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Transcript
- 03:14 What is integrative medicine?
- 09:40 Toxicity is the root cause of diseases
- 12:35 Radioactive exposure
- 15:30 Do you need a medical degree to practice integrative medicine?
- 18:05 Integrative medicine diagnostic tests
- 27:02 Drug-free healing methods are safe and effective
- 28:52 Neuropathy and statin drugs
- 35:31 How does integrative medicine treat diabetics?
- 40:36 Sports rehabilitation
- 42:50 Laser therapy
- 47:26 Lumbar disc decompression
- 54:40 Can you treat diabetes without insulin?
- 59:26 What is the status of healthcare in America?
Wendy Myers: Welcome to Liveto110, my name is Wendy Myers. I’m a Health and Nutrition Coach and we are broadcasting live from Los Angeles, California. Today I’m interviewing Dr. Jason Kelberman about integrative medicine and chiropractic care, what exactly integrative medicine is. So please go out and check my website, myersdetox.com™.
I’ve started myersdetox.com™ to educate people on proper nutrition, the importance of detoxing from heavy metals and industrial chemicals that are the major underlying cause of disease and how to treat your health conditions naturally without medication. My goal with myersdetox.com™ is to help you prevent disease and live a long and healthy life, hopefully to 110, because I don’t know about you, but that’s my goal.
But before we get started, I have to do a little disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this show is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition, because that would be illegal. Live to 110™ Radio is solely informational in nature. Please consult your health care practitioner before engaging in any treatment I suggest on this show. So if you like the show and you want to learn a little bit more about health and nutrition, I’m teaching a class at the Brentwood Library here in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8 at 2pm. I’ll be teaching a class on the Live to 110™ Diet that will cover Modern Paleo nutrition principles and best of all, it’s absolutely free. So come on down and get healthy with me.
Today we’re going to be talking about integrative medicine and why it’s so popular today and why it’s so important to find a practitioner whether they’re medical or a chiropractor or another kind of healthcare practitioner and integrate them into your team of practitioners. These are the doctors, and other healthcare practitioners that are using drugless medicine, using eastern and western medical philosophies, using herbs and supplements to treat patients rather than just out of the gate using a medicine to treat an illness. It’s pretty much like western medicine, they treat people symptomatically. They symptomatically treat you, like if you have a headache, then you take an aspirin, or if you have pain the doctor gives you a pain medicine, but that doesn’t address the root cause of the problem. So the goal with integrative medicine is that you’re attempting to treat the cause of illness, rather than just the symptom, which just does not work for most people.
Wendy Myers: Well, hello Dr. Kelberman, how are you doing?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Great! Good afternoon Wendy.
Wendy Myers: How are you?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: I am really good. Glad to be part of the show!
Wendy Myers: Thank you so much and thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it! So Dr. Kelberman, you are the owner and founder of the Westside Wellness Center in West Los Angeles, California and your site is drkelberman.com. The Westside Wellness Center is a whole center for education, non-surgical treatment and preventive health programs. And you’re a chiropractor and are board certified in integrative medicine with an emphasis on the triad of health: physical, chemical and mental aspects of health. And you specialize in the drugless management of the metabolism disorders like diabetes and europathy. Now I’ve heard a lot about integrative medicine from Doctor Andrew Wiel and Dr. Mark Hyman, they are two very vocal advocates of integrative medicine who are attempting to introduce it to the mainstream.
Wendy Myers: Can you tell our listeners what exactly is integrative medicine?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Well, integrative medicine is combining everything under the medicine umbrella and that does not mean drugs. Any substance that is used to treat a disease or illness can be considered a medicine so, for everybody out there, that could include herbs, homeopathic preparations, amino acids, etc.
Wendy Myers: Okay.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: So what we’re trying to do is to fit the treatment to what the patient needs rather than select only what might be available in the drug world. For example, you have a headache, so you took an ibuprofen.
Wendy Myers: Can you tell me how you got into integrative medicine and became a chiropractor?We’ve heard a little bit about integrative medicine. I’m just wondering how did you get into integrative medicine?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: First I’m going to take you on a short ride on why I became a chiropractor because that will tie into a belief system that I have. When I was twelve, I was riding my bike and got hit by a car and at that point, no one was able to help me and I was suffering for a while, like many of your viewers may have been suffering with a variety of different conditions, not necessarily a trauma like that. And somebody in the family said, “hey, you should go to a chiropractor” and my mom was pretty open so she did and within 3 to 4 months, I was a new kid. And that only stuck with me, and so, like many of us, we have things that we think we want to do with our lives and so I was busy doing those, which included teaching, etc.
