Alternative Therapy for Wound Care

**Posts moved from TJandGenesis thread.

I didn't say to stop any of the current therapies. What I did say was to research them and to consider other therapies that come up with that research.

One therapy that I failed to mention is the use of light, both visible and infrared. My endocrinologist has an Anodyne machine that he uses on diabetic ulcers and other slow healing wounds. More info at The Official Site of the Manufacturer of Anodyne Therapy Systems and NIR infrared therapy offers the latest in PILT technology bringing relief painful numb feet that have resulted from poor circulation - What Infrared Therapy Does

Because of all the profit motives and regulatory overkill, these machines are quite expensive. One alternative is to expose the sore to the mid-day sun. Nobody's figured out how to charge for that one yet. Don't use any sun blocks, and don't exceed your personal direct sun tolerance. About 10-15 minutes per day should be useful without any worry of getting sunburn.

Consider a device like the "Dual LED Array" at LED light therapy accelerated healing pain reduction red near infrared . It is a consumer device priced at about $125. Most of the other products there smell like a waste of money, but the LED technology is real. Beware units that produce too much heat (test them on an area where you have good sensation before risking an area with neuropathy).

My endocrinologist says that he doesn't have to send any of his patients to the hospital anymore since he learned to use therapies like arginine/citruline, high dose vitamin D3, and the Anodyne machine. Of course he also uses traditional therapies like metformin and insulin. Byetta is a regenerative drug that he is quite excited about, although about 1/3 of the people who try it have unacceptable nausea problems. Maybe the once-a-week version coming out soon will work for more people.

 

Re: So I'm about to lose my right foot.

I love it. The $100 a visit doctor can't handle it, so you go to a $400 a visit doctor who puts honey on the wound. Your grandmother probably knew about using honey on wounds. My question is just how much better is this manuka honey than the stuff you could buy at the local farmer's market?

I had a similar experience with several doctors. The standard one wanted to put me on a cocktail of blood pressure medicines for life. I went to a $400 a visit one, and he puts me on arginine and citruline, something body builders have been using for decades. The arginine/citruline clears plaque from the arteries at about 10% a year. Most important, it stops any increase in the problem.

From what I have heard/observed of Dr. Prendergast's experience with arginine/citruline, just about everyone would benefit from taking it. His diabetic patients don't lose their toes and eyes anymore. A cardiologist called him up to ask if he'd offended him somehow. No, the patients just weren't progressing to a point that they needed a cardiologist any more.

To make a long story shorter, there was a Nobel Prize awarded in 1998 for the discovery of the importance of nitric oxide in vascular metabolism. Dr. Prendergast learned about the nitric oxide work through contacts with people doing research in preventive cardiology at Stanford University. He applied the research results to himself, and went from having extensive atherosclerosis to having the arteries of a teenager. Two CT scans ten years apart showed the complete reversal of vascular calcification. Experience with about 5000 patients since then indicates that it was not just an individual reaction, but a general one worth applying to essentially all of his patients.

You can learn more about Nobel Prize winner Dr. Ignaro and his recommended treatments at :: Dr Louis Ignarro :: . He recommends a number of supplements, but the 5 grams of arginine and 1 gram of citruline a day is the Nobel Prize related recommendation.

Dr. Prendergast's clinic website is Endocrine Metabolic Medical Center . Follow the "Resources" tab for info about diabetes. I particularly like his 20 minute video at Dr. Joe's E-News - A Diabetes Newsletter: D3, L-arginine and Cancer .

You don't have to visit either doctor to get the benefits that they've found from arginine. Their websites have a lot of useful data, particularly for people with diabetes, vascular problems, or cancer.

 

Re: So I'm about to lose my right foot.

I said that your grandmother probably knew about using honey on wounds. Well, it goes back a bit further than that. A whole lot further.

An article by Dr. Julian Whitaker was just posted to the web at The Sweet Art of Healing

So apparently we are relearning what was known 5000 years ago. Honey is good stuff.:rockon:

But I have some reservations about cat dung...:suspicious:

 

Re: So I'm about to lose my right foot.

