very difficult
for some people to change their doctors. And I also
suggest that they read your book iodine why you need
(23:39):
it and why you can't live without it, And I
would love for you to share your thoughts on why
that is so important and why that is so important
for the thyroid.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
So when I started, you know, after my dad, I
call him my first and my best patients. And my dad,
by the way, from that moment, never never suffered another
moment of avangiina. I never took another nightero glizzerin Bill,
and you know, and you know, markedly improved the quality
(24:11):
of his life after that. But after my dad, are
we still there?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yes, sorry, my screen just faded off after from my
from the moment I treated my dad, it's all those results.
Every single patient got a full nutritional hormonal examination, so
everybody got a thyroid exam test from that moment on,
and I started treating people with thyroid hormone who I
either you know, from my from a full physical exam
(24:37):
and history and clinical you know, evaluation and laboratory work.
And so I found after about ten years of my practice,
I would estimate about three quarters of my patients were
on thyrite ormone. Now I was happy, they seemed happy,
they orted things were better, and you know, I was
writing books, I was lecturing on it, and but it
(25:00):
was bothering me why I have so many people on
thyroid hormone. I didn't think we were designed by our
maker to need a little thyroid hormone just because we
were getting older human bodies. Designed pretty well, if you
supply it with the basic raw materials and needs. It
can do pretty wonderful things from the beginning to the end.
You have good energy and good brain function from the
beginning to the end. That's how it should go for us.
(25:24):
So at the end of ten years, I have three
quarters of my patients on thyroid hormone, and I'm, you know,
just it was bothering me. There were two studies that
came out a ten year time perod What was bothering
me was why are so many people needing thyrate hormone?
So I would I went to my biochemistry. I went
to the physiology, you know, particularly the chemistry of the
thyrid gland, looked at the pathways, and I wrote down
(25:45):
all the cofactors needed to make thyrate hormone. You need selenium,
you need magnesium, you need vitamin C, you need B vitamins,
you need magnesium, and you need iodide. So I thought, well,
let's let's check these love all of these things and
we'll improve their biochemical status and then maybe they don't
(26:06):
need as much thyroid hormone. So I would check all
those levels. And back then there wasn't a great test
for iodine, and I didn't Idiin was a really difficult
concept for me to gather. It's got all these different
different states it can be in, you know, iodine, iodide,
and iodate, and you know, the literature was confusing. There
(26:26):
wasn't great testing for it, and you know, I would
try the other things first that I understood better, like magnesium,
seleni and vitamin C and things. So I would put
people when they were deficient on these things on those
items check their thyrid normal levels. And nothing worked as
well as thyroid hormone. And I really couldn't lower any
anyone down from their thyrod normal levels without them not
feeling as well as they were before. So iodide I
(26:48):
always came back to iodine. Iidine. You know, it's interesting
with idine. When you talk to someone about iodine, they
might not know anything about it, they're interested. Everyone seems
interested in idine no matter they I just know the word.
They don't really know much about it. But it's an interesting,
an interesting element in nature, and I was interested in
it as well. Now, part of my interest in idine
(27:10):
was I grew up and I was practicing medicine in
the Gorder Belt of the United States border refers to
a swollen thyric glan. The thyroid sits in the lower
part of the neck. It weighs about one point five ounces,
and it produces a teaspoon of thyroid hormone for a
whole year. Little variations in that teaspoon of thyroid hormone
have big effects on the body, since every cell in
the body needs and requires thyroid hormone. So it's you know,
(27:33):
the thyroc glan. I've always said, if you have put
all the hormones in a bus, the bus drivers, the
thyric lan, you really need the thyroid glan functioning well
to get the other hormones balance and to get people
to feel well. So I was having luck with using
natural desicated thyroid hormone. I was not having luck using
any of those cofactors to lessen my need for natural
(27:56):
desiccated thybrid hormone. Well, ten years into the practice, I said,
had about three quarters of my patient's i'm thyroid hormone.
I'm happy, they're happy. There was an article one of
my journals written by a physician from California, doctor Guy Abraham.
He developed an idine loading test. Now, at that point
in my career there was no good testing for idine.
(28:18):
I called him up when I saw the article. He
took my call. Ac cur Abraham was very untrustworthy of people.
He had been burned by colleagues in the past. He
was very rough on me at first because he didn't
trust me. He didn't know what my motives were for
calling him, and that's another story. But I persisted and
(28:38):
when he warmed up to me, which took a while
and took a lot of abuse on that one. And
when he warmed up to me, we became an incredibly
cross colleagues and friends. And I blew out to California
to meet him, and then he invited me to work
in his lab with him. And so here I was
with two babies, full time practice, learning from the master,
(28:59):
and I, you know, taught me more than he'll ever know.
And I was flying out to California on Thursday after
working late, and we worked fourteen hours a day in
the lab. I fly back late Sunday and get to
work on Monday. And I would do that four to
six times a year for years. And what I found
out was that Number one doctor Abraham, and I started
(29:23):
testing my patients for the right A status. He was
very interested in my practice because I was in the
couiter belt. He knew that the idine levels in our
soil and water and food are one of the lowest
die dinge levels in the entire world. So what I
found was when we check levels at ninety over ninety
seven percent of patients were deficient and idine, the vast
majority severely division and iodine now severe deficiency and idine
(29:47):
has a lot of problems associated with it, which I'll
get into. But doctor Abraham taught me why the form
of idine I was using wasn't working, which was just
iod died the reduced form id and that different tissues
of the body preferentially take up different kinds of iodine.
For example, the breasts primarily take up iodine, the oxidized
(30:07):
form of iodine, while the thyroid takes up the reduced
form iodide the reduced and oxidizer just terms for meaning
does it have an extra electron in a Souder show
or not. But once I started using a combination of
iodine and iodide, then I started to see the results
I was looking for. I wrote about this in my
book Iodine, Why You Need It, Why You Can't Live
Without It, and publish the research I did with doctor
(30:30):
Abraham in that book, and when I went from the
first ten years of my practice and three quarters of
the patients on thyroid hormone feeling well to now the
next probably twenty five years. At this point, I think
it's twenty four thirty four, thirty five years right now
I've been in practice. I have less than one quarter,
(30:51):
less than a quarter of my patient's on thyrid hormone,
yet everyone's on iodine. And out of everything I've done
in my practice in thirty over three decades, if the
government storms into my office unannounced, which they did during COVID,
and if they come in last their badges, which they did,
and basically tell me they don't like what we do,
(31:13):
which I felt they did. They probably didn't use those
words and said to me, hey, we don't like what
you do. You got to go back to doing conventional medicine.
But you can take one thing with you pick and
I would pick iodine for the idine provides the biggest
bang for the buck Idine deficiency is ramping across the
entire United States. Iideing levels have found fifty percent across
(31:36):
the country over the last fifty years. Idning is an
essential item we can't live without. In our body. There's
idine receptors in every cell in the body, and all
the glandeorid tissue needs and requires iodine for normal function.
In normal architecture, the glandor tissue includes the thy rate,
overs uteris, breast, prostateum bankers. And if you think about it,
(31:59):
what do we having problems within our country right now?
We have one in seven women with a lifetime risk
of breast cancer, one in three men, same with prostate cancer.
We all know people with prostate cancer and breast cancer.
