Ways to Ease Chronic Inflammation

There’s a lot of talk about inflammation in the medical media these days. Unfortunately, this dangerous problem is often portrayed as a natural and unavoidable consequence of living a modern life. If you want to avoid the potentially life-threatening consequences of inflammation, here are some strategies that will help.

0:45 - Acute vs Chronic Inflammation
1:45 - Decrease inflammation by reducing stress
2:50 - Breathing to manage autonomic nervous system response
5:42 - How to maintain healthy gut
7:50 - Ways to reduce toxins from environment
9:30 - Testing for toxins
11:15 - Exercise based on your body's level of function
13:00 - Find triggers and detox properly
14:50 - Anti-inflammatory supplements

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Transcript

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 0:06

Are you struggling with chronic inflammation in your body, and not sure how to reduce it? We'll be talking about ways to reduce chronic inflammation today on The Dr. Lam Show. I'm Dr. Jeremy Lam. I'm an internal medicine physician who's also board certified in anti aging and regenerative medicine. I'm here with my sister, Dr. Carrie Lam. Dr. Carrie, why don't you kind of tell us about chronic inflammation and our ways to reduce chronic inflammation?

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 0:40

Inflammation is just such an exciting topic. I'm glad we'll be able to deal with it, because it can really show up in so many different ways. Inflammation is usually something that's normal unless it goes rampant in your system. Inflammation can show up like fevers if you have the virus or if you're undergoing an infection. Or inflammation can show up as a joint that is just aching and wearing out. But the type of inflammation that we're talking about is more of a chronic inflammation, so not acute, like the fever or the joint pain, acutely, but something that just is irritating your system over a long period of time. What we need to do is really reduce this type of inflammatory response in your system, whether it's triggered by stress, emotionally or physically. One of the most important things- so, we'll say number one, is to reduce that stress. Because stress, like I said, even perceived stress can cause inflammation in your system. One of the most difficult things is to simplify your life to live a minimalistic life. In this modern world, we have burdens that are placed on us. Emotional, physical demands that are just above what normal humans are designed to undergo. Oftentimes we have to find ways of getting around this stress. But a lot of times we fail with this stress just tends to overload our body and it causes inflammation. The number one thing really is to try to maybe meditate or breathe and to be able to control the autonomic nervous system in dealing with the stress and ultimately to inflammation. Can you go through a little about that, Dr. Jeremy?

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 2:48

Breathing is one of the ways that you can actually control your autonomic nervous system and it's really a wonderful thing. But the problem with adrenal fatigue is that if you're weak, improper breathing, which, even for normal people is helpful, can actually make you worse. The in-breathing and the out-breathing must match your body's autonomic nervous system. Over breathing can actually sometimes crash your system, as well as under breathing. We've developed the adrenal breathing method that is specific for people with adrenal issues in order to not really stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. The key to breathing and other similar modalities, such as meditation is to really just have your body relax. You don't want your body to be excitatory. So, take a deep breath and kind of refresh your mind. That will help rebalance your autonomic nervous system, decrease the stress, and then in doing so, also decrease that chronic inflammation in your body.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 4:08

When you move that diaphragm with this belly type of breathing, you can actually move that vagal nerve which is very important to the parasympathetic response to balance out that sympathetic fight or flight. You want to be able to relax and sometimes even a deep, full deep breath might be overstimulating. So, instead of taking a full deep breath, you might have to cut back to maybe 70% of your breath. Gauge your body and how it responds to deep breaths because some people cannot tolerate even taking deep breaths. You don't want to stress out about the breathing but you want it to mostly just calm your system. The ultimate physiological response to being calm is that it will reduce the amount of stress and therefore reduce the inflammation that it can be causing in your body.

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 5:06

If you want some guidance with that we do

have an app: 5:08

Dr. Lam's Adrenal Breathing app on the App Store. If you want to download it, you just go to the App Store and you can actually breathe with the app. It will teach you the right type of breathing. It's very important not to overdo it and just to go slow, start slow, and then go up with intensity as you can. That's number one- really reducing stress, both emotionally and physically. What is number two, Dr. Carrie?

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 5:43

The second most important thing is to maintain a healthy gut. How do people do that? Well, obviously, you definitely want to have a clean, natural, pure non processed diet, which could consist of avoiding wheat, corn, dairy, some basic things that everyone could be doing. However, it's not easy, because these types of foods are just so pervasive in a lot of our foods, especially the processed ones. Getting on a gut program can be very important. Whether it's on some digestive enzymes, or probiotics to help rebalance or rebuild your gut lining. There are very personalized approaches to be able to help you when your gut is weak. But it's important to have a healthy gut, because it is your second brain. In addition, it is also where a lot of your inflammatory cells are hidden. They have a lot of Peyer's patches, which holds memory cells. If toxins are able to get through your gut to these Peyer's patches and antibodies are being made, these antibodies can produce lots of toxins. So you want to make sure that your gut lining is well lined with no leakiness, which we can call leaky gut, and that you have a good overall balance in your enzymes and probiotics and your microbiome, which is the gut bacteria in your gut. Having a healthy gut is very important. Dr. Jeremy, what's the next way of reducing inflammation?