And later in life, I think I was about 27, I finally decided that it was time for me to embark on that career. In those days, all of my colleagues were of similar minds. We already knew the value and the advocacy of chiropractic care. Today, students may elect that as a profession because they think it’s a good profession or for other reasons. Back then, you have to have been helped, typically, by one. One thing led to another through my career and I was always drawn to a system called applied kinesiology which started in the early 60’s with Dr. George Goodheart. And basically, that was the first alternative care and integrative care because he began to bring chiropractic into the realm of integrative medicine which meant that they not just look at the spawn but they also look at how nutrition was a component to the health of the area that they were trying to work on.
And so I joined that organization some 25 or 30 years ago and it has evolved because many doctors have kindly spent years of their lives researching and giving their information to all of the field doctors. And so today, that field has exploded into where we are now. I’d like to add the word functional medicine to integrative medicine because that’s really what we do. When our body breaks down, for one reason or another, there’s a reason for it. If I’m having allergies, there’s a reason for it. If I’m tired, there’s a reason for it. So I’m being very simplistic at the moment, we can get more complex as we go, but basically, if you address the root issue as you know, if you deal with the functional component, then the symptom, which is what everybody wants to go away, or to change, is greatly affected. We see that everyday in our practice and I’m sure that you do in your coaching as well.
Wendy Myers: Yes, it just seems to make so much more sense to address the root cause than just treating the symptom and then leaving the root cause there to continue to cause symptoms.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: For example, let’ just talk about a diabetes for a second. We have an epidemic of diabetes type 2 in America. It doesn’t surprise me, given the amount of stress we’re under, the amount of horrible food that we’re offered routinely, and the amount of environmental toxicity that we have as well. So I think, moving forward into the next century, our biggest issue, is going to be toxicity from all sources.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s been my message that I’m trying to get across to people, you just can’t be healthy unless you get rid of toxicity and heavy metal and chemicals.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: I completely agree with you. These things are way too impactful on our systems and it really does affect at a very deep level. One of the things that many of your viewers may not be thinking about currently is that we’re still being affected by the Fukushima radiation that occasionally jerks our way. It is not over, it has affected the whole world and we are a compilation of all of these exposures. Our environment is always adding onto. What I mean by that is every time there’s a volcanic eruption, there’s arsenic and this and that toxicity. Every time there’s a radiation, that’s released and these things become compounded. I want to relate it to a person who has had multiple head injuries because it’s so appropriate.
If I had one head injury, I could have x amount of healing time, if I have two head injuries, it changes the healing time. By the time I get to my third or fourth, it’s exponential, it’s not the same amount times two or times three. It goes into an exponential function. So every time we get exposed to more and more and more, we get hit harder and harder and harder. So we have to be weary of and be always working on how we can combat that, how we can lower our intake and what precautions do we need to take on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I didn’t realize it was the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown because those fish from this fisher’s pond over there and they swim over here which happens in the currents, they are finding fish that have radioactive levels that does absolutely affect our health and our thyroid.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Immensely, immensely! It really affects how we hydrate as well. Because radioactivity affects minerals, we have trouble keeping ourselves hydrated, so our cellular activity and all of that stuff that’s supposed to happen between our cell membranes is affected as a whole. You think you’re drinking enough water and you think you’re getting enough of all your nutrients but it’s being blocked and it’s very hard to diagnose as well. We don’t really have a test that you could run that would say “oh yes, you have x amount of radioactive exposure and it’s cumulative and now it’s in your liver” or this or that. We really don’t, and that’s one of the reasons why none of the governments want to tell you how much exposure you had or that you’re constantly having it because they really don’t have a test for it. So better out of mind.