We have pain credit cancer growing at epidemic rates, ovarian
uterine cancer growing at epidemic rates. Direct cancer is the
fastest growing cancer out there. All these conditions can be
(32:22):
related to diidine efficiency, and I think that it's been
the single most thing missing. Conventional medicine and alternative mesine
hasn't been so easy to to embrace iodine. You know,
I get criticized severely from conventional colleagues about my views
and iodine. And you know, some of my holistic colleagues,
who are you know, just misinformed, But it is really
(32:46):
the neatest thing we do in our practice. You know,
it's it's just a woman with fiber cistic breast disease
or breast cancer needs more iodine than a woman without
fiber cistic prest disease or breast cancer. Similarly, a man
with prostate problems needs more iding than a man without.
That includes pan credit problems. So very uterine stick here
any of the clange or tissue. So that's my iodine story.
(33:10):
I'm still, you know, still using it, and you know
it's it's you know. I think doctor Abraham from now
to eternity for helping me. I knew, I knew the answer.
I reminded that the answer was there with the idine.
I just I wasn't smart enough to do it on
my own. I need a little bit of push from
doctor Abraham and then I was able to take it
from there.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Oh wow, that is such an amazing story and I
so appreciate you sharing it with us, and it makes
me think about so many different things. And I've been
doing my iodine daily since since I've read your book,
and I just would tell everybody. You also have these
on DVD and they are fantastic as well, and very easy.
(33:51):
If don't have any kind of vision problem, you can listen.
But you know, one of the things I learned in
my research is that back in the United States, up
until nineteen eighty, they were putting iodine in all the
breads in all the bakeries, and they stopped doing it
in nineteen eighty and they started putting in potassium bromate,
(34:13):
which actually acts like iodine and mimics it in your body,
and it will take the place of iodine in your
thyroid and it will block it, so basically it shuts
down your thyroid. And that ingredient is actually illegal to
use in most of the world, but not in the US.
(34:34):
And when I was growing up, doctor Brownstein, you know,
if I got a cut or scrape or anything, we'd
immediately put iodine on it. And I don't know why
that practice stopped or got out of favor, but I mean,
it's anti parasitical, It supports your thyroid. It has so
(34:55):
many beneficial things to it. And yet you know, the
a whole white refined salt with the iodine added to it,
where the iodine dissipates when it hits oxygen, so it's
not reliable. And of course the white salt has had
all the minerals taken out that you want and need,
and it's been bleached, it's had high freakedtose corn syrup
(35:16):
added to it, couldn't cause diabetes, and also a bunch
of chemical preservatives to it. And so your body just
reads that like a poison. And I can't tell you
how many people that I counsel on a daily basis
that tell me number one, oh I eat iidiye salt,
or oh no, I don't eat any salt at all.
(35:36):
And so I would love for you to kind of
pull together how all these things kind of go together,
if you can.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
So I written my I was writing my idiine book,
and you know, I practiced medicine full time. I was
a good dad. I was around for my kids. It
wasn't just working. And you know, I was in a
busy practice. And people say, how do you have time
to write seventeen books? Well, I write about what works.
And I write books for one of two reasons. Either
(36:05):
I'm excited about something or I'm really irritated. And the
Idine book was excited to it. I was nearing the
end of the Idine books, the first edition of that,
it's on its fifth edition now. And I had been
using salt in my practice, and I realized quickly into
my holistic practice when I started looking at biochemical pathways
that all these hundreds, if not thousands of pathways require
(36:30):
sodium and or chloride as call factors to run these
enzymatic reactions throughout the entire body, but particularly the adrenal glands.
The adrenal glands to create hormones that ensure that we
have adequate amounts of sodium chloride in our body salt.
And if we don't have adequate amounts of sodium chloride,
(36:50):
you know, the disastrous things happen. So I started looking
at the biochemistry of salt and realizing the vast majority
of my patients were deficient. And so now in med school,
I was taught people shouldn't people should eliminate, eliminate salt.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
In their diet.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
You should have zero salt. You have zero salt, You're
going to die, So that's not possible. And then they said, well,
maybe not zero salt, but you should have less than
two grams of salt today. Let me tell you. Try
to need a diet less than two grams of salt today.
Food tastes terrible, nobody likes it, nobody wants it. And
you know I'm being you know, I'm being told in
(37:27):
medical school, and I'm looking at the media and they're
saying everyone needs too much salt and that's the cause
of hypertension and heart disease, and you know all the
other ills that are out there. Yet here I am
seeing low salt levels on my patient or or not
optimal salt levels on my patient. And I was focused
on the Sietine book. So I'm near the end within
days of going to print. So in the Detroit Free
(37:49):
Press every Tuesday there was a health column back then,
and the health column wasn't really health. It was a
health section of the paper. It wasn't really a health
section because it would just be on the newest of
drug that came out or some medical device that a
hospital had got. There was very little, and you know,
anything holistic, not all therapies they would come out with.
But in that Tuesday column there was a weekly resident
(38:14):
dietitian who an RD, who wrote a column about Q
and A. People would ask questions she'd answer. So the
question came days before I was done with the Idine book,
is there any difference in unrefined and refined salt? And
her answer was no, there's no difference. They're both equally
too high in sodium, and therefore they both need to
(38:35):
be avoided and minimized in the diet. So I cut
that out. I pasted it over my computer screen, and
I looked at it for the next few days when
I was finishing my idine book, and it irritated me.
And I knew exactly what my next book was going
to be, and that before that I didn't really consider
writing a book on solved. So I immediately began to
(38:56):
work on my book, Salt Your Way to Health, And
I went back through the literature on salt, and I
I discovered why, you know, the misrepresentation of salt earth
occurred and why people are told to lower their salt intake,
and which was a bunch of nonsense. You know, I
described that in my book. If you want to hear
about it, I'll tell you about it. But salt, there's
two basic forms of salt out there. There's refined salt
(39:18):
and unrefined salt. Refined salt is that thin white stuff
that's in every restaurant across the US, in most people's houses.
Morton's table salt is an example of refined salt. Refined
salt has had all of its minerals removed if salt
companies refer to those minerals as impurities, and it's been
bleached white because they think white looks more pure to us.
(39:38):
And it's got taxic chemicals in it, like ferrisinine and
aluminum silicate, so that's not a healthy product at all.
And unrefined salt has over eighty trace minerals in it,
and it's got the trace minerals that our body needs.
Plus it's got adequate amounts of sodium chloride in it
that we need as well. So that's when I started using,
(40:00):
you know, the beginning my hole is to practice, you know,
the first ten years. You know, this was already fifteen
years into it at that point. And when that woman
wrote that response to that question in the Detroit Free
Press and I taste it over my computer, just irritated
me enough. I knew what I wanted to write on next.
And that's why I came with my book, Salt Your
Way to Help. So salt should be part of any
(40:21):
adequate ensuring adequate salt levels should be part of any
holes stick treatment regimen. It's the basic thing. I call
this the basics drinking water. You know, maintaining hydration, getting
adequate amounts of salt in the human body is seventy
percent water, and the human brain is eighty percent water.
The next major constituent next to water and the human
body assault we have to have adequate amounts of salt.
