Healing From the Toxic Wildfire Smoke

Dr. Miller: (00:00)
Hi, this is Dr. Damon Miller. Welcome to the OrganicMD podcast. We're here today. I'm still in the midst of the wildfires in California, and, it's become such an issue that we decided to devote an entire podcast to dealing with the toxic smoke, the kinds of things you can do to protect yourself from the very toxic smoke from these wildfires. The smoke is now blanketing the entire earth! You know, when you're out, if you're, if you're following the air quality index, you know, if the air quality index is 200 parts per million of the small particles, being out in that air for any length of time, it's like smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day or more. So it's, it's pretty serious stuff, but there are things you can do.

Dr. Miller: (00:51)
And we're going to talk about that. I'm going to be doing this today, with Christine Rosche. so Christine Rosche is a master of public health and a certified nutritional specialist. And she's, worked for years and years as a specialist with the microbiome and digestive health, is an expert that's developed an integrative approach to health and stress management, and has had over 25 years in this field, including a lot of years recently here in the San Francisco Bay area, working at Stanford. She's written a couple of books, and it's just a really good on this. Now you ask how is a bowel specialist useful here, you want to understand that in most of the major medical systems in the world, besides Western medicine, you know, Vedic medicine, Oriental medicine, and even a lot of the indigenous medicines, there's a clear understanding that the lungs and the gut are linked. The health of one depends on the health of the other. I like the poetry of it in Oriental medicine. The lungs are responsible for bringing in pure energy from heaven and the bowels are responsible for getting rid of everything you don't want. So anyhow, let's, let's just say hi to Christine. Hi Christine.

Christine: (02:05)
Thank you so much, Damon, and, I'm delighted to be here with you. I also want to introduce Dr. Damon Miller, who is a functional medicine physician in private practice, practicing in Redwood City. And, he's been doing this for many years, since 1985 and detox is an integral part of his practice and helping you with the root cause of your health issues.

Dr. Miller: (02:34)
Well, thank you. Thank you. So Christine, start us off here. You've been doing a lot of research in preparation for this talk. So, I know we're going to be talking about a number of things, just basically how to protect yourself from the smoke, how to detoxify from the smoke. some things that can be done, in terms of herbs and supplements and, you know, and different kinds of essences and, and how to work with the bow, which we have said is a critical part, keeping your bow functional, healthy, moving, is an important part of all this. So go, go ahead and take, take, take off with this here.

Christine: (03:10)
Thank you with aim on one of the key pieces of research that came out recently is that people that had a healthy microbiome back at bacteria that was balanced and was effective at removing the toxins actually were less susceptible to flus colds, and also to infections such as the SARS COVID virus. So they show that giving people in these experiments, you know, specific types of viruses that people that have the right colonic microbiome balance, which meant no, not very much overgrowth of bad bacteria, very strong, healthy microbes that really helped them absorb that just their food and boost their immunity actually have much better outcome. They actually had a 75% reduction in flu cases with people in the lungs themselves with lung issues that had a healthy gut. So that's why I'm focusing, in this podcast on helping you to, with the organs of elimination that got colon is one of the most important ones, just like the, also the lymphatics, the kidneys.

Dr. Miller: (04:17)
Yeah. Well thank you. Yeah. And if you poke around, you know, we did a previous podcast about COVID and bowel health. So that's, there's much more information on that. Yeah.

Christine: (04:25)
Yes. And, and you know, exactly. And so if you, one of the things that's very important for you to know is I'm offering as part of this. so we're going to have, of course, specific things posted here with detailed information for you. And I am also offering a personalized cleanse of your, of your digestive system that will be individualized for you as well as a test. If you would like to take a test, I'll help you find the right test for you that helps you assess your microbiome. And to do that, and get that information, please go to www dot digestivehealth dot center, or call me at (650) 856-3151. Well, one of the most important things is the air. You breathe the inside air because it's very important for you, you know, to stay inside during the high levels of smoke pollution as Damon was indicating. And so, so you need to know that your heating and air conditioning can really help you with that. If you have, you know, a forest or forest, the air system, but type of system, you have, you can do a great job at filtering the air by making sure that you get a mers filter that's at the 300 or higher level, the medical grade in your furnace system, that can make a really big difference.