Wendy Myers: There’s a lot of things you have to be looking at when you have big symptoms. But I know how to protect myself like when I go to get sushi I don’t order Japanese fish. Haha
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Or any tuna anymore. Really, in my opinion. Such a large fish that travels around the world. Really, that’s a tough one. We need to limit the things that are bad instead of eating them all the time.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love salmon and really small fish like sardines or anchovies and that’s it. Occasionally, I treat myself to sushi but it’s so horribly guilty with all the mercury I’m digesting. Haha
Dr. Jason Kelberman: You know I rarely hear that people are eating sardines. It’s one of my favorite recommendations because it’s such a well-rounded food. It has all the little bones full of minerals, it has good iron source for most of the women but unfortunately our American taste buds don’t usually adapt very well. However, I usually say hey, they got salsa flavor and mustard flavor, and chili flavor so sometimes you try to give at least give those options.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love sardines. I love the wild plain ones. You can get it at Whole Foods. They taste just like tuna to me they taste really, really good. So let’s talk about integrative medicine. I’m very curious about it because I’ve actually only heard doctors talk about it, like Dr. Andrew Wile and Dr. Hyman so I guess I never thought it was an extension of integrative medicine because is called medicine. You know, that word, and so do you need a medical degree to practice integrative medicine?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Basically, there are two groups in America. In one of the groups, you must be an MD. That’s the American Board of Holistic Medicine. In the other, the American Association of Integrative Medicine, you have to be a licensed practitioner so you need to be a osteopath, chiropractor, psychologist, dentist, some other licensed psychiatrists and so forth to participate, acupuncturists as well. So there were two different camps. The American Association of Integrative Medicine I’m sure was founded because they were excluded from the Medical Association so that group is dedicating to maintaining that we have the options available to us rather than just drug-based medication.
Wendy Myers: How does one become board certified in integrative medicine?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Within that organization, there’s a process like in the other organization of testing and of hours of education. After 30 years in the field, it was a little bit easier for me to do that because I’ve had so much training than somebody just coming right out of school. But there is a curriculum, if you will, that’s required and you must have that curriculum to get board certification.
Wendy Myers: Okay. So you really have to have a pretty extensive amount of training to be board certified in integrative medicine?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Yes.
Wendy Myers: Okay. I just think it’s wonderful that you can visit an alternative health care practitioner and get the same diagnostic tests as the medical doctor without having to worry about if you’re going to be prescribed a needless toxic medication because I’m hearing more and more about alternative healthcare practitioners like acupuncturists and chiropractors utilizing diagnostic tests just like conventional medical doctors so that they can provide a more complete, well-rounded level of care. And, you know, these tests are for adrenal fatigue or thyroid function tests for instance. And a patient can always be referred out to a medical doctor if their condition is more serious or outside an alternative health care practitioner’s scope of practice. What do you think about this? Is this something that you’re doing or practice?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: I completely agree with you on that. I want to take it one step farther. In my office, we also offer a special urine analysis that my colleague, Dr. Jim Blumenthal, spent years developing. Unfortunately, Jim passed away in December so I’m trying to carry on his amazing work. This 24-hour urine analysis, unlike blood, let’s talk about this for a second. What do we feel when we look at blood? In my opinion, when we look at blood, we get a snapshot of what’s going on in the blood. Now, for those Star Trek fans out there, the prime directive for blood is to be completely normal because it feeds of our body parts all day long. So for example, if you’re missing calcium in your blood, it might steal it from your bones. If you’re missing protein, because you haven’t been eating any protein at all because you’re on a very restricted diet, it might steal that protein from your muscles. That’s the idea of what the blood is supposed to do, to feed all the body, not just one spot. So its directive is to all the most possible. Now, can it tell us if you are calcium, magnesium, amino acid defficient? Only if it’s pathological, really. I mean if it’s a nutritional issue, it probably won’t show anything at all. And how often do any of your listeners have a symptom, go to the doctor, they get a blood test and they say you’re completely normal?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I’ve heard that happen to so many of my clients. I even had that myself. I went to a naturopathic doctor, thinking I was a step up from a regular conventional doctor and they just did a blood test to test all my vitamin and mineral levels. But of course, my minerals are normal because your blood has to keep everything at a certain level. And so many of my clients have had the same thing. But when they get a hair mineral analysis, they’re devastatingly low in a lot of nutrients, is not a chronic health condition that they have, but their health is just suffering a lot because of very low nutrition and minerals levels.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: This is another test and I’m going to make an analogy here. You took your car to the mechanic, he put a censor in the tail pipe, he turned the car on and said, okay, this, this and this are not right. Your spark plugs aren’t working, your midshaft is too rigged, so forth and so on. So by looking at what’s coming out of the car he knew what was going on inside. So this NeuroHealth PathMAP is a 24-hour urine test whereby you look at the elements of the body which are coming out. And by looking at what’s coming out, we know what’s going on inside to a more accurate degree.
I think that in the next 20 years, 50 years, we are going to get so accurate at trying to read what’s going on in the cells as opposed to the blood that can help us tremendously help all of our patients that we weren’t able to help before. So by looking at the urine, we can really look at energy production, detoxification, anti-oxidants, amino acids, neurotransmitters, hormones, your steroid production and these types of things. And we took it one more step further because what we found was the average person had at least 15 vitamin, mineral, amino acid co-factor deficiency, so we started compounding it into one formula. How easy is that?
