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  • 01:25 Body BioRehab
  • 03:07 About Dr. Jess Armine
  • 07:20 Why Balance Neurotransmitters?
  • 08:59 Neurotransmitter Testing
  • 11:41 Healing Health Conditions with Neurotransmitter Balancing
  • 13:52 Anxiety and Neurotransmitter Balancing
  • 16:54 The Protocol
  • 19:36 Healing Your Gut
  • 24:35 Neurotransmitter Balancing
  • 31:45 Dangers of Long-Term Use of SSRI’s
  • 34:31 Sugar Addiction
  • 35:43 Genetic Testing
  • 41:49 Methylation and Bio-Individualized Medicine
  • 55:09 Where to find Dr. Jess Armine

Wendy Myers: Hello! Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me on myersdetox.com. You can also find the video on the corresponding blog post on our YouTube channel, WendyLiveto110.

Today, I have Dr. Jess Armine on the podcast today. We’re going to be talking about neurotransmitters and how to balance your neurotransmitters and all about testing, acid therapy, et cetera. A lot of people suffer from health conditions and mood disorders like anxiety and depression and don’t realize that they can simply alleviate their health issues by balancing their neurotransmitters.

We’re going to be talking about antidepressants and why those may not be necessary. You can simply treat your health issues with amino acid therapy. So we’ll delve into that during the podcast.

Please keep in mind that this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional, medical advice. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment today that we suggest on this show.

01:25 Body BioRehab

I’m thrilled to announce my new online health program called BodyBioRehab.com. Go to the website and sign up. It will be unveiled on April 1st. During the online program, it’s a 6-week program with a 30-day Paleo reset, I’m going to be talking about the five pillars of health – your diet, exercise, sleep, stress and of course, my favorite subject, detoxification.

You have to tend to these five pillars of health in order to live a healthy lifestyle disease-free and reverse health conditions. This is a very powerful online program that will help you to regain your energy, regain your mental clarity and focus and regain the vitality of your youth. It just takes these five simple steps to make this happen. I’m going to walk you through each step and show you all the tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the last seven years for how you need to improve your health and separate the myths from the facts, from the scientific, research-based facts in this program.

I’m so excited to bring it to you. It’s going to be very interactive with lots of video content, lots of online downloads, 30-day meal plan for the 30-day Paleo reset. You could lose weight. You can lose up to 10 lbs. during the 30-day reset. I’m so excited to bring it to you. So go to the website, BodyBioRehab.com and sign up!

And now, for today’s show.

03:07 About Dr. Jess Armine

Dr. Jess Armine holds a license as a doctor of chiropractic and a registered nurse and has been a healthcare professional for over 37 years. He is trained in chiropractic, methylation, genetic research, neuroendoimmunology, functional medicine, nutrigenomics, applied kinesiology, cranial manipulation and nutritional counseling.

Dr. Armine is one of the few specialists in the United States specializing in correlating genetic snips, which are single nucleotides polymorphisms like MTHFR with neuroendoimmunology. He also correlates this with acquired mitochondrial dysfunction and cell wall integrity to identify hidden imbalances, hidden stressors in the body. He develops individualized treatment plans specific to the health history and physiology of each individual patient.

Dr. Armine, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Jess Armine: I am very happy to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you began balancing neurotransmitters.

Dr. Jess Armine: Well, I’ve been a healthcare practitioner for close to 38 years now. I started out as an EMT in New York City and then I went to college for nursing and I was a registered nurse for about ten years and for the past 28 years, I’ve been a chiropractor.

Alternative medicine has always been something I’ve been interested in, but I got into the neuropsychiatric realm because I have a child with schizoaffective disorder. So going the traditional route, my son very quickly became not my son. They had him on so many different medications that he simply wasn’t who he was.

So there was a day when I looked in the mirror and said, “This disease is screwing with the wrong daddy.” I started researching and I started associating with people who are in the know and his entire realm of neuroendoimmunology, neurotransmitter balancing started blossoming in my head. Not only was I able to help my own son with integrative psychiatry, but I learned an entire new practice.

This included things like neuroendoimmunology. I also have certifications in applied kinesiology, cranial manipulation, nutritional counseling and I treat all manner of different things because what we do now that we’ve coined as methylation in bio-individualized medicine gives practitioners the ability to look at the root causes and downstream effects of everything where usually the people we’re treating are one end or the other and the genetics gives us a big 10,000 ft. point of view in saying, “Gee, that pathway may crash. That one may crash.” We can look at everything, put it together and say, “Hey! This is why you’re not healing and these are the possible causes.”

So it just blossomed over time and burgeoned. This is my absolute passion. I have been enjoying what I’m doing in helping a whole lot of different people finding the answers when they haven’t been able to get answers elsewhere. And those answers also include methodologies of healing. I’m watching kids and adults who have been ill for lengthy periods of time and had been told, “It’s either in your head” or, “You’re never going to get better” start to get better.

Wendy Myers: And I love that you’re doing this all with functional medicine and targeted nutrient therapy and amino acid therapy, et cetera. I love to hear stories. You talked about many case studies and the conference this January in the Center for Bio-Individualized Medicine, the methylation conference. I loved hearing all these stories of success.

07:20 Why Balance Neurotransmitters?

Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about why you need or want to balance your neurotransmitters?

Dr. Jess Armine: Well, the neurotransmitters are the way that you express your moods, the way that you think. Neurotransmitters, I think we bandy the term around, but what they are are substances (and there are about 300 of them) that transmit nerve impulses from one nerve to another. Our nerves actually connect to one another.