The article I referenced also mentions that honey has been effective on MRSA infections. The antibiotic age may well pass before the oil age does. When bugs develop that are resistant to all of our antibiotics, including the latest ones, then we can either die or use something else that is effective. Honey, sugar, maggots, enzymes, vitamins C & D, and quite a number of other materials are already known to be useful against the things that we currently treat almost exclusively with antibiotics. I'm all for new products that work, but I think we're going to have to also reach back to older ones that have been forgotten.

No argument that arginine alone is short acting and has only a minor effect on BP. Adding citruline, at about 1/5 the quantity by weight, extends the activity out to 36 hours.

The healing effect of arginine is different than the BP reducing effect. If all one wants to do is to reduce the number on a BP machine, there are many better materials available. Zeroing out a calcium score is a big deal, and I haven't heard of anyone else besides Dr. Prendergast who has CT scan evidence of such a major reversal. Twenty years ago the medical goal was to slow down the accumulation of plaques. Actually getting rid of them was unheard of.

The major tracking device that Dr. Prendergast uses is the CVProfilor. It collects data on the shape of a pulse wave, and derives arterial flexibility indexes from that shape. The traditionally measured systolic/diastolic pressures are just two points on the curve.

Measuring progress with the CVProfilor enabled the determination that 3 grams of arginine a day is not enough for some people. 5 grams provides improved endothelial function in 90%+ of people with coronary artery disease. Personally, I take a tablespoon of arginine plus a half-teaspoon of citruline a day, sometimes twice a day. This figures out to about 10 grams of arginine, 2 grams of citruline. I pay about $0.92 per 10 gram serving (double the recommended dose). Premixed brews cost a lot more, so I use bulk powders instead.

The last time I saw Dr. Prendergast, he ducked out of the room for a while to handle something. While he was out, I used his BP machine and collected maybe a dozen blood pressure readings. The high number bounced around between 140 and 160. When he returned I asked which reading was correct, and he replied "none of them". He finds the traditional systolic/diastolic numbers to be at best a distraction from a real diagnosis. The CVProfilor machine gives him a better sense of arterial condition, but even it is just one machine. He's really interested in various measures of inflammation, particularly of the arterial wall.

So I recommend the arginine/citruline protocol as a way to heal arteries. It's not very dramatic in terms of reducing the numbers on a BP device.

Dr. Prendergast gave a talk at Smart Life Forum several years ago. The video of it can be accessed from the page at 2007/02 - Smart Life Forum . It's available in large, small, and audio-only versions, and is over an hour long. One of the comments he makes is that about 1/3 of his patients on Byetta are no longer diabetic after 2 years of treatment.

 

Re: So I'm about to lose my right foot.

The description I've heard is that the citrulline recycles the arginine. So while a time release spreads out the dosage, recycling allows the original dose to be used repeatedly, but with loses. In this case, the effective time is increased from an hour or so to over a day.

My knowledge of this is from Dr. Prendergast. In about 1991 Dr. Dzau replied to Dr. Prendergast's queries about potential treatments with the animal results. Further query led Dr. Prendergast to actually try the therapy on himself. A CT scan in 1991 showed heavy calcification, and another in 2001 showed that it had completely cleared.

The classical sequence of events in developing a patient therapy starts with someone's idea/observation, some initial experiments, then maybe some formal animal experiments. If all goes well, then there are human experiments and maybe early product development. Of course each of these steps requires a financial sponsor, and those are in limited supply. What Dr. Prendergast did was to jump on the treatment as soon as the animal experiments looked positive. This probably saved about 10 years of the development process, but also bypassed the peer reviewed formal studies that you find so important.

Per usual, the paperwork is the last thing to get done. In this case, personal communications delivered an actionable therapy in 1991. Here we are 18 years later and the paper mill is barely getting wound up.

I don't much care about the rules and regulations on embargoed reports in the medical business. I'll go with the Nobel Committee's opinion that the scientific discovery is really important.