Think about that from a compliance point of view. Because, even you and I, if we had to take 15 -20 things a day, we’d get tired of that after a while unless we were extremely sick and, let’s face it, as humans, we like things to be little simpler. So we did that. So I’m on board with anything that gives information about functional medicine or things that will help the body provide function at a cellular level. It’s the same way with my specialty of applied kinesiology by combining chiropractic kinesiology, acupuncture, nutrition. I have a much better idea what’s going on the body and it’s not usual for me to say to a patient, “You haven’t been sleeping well, have you?” or “You had alcohol last night, didn’t you?” or “You’re eating too much sugar, aren’t you?”, because I can see what’s going on functionally in the body, in the pathways that are becoming affected by their diet or stress level.
So it’s really my life’s work. I’ve been doing this for 30 years. In the old days, I would have been called a mixer. What that means is, chiropractic was extremely narrow in its approach 60 years ago but it has expanded greatly in the last 30 years or so. So for everybody out there listening, if all you think chiropractors do is manipulate your spine, that’s traditional chiropractic. And that’s great and when you need that, it’s an amazing treatment but some people, A – don’t like it, don’t tolerate it, don’t understand it, don’t want it, there are alternative things available including non-manipulative mobilization, instrument work, muscle therapies.
I would like to, if we could, spread out into the concept of specialization. Because, believe it or not, chiropractors are specialized also. For example, you get hurt playing baseball, and you’ve never been to a chiropractor before, what do you want to do? You want to find somebody who can help sport injuries, don’t you? Not all chiropractors can do that. You are having problems with your jaw and skull. What does that mean? Or you might have some jaw pain headaches or what we call TMJ syndrome, which chiropractor should you go to for that? Well you better go to somebody who’s trained in craniomandibular or temporomandibular joint work. So it’s probably as important to interview the chiropractor you want to see as it was the MD or anybody else in your healthcare team and I truly believe that you should have a team if you want to live to be a hundred years old.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I believe that too.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Today that the country doctors are pretty well gone unless you’re in the middle of America, these days if you want to live to a hundred, you need an MD internist or family doctor, you need a dentist, okay, you should have a chiropractor, you might need a health coach or a personal trainer or a gym or a psychologist, depending on who you are and what your needs are. You might need different people, might be an acupuncturist, etc. You might need different people as part of your team. There’s no one doctor anymore that can do it all because the knowledge that we now have is so huge and it’s growing so fast, there’s no way that any of us can totally keep up with it all.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, there’s no doubt that modern medicine practice needs improvement because it’s just been adapted by the pharmaceutical companies. Now when you go to go your doctor, the only thing you’re offered is a medication or surgery and there are so many more options other than that. And some of the criticisms that are against it are by many within the medical establishment itself. And there are also to be no doubt that a few of the natural medicine than healing methods now used by practitioners of alternative medicine are proven to be totally safe and effective, what are your thoughts on this topic?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Well, having worked in an integrative practice, meaning, I worked alongside MDs, DCs, DOs, PTs etc., I can tell you that in the medical world, because medicine is their venue, from a legal point of view, if they don’t prescribe medication, they’re just as liable as if they don’t. I know that sounds confusing but let’s just say cholesterol for a second. You walk into a medical doctor and if you have high cholesterol and they don’t medicate you, they’re basically committing malpractice. So that’s a very odd box to have to be in. I understand what’s going on in the world. Their problem is out it ain’t going to change at all. And how that relates overall, I’d like to talk about some of the drugs that are unfortunately still being dispensed but actually cause nerve damage.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, because your specialty is peripheral neuropathy.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Yeah and I didn’t make this stuff up, I got this from the Neurology Association of America. I work with neurologists on these cases and they send me people because they know of my specialty and I actually help them. Drugs don’t really help, they don’t cure neuropathy and, in a sense, you could say that there is no cure for neuropathy. But managing neuropathy, just like managing diabetes is extremely important and they’ve come to know. I have a list of over 50 drugs that cause neuropathy and I’m happy share that with your listeners.