Dr. Miller: (05:54)
Yeah. And you can, you can find those at your local hardware store, home Depot, you don't have to, you know, go searching all over the world for those. That's a common thing. You just need to make sure you got that in your filter.

Christine: (06:03)
Yes. Very, very critical. And also the other is, you know, when you are outside, if you must go outside, I've done a lot of different research for which masks are best for you, which will be included as part of this podcast. You can see the handout with what we provide you with. just very specifically, I want to say that the best mask is the one that provides you with a filter to breathe for, and also virus protection and smoke protection. So that's the key.

Dr. Miller: (06:34)
Yeah. And just, we are gonna, we don't want to flood you with too much detail on this audio podcast, but if you go to the podcast page or you go to Christine's website, you'll find, easy links where you can download all this information and much more than we're actually speaking, you know, some of the detailed stuff she did research on with the, the masks and the indoor air filters and, you know, so that's, that's going to be there for you to download and read. So just, you know, we'll try and keep this smooth and easy and short here, just for your listening pleasure. So, so Christina, what about, we had talked to about the Molekule filter, the, the it's it's a bit pricey, but boy, is it a great indoor air filter?

Christine: (07:20)
Yes, that's really very important. because most of us are working from home. Now we spend so much time indoors as it is. And research shows the indoor air is actually sometimes even more polluted without even without the smoke than the outdoor air. So the Molekule is the one that I have used for myself. Most of the physicians use it, that I worked with. many patients, I highly recommend it. We'll have a link to that for a special offer for you. When you go to the supportive documentation, there'll be a link together. Yes. The other is, you know, hydrate, hydrate, then most important thing is in order for the lymphatics, you know, in all the organs, kidneys, bladder, you know, the colon to eliminate drink lots of hot liquids, chicken soup, or herbal teas stimulate the filaments, the cilia filaments, they cover yourself. So these cilia will help remove mucus and foreign bodies from yourself and so hot liquids, get them moving more quickly to flush it, toss it away.

Dr. Miller: (08:26)
And again, when we're talking about all this smoke and the lungs, you know, assuming you haven't, you know, been smoking cigarettes for the last 20 years where you've killed all the cilia in your lung, but if you've got reasonably healthy lungs, you know, our bodies have a way to get rid of all this garbage that falls into them when the air is so full of toxic smoke. And it's those little cilia, they're remarkable things, they sort of move and they, they lift and pull all that stuff out of your lungs and dump it, your throat where you can swallow it. So, again, you know, the best thing for most problems is to really support the natural systems that are already there. So, you know, drinking fluid, keeping your lungs and the lining of your lungs, moisture is one of the kindest things you can do. And do you want to say something about, N-acetylcysteine?

Christine: (09:16)
Exactly that is so critical that research has shown that at least 1800 milligrams a day during the smoke exposure will help your lungs to create the right type of fluid or liquids to help expel some of these irritants. So N-acetylcysteine is a critical part of the protocol take 600 milligrams, three times a day or 900 milligrams twice a day. Minimum. Some of you that have more compromised lungs, you can take a little bit more than that. If you need to. The other, is quercetin very important to take as much quercetin you know, 350 milligrams, a couple of times a day will really help to reduce the inflammation in your air passageways.