They have their own little personalities and when a nerve impulse comes down the pike, it needs to get from one place to another, so it uses these chemical substances, hence the word ‘neurotransmitters’. And the type, the particular receptors all give us the ability to wake up, calm down, be able to think, be able to reason, keep an even keel in our lives. It’s all based in the neurotransmitters.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that nerves don’t go in one direction. We think of the android in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mr. Data, he’s got that positronic brain. That’s really what our brains are like. They’re very holographic. So the ability to move information around is the way that we express ourselves, the way that we walk, the way that we interact with our environment. It’s all based in neurotransmitter balance.

08:59 Neurotransmitter Testing

Wendy Myers: So how do you go about testing for neurotransmitters?

Dr. Jess Armine: I’m going to say it and then I’m going to have loads and loads of people yell at me because they always do and I sit there and…

Wendy Myers: Let them yell…

Dr. Jess Armine: Let them yell. You can yell at me as much as you want, you’re just taking your chances. You can test neurotransmitters either with serum, cerebrospinal fluid or urine.
Obviously, if you use cerebrospinal fluid, you’re going to get more of the central nervous system reading, but that’s a dangerous procedure if you’re going to do a lumbar puncture to get cerebrospinal fluid. It’s not something you want to do on a regular basis.

Most people will test either with blood serum or urine. I tend to use more of the urine test.
Now, to anticipate everyone’s argument, the first thing that every researcher jumps up and stomps their feet and says is, “That’s not central nervous system” and I’m like, “Yes… I know that. Some of it is from the central nervous system and some of it is from the peripheral nervous system. You have to understand that and you have to correlate with the history and the findings to see what is significant.”
But if you think about it, utilizing urine and saliva or using blood serum is more available. Remember, you’re looking at biomarkers. You’re looking more at patterns than you are at absolute numbers and you combine it with the history.

My biggest joke, for real estate, it’s location, location, location. For doctors, it’s history, history, history. I think they’ve forgotten that though. You can look at those tests, look at the patterns, look at your patient and say, “Okay, this is what has to be done.”

And I will tell you something about urinary neurotransmitter testing (which I’ve been doing for almost two decades now), when someone gets better, when I’m seeing a particular pattern and I treat that pattern, the amount that they get better when I re-test them is the amount that those neurotransmitter balances have gotten better. It’s almost a straight correlation. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen at any kind of lab test.

So yes, I do use urine. I know I’m going to get yelled at, but guess what? It works.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. And the same thing happens. I use hair mineral analysis with most of my clients and it’s the same thing. You can’t look at absolute levels. There’s a number of things that were raised (magnesium, for instance) and you have to look at the person as a whole and their health history, et cetera.

Dr. Jess Armine: You build up a lot of uranium, you do have to ask if they were going to…

Wendy Myers: No, uranium factory.

Dr. Jess Armine: But if that happened from Rosswell, New Mexico where they had the explosions, they might have a bit of uranium in the soil. You just have to think about it a bit.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

11:41 Healing Health Conditions with Neurotransmitter Balancing

Wendy Myers: And so what kind of health conditions can literally be healed or greatly improved by balancing neurotransmitters?

Dr. Jess Armine: Well, without trying to sound facetious, almost everything. But what do I tend to treat? I tend to treat children with PANDAS, with OCD. I treat people with OCD, depression.
The more serious psychiatric disorders, I will co-treat with the physicians. I’m not an anti-medicine person. I’m not going to take somebody with psychosis and take them out of their antipsychotics just because I do alternative medicine. I’m going to balance the neurotransmitters and then have the psychopharmacologist slowly change that around.

I’ve seen people in five, six or seven medicines, after six or seven months working together on one medicine and that individual who was non-functional is now a functional member of society.

Almost every condition that you can think of where there’s any kind of mood component or physical component – I spoke with a family over the weekend. One of them was a physician and the daughter had PANDAS, but had horrible neurological ticks – jumping all over the place and dancing the whole bit. Even before we started with the neurotransmitter balancing and the history, I looked at what she was taking, what could have possibly raised sulfur or increase the excitatory neurotransmitter, I took her off all of those things and within one day, all of the neurological symptoms were down by 50% just by knowing the biochemical pathways. When I get her testing back, I’ll be able to balance that better.

Understand that that is a result of something. It isn’t by itself a thing, it is the result of something, but this is how we interact with our environment. Balancing neurotransmitters is a very great part of healing almost anything.

13:52 Anxiety and Neurotransmitter Balancing

Wendy Myers: And what about people with anxiety? I have a lot of clients with anxiety. What is the process for that? What neurotransmitters are excitatory? What’s happening to them and what can be done to calm those, put the breaks on?

Dr. Jess Armine: Anxiety or let’s use the word ‘excitation’ because men will not talk about anxiety, they’ll talk about irritability. Anything that is an excitatory condition (anxiety, irritability, OCD, ODD, oppositional defiance disorder, stuff like that) is an imbalance in the inhibitory versus the excitatory neurotransmitters.

Inhibitory neurotransmitters calm things, excitatories allow you to wake up and have energy. You have to have a balance.

If, let’s say you’ve been under so much stress that you’ve overused your inhibitories, you may even have normal level of excitatories, but guess what? It’ll look like this.

So depending on your genetic predisposition, that excitation will express as anxiety, irritability, OCD or whatever it happens to be. So you always look to balance inhibitory and excitatory.

Now, the safest way to go about it without worrying about you’re going to hurt somebody is to use some form of GABA (usually a phenylated GABA) that could get into the brain. GABA is the great calmer/downer for the whole mammalian species. Things like alcohol, benzodiazepines will stimulate the GABA-A receptor to release GABA. They don’t provide with GABA, but there are certain substances out there that will actually supply the body with GABA. And if it’s phenylated, it will get into the brain and your body will have the ability to counterbalance whatever the excitation is.