Wendy Myers: Let’s tell the listeners what is neuropathy. It’s nerve damage that causes severe pain or tingling in your extremities, just so that we’re clear on that.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Yeah, it’s a general term for nerve damage, if you will. If we get to be a little more specific like peripheral neuropathy, then we’re talking about usually feet but sometimes hands. Peripheral neuropathy is damage to the smaller nerve ends and sometimes smaller vascular capillaries as well, to the extremities as we get older. It’s not usually found in people under 50 years old, for example. In my opinion, it’s part of a neurodegenerative process, except in diabetes, because it’s a different mechanism there. Let’s just talk about statin drugs for a second. It’s very popular, every third commercial is a drug commercial, so no wonder why we’re putting much in the medical drug world. But what do the statin drugs do? Statin drugs lowers your cholesterol, blocks your body’s ability to utilize and uptake cholesterol. Well nerves have a fatty sheath on them, at least large fiber nerves anyway. This fatty sheath is called the myelin sheath. And if you start taking drugs that block your body’s ability to use fat, it can destroy the outer fat linings of your nerves and actually causes neuropathy, if you will. And I don’t wish this on even my worst enemy because the pain is excruciating. The nerves just misfire completely. Some people report it’s as if being stung by a pick, other people have spasms, some people feel like they have bugs crawling all over their skin, some people lose muscle strength completely and can’t walk. And this can be a rather serious condition and there’s a lot of it going on out there and all the medical world has to offer is the neurontin and pain medication. Pain medication blocks your brain from feeling it but the degenerative process just goes on and on and on.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, my father had that. The doctor had no explanation to why it was happening. Of course he had diabetes so I thought it was due to that but he took statins for 10 years.
Dr. Kelberman: These drugs are really ineffective.
Wendy Myers: I read that too.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: It’s all about the liver and the statins affect the liver and that is where a lot of your issues become predominant. So diabetes mechanism is a little different than the fat mechanism we just talked about. We believe now that when you are diabetic, that the size of the red blood cells actually enlarge and that they cannot get to the very ends of the capillary bed because they’re blocked. So it’s a more of a vascular neuropathy, if you will, some diabetes. And we use a system called tesla or neurocare which is an electrical modality that actually opens up the vascular bed and enables the blood cells to get all the way down to the tips for a really great response. I’ll take a diabetic neuropathy case hands down over some of the other more difficult ones because we have technology that is outstanding in that department.
And I think that I just started specializing in peripheral neuropathy because I started seeing my clients, my patients getting older and starting to develop these. When I was in practice for 5 years, I rarely ever saw anything that even remotely looked like it, nor was I even trained to figure it out even if it did walk in the door. Now after 30 years, I can see a neuropathy patient a mile away and since I wanted to help my patients, I started using some of the modalities I had earlier which was mostly laser and monochromatic treatments and got some results with those. It sort of pushed me into wanting to learn more about that, as we all do. So I studied with some of the neurologists around the country and the chiropractic neurologists. We talked earlier about specialization. There are chiropractic neurologists just like chiropractic orthopedists, and so forth. So there are a lot of different specialties within the field. Did I go to far adrift on that one?
Wendy Myers: No, not at all! Your clinic specializes in treating diabetics and peripheral neuropathy. I was wondering how do you treat diabetics? Are you trying to avoid insulin? In what ways do you treat these diabetics?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Like you I’m sure, we have to teach our patients that certain foods are the devil. Let’s face it. I like to use glucose testing at home with all of my patients so they can know what food they eat will be bad for them. Okay. When their sugar spikes after having bread or spikes up after having coffee for example, then they know that certain foods are not going to be in their best interest if they want to keep their blood sugar lower or at a good normal level. In addition to that counseling, there are some very successful nutrients available that helps us in that world and we treat the periphery neurologically with the tesla unit with great success. Sometimes, in some cases, we basically just put them on home therapy where they can do their own therapy and maintain themselves rather than always having them to come to the office up here.
Wendy Myers: What kind of home therapy are they doing?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: There are several units now available for home therapy. The tesla unit is available, as is the re-builder unit. These are electrical modalities that help nerves and vascular flow and they’re specialized as well. A typical muscle stem doesn’t do it. These are specific equipment designed for that purpose with special frequencies. For example, the tesla unit is a high-voltage unit as opposed to a low-voltage high-amperage unit that the rest of the electric stem world uses. Let’s say you went to your therapist or chiropractor and they did an electric stem on you. That electric stem is typically a lower volt but higher amperage. It might go anywhere up to maybe 40 milliamps of current.
The tesla unit uses a maximum of maybe 6 milliamps of current which is up to 400 volts which is a very interesting segway here because when they tested the human body, they were outraged and surprised to hear that in any one point, if you actually measure all of the voltage that was going on in the human body, it would add up to a million volts. I had to let that one sink in because I didn’t believe it but a volt here and a volt there in this part and that part, and it all adds up, think about all the electrical communication that’s going on in your brain at any given point.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, the hydroelectricity, we have to drink water to generate hydroelectricity in our body too, because if we don’t drink enough water we won’t generate enough energy through the hydroelectricity generation in our cells.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: I agree with you. And I also stress fluids, superfluids. There are many ways to get fluids in you. Bread doesn’t count, of course. I love when I see people carrying bottles with them all over the place. I have mixed feelings about that. I grew up in a time when you can get good, clean water out of the tap. Unfortunately, in Los Angeles, that’s not the case.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I wouldn’t drink tap water after I brush my teeth with that water. No way!