You may want to talk to Dr. Dzau. He's the person who originally told Dr. Prendergast about using arginine to clear out plaque. At the time, he was chairman of the Department of Medicine at Stanford. Since then he's been at a few other universities, such as Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His current job is chancellor for health affairs at Duke University and president and CEO of the Duke University Health System. His bio is here: Bio - Duke Medicine

This isn't back alley stuff.

 

I'm not a seller. I'm a buyer and reviewer in this case.

I'm a 65 year old guy with systolic hypertension. There are a number of therapies offered for my situation, including statins, diet, EECP, and arginine.

I don't see arginine as an isolated therapy. I see it as an alternative to statin drugs. If you want to eliminate arginine as a reasonable choice, then please tell me about a superior one.

I just read a study in NEJM on Simvastatin and niacin (Vol 345:1583-1592 November 29, 2001 Number 22). It has all the trappings of a properly done study, published in a major peer reviewed medical journal. The bottom line of the study is that the treatment invokes a 0.4% reduction is angiographically identified stenosis. If we assume a similar rate of improvement over the next 8 years (a rather big assumption), then the end point will be a 2% improvement.

Dr. P's experience over 10 years was a 100% improvement in CT scan identified calcium deposits with arginine/citrulline. But, as you say, the documentation is weak.

Statins suppress CoQ10 production (I think we agreed on this in a previous discussion). That's a really bad thing. A running buddy of mine used to run a particular 50K race every year for 17 years. He really wanted to make that at least 20 years. His doctor convinced him to go on a statin drug, and his running career is trashed. Since he can't run as much as he used to, he's gained a lot of weight. He looks puffy, his muscles ache, and he tires easily. All this degradation happened soon after the statin therapy started.

Think my aversion to statin drugs is just a personal thing? Check out Spacedoc.net . Astronaut and flight surgeon Dr. Duane Graveline relates his horror story of transient global amnesia which he blames on statin therapy. I thought that maybe adding CoQ10 to statins would solve the problems. But apparently statins also reduce dolichols, selenoproteins, Rho, glutathione, and phosphorylation. In Dr. Graveline's words, "This I believe, is the cause of the thousands of side effect reports largely unknown to the medical community."

The amount of niacin used in the study causes flushing. Gee, you get to know first hand what it's like to be a menopausal woman suffering flashes. For life. At least women get through that stage.

Side effects of arginine? Better circulation while there is enough active in you. More growth hormone is released. Better sexual response (a cheap Viagra without the vision side effects). Body builders have been using it for ages as an aid to getting stronger. Sounds pretty good even if it does nothing for healing arteries.

My current treatment with arginine/citrulline is being tracked on the CVProfiler. If it isn't performing as expected, I'll know. I'm too cheap to pay $150 for another one of those tests just yet, but I do have a number of positive indications. Like my maximum heart rate has gone up by 10 beats over the past 2 years. The previous 30 years was a consistent degradation. Something is loosening up (like maybe the calcium is moving from my arteries back to my bones?). Someone on statins probably couldn't exercise hard enough to even reach their maximum.

Do you seriously think that I should drop an effective treatment prescribed by my doctor in favor of a lousy treatment that been described with a gazillon digits of precision?

Wow. You're really into the dirt and politics of all this. I'm just trying to choose a treatment.

Yeah, I really got a kick out of realizing that Victor was Chief Poo Bah at your med school. Congratulations on the Phd. Honest.

Nor could I. That's why I had to pay Dr. P to tell me what Dr. Dzau told him.

I'm sure that Dr. P must have used those "systematically studied and proven" statins early in his search for a treatment for his atheroscerosis. It was his personal experience that convinced him that arginine/citrulline was a better approach. His case history was the big demonstration, but he also has an additional 8 years experience treating over 5000 patients with this protocol. Their progress is monitored with the CVProfiler, as well as other more common measures. As a clinician in private practice, I guess he no longer publishes like he used to. But over his 40+ year career in endocrinology, he participated in several hundred clinical studies and published dozens of articles in peer reviewed journals.

One thing is certain. Big Pharma is not going to sponsor any university studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of arginine/citrulline.

