Re: CCSVI and CCVBP
Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 5:23 am
I know some chiros are embracing this method of tackling the Vagus system. Upright doc what do you think.??? Do you know of the work of David Berceli?
How And Why I Use TRE In My Medical Practice
I am teaching many patients per week the TRE’s. The reason why TRE’s are so useful is that, in my experience, they affect two of the underlying physiological reasons for why diseases develop in the first place. The first physiological underpinning of many diseases is that the body is in a state of chronic fight-flight over-activation. When this happens, there is an overproduction of stress hormones, and this can affect the health adversely in several ways. Stress hormones sensitize nerve fibers and lead to more pain in patients with chronic pain syndromes. They increase heart rate (think arrhythmias), throw off digestive processes (think GERD and irritable bowel syndrome) and affect urinary function. The cortisol abnormalities that are invariably involved with chronic fight-flight can affect the function of the immune system and may be related to inflammation and autoimmune diseases, as well as the tendency for some folks to always be sick, or to have difficulty healing. It can also affect blood sugar levels and be related to diabetes.
In our caveman ancestors, the fight-flight mechanism was turned on only for brief periods of time when there was an acute threat. The challenge is that now, due to technology and certain societal factors, the “smoke detector” part of our brain that looks for danger is constantly being activated and firing off the fight-flight mechanism. I believe that fight-flight physiology for many of us gets activated so often and for so long that it can actually enter an autopilot mode, and be challenging to turn off by conventional medical treatments.
The second physiological phenomenon that underpins disease involves the freeze mode. If a trauma is happening to us at any point in time in our lives and if during this we feel overwhelmed and helpless, then instead of fighting or fleeing, we will actually freeze and immobilize. It is as if we are tensing up to either protect ourselves from harm, or to somehow keep ourselves from feeling emotionally overwhelmed. One challenge is that, even after the threat is over, these bracing and tension patterns may persist in our bodies, running on autopilot. It is as if a certain primitive part of our brain tasked with “protecting” us doesn’t realize the threat has passed. So, later in life, when the same types of stressful situations arise (that triggered us when we were younger), those same protective muscle groups will become chronically tensed and spastic (think fibromyalgia, or chronic neck and back pain).
The freeze mode also involves over-activation of the parasympathetic nervous system and vagus nerve. The parasympathetic nervous system is normally responsible for “rest and digest”, however when over-activated for too long, it can wreck havoc. There may be over-activity of the bowels or bladder, or a heart rate that is too slow, or hypotension.
Many folks who have been traumatized have a combination of overactive sympathetic AND parasympathetic nervous system responses occuring at the same time. This is akin to trying to drive your car with your foot on the gas and the brake pedals simultaneously. You don’t need to be an automotive mechanic to realize that this would cause the car to wear out much faster (think premature aging, or chronic fatigue syndrome). I believe this combination of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems working on overdrive at the same time causes many of the dysautonomia syndromes that we see.
Everyone knows that the body is supposed to heal itself, but for many folks with chronic illnesses, this is not happening, and I would suggest that it is the factors that I’ve listed above that are the reason for this. And, ideally, if one could shift out of chronic fight-flight-freeze mode, and start relaxing patterns of chronic muscle tension and spasm, this would be good to help facilitate better healing in the body. For those of you with a bent towards eastern medicine, I believe it is these chronic muscle tension and bracing patterns that block the flow of energy in the meridians in the first place.
Eighty percent of the patients who go to a primary care doctor’s office have functional medical problems. The word functional means these patients have real symptoms and real complaints, but on physical exam and laboratory and x-ray studies, we might not find anything anatomically wrong, like a broken bone, a tumor, a ruptured appendix, a bowel obstruction, an obstructing kidney stone or prostate gland, etc. What I would suggest to you is that the physiological mechanisms that I’ve described above are what cause functional medical problems---too much fight or flight or freeze physiology, and too much muscle tension and spasm and bracing.