Dr. Jason Kelberman: That’s kind of what some of the latest specialties are. I’m also a specialist in thighs and shoulders and I’m certified in the Niel-Asher Technique. Over the years, I just keep learning and learning and learning because I have more and more patients who come in with a variety of things that they need help with. So that’s a phenomenal technique as well and only osteopath, chiropractors, etc. are using that particular technique that I’m aware of, but I would be happy to tell it to anybody else who lives.
Wendy Myers: So you do sports rehabilitation as well?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Yeah, I’ve been in that field for about 17 years. It’s a complete different take than to just a traditional chiropractic. It’s more akin to kinesio-physical therapy. It is basically pertains to chiropractic kinesiology, the study of the muscles of the body and movement of the body. When we talk about integrative medicine, we are an integrated creature, okay. Our feet, for example, support and propel the rest of the body and if you’ve got a foot problem and don’t know it, and you’ve got some kind of knee, hip, lower back, shoulder, or even a neck problem, if you don’t adjust the foot problem, every time you walk around, you’re not mechanically efficient.
We call that the gate mechanism or the walking mechanism. It’s another thing that I never thought that I would be doing when I first entered chiropractic care because I thought that the world all evolved around the spine, 40 years ago. But I started looking at foot function many years ago and started finding that in many, many, many, many, many, many patients, there’s a problem there. So if anybody comes into my office for an evaluation, I check them as a whole. I check their walking mechanism. I find out what’s wrong with their structure. We try to get as much information on as many different levels as possible to make as big a change as quickly as possible. I know that’s probably an area that you would not have expected but as a result, I’ve done foot exercises and foot rehabilitation and laser treatments and all kinds of things geared at strengthening and normalizing foot balance and basic locomotion.
Wendy Myers: I know that’s what I love about it, that you’re an integrative medical practitioner because you’re just dabbling in all kinds of stuff, you’re doing laser therapy and lumbar prone dis-compression and the sports injury rehabilitation and kinesiology and chiropractor and you’re just testing and all kinds of stuff and it will just be very wise for a patient to come to a practitioner like yourself to just get a holistic level of care. Can you explain some of the other kinds of healing technique that you’re using like what is the laser therapy?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: In my office, I use what we call a Class 4 laser. It basically boils down to hot or cold. We have new technology that enables us to do hot lasers safely. What I mean by that is, when you say hot to somebody about lasers, they immediately think of 007 being cut to pieces by a laser. But that’s just the higher end of hot. For many years, all we had was cold. We had been doing laser therapy for about 20 years. As technology advances, so does laser. What I love about laser is its penetration capability. When we look at things that we usually have done as a physical therapist or a chiropractor or any other manual therapist, what do you get? Hot packs, cold packs, electric stems, ultrasound. Those are the staples of the industry for years and years and years. None of those penetrate very far. I’d be shocked if you got more than a quarter of an inch penetration at most out of any of those. With a Class 4 laser, I can penetrate 4 inches without applying pressure.
Wendy Myers: Is there any pain involved in that?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: None whatsoever and almost no heat whatsoever. Some are afraid to get laser treatment because it’s hot. No it doesn’t have to be hot because it’s cold. It has many different qualities. It accelerates tissue repair, it’s an anti-inflammatory analgesic type thing, it can increase vascular flow, and ideal for nerves as well. In fact, for years and to this day, I still love it for sciatic nerves because I can penetrate all the way down where the nerve is without putting any pressure on the nerve whatsoever. I can go onto the shoulder joint, knee joint, etc. And for somebody who comes in with plantar fasciitis of the foot, I can get all the way down into that heel where the attachment of the fasciite is without any pressure at all. If anybody out there in your listeners land has had plantar fasciitis, you know how painful that can be and how miserable it is to walk.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, my mother has a problem with her sciatica and her other friends, they go to a physical therapist and they can’t touch them because they’re in so much pain that they can’t get any treatment because the person is not able to do any kind of manipulation or touch them and so lasers now are just perfect for that.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: But I have a whole protocol for plantar fasciitis. It’s rare that I don’t help somebody now. I don’t know why but I do love working with feet I guess because nobody else is doing it.
