As the baby boomers are aging, the greatest fear that I hear from all of them is the development of Alzheimer’s disease. More feared than even cancer or heart disease, people are afraid of losing their memory. I even get emails and calls from the children of older patients, very concerned about their parents memories.

Now, a new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that people with purpose in their life are 2.4 times more likely to remain free of Alzheimer’s disease than is a person who has low purpose in life. The article specifically explains that “Purpose in life, the psychological tendency to derive meaning from life’s experiences and to possess a sense of intentionality and goal directedness that guides behavior, has long been hypothesized to protect against adverse health outcomes.”

In an interview with the author of the article, Patricia Boyle, Ph.D, who is a neuropsychologist at the Rush Alzheimer’s disease Center in Chicago, she pointed out that purpose is “a very robust predictor of health and wellness in old age.” In her research she found that purpose “also slowed the rate of cognitive decline by about 30%, which is a lot.”

After they followed 246 people who subsequently died and had autopsies, they found that many of the people with high purpose also showed the distinctive markers of Alzheimer’s disease, but did not show signs of that in their day to day life! “But even for people developing the plaques and tangles in their brains, having purpose in life allows you to tolerate them and still maintain your cognition,” said Dr. Boyle.

In another study researchers also found that those who have high purpose had approximately half the mortality of those with no purpose.

Dr. Boyle also went on to say that older people “want to make a contribution. They want to feel part of something that extends beyond themselves.” People who have a purpose “have a sense of their role in the community and the broader world she went on to say.

This information fits in very well with what I I have observed in my practice over the last several decades. I’ve observed that after people retire, if they don’t have a focus for their energies they usually get some chronic disease within five years.

To all my patients and readers who are aging baby boomers, or the children of parents who are part of the aging baby boomers, be sure to maintain a focus in the purpose for your life as you move into retirement age. These studies clearly show that this will help keep you young and vibrant and help protect you against Alzheimer’s disease.

Let me know your thoughts about this. Do you maintain a purpose in your life? After you retire what are you planning on doing with your life? I look forward to hearing from you.

Dr. Soram

References

Effect of a Purpose in Life on Risk of Incident Alzheimer Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment in Community-Dwelling Older Persons

Purpose in Life Is Associated With Mortality Among Community-Dwelling Older Persons

Centenarian Secrets: Living Long and Strong

Living on Purpose-The New York Times

My longtime mentor in my study of biochemical nutrition, Jeffrey Bland, Ph.D., has just completed a new book. The title of the book is The Disease Delusion – Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life.I began studying with Dr. Jeffrey Bland in 1980, and I have continued since then, to learn from this genius of a man. Dr. Bland has a photographic memory, and has been able to quote medical journal resources in rapid fire to me, when we have conversations. In his monthly audio program called Functional Medicine Update he has interviewed hundreds of leading integrative medicine practitioners and I have learned so much from him.

As my patients well know, and most of my readers know, my approach to taking care of patients over these last many years, has been to look at the underlying function of organs, and to use natural techniques to improve their functioning. By doing this the “side effect” is bringing a person back to good health.

Now in this seminal book, which I consider to be a manifesto for functional medicine, Dr. Bland has made the concepts of functional medicine clear and concise for all to learn.

Functional medicine is an approach to health care that looks at the underlying function of the body organs. It looks at the weblike interaction between all of our organs that lead to the health that we have today. It accepts the concept that genes are not written in stone. Our genes take our environment to activate them or deactivate them and that is what leads to our current health status. Just because your parents had heart disease or Alzheimer’s disease, does not mean that that is your fate. Functional medicine realizes that by modifying environment and lifestyle, good genes are activated and bad genes are turned off.

A recognition of this weblike interaction between our organs, and the effect of environment on our genes, is critical in medicine today. Our current system of healthcare, where we treat “every ill with a pill”, is leading to more and more disability and lost productivity, especially in the elderly. It leads to the constant use of drugs to cover symptoms of chronic disease, rather than looking at the underlying organ dysfunction and supporting that with natural therapies.

My colleague Mark Hyman, M.D. has written a wonderful preface to Dr. Bland’s book which I quote here:

“That is the exactly the state of medicine today as we face the tsunami of chronic diseases that will cost our global economy $47 trillion over the next twenty years and kill twice as many people around the world as infectious disease.