Dr. Miller: (10:02)
Yeah. And just, I just, for the NAC, the N-acetylcysteine, you know, most vitamin companies that sell it, just refer to it as NAC Thorne makes a very good one. that, that originally kind of came to be understood as something valuable for the lungs in work with, the, people with cystic fibrosis. You know, fortunately, most of you don't know anybody with cystic fibrosis, it's a genetic disease where you don't make the right kind of mucus and it becomes really sticky and clogs up your lungs and your gut and you die if you don't do something about it. Well, the modern treatment for cystic fibrosis is a whole lot of NSF teal system for these kids every day. And so, you know, there's been, you know, this is one of those things that doctors just don't go after natural treatments, but this stuff has been published over and over again, in all kinds of peer review journals, the new England journal had new England medical journal had a great review article over 20 years ago about how this was useful for all kinds of things like emphysema and asthma.

Dr. Miller: (11:05)
And, and basically all it does is that, you know, when your lungs are irritated, they make mucus to try and, protect themselves. And also to just in response to the irritation. And so that's the, that's the phlegm you cough up when there's all this stuff in the air. But if that, if you're not hydrated or if that's gets sticky, it's hard to get it out. And so just something as simple as an asset deal, Sistine works miracles to keep that phlegm that your lung is producing soft and loose so that you can move it out of your lungs with all the garbage that it carries with it. And it's just a, if you did that one thing alone, you would, you would find amazing benefits. So, and it's cheap. Yeah.

Christine: (11:46)
Thank you. also rinsing your nasal passages, you know, exposure to smoke makes you a nasal passages, irritated, dried out, use a neti pot, or use some of the nasal rinses. And you can also make a steam pot with dry time leaves. If you refer to that, through that, that has very good antimicrobial antiviral factors. And I also recommend, you know, peppermint tea is fantastic and, and you can make a ginger tea cause ginger is one of the best herbs for long purification add lemon to it, which eliminates toxins from the respiratory tract. You can also add a little bit of tumeric for the inflammation. So a great tea is either peppermint in nature. Tea will support the inflammation, ginger root and ginger lemon tea with tumeric and raw. Honey is one of the best things you can do for that. For the,

Dr. Miller: (12:41)
If you have a Trader Joe's near you, they make a really beautiful and very inexpensive ginger and turmeric tea. and I just, you know, in addition to the teas, I just want to say that they're some of the things that you take in with this smoke do actually become systemic. In other words, they, they are toxins that don't stick in your lungs, they get into the rest of the body. And it's a little much to talk about everything that you can do to detoxify your body because of this toxic exposure. But one of the things that a course that we've offered an online course that we've offered for many years now, and that we're going to be doing again in the middle of October. And you can find a link to that on our, on the podcast page or on the webpage at organicmd.com. And that is just a course on detoxifying your lungs, sorry, Detoxifying Your Body And Detoxifying Your Home.

Dr. Miller: (13:38)
You know, toxicity is just a fact of life in the 21st century. It's not the cause of all disease, but it isn't, it is an obstacle that if you don't deal with it, it will become a major obstacle in the way of your healing yourself. So there are things you can do on your own, in your own home that can detoxify your body and detoxify your home. And it's a very worthwhile course. I strongly recommend it, because we'll be dealing not only with the lungs, but detoxifying, everything else, heavy metals and all the other crap that fills us up and poisons us.

Christine: (14:12)
Great. Thank you, Damon. the other is, you know, if you have burning eyes, you can make a poultice from chamomile. Many of my clients reported quite a bit of eye irritation is last week. So, you know, having that, I poultice this with chamomile and also sometimes with lavender or other things you want to add to that a really effective.

Dr. Miller: (14:36)
And the easiest way to make a chamomile tea poultice is get some chamomile tea bags, make a cup of tea, drink the tea, take the tea bag, ring it out and put it over your eyes.

Christine: (14:46)
And that also recommend, of course, good bowel motility is the number one. Like you want your lymphatics to move. You know, you want to drink enough water to help your colon. And the main organ of elimination is to work on bowel motility. And this would have to do with looking at what you're eating and what is making it easier for you for good bowel motility is actually consuming some vegetable juices. You can try celery juice, cucumber juice, Spanish, black radish, and daikon, a wonderful remedy for diphoresis, which means opening up those organs is radishes and lemon with olive oil. It's really great for promoting diaphoresis.