(40:41):
We were designed by our maker to have salt receptors
all through the body and every cell, and that's why
it's the second major constituent in the body. We were
not designed to ingest salt as sodium chloride only with
toxic additives. We were designed to dingust salt as one
you know of a healthy product that has over eighty
(41:02):
essential minerals in it. And I frequently tell my patients
they need a tea spoon or two of unrefined salts
such as Selena's Celtic Bran salt or Redman's Real Salt
or Himalayan salt. And it's been a wonderful addition to
the practice, and to this day I still find you know,
I'm still talking to my patients all the time. You're
not drinking enough water, You're not getting enough salt in
(41:24):
your diet.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Oh my goodness, I am so honored to have you
here because you are so amazing, and we're getting close
to the end, but I want to I want to
expand to what you just said because it's just so
brilliant and like in your book Sought Your Way to Health,
you say that if an adult human has less than
a teaspoon of salt in your diet a day, your
(41:45):
body can actually become toxic. And I have embraced that
holes wholeheartedly. And when I started researching hydration, I had
a doctor tell me nancy the word electrolytes of fancy
meta term for the word salt. And then when I
found out that when you go in the emergency room,
(42:07):
you're quite literally completely devoid of any of these minerals,
and they give you what they call fluids, but it's
really concentrated like sodium and chloride in these minerals in
a liquid form. But what my understanding has come is
that you cannot even hydrate without these minerals. So if
(42:31):
you're not having any of these minerals, or I call
it mineral rich salt and kind of to be more specific,
when I talked about people and I tell them that
it needs to have color. Minerals have color. If there's
no minerals. It's probably been bleach, it's probably had it
taken out. But we had one of our questions in
(42:52):
the studio, say, you know, why do they tell kidney
patients not to use salt. I have to admit I
think that it's an absolute recipe for death.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Well, here's the issue with salt, So it's also second
major consistent in the body, next to water. If you
have normal kidney function and normal heart function, you should
be able tower. You should be able tower huge amounts
of salt you be very difficult to become. You can
become toxic on salt. I mean that can happen, But
if you have normal kidney function, normal heart function, it's
(43:25):
I don't think anyone could eat that much salt to
become toxic on it. However, if you have detweased renal
clearance and you have kidney failure, that is where the
salt levels are regulated really in the body. It's in
the kidneys, and if the kidneys lose that ability to
regulate salt, that can become a problem. They have to
be careful with that. That's why you should work with
a salt literate physician who's knowledgeable about salt physiology and
(43:50):
salt biochemistry and you know, optimize things. But those are
the vast minority of people. For the person who doesn't
have that, then the concerns are much.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Lower, Doctor Brownstein, We've got like three minutes left, and
I just want to tell you again how honored I
am to have you join me here today on the show,
and I'm hoping you'll join me again in the future.
And I've had Rebel, my fabulous sound engineer, put up
your website d R. Brownstein dot com. Can people hire
(44:24):
you from you know, a distance or for consultations or anything.
Can you give out your information that people might be
able to find you better?
Speaker 3 (44:35):
So my you know, my website is as you you're
scrolling it across there. I work at the Center for
Holistic Medicine dot com. The website is www dot one
word Center for fo R Holistic Medicine dot com. We
find that we would like people to come for the
first visit in person. After that we can deal with
(44:57):
people you know, from a distance, but we have to
see people at least at least the first time. I
did do some distance medicine and you know video and look.
I feel for people that that are far away, and
that I have difficulty traveling. But I never felt connected
to them without catching them, without listening to them, without
that personal human to human connection, and I couldn't. I
(45:21):
had a difficult time doing that over the internet. Now,
once I meet them, I'm fine, you know, I can.
You know, we can move on from there. But we
don't do distance visits alone solely. You know, we want
to see them the first visit. I've said, I there's
seven of us practicing, including two of my daughters, and
you know I'm not taking new patients. They're taking new patients,
(45:42):
and you know we have a busy, fun practice and
we're all sort of, you know, feel the calling of
where we're where we are all need, where we need
to be right now, and where we should be placed
and where you know someone wanted us placed. And that's
how I feel better off us.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Well, I am just I just think what you're doing
in your whole family and your your work is that
you gift to everyone. And I just highly recommend your
books to everyone. And you can find his books on
Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or you can go to
his website.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
One thing, we stopped Amazon, and I got mad at
them years ago, so they're just on my website. There's
a lot of old ones on Amazon. Those are so
I would tell you get them from my website. You know,
Amazon was not a pleasant experience for us back in
the day. And we do this. My wife and I
have done this, you know. I write the books, get
them printed, she mails them out, and you know, that's
(46:42):
what we've done for twenty since nineteen ninety eight and
twenty seven years. And so I would I would encourage
readers get it from my website versus get it in
on Amazon to get an older version.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Awesome. Well, I just so thrilled to have you here.
And the place where you practice is in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
So Lucy was asking that, and doctor Brownstein, we have
like probably you know, forty seconds left and would you
like to share a party thought with our listeners before
(47:15):
we have to sign off.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
I would suggest, if you're not feeling well, you're not
getting anywhere with your conventional doctor, don't don't put up
with poor medical care. There's hope out there. And the
best advice I can give you is find a good
holistic doctor, and they can be found. We are out
there and you know, find an eidine literary doctor, find
as salt literate doctor, find a biochemistry literate doctor, and
(47:39):
very few things. You know, there are so many things
you can you can solve with you know, rebalancing the
nutrition and hormonal system that will will much lessen the
need or hopefully one hundred percent less than the need
for drug therapies. And you know, we're happy with what
we do and if if you want to give us
a chance, and I'm sure we'll take good care of
(47:59):
you as well.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
That's beautiful. Thank you so much for joining us today,
and for all you wonderful listeners out there. We love you.
Thank you for sharing your valuable time with us and
doctor Brownstein, and I wish you wonderful health.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Thank you me too.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
I look forward to talking to you all again next week.
Any health related information on the following show provides general
information only. Content presented on any show by any host
or guests should not be substituted for a doctor's advice.
Always consult your physician before beginning any new diet, exercise,
or treatment program.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Welcome beautiful people too, organic healthy lifestyle And I'm Nancy Addison,
your host, and I love to start off my show
with a prayer. I feel like it just frames it
in the perfect kind of situation that I would like.
So everybody, take a deep breath and just let out
any kind of stress you've been holding in your body
(00:58):
this morning. And and I ask you to join me
in whichever way you would like. And I just ask
our divine creator to please allow your love for us
to extinguish any fear that we may have, enable us
to become quiet and focused on your spirit of divine love.
May we feel the waves of peace washing over us
(01:19):
in the earth and clearing away any kind of anxiety
or negative situations. We claim and declare your grace, love
and promises, and gratefully accept your gifts of strength, compassion, fortitude, flexibility, wisdom, insight,
and perfect health. Bring peace to our souls. That passes
(01:41):
all worldly understanding and make us a light for others
to see your strength. And I ask us in the
highest good of all concerned for everyone listening now and
for everyone listening in the future. Well, I just wanted
to make a quick announcement that I was notified that
I one the Dallas Awards for Excellence of Healthcare Business
(02:06):
twenty twenty five. That's seven years in a row and
I am now in their Hall of Fame. So thank
you Healthcare Dallas or Dallas Awards. Thank you for recognizing
me and appreciating holistic health. You know that's always a
(02:26):
really nice thing. So today we have one of my
favorite heroes on a holistic medical doctor, doctor David Brownstein.
He's a Board certified family physician. He is one of
the foremost practitioners of holistic medicine and is the medical
director of the Center f Holistic Medicine in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
(02:51):
He's the author of fifteen books, including Salt Your Way
to Health, Iodine, You Can't Live Without It, and Overcoming
Thyroid Disorders. He's lectured internationally and he frequently speaks about
hormones and nutritional therapy. He is a graduate of the
(03:13):
University of Michigan and Wayne State University School of Medicine.