As we spend more and more for health care we get less and less. The United States has worse health-care outcomes and lower life expectancy than almost every other developed nation. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune diseases, digestive disorders, dementia, allergies, asthma, arthritis, depression, attention deficit disorder, autism, Parkinson’s disease, hormonal problems like early puberty and infertility—these and more cause endless suffering and drain our financial resources. Chronic diseases now affect one in two Americans and account for 80 percent of our health-care costs. Yet despite a host of new drugs and procedures, the incidence of chronic disease continues to rise, not only in the United States but around the globe as developing countries adopt the worst of our food and culture.

The answer to this paradox should be obvious to all of us: what we are doing is not working. Our current medical model was constructed to treat acute disease, which we have mostly vanquished. We identified a single agent for illness—a microbe—and a single agent to treat it: antibiotics. Since then, medicine has pursued a quest: to find a pill for every ill. This quest has failed. We need a different paradigm, a different model for diagnosing and treating this new epidemic of chronic disease.

Disease as we think about it is a false idol. It does not exist in the way we think about it. The names we give diseases are useful for finding the right medication but not for truly getting to the cause or creating a healing response. Knowing the name of a disease tells us nothing about its true cause; nor does it lead us to the right treatment. This is the disease delusion.”

Dr. Bland lets us know that by chronic diseases he means all those conditions, ailments and illnesses that make you sick and then really never go away. “That’s not their nature”, he says, “Their nature is to stay or to come back again and again.” And any conscious thinking doctor sees this all day in his practice.

Dr. Bland points out that the title of his book is based on the idea that disease is a delusion, one that has been shattered by the still emerging science of genomics. As he says “these so-called diseases are dysfunctions of each individual’s physiological functioning; they are due to varied causes and they demand treatment approaches as different from one another as are the individuals.”

He goes on to point out that almost half of adult Americans – 133 million people -now suffer from at least one chronic disease. Among Medicare beneficiaries, 65 and older, the statistics are even worse. More than half of Medicare patients are being treated for multiple chronic conditions – diabetes and hypertension and heart disease, are the most common of them.

Chronic diseases account for 80% of our healthcare costs. And even though we have new drugs and procedures to treat them, the incidence of chronic disease continues to increase not only in our country but in countries all over the world.

It is this very approach to treating chronic disease of giving a drug for each symptom that leads to what doctors call polypharmacy. I teach my medical students at UCLA to avoid polypharmacy. However, when a patient comes in with multiple complaints, it is hard not to give him a drug for each symptom. This leads to drug-drug interactions with its own set of side effects, which often can result in hospitalization and more expenses.

After several chapters describing what is going on in medicine today and the basics of the functional medicine approach, Dr. Bland looks at the seven core physiological processes in our body. These are:

• Assimilation and elimination
• Detoxification
• Defense
• Cellular communications
• Cellular transport
• Energy
• Structure

After reviewing these basic physiological processes that functional medicine addresses, in part three of his book Dr. Bland looks at how to personalize your own health management plan.

I urge all my patients and my readers, to read this wonderful book, which will explain functional medicine to you in an eloquent fashion. For, in my opinion, functional medicine is the future of healthcare in our country.

If you or a family member, or friend has a chronic health condition, or is concerned about getting a chronic health condition, this book will give you a new approach to thinking of that condition. And most importantly, it will give you a lot of hope!

Dr Bland has given several interviews about his book and I post them here for your review.

This first video is Dr Bland talking about his book ( The audio was not working when I posted this, but hopefully Vimeo will get it working by the time you read this! )

This video is a great interview of Dr. Bland, by a Christian Radio Announcer, Rick Wiles, whose own wife was helped by functional medicine. For those of you who do not follow Christian radio, you can advance the slider to exactly 16 minutes and 28 seconds –16:28 and you will hear a wonderful interview with Dr Bland where he has the time to really talk about functional medicine in an expanded way.

Let me know your thoughts! Do you have a chronic health condition that has been benefited by a functional medicine approach?

Wishing you the best in health

Dr. Soram

For a long time now, women and their physicians have been in conversation about the question of whether estrogen causes breast cancer.

The Women’s Health Initiative study which was published in 2002 showed a very slight increase in breast cancer in women who were taking a combination of a horse estrogen and a synthetic progesterone.

The headlines of the newspapers around the world forgot to mention that it was horse estrogen that was being tested. Along with the horse estrogen women were given a synthetic chemical progesterone-like molecule which is completely different than human progesterone. This is called medroxyprogesterone and is a completely chemically created drug.