Dr. Miller: (15:31)
Yeah. And, and radishes, you know, we're in the fall now, at least out here, radishes are not exactly in season, but, turnips and radishes are pretty much genetically identical. So you don't think about that, but, you know, if you can't find radishes use turnips and, and the, the other thing just with the, bowel motility, I just want to say, you know, the, there's an epidemic of magnesium deficiency in this country. we just don't get, I mean, magnesium is hardly even a vitamin. It's actually a macro nutrient. You need a lot of it. And if you're just taking a multivitamin, you're not getting anywhere near enough. So if you've got constipation or any kind of a neurological condition, whether you've got a heart arrhythmia, or you're having leg cramps at night, or you've got, you know, some, some sort of a nervous problem, including that your gut isn't working well enough to get past the stool out.

Dr. Miller: (16:27)
Just taking magnesium every day is a very useful thing. We recommend magnesium malate as the form of magnesium because the malic acid. So it's a assault between magnesium and malic acid. Malic acid is actually quite soothing to the gut. So it's sort of a two for one thing for your gut using magnesium malate and just up the dose until you get diarrhea. The only thing that happens if you take too much, magnesium is you get diarrhea. So if you're constipated, you probably don't really need to worry about that. Just take enough so that your bowel start moving once or twice a day.

Christine: (16:59)
Great. And then also, you know, if you have an infrared sauna, that's a really good way to remove the toxins. And, and with that, making some vegetable healing, broths and soups can make a big difference. And vitamin C has also been shown to be very effective in helping detox from the smoke. So generally speaking, what's recommended is the product vitality C, which I know Damon and I use from American nutraceuticals. And you take, you know, as a maintenance, there was a lot of people on with smoke, take at least a thousand milligrams every couple of hours during this stressful time.

Dr. Miller: (17:38)
Yeah. I mean, doctors tend to not understand vitamin C. I just want to remind people that Linus Pauling, you know, the physician one, two Nobel prizes on his own unheard of in science, usually have to share it with somebody because the work has done together. Two Nobel prizes, both for the work. He did the very amazing work on vitamin C. And since he won those prizes, did all that work. Other doctors have come along, published books, published articles, all in peer reviewed stuff. vitamin C is just a very useful thing. The vitality see that Christine just mentioned the thing that's nice about that is it's a sodium ascorbate. So it's a sodium salt of vitamin C, not a calcium salt, which is much better tolerated by the gut. And then you combine with that, it's a bound to a five carbon sugar ribose, which doesn't affect cancers or blood sugar or anything like that.

Dr. Miller: (18:33)
But it does allow the vitamin C to be sucked out of the gut almost immediately. It starts getting absorbed even in your stomach stomach. And the, the reason for that is that you can start taking pretty large doses and it doesn't upset your gut. So if you start trying to take, you know, anything more than four or five, six milligrams a day of calciascorbate, you're going to have the runs. You're going to have an upset stomach. People take, you know, depending on what kind of medical condition they have, they take 20, 30, 40 grams of vitamin a vitamin C in the form of vitality C every day. And, it just goes into their body to help them. It doesn't make their, doesn't give them diarrhea. So yeah, vitamin C is a great one.

Christine: (19:16)
Also, you know, many of us, of course, having to be inside for the whole last week in the Bay area, found that rebounding on a rebounder. If you have a rebounder, if you don't, you can do the same thing just by pumping and moving your feet as slightly, you know, up and down and for about five minutes or so a day, or because that's what gets the limp activated. So one of the things that's so important is movement to remember if your camp, if you have to be inside through some type of movement to get your lymph flowing and rebounding is, is only one of one of the movements.