I’ve taken away hallucinations in kids with just the use of GABA and maybe [inaudible 00:16:07] glutamate up using some thinning to knock down the glutamate just to bring the excitation down.
So if you always think of excitation versus inhibition, you always think of balance, you can never be wrong.

Wendy Myers: I know GABA is a huge one. I offer that to my clients when they’re having trouble sleeping, when they have anxiety, et cetera. It’s a huge help. It’s much better than Xanax.

Dr. Jess Armine: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Wendy Myers: It’s much better than taking benzodiapezines.

Dr. Jess Armine: You can get hooked on them bad.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jess Armine: And getting off them is a real bear.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I know a lot of people who have permanent damage from using them. About 60% of people are okay, but there are a big percentage of people that suffer a lot of damage from just trying to increase their GABA and feel better.

16:54 The Protocol

Wendy Myers: So why don’t we talk a little bit about how you do neurotransmitter testing. Is that one of the first things that you do to help? In their treatment protocol, do you balance the neurotransmitters first? What’s your method?

Dr. Jess Armine: Well, my standing joke with everybody in the world is that protocols are a four-letter word in my office. I’ll tell you why.

The subset of people I tend to treat are those people who haven’t found the answers elsewhere, which means I may be their 10th doctor, 18th doctor, 75th doctor. They have been everywhere. So the first thing I do is gather all their information and do a very, very good history.

Why do I do that? Number one, they’ve probably done all the tests I can think of having a need to do be done. And I know that there are a lot of alternative medicine practitioners that people will go to see who charge a fair amount to see them, but then also request, before they even see them a very large amount of laboratory testing, which in my estimation is throwing you-know-what against the wall and seeing what sticks. So I’ll see whatever is there.

After I take a history and I kind of figured out where the stones had been left unturned, the neurotransmitter testing may have already been done. I may have something like a Nutreval where I have the neurotransmitter metabolites and I can be guided by them. There’s a whole mess of different ways of garnering that type of information.

If you’re asking do I do a lot of neurotransmitter testing, it’s probably about 70% of the people because they haven’t had that done. That’s one of the stones that had been left unturned generally speaking.

The other one is that people haven’t fixed their gut correctly. And many, many practitioners are fixing the guts differently, but leaving one portion out. And I think it not to be ignorance (everybody’s doing their best), but it’s the way everybody’s been taught. So now, we have a lot of whole mess of information going on.

So neurotransmitter testing comes either earlier or later depending on what I see. With the individual I spoke with over the weekend, that’s the first thing I’m doing and it’s the only thing I need to do because I have everything else. I’m like, “Look, I know what to do with the GABA. I’ll send you the phenylated GABA, but we have to see what the rest of these neurotransmitters are doing.” I can tell by the pattern what the body is doing and then I know how to intervene.

19:36 Healing Your Gut

Wendy Myers: So why is it important to heal your gut, to indirectly balance your transmitters?

Dr. Jess Armine: Well, we all talk about leaky gut syndrome, intestinal hyperpermeability and the like. The gut has a mucous layer, which is its extrinsic barriers which traps things like toxins, biotics, dietary peptides (which are incompletely broken down products of proteins). The mucous layer is the biota. If we take probiotics, that’s where they sit, that’s where they do their work, that’s where the eat. And then we have secretory IGA that’s supposed to bind up all those bad boys.

Underneath that, we have cells that look like this and we always talk about the tight junctions and how those toxins and stuff can’t get through tight junctions unless they open up. What’s really happening is the cells begin to die because of damage. And when they die, they release cytokines, which are the Reese’s pieces for E.T. Have you ever wondered how the white blood cells know where to go? Well, they look for cytokines.

Then they go in and they literally rip out the area. They make everything nice and clean, but they leave these gaping holes. One or two is not a big deal, but when it happens generally throughout the gut, you’ve got entries for all these antigens.

The immune system sitting underneath there will start chewing on the antigens bring it to a t-cell and that t-cell will start producing antibodies.

Now, here’s the thing. The more that the body gets stimulated, the more memory t-cells are created. So every time the body sees that particular antigen, it’s going to produce a prodigious amount of antibodies. The more antibodies you have, think of that as the equivalent of inflammation.

So if you have this massive leaky gut and you’re reacting to everything, you’re constantly producing a ton of antibodies, immunoglobulins or whatever word you want to use and that equals a ton of inflammation.

Inflammation, even in the medical literature right now, is being identified as being the major source of all the ills of the world. Whether it’s inflammation, oxidative stress, it’s the same thing. We now understand oxidative stress, but the very first thing that you want to do with anybody is try and bring down their inflammation – and not by blocking it at the prostaglandin level or at the cyclooxygenase level like with the COX-2 inhibitor, but at its source, which is usually in the gut to at least 50% to 80%.

I’ve had people with autoimmune diseases. One month on a leaky gut treatment plan and their pain is 80% gone just by virtually the fact that the inflammation is going down.

So if you have a lot of inflammation, depending on your genetic predispositions, you’re going to start stimulating maybe the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, you’re going to start messing with the neurotransmitters in that particular manner. Any type of excitation is going to start having problems with the neurotransmitters in one way or another.

And by the way, the neurotransmitters and the immune system and the hormone system, they all talk together. They’re constantly chattering. So you mess one with one, you mess with all.

Leaky gut is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. You don’t even have to test for it, between the glycophosphates and everything. Everything that attacks the gut attacks the biome in the gut. That’s where the new research is going.