He's a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians
and International College of Integrative Nutrition, where he is a
board member. And some of those books Hormone Imbalances, Chronic Illness,
Immune Disorders, arthritis, Bibermialgia, adrenal fatigue, Headaches in Migraine, and
(03:41):
his website is dr brow nstei n dot com, doctor
Brownstein dot com. And I actually cite his books and
his research in my books, my sixth health and nutrition
books that I've written, like Diabetes in Your Diet and
(04:03):
how to be a Heavy Vegetarian. And I cite his
work in my chapters on salt and how important it
is for you, and also in the Thyroid and Aine
and doctor David Brownstein, welcome to the show today.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Thank you for having me. Nancy Well.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I am greatly honored. You have been one of my
best teachers in the last forty years. And I read
your books and I frequently. I don't think a week
goes by where I don't refer someone to your books
and say you need to read these. For a medical doctor.
(04:44):
You make the information so understandable and actually enjoyable to read.
And I think that's a real gift in itself.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
You know, my feeling has always been if you don't
understand what I'm writing, then I failed, And so I
try and make everyone to be able to understand it,
and that means I understand it. I can do that.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Well, I have to admit it's changed my life. Your information.
I quite literally carried my salt with me everywhere I go,
and I always use the mineral right salt that I
know that you recommend and frequently. I have to admit
I think I've saved some people's lives by simply having
(05:27):
that salt on hand.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
It's really neat, isn't it. And you know I call
that part of doing the basics just falts so important
for the human body. That's the second most major, second
most common nutrient in the most common item in the
human body of salt, next to water. And drinking adequate
amounts of water and getting adequate amounts of unrefined, nutritionally
(05:51):
supportive salt in the diet is a huge help for everybody.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Well, I have to admit it changed the way I
like to a lot of nutritional ingredients after I read that,
because so much misinformation was out there about oh, you
shouldn't have salt in all of this type of thing.
And I'm seventy now. I never get sick, but I
(06:18):
follow a lot of your suggestions along with the organic
eating and having iodine in my in my diet and
things like that. And I even do it for my animals.
You know, our molecular structure is the same as theirs.
(06:38):
And I find that the things I do, I do
the same thing for my animals, same quality and everything,
and they thrive on it as well. Doctor Brownstein, could
I get you to start with just a really short
reason why you went into medicine in the first place
and how you became so involved in natural holistic healing remedies.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Well, I went into medicine. Medicine was always in interest
to me, even when I was a little boy and
I was sickly as a child. I had asthma, severe
asthma back in you know, when I was growing up
and saw numerous doctors, numerous trips to the emergency room
for asthma attacks, and I liked science and I found
(07:25):
it fascinating as I was the patient, and so I
decided when I was little, I wanted to be a doctor.
And I saw my family doctor a lot for my asthma,
and you know, I was getting all these viral infections,
you know that would trigger my asthma. So I wanted
to be a family doctor. And so when I went
to the reigning, defending undefeated national champion University of Michigan
(07:48):
Wolverines for undergrad I geared my training towards getting into
med school. When I went to med school Wayne State
in Detroit, I geared my training towards getting into a
family practice residency. And because I wanted to be a
family doctor, I wanted to I wanted to care for families.
I wanted to know. I wanted to know the whole family,
(08:10):
and I wanted to know the person, and I wanted
to just be a part of that family thing. And
so I remember when I was going to family practice,
everyone said, you know, I shouldn't do that. My advisor
was telling me go into something else, the least paying specialty,
and I'm like, well, that's why I went to med
school for so but I had no interest in anything
alternative or holistic. I was straight by the book. I
(08:31):
grew up in a conventional household. We went to the
doctor when we were sick. We took whatever the doctor
told us to take. We didn't question anything. And I
didn't take a vitamin. I didn't eat a certain way.
I ate whatever I wanted to date, which was a
lot of McDonald's and you know, a lot of coke,
a lot of whatever I wanted to eat back in
the day. And you know, I went. I did my
(08:54):
residency and family practice and then started working as a
family practitioner in a suburb of Detroit, you know, near
right near where I grew up. And I thought, I
thought world was my oyster, this was my calling, this
is what I wanted to do. And then six months
into that, I had a little change. So right up
(09:16):
until the sixth month time frame, I was happy. I
was going to be a partner in this practice, making
more money than I ever thought I could make, and
I was doing what my calling was. And then I
started to lose sleep for an unknown reason. And it
was three days in a row I did not sleep much,
and I you know, after the third night, the anxiety
(09:37):
crept up a little bit that morning, and I remember
my wife and I were getting ready to go to work,
and I blurted out, I don't want to be a
doctor anymore. Now. Allison and I met when we were
a freshman at University of Michigan, first day of orientation,
been together ever since. The only thing she knew for
me was I wanted to be a doctor, family doctor.
There was no plan B. And I never voiced any
(10:00):
concerns to her about any concerns to the other ways
about that. And so here we were, six months into it,
She's seven or eight months pregnant with our first child.
You know, we have one hundred thousand dollars in student
loans that were pretty much all mine back then, and
you know, we're getting up, getting ready to go to work,
and she says, what's wrong. He says, you've got to
(10:20):
be kidding. She goes, what's wrong and I said, I
don't know. She goes, well, what are you going to
do about it? And I said, I have no idea,
but I can't do this for the next thirty years.
She goes, what, you can't do what? And I said,
I can't treat people with drugs that most of them
don't need, that aren't treating the underlying cause of their problem.
For the most case unless they had an infection or
something like that. And then I was treating the side
(10:42):
effects from those drugs with other drugs. And most importantly,
most people weren't getting better on these drug therapies. I
was just managing symptoms. And she said, well, why don't
you do another residency, and I said that I don't
want to do. So we left, went to work, and
that day patient saw me who was bothering me to
meet his chiropractor. Now, at that point in my medical career,
(11:05):
I never met a chiropractor, never talked to a chiropractor.
Never didn't even know anything about him. I didn't know
what their philosophy was. I didn't know anything really. Never
once went as a kid either, but I used to
tell people, don't go, they were dangerous, and that's what
we were taught in medical school. So he was bothering
me to meet his chiropractor because his chiropractor helped him
more than just adjusting him, he helped him with nutrition.
(11:26):
So in that and I had put him off for
months that I didn't want to do this, and so
in that lack of weakness, he gave me the chiropractor's
phone number again that day, and I called him set
up on a dinner meeting for the following week. And
that day comes around and I remember getting home from
work and I still wasn't sleeping great then, and I
told Allison when I got home from work, I'm going
(11:47):
to cancel this dinner meeting. I'm tired and I want
to go. What's a chiropractor going to tell me? And
a waste of my time? She said, it's too late,
he's probably already there. You need to go and hold
me to be nice on the way out the door.
So I go there. His name was actor Rapper Radkey.
He was about ten years older than me. He was
doing he was doing chiropractical nutrition. He had a big
nutrition practice with patients. And he started telling me stories
(12:09):
that patients were getting better on diet and you know,
correcting imbalances, and you know, so either he's lying to
me or there was some other therapies that I really
didn't knew nothing about. And doctor Radkey was a nice guy,
Robert Radkey, he was a really nice guy. We hit
it off as a friendship, became really close friends, you know,
(12:29):
like brothers. From that moment on talked to him most
days after that, and we shared a lot of patients,
so at that meeting he brought me a book, Healing
with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright, an allopathic physician. I came
home from that meeting late because we talked late, and
I read that book until the middle of the night.