 

Make that no published evidence that you could find. There is a lot more medical knowledge out there than what makes it into the medline indexed journals. Doctors go to conferences, seminars, and just plain networking. One of Dr. P's sources of info on vitamin D3 is apparently personal contact with researchers in Germany who know about work done in the 1920's. They found that enough D3 (like 50,000 IU) for a week invoked a stronger immune system. You'd have to read German paper journals of that vintage to pick up on any of it.

Placing articles in peer reviewed journals is something that academics do. Clinical practice doctors may occasionally do that, but it's not their primary job. And much to the disgust of some academics, individual doctors do make discoveries and develop treatment protocols.

A doctor's primary responsibility is to do the best that he can for his patients. If there is any time left, then maybe he should report results that are out of the ordinary. One way to shortcut the analysis of data is to accept an analysis by someone else that you trust. Like that cute detail lady from the drug company?

I had EECP based on my own research. The biggest problem was finding a provider who would only charge me what Medicare normally reimburses at. The local hospital wanted about 5X that amount. The priority of using EECP versus other therapies is totally backwards. The standard protocol is drug, stent, bypass, and then, if there are no more donor vessels available, EECP. If they started with EECP, much of the surgeries would never have to be done. But why bill $4000 when you can bill $100,000?

In my case, EECP produced a major improvement in my energy level. I noticed several places on a trail run where I kept running instead of dropping back to a walk. It's been tested on younger athletes, and doesn't seem to be worthwhile for most of them. I'm working on building my own machine so I can do more of the therapy without the outrageous prices normally charged. My wife laughingly calls it the ultimate in exercise - you just lay on the bed and the machine does the exercise for you.

The ratio between N=0 and N=1 is infinite. How many atomic bombs did it take to provide proof of concept? N=1 was quite sufficient. The larger the effect, the lower the sample size required to test it. If it takes 10,000 samples to produce a statistically significant result, it's probably not worth using the result.

I certainly agree that it would be more comfortable to have more data. But I find the professional judgement of a doctor who has used the therapy on 5000 people to be adequate for my trying it. And for telling others that it would be worth trying.

I've tried to come up with a timeline about what Dr. P did and when. There is a lot of data that I'm missing, so if the story seems incomplete, it is. The starting point is that at age 37 he was diagnosed as having the arteries of an 80 year old. His father had had a stoke at age 42. As a MD, he knew full well what standard therapies could deliver. And so he decided that he had to do something "outside the box". My guess is that he used the medical literature to identify a wide variety of drugs and supplements that had any indication of helping. He speaks of taking 45 minutes to consume all the pills he eventually took. They probably helped him to reach age 52, 10 years beyond what his father's experience would have predicted. But he had the first CAT scan then, and it showed extensive calcification. This is also the time period when Dzau told him about arginine. I don't know when citrulline came into the picture, but my impression is that it was not part of the initial arginine protocol. Fast forward another 10 years to age 62 when he had another CAT scan. The same radiologist read the both scans, and was quite amazed at the improvement. My observation is that while all those supplements he was taking were useful, the reversal didn't happen until he added the arginine.

The protocol that he uses on his patients is much simpler than the one he had followed himself. Most of the supplements are gone, and there are certainly no statins. With the CVProfilor machine, he doesn't have to wait 10 years to measure the progress. There are a number of other materials in the products that he recommends besides the arginine/citrulline, such as 10,000 IU of vitamin D3 (after several months at 50,000 IU). Calcium supplements must be avoided when using high D3. But he's cool with my mixing the arginine/citrulline from bulk sources. There are several blood and lab machine tests that he wants me to do in case there are other problems that need to be addressed.

Statins are a disaster. The vendors know it, and are trying to shift the reasoning from cholesterol control over to inflammation control. The same level of inflammation control can be achieved with fish oil or some aspirin. Statins may have been a promising idea, but they're running on momentum now. Maybe they're good for the few people with genetic hypercholesterolemia, but not for the masses that the promotions address.