Wendy Myers: Well I have a patient that I’ll send to you. Because she couldn’t get help anywhere but she got a toe that’s stuck in a position and it’s excruciating and no one can help her.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Well I’d be happy to do a proper exam and see if we could.
Wendy Myers: I’m going to send her in to you, for sure. She’s a wreck. She needs you really, really bad.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Well, I also have a list of drugs that cause neuropathy for any your listeners who want to get a copy of that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I’ll put that on the website. I’ll put that in the transcript so that people can look and see if their drugs potentially can cause problems to them. I also see here that you do lumbar disc decompression? What is that?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Basically, it falls under the category of traction. In the old days, it was a static traction and these days decompression means that you’re very gently are allowing the vertebrae to open without resisting the effort and by doing so, you help to get plump, if you will invite fluid or take the pressure off the nerves, typically, in the lower spine. We do this in the neck as well, but it’s different there. It can be done prone or supine and many patients get amazing relief from that process. We also are believers in inversion therapy which is hanging upside-down to do a similar treatment whereby you also get it if you’re capable of handling that procedure.
Wendy Myers: What kind of patient would be a candidate for the lumbar prone decompression?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: These are people who have lower back pain or leg pain. Sometimes just buttock pains but typically lower back and buttock or leg pain. And these are people who either have degenerative discs or herniated discs or genetically thin discs as a whole. They could be young people as well. This could be the late effects of injuries earlier in life. I did treat a fair amount of injury cases and somehow I feel an affinity to it because of how I became a chiropractic patient myself, and so my heart is always out for those people. Let’s say you are twenty years old, you had an auto accident, you hurt your back but you got care and in about 3 or 4 months, you felt like your old self again and you went about your business, and you didn’t keep up any type of chiropractic care, physical therapy, etc. Over a period of years, basically, you trigger early degeneration that would not have otherwise been there were it not for the trauma that you received. So years later, and it varies in everybody, that’s if you’re going to have a late effect in the injury, not everybody does, you’ll start to have degenerating discs, thinning discs, these things are typically referred to later as arthritic involvement. It’s all part of the degenerative process and it all started from your injury years before. And you never know when that’s going to happen.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I know a lot us don’t realize it. From my own experience, I had a couple of injuries from working out and I ignored them and then finally got physical therapy but even though now that I’m not in pain anymore, I still have to continue to go to train my body to stay in the correct alignment because it wants to go back to the old holding pattern and it’s similar to where you have to retrain your body, even though you’re not in pain anymore.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Gait and posture are extremely important. Many people think that posture is only important when you stand. Well, we sit. Most of us sit during our jobs, fortunately I stand quite a bit. Most people sit for hours and hours and hours and never think about sitting posture, how they’re working at their desk, how far away the monitor is, what they’re doing with their shoulders, elbows, etc. And I always tell my patients, “If I give you a set of exercises to do, it’s because you probably will always need them. So don’t stop once you’re feeling better. Incorporate that into a routine that you do for you no matter where you go, whether it’s to the gym, or to your Pilates or yoga or whatever mode of exercise that you partake in. And it’s all great, you got to keep your body moving. Life is motion so you have to stay in motion as best you can”. We typically have our specific posture when things go wrong, we fall back into, and I am no exception to that.
Wendy Myers: And I can say that I sit up straighter in my chair and not slouching. I have to sit up straight.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Most of us, another thing for all you out there in listener land. If you wear lenses or even if you don’t, you should take a page that has maybe a 12 point font and see where your focal distance is on that page and wherever that is when you’re sitting straight up, that’s where your monitor should be, okay? Not two feet up in front of you where you have to stretch your head forward and wreck your neck and shoulders all day long. So that simple little test will probably make all of your optometrist and opticians very happy to know that you’re at least looking at a proper setup for good reading because your glasses aren’t going to work as effectively if you’re at a wrong distance of the lenses or your surgery or whatever is going on optically. That’s just kind of gives us an idea of how many other specialties in our health. I just realized that we may need an optometrist or an ophthalmologist as part of our team as well. As we get older. You know, and a team works better than only one individual and I’m a big fan of that. So that’s basically how I got involved with integrative medicine.
Wendy Myers: I love that your practice is completely drug free. And going back to diabetes, I just have a question. Are you able to treat diabetes without insulin? Because whenever people go to the doctor and are diagnosed of pre-diabetes or diabetes, they’re automatically given the insulin pill or insulin shots and I’m just curious. Are people able to address diabetes without insulin?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Well, before going into that, it’s required to be a chiropractor licensed in the state of California. We have to be drug free. You know what I’m saying? Haha.