If one looks at the details of the Women’s Health Initiative, one sees that of the women taking the combination of horse estrogen and synthetic progesterone, there were 38 women diagnosed with breast cancer per 10,000 women per year, compared to 30 cases diagnosed in women who were not using the hormone replacement therapy. The statistics that are given is that this is a 26% increase (because if you divide 38 by 30 you get 26% additional .) However, if you look at it as noted above it’s really an extra 8 women per 10,000 women who got cancer. This number does not sound as big as the number 26%. And again this was with a horse’s estrogen and drug form of progesterone!

When we look at the horse hormones in the estrogen used in this study, we see that they are called equilin and equiline. In at least one study equilin has been shown to be metabolized into a molecule which is a very potent cytotoxin. A cytotoxin is a molecule that is toxic to cells and can degenerate them to become cancer.

When integrative doctors, including myself, were asked about this study when it first came out, we pointed out that the estrogen used was from horses. Although there was one human estrogen in the estrogen combination used in the study, the other estrogens in the hormone, called equilin, and equiline, are only found in horses,. We also pointed out that the horse estrogens were much stronger stimulators to the breast tissue than human estrogen. In addition we would always remind people that the synthetic progesterone used in the study was a synthetic drug and was not human progesterone.

Gynecologists and oncologists have always been skeptical that there was any difference in the effect on breast tissue, between horse estrogen and a synthetic type of progerstone, than human estrogen and progesterone would have.

Now I am happy to tell you that a major presentation at the International Menopause Society has shown for the first time, proof of what hormone replacement therapy actually does to the genes involved in breast cancer.

The study that was done at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found 30 healthy women volunteers who agreed to have two biopsies of their breast using a needle technique.

Breast tissue was taken from the group of women and the activity of 16 genes that were known to be associated with a greater risk of breast cancer were evaluated. The women were then divided into two groups.

One group took the conjugated horse estrogen and the synthetic progesterone, both of which were used in the Women’s Health Initiative study noted above.

The other group of 15 women were given human estrogen gel and oral capsules of human progesterone.

The women went through two cycles of the hormone replacement therapy and then had their second breast needle biopsies.

What was found in the biopsy analysis is that the horse estrogen and chemical progesterone combination changed the expression of 8 out of 16 of the breast cancer genes. In the women who took the human estrogen and human progesterone, only 4 out of the16 genes changed their expression. This difference was certainly statistically significant.

What does this mean?

Professor Gunnar Soderqvist, the lead author of the study stated ““Until now, it has not been possible to assess breast gene regulation in healthy women in vivo. This is the first study ever describing effects in healthy women during these HRT treatments and shows very important differences mostly in favour of ”natural“ treatment with the gel containing estradiol/ oral micronised progesterone when compared with ”synthetic” oral CEE/MPA. (horse estrogen and chemical progesterone).

He went on to say “The study does not show that either HRT formulation ”causes cancer,” but it does show that the type of HRT and perhaps the route of administration will cause differences in genes associated with breast cancer.

“We can conclude by saying that natural treatment with the estrogen gel and oral progesterone affects gene regulation and surrogate markers for breast cancer risk (such as mammographic density and breast cell proliferation) considerably less than the conventional synthetic treatment which stopped the WHI study.”

In addition, the president of the International Menopause Society, Professor Rod Baber said that “This very important study shows that use of HRT combining a transdermal estradiol preparation with oral micronised progesterone causes significantly less expression of genes associated with breast cell proliferation and breast cancer than the more traditional HRT combination of conjugated estrogens plus medroxyprogesterone.

“The basic science from this study supports the evidence we have from clinical trials such as the French E3N trial, which shows that the choice of estrogen and progestogen and the mode of delivery is important in reducing any risk of breast cancer possibly associated with long term HRT”

I am so delighted that this study has recently been published. Hopefully it will encourage doctors to give women who choose to take homone replacement therapy the natural bio-identical type of hormone replacement, rather than the horse and synthetic hormones which are still so widely used today.

When I look at the bottom line of this study in the perspective of time, I am so disappointed that it took scientists until 2014, using genomic testing only recently available, to figure out that naturally occurring human hormones would have less effect on a woman’s breast than horse estrogen and a synthetic drug.

I look forward to being in conversation with all of you about this.

References

For the first time, proof of what hormone replacement therapy does to genes involved in breast cancer

WHI Trial Suggests Possible Reduction in Breast Cancer Risk with Estrogen Alone

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)

WHI Updated Analysis: No Increased Risk of Breast Cancer with Estrogen-Alone

PREMARIN MARES AND FOALS

Equilin Breakdown