So is it worth treating the gut? You bet! What’s the risk? Zero. What’s the benefit? Immense. And since treating the gut is not an expensive deal, it’s just a matter of maybe being careful about your diet and giving your body what it needs to heal, it’s kind of a worthy thing to do.

Wendy Myers: I was very surprised when you guys mentioned in the conference that 40% of people that had leaky gut have no symptoms.

Dr. Jess Armine: Absolutely true. I often get that, “But I don’t have any gut symptoms.” I don’t know why there’s not more of that, but 80% of the people with gluten intolerance don’t have gastrointestinal symptoms. It’s called Silent Celiac Disease and it affects different areas of the body.

It took the allopaths a very long time to recognize what we knew for years that gluten is a problem. And the biggest thing I’m seeing now is that people are reacting to the non-gluten grains, which unfortunately, people are still starting to get that mindset, “Oh, let’s just take the grains away.” No, let’s fix the leaky gut. That’s what’s causing it.

24:35 Neurotransmitter Balancing

Wendy Myers: And so how do you go about balancing neurotransmitters?

Dr. Jess Armine: Well, you use targeted amino acid therapy, which is to say that if I want more serotonin, I’ll use 5-hydroxytyptophan. I’ll use Citicoline’s 5-hydroxytryptophan, serotonin. And serotonin or melatonin, usually, you want some B6 or what are co-factors with that.

GABA, I try and supply directly for a while because GABA comes from glutamine in the gut and glutamine becomes glutamate, which is excitatory, then it becomes GABA. And if you have some problems in that pathway, you end up with a lot of glutamate and not too much GABA. So until the gut is fixed up and everything calms down, I tend to want to give people straight GABA.

The excitatory neurotransmitters is kind of interesting. It’s a bit of clinical decision-making because you’ve got things like phenylethylamine and norepinephrine, which is responsible for your ability to focus. So your true ADD person has too little phenylethylamine and too little norepinephrine. Whereas your ADHD person (I know they have different classifications these days), the ones with the hyperactive mind, their minds are moving so fast that they have the attention span of gnat. So guess what? You have the same symptoms, but different causations.

So if I have a lot of excitatories and very little inhibitories, I’ll build the inhibitories up first. If they’re all down, in my history, if they tend toward the anxiety disorders, I’ll build the inhibitories up first. If there’s no history, I may do it simultaneously.

And there are certain substances like tyrosine, DL-phenylalanine, D5 Mucuna. There are a lot of natural substances that will plug directly into the pathways and supply dopamine.

Generally speaking, if you looking at phenylethylamine, [inaudible 00:26:46], phynelalanine and tyrosine, L-dopa, dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine, but for some reason, the tyrosine likes the norepi and epi and then the D5 Mucuna likes the L-dopa and the DL-phenylalanine likes the phenylethylamine.

So you have to do it based not only what you’re seeing on the paper, but with your patient’s primary problems are. And plus, if I have a high functioning person that needs to think, I may do things simultaneously. It’s clinically variable, but the general principles to increase the inhibitory neurotransmitters prior to increasing the excitatories. Otherwise, you create anxiety states.

Wendy Myers: And so are you a fan of – you had mentioned 5-HTP. Do you prefer that over tryptophan? I’ve heard that tryptophan can be made into more neurotransmitters.

Dr. Jess Armine: Tryptophan, l-tryptophan is what used to be used consistently until the observation was that with some people, tryptophan made theme excited instead of calming them down. They discovered something called the kynurenic pathway in the presence of pro-inflammatory cytokines (in other words, inflammation in the brain). L-tryptophan will become kynurenic acid, which is protective and then it becomes quinolinic acid, which upregulates the NMDA receptors, which create excitation.

The problem with tryptophan, they did a study 15 years ago where they did blood tests in 10,000 people. They found everybody is low on serotonin. Here’s the reason. Tryptophan is kind of a big molecule. And when you’re eating, you’ve got about a 3-hour window of absorption. The amino acid realm, tryptophan is the last guy in the bus to go across the membrane.

Tryptophan in and of itself, only about 5% or 10% converts to 5-hydroxytryptophan. So you’re already kind of at a deficit. If anything’s wrong in the gut at all, if there’s any kind of inflammation, the tryptophan is the one that’s going to take the hit.

So you get very, very little 5-hydroxytryptophan, which does not get into the manufacturers to create serotonin. So that’s how we kind of got into a ubiquitous serotonin lack in this country, which is why SSRI’s were kind of the first thing to come down the pike and did, in fact, helped a whole lot of people except that when you use the serotonin reuptake inhibitor, at the synapse, it’s helping the reuptake and keeping more serotonin at the synapse, but is doomed to fail because eventually, it doesn’t address why it’s low. So the fact is if you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it. It doesn’t matter how much you’re reuptaking.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I’ve read that it depletes the serotonin eventually because you’re constantly leaving it in the synapse and you can only do that for so long.

Dr. Jess Armine: Yeah, you’re making a copy. It’s like making of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s going to fade. You’re not going to have all the same qualities of it. The reality is that whatever is draining the serotonin, whatever is not allowing the serotonin to be replaced in the warehouses, the vesicles, if that process continues, then at some point, some amorphous point, the medicine will stop working and they’ll say, “Oh, let’s just give them more medicine” or worse, “Let’s give them Abilify.” It drives me nuts! “Oh, let’s give them a typical anti-psychotic” and now uses instead of reuptake inhibitors, receptor agonists and antagonists. All you’re doing is stretching the inevitable.

So now, people are beginning to think, “Hey, maybe we should treat both ends of this.” Using a band-aid is not dishonorable especially if you’re bleeding. What’s dishonorable is only using a band-aid and never paying attention to whatever is causing the bleeding. This is how we came across this particular way of thinking. So this is why when people come to me, everything else has failed.