Wendy Myers: You’re treating people without drugs. You don’t have to have drugs to treat illness.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Right. Right. So, first of all, I don’t treat diabetes type 1. That’s truly an insulin-dependent situation. I do treat type 2 and it’s all about compliance with type 2. Of course some of the type-2s were misdiagnosed to be type 1, we’re not going to talk about those. The true type-2s, if the patient is willing to deal with the lifestyle changes, I’ve never had a case that needed drugs. Herbs, nutrients that are specific to help the body, transport the sugar out of the blood into the muscle cells. By the way, so does exercise. We were just talking about exercise. Exercise helps the sugar come out of your blood and get into the muscles and tissue. So exercise is just as important in the management of type-2, as well as proper nutrition and supplementation.
Wendy Myers: It sounds amazing to me that you absolutely don’t have to become insulin dependent because what happens, like what happened to my father, he’d take insulin shots right before every meal and insulin is the hormone that tells your body to store fat and prevent it from being used as fuel and he just got fatter and fatter and fatter. He was 360 lbs right before he died because of this insulin. It was like the more insulin he took, the fatter he got, the more insulin he needed. It’s just was a vicious cycle.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Right. I also lost my grandfather that way as well. But that was before, before anybody knew. It really boils down to functional medicine again. If you really get down to why the body is not doing what it’s supposed to and you help it do it, it typically works. There must be some catastrophic event that’s blocking it. Some major disease process, or autoimmune disease process, and even those if they’re handled correctly, can respond. Yeah, I’m confident that type-2 however, the biggest issue is compliance and many people just are not willing to give up sugar.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s hard.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Let’s call it what it is, you know, they want to continue drinking alcohol which is equivalent to sugar. They want to drink alcohol, they want to eat their sweets, they want to eat bread, they want to eat all the things that are bad for them, and so for those people, drugs is necessary.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, they’ll have to take insulin.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Change is required. I got some people who go vegan. I got people who are on grain free. I got people who will do whatever to stay off medication because every medication has a side effect. Every medication will create you nutritional deficiency one way or another. This is another reason why I love that NeuroHealth PathMAP by the way, is you can pick up on the deficiencies and if I have patients who absolutely need to be on drugs, we can find out what they’re deficient at and support them so that they can be healthy while they’re taking their medication, which I know it sounds oblique but when people really do need drugs, they need drugs. Let’s face it, there’s a real place for drugs and it’s helping out millions of people in America but they can’t also partake in supporting your systems in being healthy at the same time.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Before I turn to medication, I just try everything else first and then do that. Not the first one, which most doctors will be doing because you’re a physician.
59:26 What is the status of healthcare in America?
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Right. America, I believe, we excel in emergency care. I don’t believe that we excel in true health care. I think that we are basically disease care. When you get diseased, you take a pill. When you get diseased, you get a surgery. There’s not a whole official preventive care going on. We are at last check, the 37th in the world in the healthcare system.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, we’re in line with Croatia. We’re in the same level as Croatia.
Dr. Jason Kelberman:And they just went through a horrible 10 years. I read that too. I was like, how could that be possible? There’s just a lot of bad health care in America. And I don’t know how to put it any more bluntly.
Wendy Myers: I know we have amazing doctors in private practice. The doctors go where they’re going to get paid and they get paid very well in the US and we have a lot of amazing positions. But as a whole, our health care is pretty sorry.
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Yeah, I think we’re headed for some big changes. I don’t know how Obamacare is going to take care of that, there are a lot of other things you can talk about. I don’t really know the future of that but I can tell you that you’re on the right track with what you’re doing with your clients. And here we are at the year 2013, and we still need to have a good night sleep. There are certain basic things to our body that you cannot replace. You need good clean water. You need good clean food. You need a good night sleep to recharge. People don’t realize it though. We repair our tissues, we recharge at night. It’s like plugging us into a battery charger at night. If you don’t sleep, your healthcare is going to suffer. So those are the facts, folks! All of those 3 are still very important and the more of that you can do on your own, on an ongoing basis the healthier you will be.
Wendy Myers: Well, thank you so much Dr. Kelberman for being on the show. That was so informative and enlightening. And for you listeners out there, just definitely check out his website, it’s doctor D-R Kelberman dot com. And if you’re interested, if you have any kind of pain, if you’re diabetic, if you have some neuropathy going on, sports injury, he’s doing it all over there. You can go check out the Westside Wellness center ran by Dr. Kelberman. Thank you so much for being on the show Doctor!
Dr. Jason Kelberman: Appreciate the opportunity. You have a great weekend.
Wendy Myers: You too!