Obviously it's just my prejudice. Fed by several doctors who've told me about similar disasters. One MD I know spent 10 years in emergency medicine. He got fed up with end stage handling of conditions that could have been prevented. Anyway, he told me that statin use had absolutely nothing to do with who arrived for emergency treatment. People with high cholesterol had heart attacks. People with low cholesterol had heart attacks. People with cholesterol controlled to normal levels had heart attacks. Maybe precise research could identify a difference, but a guy on the front line didn't see a worthwhile pattern. One of his current patients is on 900 mg of CoQ10 a day, because that's what it takes for him to achieve a healthy blood level. I wonder how long that guy was on statins?

The maximum heart rate that I'm referring to is generally regarded as a physiological limit similar to what a governor does. The classic value is 220 minus your age, and all of the other formulas assume degradation with age. The numbers I have start with a treadmill test at the local college sports department. At age 34, my max heart rate was 199. The next value I have is 191 at age 51. So that's a degradation of about a half beat per year. Additional data points are 183 at age 60, and 181 at age 61. Start arginine/citrulline. Next data is 186 at age 63, and 191 at age 64. So when the value would be expected to go down by about a beat, it instead went up by 5 on two consecutive years.

All of the values recorded after the first one are readings from a sports heart rate monitor. The first one I owned had no recording capacity, but I was watching it as I sprinted to the finish line of a half marathon. There have been several more monitors, and the current one records heart rate and GPS location about every 5 seconds.

I've never heard a good explanation about what establishes the max heart rate. It could be a nervous system limit, cross linking of tissues in the heart and vascular system, or maybe the level of calcification. Or maybe all of them. In any case, the value going up by 5 beats each year for 2 years is outside the normal experience. The earlier numbers are entirely in line with the normal experience.

One of the data points for arginine/citrulline therapy is that 3 grams of arginine isn't enough. Some people were not progressing as expected, and a lab analysis of the supplement product that they were using showed that there was 3 grams of arginine in a dose claimed to have 5 grams. The QA at that company was somewhere between sloppy and fraudulent. One of the reasons that I take 10 grams is that I want to cover for a potential mislabeling. And I don't buy anything from those crooks.

A story of one woman's experience. This older lady that I met said that she had been on $300 a month worth of medications. She was essentially house bound, and ready to die. The interesting part is that we were having this conversation on a tour bus in Costa Rica. She had cut back to $15 a month for medications, and was back living again. She didn't go horseback riding, but she did go on the river tour on a Zodiac boat. What changed is that Dr. McDougall had taught her to eat differently, and thus was able to discontinue most of her medications. Every one of those medications passed the FDA examination of scientific studies on the effects of the meds. It's reasonable to assume that the medications were properly selected to treat conditions that she was experiencing. But the overall effect of the bad diet and the pharmaceutical interventions was a disaster. The professional judgment of a doctor knowledgeable about both diet and drugs caused a major improvement in her situation. You should approve of the treatment, as Dr. McDougall learned about dietary effects by extensive study of the peer reviewed medical literature. Obviously her other doctors failed to read the relevant data, or at least failed to act on it.

Every doctor develops a personal repertoire of treatments. The quality of the research backing up a particular substance is quickly replaced by experience with it. Thus a doctor who has used a substance for many years has a well developed opinion of what can be done with it. It is no long very important what the quality of the initial research was.

Quality research is most important when applied to synthesized substances, such as most modern drugs. Whole foods and extracted substances simply don't have the potential dangers that new substances have. The safety profile of natural substances is generally know, and there are already coping mechanisms in place for handling damaging ones.

My guess is that the duties of management took him out of the lab. Does he still publish anything? His biggest job these days is probably fund raising. That and keeping the cats corralled.

The data isn't secret. It just isn't aggressively promoted enough to cut through the noise. I'd like to see more work on the dose/response relationship. And why no proline or lysine? Vitamin D3 is getting attention, but doses over 10,000 IU are still ignored. How does high D3 affect the need for A?

When I cut myself, the wound usually is pretty much healed in a week. A broken bone takes 1-2 months to heal. Joints and tendons heal more slowly, supposedly because the blood supply is more limited there. If the rate of healing is subject to the supply of oxygen and nutrients, then why aren't blood vessels the most healthy parts of the body? The potential seems to be there for blood vessels to heal in weeks, rather than 10 years being an impossible dream.