And I get up the next morning after a couple
(12:50):
hours of sleep. But this time I wasn't tired. I
was excited, and I called my dad and I said,
can you come in the office. I want to draw
a couple of blood tests on you, And based on
what I talked about with doctor Radkey, based on that
book that I read to the middle of the night,
I drew two blood tests centem a testosterol level on
his thyroide hormone levels, the whole panel that I'd never
drown driven, never drawn before. My dad had his first
(13:11):
heart a ticket forty, his second heart a ticket forty two.
In the intervene. In the next twenty years, he had
continual angina, always have chests pain no matter what he did.
He was popping nitro glycerom pills like there were candies.
He was on twelve medications for cholesterol, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes.
He looked awful. He looked like he was going to
die at any moment. I was actually waiting for the
(13:33):
phone call thatd he you know, something happened, and so
he came in the office. I drew his blood a
couple of days later, get the results. His TESTOSTERL level
was below detectable limits no one had bothered to check it,
and his thyroid levels were in the reference range, but
in the lower part of the reference range. I put
him on two things, natural testosterone and natural thyroid hormone.
(13:55):
Within seven days, his twenty year history of angina melted away,
never to return. Within thirty days, He's lost weight without
changing any of his bad dietary habits. He went from
pale and pasty to pink looking, you know, healthy looking.
He was able to do things. He was able to
do yardwork now. He was able to you know, he
liked being in the art, He like being gardens. He
(14:15):
was able to do it now because he couldn't do
it before because he would have chest pain. And friends
were asking my mother and my mother's friends were asking her,
you know, what's happening with Ellis? He looked so much better,
and they wanted to do that for their husband. So
once I saw the changes in my dad.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
The other thing was thirty days later I drew his
cholesterol levels. His cholesterol was with the three hundreds. My
dad a terribly smoked, was overweight, never exercised the day
in his life, still doing the bad things in life
because he never changed any of the bad things. The
only thing he would take our supplements and hormones. After
thirty days of taking natural disaserum, natural thyroid hormonous cholesterol
fell below two hundred without changing any bad habits, the
(14:53):
way he looked, the way he acted those blood tests.
I didn't want eighty in my practice. I went to
the partner and said, I don't want to be a
partner anymore. I said I want to I'm going to leave.
And I was on good terms with them, and they
said what's wrong? And I said, I want to do
holistic medicine And they said what's that? And I said,
I don't know, but I'm going to go figure it out.
Why don't you do it here? And I said, now
I need a holistic office where the people answering the phones,
(15:14):
people filing the charts, the nurses, the other doctors were
all on the same page. And so I left now
at that point, Allison's nine months pregnant, the first baby's coming,
one hundred thousand dollars in student loans, and you know,
said to her, I'll work the emergency room, you know,
and moonlight if I have till which I did to
make ends meet. And she was all supportive of it.
(15:34):
And here I am thirty five years later. You know,
I have seven partners now. My daughters are two of
the partners who are practicing with me, both physicians and
every patient since that time with my dad, every single
patient I've ever seen. It's a full hormonal nutritional evaluation
and you know, getting to the underlying cause of problems
and helping people, you know, clean up their their nutritional
(15:58):
deficiencies and rid of their toxicities. And the best thing ever.
Medicine is still a calling for me. It was the
best thing I ever did, and I wouldn't do anything
different going back in time that maybe learn about nutrition
a little bit earlier. And you know, I love my
practice and uh, you know, grown old with my patients
and just just the way I envisioned it.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
Well, what an amazing story. And you're so insightful, and
I think courageous branching out like that, and we had
someone in the chat room asking, you know, why would
what is your turning point to understand that medicine is
not actually medicine? As Oscar asking that question, asking the.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Question what I would say, I'm gonna I'm gonna tackle
those first two questions, Askar and Beth. My turning point
was understanding that, and Beth asked, why would someone need
twelve with the same medicine at once? For Beth, that's
conventional medicine. People are put on cholesterol lowering medications, diabetic medications,
hypertensive medications, and you know, I frequently as people get older,
(17:05):
they're they're on six to ten to twelve to fifteen medications.
And there's been no studies that show taking these medications
together are safe or not. But people are doing doing that.
That's the norm out there right now. So my turning
point came when I saw my dad, you know, the
improvement he had, and I realized, Hey, this natural stuff
really worked, and that's what I want to learn about why.
(17:26):
And you know, so I basically went back to my
biochemistry books and started looking at biochemical pathways. Why would testosterone,
thyroid hormone lower cholesterol from the three hundreds below two
hundred without changing anything else. And when you look at
the pathways, you can you can see it. You know,
you understand why cholesterol's metabolize better, why the liver functions better,
(17:46):
because we can get rid of high cholesterol levels. And
you know, so every patient I see, I think of
my biochemistry pathways, and I in my office, I have
a big biochemistry chart I frequently refer to when I'm
thinking about my patients and how to improve and optimize
their biochemistry.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, one of the things I learned from you, doctor Brownstein,
is how were unreliable some of the tests that these
mainstream medical allopathic doctors give people. And I was just wondering,
you know, have they improved the thyroid tests, because you know,
when I read your book, you were saying that the
thyroid test really is not very good and that you've
(18:29):
been trying to get them to change it for years.
Were you ever able to get them to change it?
And what would people do if they, you know, aren't
aren't able to lie to Michigan and hire you.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Well, of first of the first thing I would tell
people is educate yourself. I mean, one of the main
reason I started writing books back in nineteen ninety eight
was I got tired of having to explain the same
thing to every patient. So finally I would say to them, Hey,
I want you to read this. You're interested in this,
let's talk more. And if you're not, you're going to
let me know. And what I realized was that there
(19:02):
just wasn't much out there for patients to understand. Now,
my books can be read by physicians as well, because
I have a lot of physicians, because I make things easy,
hopefully I'm I'm not a complex guy, and I don't
think things need to be complex. They need to be
easy so we can all understand it and all learn
from each other. So you know, that's why I started
writing books. And as far as thyroid goes, my first
(19:25):
book was America Natural Hormones and what filed right on
the heels, So that was overcoming thyroid disorders because those
were the two major things I was doing after my
dad use of those two natural hormones, and what I
wrote about in Overcoming thyroy Disorders was in med school,
I was taught to just check a TSH tyroid stimulating
hormone test and that's it, and if that test was
out of the app out of the range, I could
(19:46):
treat someone with thyroid hormone. If it wasn't out of
the range, I couldn't. Well, that means I'm not talking
to my patients. I'm not examining my patients. I'm not
thinking about my patients. I'm just reflexively doing what an
algorithm tells me to do. And basically a monkey could
do that, and I realize that's not the best way
to treat people. Everyone's different blood tests provide a guide
(20:08):
on which way to go, but ultimately it's up for
the physician to make a decision whether that therapy is benefits,
out weigh any risk that might come with that therapy,
and whether that therapy is warranted or not. Now, in
med school, I was shot to check a TSH level
and that was it. I never checked T foreign T
three and active and active thyrate hormal levels. I never
checked a reverse T three, which is the most important
(20:30):
thyroid tests to do. When I make a point of
that in my book talking about that, I never checked
thyrate to anybody levels and very rarely did I ever
check that back in my conventional days. Now everybody gets
that full panel that I just mentioned, you know, one, two, three, four, five,
six thyroid tests where I was taught to do one
in med school. So I do think they can provide
(20:51):
a guide. But I have many patients who the thyroid
tests aren't giving the true picture because there's other conditions
like tired hormone resistance going on, where the tests are
all normal. You have the patients hyper clearly hypothyroid when
you do an exam and you do a history on them,
and they're suffering from that, and they're going to die
from that unless you can think outside the box and
(21:14):
you know, treat them with a little bit of thyroid hormone.