I look at it and I say, “Okay, I know why it’s failed.” You can have a list of medicines and the neurotransmitter test, I can look at both of them and say, “Okay, I can tell you exactly what the real levels are based on I know how medicines bring the levels up artificially.”

I have a nickname that somebody gave me about a two years ago when I looked at her neurotransmitter test and I was literally telling her her entire life story. She said, “I know who you are!” I said, “Who?” “You’re the neurotransmitter whisperer.” And it stuck! All my friends, they come over to me and they’re like, “What do you think about this?” “Okay, [blubbering]… and this is what happened with this person… [blubbering]… and then this is why it’s failing. It’s going in this direction.” They’re like, “You’re weird.” I’m like, “Thank you.”

Wendy Myers: That’s a compliment.

Dr. Jess Armine: It is, it is.

31:45 Dangers of Long-Term Use of SSRI’s

Wendy Myers: So as the neurotransmitter whisperer, what in your opinion are some of the dangers of people using SSRI’s especially long-term?

Dr. Jess Armine: The dangers are as follows. Number one, let’s get to the big one, serotonin syndrome – first of all, an almost unheard of occurrence. The only way you can get serotonin syndrome is overdosing on SSRI’s. It is a life-threatening condition. Even if you see the serotonin way up and you use a lot of amino acids, you can’t get serotonin syndrome because when you use amino acids, if there’s extra, the body changes it into glucose via gluconeogenesis and there’s nothing to worry about.

Yet the utilization of the medication fosters a lack of responsibility on the physician’s, healthcare provider’s and patient’s part to go after the root cause of the problem. So here you are feeling better because of the SSRI, and let me tell you something, it’ll work 10 or 15 years, but then you never fixed what the problem is. Suppose it’s the Lyme, suppose it’s one of the co-infections, supposed it’s chronic strep, now you’re giving that organism ten more years to wreak havoc in your body.

So medicines aren’t evil. The injudicious use of medicines are evil and to not look at root causes or causations and the downstream effects, that’s evil. And there’s a set of doctors who have stolen my idea (there are a lot of people stealing my ideas these days) and using my words – I’m going to go after them, they’re using my stuff – and this doctor now calls his group ‘the upstreamers’ because they look upstream. I’m like, “You think you just discovered something?” I was like, “Okay!”

But the dangers of using anything like this is the fact that they’re doomed to fail and when they fail, it means that the body has gotten clinically worse. Think of it as a bell curve. If you’re within a couple of standard deviations, the body can fix itself. But the further you go out, the harder it is. If you were here, it would’ve been a lot easier, but if you were out here –

I don’t believe in permanent injury. I do believe things can be chronic, but it makes it so much harder to get it back here so that the body’s homeostatic mechanisms can heal it. So it’s the lack of looking any further than the medicine.

34:31 Sugar Addiction

Wendy Myers: Yeah, we were talking about tryptophan earlier. I think one of the reasons why a deficiency of serotonin is one of the reasons why so many people are addicted to sugar because when we eat sugar, the insulin clears out all the amino acids except for tryptophan. There’s no competition for it to get across the blood-brain barrier to make serotonin.

Dr. Jess Armine: That’s 100% true, which is why compulsive overeaters tend to go after carbs. They tend to be low in serotonin. That’s the 100% exact reason.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I always thought that was really compelling, very interesting. I know when I was a vegetarian, because I wasn’t getting any tryptophan, I could not stop eating sugar. It finally dawned on me when I woke up out of my haze to start eating meat again that that’s why, because I wasn’t getting enough tryptophan to make serotonin and my body was going to make it happen however it need it to happen.

Dr. Jess Armine: It will force you. It will force you to get what you need. Otherwise, it’ll cannibalize itself. And if it can’t cannibalize itself, it will just give you this unmitigating desire for something.

35:43 Genetic Testing

Wendy Myers: And so you do genetic testing?

Dr. Jess Armine: Yes, I do.

Wendy Myers: It’s one of the reasons why attended the Methylation Conference put on by the Center for Bio-Individualized Medicine. So talk a little bit about why you want to get genetic testing and how that very much relates to your neurotransmitter production.

Dr. Jess Armine: Well, it’s a really good question. Genetic testing, [inaudible 00:36:12] epigenome, which is the set of genes that encode enzymes that run your biochemical processes are an enormous data point when you’re looking at somebody with a chronic illness or even looking at a healthy person. You can look at someone’s genome and say, “Hmmm… this pathway isn’t as robust as it should be, so when under oxidative stress, it might fail.” It might stop producing what it’s supposed to produce, it might stop detoxifying what it’s supposed to detoxify.

And in that, when you take the genetic testing and you start putting it into its biochemical pathways, it becomes obvious why certain people become ill and it also gives you a path of healing.

The difficulty I see in genetic testing today is a lack of training. We said this at the conference. There’s a lack of training for healthcare providers understanding not only the polymorphisms or snips themselves, but they’re placed in the overall healthcare of someone. So if you have somebody with a lot of GAD snips, which is the glutamate decarboxylase that takes glutamate and makes it into GABA) and they have a lot of COMT (catechol methyltransferase) or MAO (monoamino oxidase) snips, which means that they can’t break down their excitatory neurotransmitters, you have a situation where they have a backup.

Depending on what’s causing the traffic, let’s say Lyme or yeast or whatever, they have this buildup of excitatory neurotransmitters that may work its way through that GAD, have a high level of glutamate and now irritate the heck out of the brain and whatever it’s going to do (anxiety, OCD, hallucinations and that type of stuff). That’s the pathway.