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 7:27

The next step would be to avoid synthetic materials and toxic chemicals. That's quite hard in the world that we're living in today, but it's often very good and very beneficial for those who are especially very sensitive, especially those with adrenal fatigue. Some things that you can do is to avoid plastic, to replace plastic with glass. The containers in your homes can be used with glass. Other things that are quite toxic are your perfumes, makeup that you also use, they should be more chemical free as well.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 8:13

Also things like the carpets emit a lot of chemical films. Paint if you're painting your homes. Cleaners that you have to clean your house with, instead of using bleach, or very toxic kind of chemicals. Those are all volatile and can affect your system in a lot of inflammatory ways. Making sure as natural as you can, stay away from not only like the processed foods in cans because they have BPA, or plastics or even in receipts. Ask for receipts to get sent to you by email, and stay away from canned foods. These toxins just surround us so getting to know what these toxins are and avoiding them are very important. One app that I love to use is called Think Dirty. Dr. Jeremy was talking about the cosmetics and if you want to know what are good alternatives to cleaners, or shampoos or laundry detergents or cosmetics, get this app and they would have a lot of good alternatives. It will tell you what's a good way and alternative to use for all these products.

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 9:30

If you think that you've gotten exposed, then you might want to have some testing done which we do offer in our clinic, such as toxic metals or nutritional elements to make sure that your nutritional elements are at a well balanced state and if you have any toxic metals in your body, that's also good to know. Then we can reduce that inflammation and that toxic load in your body. There were some good principles that we had just mentioned about reducing chronic inflammation. Some of them may be impossible depending on your lifestyle and schedule demands, but you can always do something. Just start with one thing, one change that you can make that will reduce your stress level, or fit within some of the tips that we have given. Just try that to see if that will make big enough of a difference for your body. Remember that you can also get help by calling our office at 714-709-8000 to get some other help in reducing inflammation in your body.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 10:45

If you would like more testing, whether it's toxic metals, nutritional elements, getting your gut back on track, and helping with the stress reduction, definitely give our office a call at 714-709-8000 and we will be able to get you started on reducing your chronic inflammation. Dr. Jeremy, we talked about it quite a few things and we still have a few more tips to give. What is the next tip for reducing more chronic inflammation?

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 11:17

The next tip is to exercise regularly if you have chronic inflammation. Now this can seem kind of twisted, because most people who have chronic inflammation have joint pain and say they can't exercise. So what are the things that they can do if they can't exercise because they're weak and they tend to be more sedentary? We've really devised our own recovery process, where we go through different exercises. Restorative exercises that focus on the adrenals to help you and your chronic inflammation decrease in your body. These exercises are adrenal circulation exercises, cardiac exercises, posture related restorative exercises, and then also a special 21 part series adrenal yoga exercises that really take people from being almost in a bedridden state all the way up to full vitality. It's a great approach and it's a very steady, systematic and comprehensive way to decrease that chronic inflammation, and to also not go too fast to really crash your body, and to really take it at the pace where your body should be at. That's one of the important steps in reducing chronic inflammation is to exercise where you can at what level your body's able to act on. Dr. Carrie, what are some other things that we can do to reduce chronic inflammation?

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 13:00

It's very important to find your triggers and to be able to detox from the things that are causing your inflammation. Whether it's your environment and you're breathing in a lot of polluted air. Or occupational with their fumes, or not hydrating enough and not being able to flush out your toxins. You have to make sure you get to the underlying root cause of what toxins are in your system causing the inflammation and be able to flush them out. If you need to undergo detoxes, that is also a very key part in reducing inflammation. But you have to be very careful about what type of detoxes you do because you don't want to overdo it if your body's very sensitive, as it can backfire. If someone is very congested, and they detox too much too fast, they could have herxheimer reactions, they could have a retoxification reaction where they actually feel worse after they detox because these toxins tend to circulate even more and cause more inflammation. Detoxes should always be done under supervision of a health care provider or someone who's experienced in order for you to know what's the best way and gentler ways of detoxing. Finding these triggers, again, is very key to making sure you get rid of the toxins that are causing the underlying root inflammation. Dr. Jeremy, we've talked a lot about the root causes and what we can do to help but there are also some supplements that can be used in chronic inflammation and we saved this for last.

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 14:50

There's a lot of supplements out there that can help fight inflammation. Some of the best natural anti inflammatory supplements are alpha lipoic acid, that's one. Curcumin, that's also a very good one that can help with a lot of inflammatory joint aches. Fish Oil is also very good to help decrease inflammation. It has to be a very high quality fish oil to make sure that it can decrease the inflammation. Some other ones that can be good but you have to be careful with those with adrenal fatigue because they can also have paradoxical reactions is ginger, resveratrol can be good. Then also spirulina. Other things that we've also found to be anti inflammatory, as we've spoken about before, is also quercitin, bromelain, that can also help with the histamine response as well as decreasing inflammation. Any other compounds or natural supplements, Dr. Carrie, that you can think of?

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 16:00

Other compounds that you can use are nattokinase or streptokinase. If you're doing them, systemic enzymes on an empty stomach, they can really try to reduce your inflammation and increase circulation in your whole body as it makes your blood flow smoother. Sometimes it would also thin out your blood. So some of these compounds you do have to be very careful if you're taking any blood thinners, you don't want to overdo it. Like I said, you always want to make sure that you ask your doctor before starting any supplements, because you don't want to overdo it and you want to make sure you're on the right dose, and that is not interacting with any medications that you're taking.

Dr. Jeremy Lam, MD: 16:44

That's all we have on inflammation today. Hope we didn't overload you and we hope that this was very helpful and that you got some good tips on identifying sources of inflammation, as well as reducing them where possible. Thank you for listening. Just remember that you can always contact us for help with chronic inflammation by calling our office at 714-709-8000. We're here to empower you to take control of your health.

Dr. Carrie Lam, MD: 17:15

Make sure to subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen so that you can get notified of our weekly episodes that come out on The Dr. Lam Show. We hope you enjoyed this episode on chronic inflammation.

Unknown: 17:36

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