This is in the literature, it's been in the literature
for forty years, yet hardly any doctors and they don't
know about it, and be they just don't think about
it because they're just letting these algorithms decide, you know,
which way they're going to go, and you know, other
than you know, the way I was taught in med
school to treat a thyry patient was I don't have
to see them, I don't have to touch them, I
(21:36):
don't have to listen to them. I don't have to
do a physical exam. I don't have to think. All
I need is a TSH test. If the TSH test
it's above the reference range, I write a script for
thyroid homone. If it's below the reference range, I don't like.
They could pull up to a bank throw their blood
through the tube. I could send us prescripture back or
send a note back says get out of here, you
don't have it. And that's that's that's how medicines practice
(21:57):
these days, and that is a very poor way to
practice medicine. And that's how I was basically taught. And
that's cool to do it.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah. One of the things I've done over the years,
doctor Brownstein, is I tell people to buy your book
on Overcoming Thyroid Disorders, and I tell them, you are
going to find yourself in this book. You're going to
be in one of these descriptive chapters that he talks
about and the things that you found to be the
(22:26):
most therapeutic for helping that person. And I said, if
you have a medical doctor's book that documents this and
you take it with you to your doctor, they are
going to be much more likely to take your thoughts
on that subject than if you just show up and say, oh,
my nutrition polistic nutrition lady told me to do da
(22:50):
da da da da right, and so I have found
that to be an Actually have them have your book
in their hand when they walk in their office and go, no.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
How about this idea? Yes, my vote is go see
a holistic doctor with my book in your hand, who's
already knowledgeable about this, who's literate on this, and who's
ready to treat you, versus someone who is not. And
then you don't have to worry about it. But my
book in your hand will help you either way.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Well, you're so right, and that's an excellent suggestion. But
I will tell you some people's doctors are I mean
they think of him, are the most worshiped. I'm almost
like they're a god or something. But it's very difficult
for some people to change their doctors. And I also
suggest that they read your book iodine why you need
(23:39):
it and why you can't live without it, And I
would love for you to share your thoughts on why
that is so important and why that is so important
for the thyroid.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
So when I started, you know, after my dad, I
call him my first and my best patients. And my dad,
by the way, from that moment, never never suffered another
moment of avangiina. I never took another nightero glizzerin Bill,
and you know, and you know, markedly improved the quality
(24:11):
of his life after that. But after my dad, are
we still there?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Yes?
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yes, sorry, my screen just faded off after from my
from the moment I treated my dad, it's all those results.
Every single patient got a full nutritional hormonal examination, so
everybody got a thyroid exam test from that moment on,
and I started treating people with thyroid hormone who I
either you know, from my from a full physical exam
(24:37):
and history and clinical you know, evaluation and laboratory work.
And so I found after about ten years of my practice,
I would estimate about three quarters of my patients were
on thyrite ormone. Now I was happy, they seemed happy,
they orted things were better, and you know, I was
writing books, I was lecturing on it, and but it
(25:00):
was bothering me why I have so many people on
thyroid hormone. I didn't think we were designed by our
maker to need a little thyroid hormone just because we
were getting older human bodies. Designed pretty well, if you
supply it with the basic raw materials and needs. It
can do pretty wonderful things from the beginning to the end.
You have good energy and good brain function from the
beginning to the end. That's how it should go for us.
(25:24):
So at the end of ten years, I have three
quarters of my patients on thyroid hormone, and I'm, you know,
just it was bothering me. There were two studies that
came out a ten year time perod What was bothering
me was why are so many people needing thyrate hormone?
So I would I went to my biochemistry. I went
to the physiology, you know, particularly the chemistry of the
thyrid gland, looked at the pathways, and I wrote down
(25:45):
all the cofactors needed to make thyrate hormone. You need selenium,
you need magnesium, you need vitamin C, you need B vitamins,
you need magnesium, and you need iodide. So I thought, well,
let's let's check these love all of these things and
we'll improve their biochemical status and then maybe they don't
(26:06):
need as much thyroid hormone. So I would check all
those levels. And back then there wasn't a great test
for iodine, and I didn't Idiin was a really difficult
concept for me to gather. It's got all these different
different states it can be in, you know, iodine, iodide,
and iodate, and you know, the literature was confusing. There
(26:26):
wasn't great testing for it, and you know, I would
try the other things first that I understood better, like magnesium,
seleni and vitamin C and things. So I would put
people when they were deficient on these things on those
items check their thyrid normal levels. And nothing worked as
well as thyroid hormone. And I really couldn't lower any
anyone down from their thyrod normal levels without them not
feeling as well as they were before. So iodide I
(26:48):
always came back to iodine. Iidine. You know, it's interesting
with idine. When you talk to someone about iodine, they
might not know anything about it, they're interested. Everyone seems
interested in idine no matter they I just know the word.
They don't really know much about it. But it's an interesting,
an interesting element in nature, and I was interested in
it as well. Now, part of my interest in idine
(27:10):
was I grew up and I was practicing medicine in
the Gorder Belt of the United States border refers to
a swollen thyric glan. The thyroid sits in the lower
part of the neck. It weighs about one point five ounces,
and it produces a teaspoon of thyroid hormone for a
whole year. Little variations in that teaspoon of thyroid hormone
have big effects on the body, since every cell in
the body needs and requires thyroid hormone. So it's you know,
(27:33):
the thyroc glan. I've always said, if you have put
all the hormones in a bus, the bus drivers, the
thyric lan, you really need the thyroid glan functioning well
to get the other hormones balance and to get people
to feel well. So I was having luck with using
natural desicated thyroid hormone. I was not having luck using
any of those cofactors to lessen my need for natural
(27:56):
desiccated thybrid hormone. Well, ten years into the practice, I said,
had about three quarters of my patient's i'm thyroid hormone.
I'm happy, they're happy. There was an article one of
my journals written by a physician from California, doctor Guy Abraham.
He developed an idine loading test. Now, at that point
in my career there was no good testing for idine.
(28:18):
I called him up when I saw the article. He
took my call. Ac cur Abraham was very untrustworthy of people.
He had been burned by colleagues in the past. He
was very rough on me at first because he didn't
trust me. He didn't know what my motives were for
calling him, and that's another story. But I persisted and
(28:38):
when he warmed up to me, which took a while
and took a lot of abuse on that one. And
when he warmed up to me, we became an incredibly
cross colleagues and friends. And I blew out to California
to meet him, and then he invited me to work
in his lab with him. And so here I was
with two babies, full time practice, learning from the master,
(28:59):
and I, you know, taught me more than he'll ever know.
And I was flying out to California on Thursday after
working late, and we worked fourteen hours a day in
the lab. I fly back late Sunday and get to
work on Monday. And I would do that four to
six times a year for years. And what I found
out was that Number one doctor Abraham, and I started
(29:23):
testing my patients for the right A status. He was
very interested in my practice because I was in the
couiter belt. He knew that the idine levels in our
soil and water and food are one of the lowest
die dinge levels in the entire world. So what I
found was when we check levels at ninety over ninety
seven percent of patients were deficient and idine, the vast
majority severely division and iodine now severe deficiency and idine
(29:47):
has a lot of problems associated with it, which I'll
get into. But doctor Abraham taught me why the form
of idine I was using wasn't working, which was just
iod died the reduced form id and that different tissues
of the body preferentially take up different kinds of iodine.