So you say, “What are you going to do about this?” Well, you bring down the inflammation. You start giving the pathways what they need, the co-factors and co-enzymes. Then you start going after the root causes.

The neurotransmitter test will tell you how much injury there is to the nervous system so you know what to start balancing. When you’ve had something chronically, different from acutely, if you have like strep throat, they give you antibiotics and a week later, you feel better and you’re fine. But when it’s chronic, damage has occurred. So there’s a certain amount of fixing that has to be done downstream if you will to allow that body to heal itself.

We do this with Lyme patients all the time. We’ll fix the body first, then let Lyme literate doctors go after them with what they do. The epigenetics give us warnings that perhaps this medicine may not be the best idea because you have these set of polymorphisms, so we should reconsider because it may not work this way.

Looking at the electron transport chain for the mitochondria, one of the reasons that many, many people don’t heal – and until last year (maybe 18 months ago), it was considered a permanent condition. Mitochondrial dysfunctions is one of the reasons that people don’t heal. They don’t produce enough energy to heal. And that’s why we coined the term ‘acquired mitochondrial dysfunction’ because in any oxidative stress state, you’re going to have a degree of it. And in epigenetics, if those highways are two lanes instead of eight, they’re going to have the most problems.

So I look at the person’s condition, I look at the snips and I say, “You know something? I’ve got to pay attention to the electron transport chain because I don’t think the person is getting better because of that.” And that’s how it’s used as a guidance.

The worst thing – I’m going to get in trouble again, so everybody get out of the way – there’s a lot of people waving the methylation flag, a lot of people waving the genetic or the nutrigenomic flag, you need to work with people who understands this very thoroughly (which is why we’re teaching it) and the worst thing you can do is go to a computer program, run your data through it and have that computer tell you what to start taking.

There are some people who are doing that now and that is as dangerous as heck because they’re doing nothing, but saying, “Ooh, you’ve got… you should take this.” If you have estrogen dominance, do you take DIM, IC3, calcium d-glucarate? Which is going to work for you? If you have dysbiosis and you get calcium d-glucarate, otherwise you’re going to make things worse.

I’ve seen a lot of people give methylating products (especially methyl B12, phenylpropiolate, trimethylglycine, yadah-yadah-yadah), the person takes it and all of a sudden, the back of their head blows off. That wasn’t the thing you should’ve been doing because you looked at this test, but you didn’t bother to take a history.

They interact. You’re going to see how the neurotransmitters break down, MTHFR will tell you how they may be produced. You look at the person’s condition, it also tells you how the person is detoxifying and where the possible glitches are, so you know where to start looking.

41:49 Methylation and Bio-Individualized Medicine

That’s the whole idea of methylation and bio-individualized medicine, give healthcare providers and everybody a paradigm to be looking at so that we heal by intention, not by accident – when we don’t forget stuff.

Wendy Myers: And it’s so true! You have to look at the whole client or health history, the medications they’re on, the supplements they’re on and all the testing. You can never have a computer tell you what supplements you have to take.

Dr. Jess Armine: I wish you could, but let me tell you something, it takes me a long time to do everything. And if you would see my desk, if I point it down here, you’d say, “Oh, my God! What a mess!” because I’m sitting here writing things, pointing things out.

Eventually, you get quicker at it, but this is, again, why we decided to run classes because the call now is there’s many, many healthcare providers and lay people literally worldwide that want to mentor with us and want to learn this and want to learn it correctly.

Believe it or not, the guys who I call the ‘charlatans’ – they call me a ‘charlatan’ and that’s okay – the ones I call the ‘charlatans’, the ones that aren’t doing it correctly, they attract people, but they never heal them and they end up in our labs. This is just the permutation of – 1970s, if you remember, there used to be psychoneuroimmunology where the medical say, “Ooh, the psyche, the mind and the immune system, they’re tied together. There are relationships there” and then in the 1980s, the Neuroscience Corporation came up with neuroendoimmunology where neurology, endocrinology and immunology starts talking with one another because they have receptors for each person’s biomarkers.

Methylation and bio-individualized medicine is the next permutation of that and we’re constantly researching. And what people don’t realize is that we constantly talk with one another. We’re not up in our ivory towers. Shawn talks to me, I talk to Shawn, we talk to Cynthia Sterling. Sterling talks a lot. There’s no one in the world who understands the polymorphisms better than that woman. And I’ll tell you something, as much as she chatters and as much as she can just go off, she’s got a heart of absolute gold. She has taken her life and dedicated it to doing this right and we have a lot.

This new form of healthcare owes her a debt that can never be repaid.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I actually have an appointment with her to go over my genetic snips.

Dr. Jess Armine: Make sure you bring your seatbelt and a lot of water because she’s very, very good, very good. She’ll tell you exactly what’s going on. She’ll also tell you, “I’m looking at all that stuff, but you better talk with a clinician because this stuff has to be differentiated.”

Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s one of those things where I think every clinician has their expertise. Clearly, hers are the genetic snips. But maybe she’s not the person to tell you what supplements to take. She has her little area of expertise and other people have their expertise.

Dr. Jess Armine: That’s true. And this is the nice thing about putting all those tests together because the more people that we bring into this sphere, the more expertise – and people, we’re going away from the specialist mindset because this is why we’re in trouble, people. People are going to specialists. In the sixties, you went to your general practitioner. The general practitioner ran everything. If you got sent to a specialist, they barely talk to you. They’ll say, “I’ll call your doctor.” Why? Because your GP run everything. Why? Because they knew you since you were a baby, they knew your family. If they had good news for you, fine. They knew what to give you. If they had bad news for you, who better to tell you?