Dr. Miller: (19:51)
Yeah, no rebounding is great. Any of these things, little things that you can do indoors, we're assuming that you're doing something to be purifying your indoor air, that your indoor air is cleaner than what's outside. and that can be just as simple as, you know, shutting all the windows and, you know, letting, letting whatever garbage is in the air, settle out, or gets sucked up by your furnace filter. but yeah, so there's, there's a lot more that we can talk about. We're going to be having this course on detoxifying, your body in your home, the things that Christine's doing with the bowel health, the gut health. And, do you want to just say a little more about the, the kind of guided bowel detox that you're gonna be?

Christine: (20:35)
Yes. it's very important to look at, you know, basically you're a history I'm going to be doing a detailed intake to see what your digestive history is. You know, what you've been doing the last few years, what your diet is because part of the bowel detox is we want to make sure that you'd be toxified the right level. So I'm going to be putting together a customized nutrition plan. And what I use for that also is different types of juices and herbal teas between the meals. And sometimes it's, you know, it's a couple of days of certain types of meal replacements that you drink that open up your phase one and phase two detox systems. It actually helps your liver to pack up the toxins and then open them up. So you'll, you'll be doing many different types of vegetables, juicing, herbal teas, also other kinds of bath things in the bath. In addition, we will assess very carefully how to customize the detox for you. I'm also going to look at the microbial balance of your gut. how many of the good microbes do you have and how many bad and what's missing to help you absorb, digest your food and remove toxins.

Dr. Miller: (21:49)
Yeah. And, you know, that's that kind of, this is the wisdom of the grandmothers that we're dealing with here. I mean, you know, back in the twenties way, back in the 20th century, I mean, it was understood by people who were really interested in, how do you make a person healthy that health begins in the gut. you know, that an unhealthy gut is behind a lot of illness and, you know, come into the 21st century. And some of the tools that Christine uses, you know, you can really analyze this in a much more detailed way, come up with plans for correcting things when they're off. and it, it makes a huge difference. It really makes a huge difference.

Christine: (22:32)
They, you know, I have, I had so many clients this week or reported that they found the root cause of the digestive issue by doing the gut test, which is found at www dot digestivehealth dot center. We have all many different levels of gut tests and they are within just two months, they are finding relief from things they've been working on for the last 10 years, you know, with no results in the standard way of treating those things.

Dr. Miller: (23:03)
Right. Right. You don't need more proof than that. So, Christine, what's your phone number?

Christine: (23:07)
(650) 856-3151

Dr. Miller: (23:13)
Thank you. Yeah. And you can reach me at (888) 838-3937 (888) 838-3937. Or you can find [email protected] and again, go to the podcast page, the podcast, you can find it on your favorite podcast service, just search for OrganicMD. And you'll find the podcast page where you will find this posted within about 24 hours. And, on that page, you'll be able to download, you'll find links to download the papers that we're offering. That, have the information that we've been talking about here with a lot more information as well. So I think we've probably overwhelmed people with more than they wanted to know, but, you know, do you have anything else to add here at the end? You want to mention a followup to this? There was something we're gonna do another one to this podcast. Yeah. We're gonna come back. sort of as an introduction to the detoxification course, which is a four week course, it combines a one, a one hour video each week, and then a one hour conference call with Christina, with me, and talking more, talking about detox in a broader, much broader way, detoxifying your body, detoxifying your home, not just focusing on the lungs.

Dr. Miller: (24:37)
And so we'll be doing another one following up on this new things we find out about the lungs, but also just sort of introducing the broader course. So you can make a decision whether you want to do that or not. And the link to sign up for that course, we'll also be on the podcast page. Great. Okay. Well, again, this is Dr. Damon Miller and Christine Rosche. We've been here on the OrganicMD podcast talking about how to deal with this choking smoke that is all up and down the West coast and now covering the world. And we hope we hope you found this useful. And please like the podcast page and subscribe, if you want to be notified when new podcasts are put up. So thank you. Bye Christine.