For example, the breasts primarily take up iodine, the oxidized
(30:07):
form of iodine, while the thyroid takes up the reduced
form iodide the reduced and oxidizer just terms for meaning
does it have an extra electron in a Souder show
or not. But once I started using a combination of
iodine and iodide, then I started to see the results
I was looking for. I wrote about this in my
book Iodine, Why You Need It, Why You Can't Live
Without It, and publish the research I did with doctor
(30:30):
Abraham in that book, and when I went from the
first ten years of my practice and three quarters of
the patients on thyroid hormone feeling well to now the
next probably twenty five years. At this point, I think
it's twenty four thirty four, thirty five years right now
I've been in practice. I have less than one quarter,
(30:51):
less than a quarter of my patient's on thyrid hormone,
yet everyone's on iodine. And out of everything I've done
in my practice in thirty over three decades, if the
government storms into my office unannounced, which they did during COVID,
and if they come in last their badges, which they did,
and basically tell me they don't like what we do,
(31:13):
which I felt they did. They probably didn't use those
words and said to me, hey, we don't like what
you do. You got to go back to doing conventional medicine.
But you can take one thing with you pick and
I would pick iodine for the idine provides the biggest
bang for the buck Idine deficiency is ramping across the
entire United States. Iideing levels have found fifty percent across
(31:36):
the country over the last fifty years. Idning is an
essential item we can't live without. In our body. There's
idine receptors in every cell in the body, and all
the glandeorid tissue needs and requires iodine for normal function.
In normal architecture, the glandor tissue includes the thy rate,
overs uteris, breast, prostateum bankers. And if you think about it,
(31:59):
what do we having problems within our country right now?
We have one in seven women with a lifetime risk
of breast cancer, one in three men, same with prostate cancer.
We all know people with prostate cancer and breast cancer.
We have pain credit cancer growing at epidemic rates, ovarian
uterine cancer growing at epidemic rates. Direct cancer is the
fastest growing cancer out there. All these conditions can be
(32:22):
related to diidine efficiency, and I think that it's been
the single most thing missing. Conventional medicine and alternative mesine
hasn't been so easy to to embrace iodine. You know,
I get criticized severely from conventional colleagues about my views
and iodine. And you know, some of my holistic colleagues,
who are you know, just misinformed, But it is really
(32:46):
the neatest thing we do in our practice. You know,
it's it's just a woman with fiber cistic breast disease
or breast cancer needs more iodine than a woman without
fiber cistic prest disease or breast cancer. Similarly, a man
with prostate problems needs more iding than a man without.
That includes pan credit problems. So very uterine stick here
any of the clange or tissue. So that's my iodine story.
(33:10):
I'm still, you know, still using it, and you know
it's it's you know. I think doctor Abraham from now
to eternity for helping me. I knew, I knew the answer.
I reminded that the answer was there with the idine.
I just I wasn't smart enough to do it on
my own. I need a little bit of push from
doctor Abraham and then I was able to take it
from there.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Oh wow, that is such an amazing story and I
so appreciate you sharing it with us, and it makes
me think about so many different things. And I've been
doing my iodine daily since since I've read your book,
and I just would tell everybody. You also have these
on DVD and they are fantastic as well, and very easy.
(33:51):
If don't have any kind of vision problem, you can listen.
But you know, one of the things I learned in
my research is that back in the United States, up
until nineteen eighty, they were putting iodine in all the
breads in all the bakeries, and they stopped doing it
in nineteen eighty and they started putting in potassium bromate,
(34:13):
which actually acts like iodine and mimics it in your body,
and it will take the place of iodine in your
thyroid and it will block it, so basically it shuts
down your thyroid. And that ingredient is actually illegal to
use in most of the world, but not in the US.
(34:34):
And when I was growing up, doctor Brownstein, you know,
if I got a cut or scrape or anything, we'd
immediately put iodine on it. And I don't know why
that practice stopped or got out of favor, but I mean,
it's anti parasitical, It supports your thyroid. It has so
(34:55):
many beneficial things to it. And yet you know, the
a whole white refined salt with the iodine added to it,
where the iodine dissipates when it hits oxygen, so it's
not reliable. And of course the white salt has had
all the minerals taken out that you want and need,
and it's been bleached, it's had high freakedtose corn syrup
(35:16):
added to it, couldn't cause diabetes, and also a bunch
of chemical preservatives to it. And so your body just
reads that like a poison. And I can't tell you
how many people that I counsel on a daily basis
that tell me number one, oh I eat iidiye salt,
or oh no, I don't eat any salt at all.
(35:36):
And so I would love for you to kind of
pull together how all these things kind of go together,
if you can.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
So I written my I was writing my idiine book,
and you know, I practiced medicine full time. I was
a good dad. I was around for my kids. It
wasn't just working. And you know, I was in a
busy practice. And people say, how do you have time
to write seventeen books? Well, I write about what works.
And I write books for one of two reasons. Either
(36:05):
I'm excited about something or I'm really irritated. And the
Idine book was excited to it. I was nearing the
end of the Idine books, the first edition of that,
it's on its fifth edition now. And I had been
using salt in my practice, and I realized quickly into
my holistic practice when I started looking at biochemical pathways
that all these hundreds, if not thousands of pathways require
(36:30):
sodium and or chloride as call factors to run these
enzymatic reactions throughout the entire body, but particularly the adrenal glands.
The adrenal glands to create hormones that ensure that we
have adequate amounts of sodium chloride in our body salt.
And if we don't have adequate amounts of sodium chloride,
(36:50):
you know, the disastrous things happen. So I started looking
at the biochemistry of salt and realizing the vast majority
of my patients were deficient. And so now in med school,
I was taught people shouldn't people should eliminate, eliminate salt.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
In their diet.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
You should have zero salt. You have zero salt, You're
going to die, So that's not possible. And then they said, well,
maybe not zero salt, but you should have less than
two grams of salt today. Let me tell you. Try
to need a diet less than two grams of salt today.
Food tastes terrible, nobody likes it, nobody wants it. And
you know I'm being you know, I'm being told in
(37:27):
medical school, and I'm looking at the media and they're
saying everyone needs too much salt and that's the cause
of hypertension and heart disease, and you know all the
other ills that are out there. Yet here I am
seeing low salt levels on my patient or or not
optimal salt levels on my patient. And I was focused
on the Sietine book. So I'm near the end within
days of going to print. So in the Detroit Free
(37:49):
Press every Tuesday there was a health column back then,
and the health column wasn't really health. It was a
health section of the paper. It wasn't really a health
section because it would just be on the newest of
drug that came out or some medical device that a
hospital had got. There was very little, and you know,
anything holistic, not all therapies they would come out with.
But in that Tuesday column there was a weekly resident
(38:14):
dietitian who an RD, who wrote a column about Q
and A. People would ask questions she'd answer. So the
question came days before I was done with the Idine book,
is there any difference in unrefined and refined salt? And
her answer was no, there's no difference. They're both equally
too high in sodium, and therefore they both need to
(38:35):
be avoided and minimized in the diet. So I cut
that out. I pasted it over my computer screen, and
I looked at it for the next few days when
I was finishing my idine book, and it irritated me.