In the seventies, everything went towards specialization and the GPs were ostracized. So now you have a set of doctors that are very good specialists in their one area, but no one talks to one another. We as consumers go to a gynecologist and expect them to be a family doctor. They go to the orthopedic and we expect them to be something else because we have needs. We don’t know who to go to, so the onus on treatment lands on the person least trained to do it and it’s the patient themselves.

What we’re doing is recreating generalists. We like to call ourselves specialized generalist. We’re recreating that person you can go to who can pull it all together and say, “Okay! This is what’s going on. If it’s not my court, at least I’ll know exactly where to send you and exactly what’s happening.” That’s the best service we can do for people.

Wendy Myers: I love that you’re going to be doing more training. I attended your January conference for the Center of Bio-Individualized Medicine.

Dr. Jess Armine: And you survived.

Wendy Myers: I survived, I survived. But you’re going to have that available for other people to purchase, correct?

Dr. Jess Armine: We’re going to have the video of it available. We’re going to be doing another seminar I think in Dallas. Of course, that was our first seminar. And let’s face it, any first seminars has these glitches.

Wendy Myers: It went well!

Dr. Jess Armine: Thank you! I appreciate it. No, I really do honestly appreciate that. We worked very hard. We spent six or seven months working on everything. So we took that and we’re going to stretch it out to three days so that we have more genetics in there and more clinical PEARLs.

And of course, that’s going to be not only physical there, but videostreamed. And you, people, healthcare providers have an opportunity to mingle with the speakers. They can just call the speakers up. We’re trying to centralize that.

I spoke with three doctors today who want to know this stuff. What they do is they bring tough cases and then go with them and say, “Okay, let’s go over it.” They put the genetic and then they put everything else and say, “This is what I’m seeing and this is what I would do” and a lot of times, it’s just like, “Oh! Okay, great! Now, I have another point of view that I can work with.”

Doctors really care about their patients. They get frustrated when they get people that they can’t heal. And then if they are too frustrated and they don’t want to learn, that’s when the head case diagnosis comes out.

But yeah, we’re going to continue. The research is ongoing. It’s ongoing, trust me. We spent a lot of time doing it and we love it.

Wendy Myers: I love that you had the conference available remotely as well because I didn’t really want to go to Philadelphia in the dead of winter.

Dr. Jess Armine: I don’t blame you.

Wendy Myers: But I took it. That’s great, so that it’s more available to more people. And you do physician training as well?

Dr. Jess Armine: Yes.

Wendy Myers: Yes.

Dr. Jess Armine: Yes, they just call our office, they make time with us – myself, Sean or they can call Cynthia and we literally go over cases with them.

It depends on what their particular needs are. There are some doctors who come and shadow us for a week or two. And basically, the time the week is done, they’ve gone through so many cases that they really got a good handle on how to think about this.

Nobody can know everything. What I can teach people, what I do teach people is how to think about it. And all the clinical experience we’ve had, the nice thing about our group like you just said, everybody has their, if you will, niche. It’s not really a niche. We all share, so that the sum of us exceeds any one of us.

So Sean has no problem working with me. He’s sitting in the next room. If he has a problem, he can just walk through the door. If I do, I have a problem, I walk through the door. And if I see something, Cynthia would know about it or Ben Lynch. I have no problem calling them up saying, “What do you think I should do about this, [blubbering]?” We constantly share information. That’s how this grew.

It’s big now. People are just going, “Dude, we heard you had some answers. We’re looking for it.”

Wendy Myers: Yeah, it sounds like you’re doing some really tough cases and had really amazing clinical outcomes.

Dr. Jess Armine: That’s the beautiful thing about it. People, especially children, who have been – and I told some stories during the conference. An ADD story, an 8-year old who was diagnosed at Johns Hopkins and Cleveland Clinic. She’s the cutest little thing on two legs. Little girls are the best. I think they live at the right hand of God.

She comes to my office with mom and I look like a bear and I have bears everywhere. I’m like, “You want to hold a bear?” She said, “Sure.” I said, “You want to hold another bear?” She said, “Sure.” I said, “You want access to my WiFi?” She said, “Okay!”

So I was looking at her neurotransmitter test, I noticed that her dopamine is through the roof. I asked mommy, I said, “Tell me about her hallucinations.” Mom looked at me and I said, “She’s been diagnosed with ADD, not psychosis.” She says, “You know, she always talks about the guys in her head. She’s eight years old.” Okay.

So I said, “What’s their name?” I said, “By the way, about the guys in your head, you like talking to them?” She said, “Oh, yeah. We’re always chattering constantly. I even have a mermaid that takes baths with me.” I’m like, “Tell me, when people are getting on you for not listening, are they getting kind of loud?” She said, “Dr. Jess, sometimes those guys are so loud, I can’t hear a thing” because I knew what was happening.

So I balanced the neurotransmitters, brought the GABA up, the glutamate down. The hallucinations went from loud to very, very quiet and we did other tests and she had Lyme disease. That’s what was setting it off. She’s in treatment now.

At first, she was very sad about not hearing the voice. You’ve got to be really careful because they’re their friends. But when hormones hit is when the voices start screaming. That’s why most of psychotic patients are diagnosed at 15, 16, 17, 18. But the time the hormones are in full swing or for whatever reason, that’s an exacerbatory effect. They scream as opposed to just having friends that they’re talking to, that they’re very happy with. You don’t want to take those guys away, you want to calm them down, so they’re not screaming.

But there’s an example of diagnosis of ADD, which is not a diagnosis, it’s a syndrome and the actual root cause of the problem. We were able to calm that brain down. She was able to live completely normally and happily and now, they decided to treat with an LLND, which is fine. They’re having great success right now.

Wendy Myers: That’s great. And Lyme disease is very prevalent. It’s much more prevalent than people think.

Dr. Jess Armine: Yes. And if any of your listeners – I know you have a great following – have any kind of chronic illness and Lyme disease has not been checked and checked thoroughly, then the doctors has not their job.

The diagnosis of Lyme is a toughie, but there are lots of tests that you have to do to look for the presence of Lyme, whether it’s hiding, whether there have been immune dysfunctions. Some of the tests are very direct, some of them, by inference. You’ve got to keep that constantly in your head because Lyme and co-infections are ubiquitous. They found them in the Antarctic in the empire penguins. The seabirds were carrying the ticks over.

So you look at those maps, you say, “Oh, this is a Lyme-endemic area.” Those aware, they find CDC criteria Lyme, that’s where they were diagnosed. So that’s where they have to be reported. That is not a reflection of where Lyme is. Where Lyme is, you can take that map, spray it and it’s everywhere.
Lyme is a spirochete just like syphilis. You remember syphilis’ end stage will go to the brain? Well, spirochete’s end stage goes to the brain. It’s going to go to the neurological system. And this is why I’m beginning to see kids with adrenal exhaustion at 13. I used to see this at 65 because they’ve had it since they’ve been two. So the upregulation of their system has made their adrenal system and their thyroid, everything just go [gesture] by the time they’re 13.

How does that express then? That’s expressed with neuropsychiatric disease, ADD, especially with the hormones, sometimes just poor behavior, sociopathy. You run that gamut.

This is why you look at the genetics, you look at the root causes, the downstream effects, you look at the mitochondria, you look at the cell wall stability and for the most part, you can heal people. You’re going to find out what’s wrong and you’re going to have a line on which way to heal them.

Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Armine, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. That was so rich of information.

Dr. Jess Armine: Thank you. I tend to babble, I’m sorry.

Wendy Myers: I know! We want you to babble, that’s why you’re here for. Babble away!

55:09 Where to find Dr. Jess Armine

Wendy Myers: But why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about you, where your clinic is, how you operate, can you operate remotely, et cetera?

Dr. Jess Armine: The vast majority of my patients are remote. I treat them on the phone or I treat them on Skype. My standard joke is, “Do you think my Australian patients fly in to see me?” Hey, I start my day in either Italy, Scotland, Ireland, England and I’m around the United States. And at the end of the day, I’m in Australia because of where it is.

I do have people from local area. Even people from local areas an hour away treat remotely with me. So I’m very comfortable doing that. If someone needs the services of a practitioner, they need hands-on [inaudible 00:55:56] for them to the appropriate practitioner, but the vast majority of the people have had everything done and it’s a matter of diagnosis, it’s a matter of figuring things out. So yup, I treat remotely.

Wendy Myers: So what is your website? Where can people find you?

Dr. Jess Armine: It’s really easy, DrJessArmine.com. If anybody had a thought that perhaps they wanted to know whether I could help them or not, they can just call my office. The number is right on my website and talk to my patient coordinator. What they will do is schedule what I call a 15-minute complimentary get-acquainted conference. I love these little conferences because I get to chat for somebody for a few minutes and within 10 or 15 minutes, I’m going to be able to say, “Yes, I can help you” or, “No, I can’t.” And this way, they don’t spend any money. And then if we did decide to dive in, we dive in with both feet.

Wendy Myers: And what is MABIN.org?

Dr. Jess Armine: MABIN.org is the educational arm. We created an LLC called Methylation in Bio-Individualized Medicine. Sterling and her MTHFRSupport.com – we all know each other, of course – and Bio-Individualized Medicine, which is Shawn’s and my trademark, we created it. We looked at each other and said, “You know, we’re going to have to get together anyway sometime. Why don’t we just put it together formally so we can teach,” hence Methylation and Bio-Individualized Medicine and that is our educational arm.

We have a scientific advisory board and this is where the education is coming out, which is why we’re into certifications and so forth. We wanted to have an educational arm that had more and more people with us so that we can expand the knowledge base and reach more types of practitioners and the benefit to the person, to the practitioners is that they’re getting four or five different points of view as opposed to one person teaching.

And to lay people, let’s face it, sometimes you have to say things a certain way and they may hear it correctly from one person and if that makes that kind of difference in their lives, that’s a real turning point for them.

So that’s what MABIN.org is. If you go to that website, I guess you can sign up for our newsletter. You’ll see everything that’s going. You’ll see pretty pictures of us. We’ve got all kinds of pictures from the seminar. It was a lot of fun!

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I learned a lot from it. I’m looking forward to watching it again and to attending your next conference. It was an earful, believe me.

Dr. Jess Armine: We shoved too much into two days. We’re going to expand it out. It was like, “Okay, [blubbering]…”

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I know. There’s a lot of information to fit into two days there.

Dr. Jess Armine: Especially Shawn, if you saw how fast he was talking, what you didn’t see is I had a dog collar on him. It’s going buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. He’s like [barking]. Faster! Okay! It’s like all these information to put in there. And then, of course, people are asking questions. He’s trying to answer questions, I go, “Stop answering the questions. We have time for that later. You’ve got all these information to put out.”

Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. No, I understand. It was a lot to chew on for sure.

Dr. Jess Armine: Yes.

Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Armine, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And listeners, if you want to learn all about detoxification and the modern Paleo diet and how to heal your health conditions naturally, please go visit myersdetox.com, learn more about me. You can learn about my healing program at MineralPower.com and pretty soon, my online health basic program called BioBodyRehab.com.

Dr. Jess Armine: Ooh, that sounds great.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s going to be exciting! Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.

Dr. Jess Armine: Thank you so much!