And I knew exactly what my next book was going
to be, and that before that I didn't really consider
writing a book on solved. So I immediately began to
(38:56):
work on my book, Salt Your Way to Health, And
I went back through the literature on salt, and I
I discovered why, you know, the misrepresentation of salt earth
occurred and why people are told to lower their salt intake,
and which was a bunch of nonsense. You know, I
described that in my book. If you want to hear
about it, I'll tell you about it. But salt, there's
two basic forms of salt out there. There's refined salt
(39:18):
and unrefined salt. Refined salt is that thin white stuff
that's in every restaurant across the US, in most people's houses.
Morton's table salt is an example of refined salt. Refined
salt has had all of its minerals removed if salt
companies refer to those minerals as impurities, and it's been
bleached white because they think white looks more pure to us.
(39:38):
And it's got taxic chemicals in it, like ferrisinine and
aluminum silicate, so that's not a healthy product at all.
And unrefined salt has over eighty trace minerals in it,
and it's got the trace minerals that our body needs.
Plus it's got adequate amounts of sodium chloride in it
that we need as well. So that's when I started using,
(40:00):
you know, the beginning my hole is to practice, you know,
the first ten years. You know, this was already fifteen
years into it at that point. And when that woman
wrote that response to that question in the Detroit Free
Press and I taste it over my computer, just irritated
me enough. I knew what I wanted to write on next.
And that's why I came with my book, Salt Your
Way to Help. So salt should be part of any
(40:21):
adequate ensuring adequate salt levels should be part of any
holes stick treatment regimen. It's the basic thing. I call
this the basics drinking water. You know, maintaining hydration, getting
adequate amounts of salt in the human body is seventy
percent water, and the human brain is eighty percent water.
The next major constituent next to water and the human
body assault we have to have adequate amounts of salt.
(40:41):
We were designed by our maker to have salt receptors
all through the body and every cell, and that's why
it's the second major constituent in the body. We were
not designed to ingest salt as sodium chloride only with
toxic additives. We were designed to dingust salt as one
you know of a healthy product that has over eighty
(41:02):
essential minerals in it. And I frequently tell my patients
they need a tea spoon or two of unrefined salts
such as Selena's Celtic Bran salt or Redman's Real Salt
or Himalayan salt. And it's been a wonderful addition to
the practice, and to this day I still find you know,
I'm still talking to my patients all the time. You're
not drinking enough water, You're not getting enough salt in
(41:24):
your diet.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
Oh my goodness, I am so honored to have you
here because you are so amazing, and we're getting close
to the end, but I want to I want to
expand to what you just said because it's just so
brilliant and like in your book Sought Your Way to Health,
you say that if an adult human has less than
a teaspoon of salt in your diet a day, your
(41:45):
body can actually become toxic. And I have embraced that
holes wholeheartedly. And when I started researching hydration, I had
a doctor tell me nancy the word electrolytes of fancy
meta term for the word salt. And then when I
found out that when you go in the emergency room,
(42:07):
you're quite literally completely devoid of any of these minerals,
and they give you what they call fluids, but it's
really concentrated like sodium and chloride in these minerals in
a liquid form. But what my understanding has come is
that you cannot even hydrate without these minerals. So if
(42:31):
you're not having any of these minerals, or I call
it mineral rich salt and kind of to be more specific,
when I talked about people and I tell them that
it needs to have color. Minerals have color. If there's
no minerals. It's probably been bleach, it's probably had it
taken out. But we had one of our questions in
(42:52):
the studio, say, you know, why do they tell kidney
patients not to use salt. I have to admit I
think that it's an absolute recipe for death.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Well, here's the issue with salt, So it's also second
major consistent in the body, next to water. If you
have normal kidney function and normal heart function, you should
be able tower. You should be able tower huge amounts
of salt you be very difficult to become. You can
become toxic on salt. I mean that can happen, But
if you have normal kidney function, normal heart function, it's
(43:25):
I don't think anyone could eat that much salt to
become toxic on it. However, if you have detweased renal
clearance and you have kidney failure, that is where the
salt levels are regulated really in the body. It's in
the kidneys, and if the kidneys lose that ability to
regulate salt, that can become a problem. They have to
be careful with that. That's why you should work with
a salt literate physician who's knowledgeable about salt physiology and
(43:50):
salt biochemistry and you know, optimize things. But those are
the vast minority of people. For the person who doesn't
have that, then the concerns are much.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Lower, Doctor Brownstein, We've got like three minutes left, and
I just want to tell you again how honored I
am to have you join me here today on the show,
and I'm hoping you'll join me again in the future.
And I've had Rebel, my fabulous sound engineer, put up
your website d R. Brownstein dot com. Can people hire
(44:24):
you from you know, a distance or for consultations or anything.
Can you give out your information that people might be
able to find you better?
Speaker 3 (44:35):
So my you know, my website is as you you're
scrolling it across there. I work at the Center for
Holistic Medicine dot com. The website is www dot one
word Center for fo R Holistic Medicine dot com. We
find that we would like people to come for the
first visit in person. After that we can deal with
(44:57):
people you know, from a distance, but we have to
see people at least at least the first time. I
did do some distance medicine and you know video and look.
I feel for people that that are far away, and
that I have difficulty traveling. But I never felt connected
to them without catching them, without listening to them, without
that personal human to human connection, and I couldn't. I
(45:21):
had a difficult time doing that over the internet. Now,
once I meet them, I'm fine, you know, I can.
You know, we can move on from there. But we
don't do distance visits alone solely. You know, we want
to see them the first visit. I've said, I there's
seven of us practicing, including two of my daughters, and
you know I'm not taking new patients. They're taking new patients,
(45:42):
and you know we have a busy, fun practice and
we're all sort of, you know, feel the calling of
where we're where we are all need, where we need
to be right now, and where we should be placed
and where you know someone wanted us placed. And that's
how I feel better off us.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
Well, I am just I just think what you're doing
in your whole family and your your work is that
you gift to everyone. And I just highly recommend your
books to everyone. And you can find his books on
Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or you can go to
his website.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
One thing, we stopped Amazon, and I got mad at
them years ago, so they're just on my website. There's
a lot of old ones on Amazon. Those are so
I would tell you get them from my website. You know,
Amazon was not a pleasant experience for us back in
the day. And we do this. My wife and I
have done this, you know. I write the books, get
them printed, she mails them out, and you know, that's
(46:42):
what we've done for twenty since nineteen ninety eight and
twenty seven years. And so I would I would encourage
readers get it from my website versus get it in
on Amazon to get an older version.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Awesome. Well, I just so thrilled to have you here.
And the place where you practice is in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
So Lucy was asking that, and doctor Brownstein, we have
like probably you know, forty seconds left and would you
like to share a party thought with our listeners before
(47:15):
we have to sign off.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
I would suggest, if you're not feeling well, you're not
getting anywhere with your conventional doctor, don't don't put up
with poor medical care. There's hope out there. And the
best advice I can give you is find a good
holistic doctor, and they can be found. We are out
there and you know, find an eidine literary doctor, find
as salt literate doctor, find a biochemistry literate doctor, and
(47:39):
very few things. You know, there are so many things
you can you can solve with you know, rebalancing the
nutrition and hormonal system that will will much lessen the
need or hopefully one hundred percent less than the need
for drug therapies. And you know, we're happy with what
we do and if if you want to give us
a chance, and I'm sure we'll take good care of
(47:59):
you as well.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
That's beautiful. Thank you so much for joining us today,
and for all you wonderful listeners out there. We love you.
Thank you for sharing your valuable time with us and
doctor Brownstein, and I wish you wonderful health.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Thank you me too.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
I look forward to talking to you all again next week.
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