I’d like to take a moment to discuss back pain since it is a "real" disease and also a metaphor for some of the factors we are describing. As you may or may not know, about 90% of chronic back pain is not caused by slipped discs, spinal stenosis, or spinal arthritis, although these anatomical findings are frequently found in the MRI scans of back pain patients. What is very interesting is that if you do an MRI scan on 100 middle-aged people with NO back pain, 65% of them will have the same findings. So if it’s not the disc, the spinal stenosis or the spinal arthritis that’s causing the pain, then what is causing it? Well, according to physical medicine expert Dr. John Sarno, the cause of most cases of musculoskeletal pain is chronic tension and spasm of the muscles. When a muscle is chronically tensed and spastic, there is less blood flow and relatively less oxygen going to the tissues, and this can cause severe pain.
Dr. Sarno used to see some of the worst chronic pain patients in the world. Most of his patients had had their pain for 10-30 years, most had had laminectomy surgery and epidural injections and years of physical therapy, but their pain persisted. With this group of patients, ones who nobody else was able to help, who had failed all means of conventional therapy, in an academic setting, he claimed to have an 88% cure rate, and an additional 10% of his patients were much improved (i.e. 50-80% better).
You might be wondering how Sarno was able to get such fantastic results with patients who no one else could help. Well, he started off by asking better questions. He asked himself, “Why are the muscles tensed and spastic to begin with?” What he found is that folks would unconsciously tense the muscles to prevent themselves from feeling certain emotions that weren’t safe to feel when they were younger, growing up in their family of origin. I know you must be saying to yourself, “This is very similar to what I just read above, about how folks develop patterns of chronic muscle tension and bracing when they are young, to help protect them from feeling what would otherwise be overwhelming emotions.” Some of these muscles freeze and stay frozen. Others will tend to tense up again later in life when certain situations begin to elicit the “unsafe” emotions.
In Sarno’s case, the way that he was able to get such fantastic results with his patients was by teaching them a mind-body approach. He would basically tell them that, when they were having pain, to ask themselves, “I wonder what I’m angry or anxious about?” Once the answer came to them, they were to allow themselves to feel their emotional truth without resisting it. They didn’t need to act out on their emotions, but they didn’t have to repress them either.
In my medical practice, a cornerstone of mind-body approach involves using the TRE’s because they address both physiological components underlying most diseases. If folks are frozen, the TRE’s seem to unfreeze them and shift them out of parasympathetic overdrive, and help to relax chronically tensed and spastic muscles. If folks are in a chronic fight-flight state, the TRE’s seem to help them to shift out of this, gradually and over time, into a state of normalcy (which we call “social engagement”).
So whether my patients have insomnia or migraine headaches, palpitations, GERD or irritable bowel syndrome, bladder over-activity, chronic back spasm or pelvic pain, fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, the TRE’s are my main recommendation, in addition to whatever else I prescribe within the standard care of practice. Sometimes the TRE’s start working very powerfully in the first session, other times the results show themselves after a few weeks or months of diligent practice. I remember oncologist Dr. Bernie Siegal once wrote a book entitled, “How to Live Between Office Visits.” If I were to write a similar book, I’d recommend doing the TRE’s between office visits because they address the higher level cause of many diseases.
I will now give 3 examples of how I used TRE’s with patients during one recent week in my office. The names and identifying information have been changed to protect confidentiality.
James was a 40 year-old police officer with groin pain that wasn’t responding well to standard medical treatment. I explained to him that, oftentimes, the pain was due to nerve hypersensitivity in a certain part of the body, and that, at a higher level of truth, this was secondary to an over-activated fight-flight stress response. I also told him that in folks with chronic pain, the surrounding muscles were tense and tight, and this tendency to spasm could be related to past patterns of how he had learned to handle stress and tension in his life (to protect him from feeling uncomfortable emotions). I taught him the TRE’s and he had amazing tremors. When we were finished, he looked confused and befuddled. It took us a few minutes to figure out this strange new sensation that he was noticing in his body---it was RELAXATION and it was completely foreign to him. He left the office looking very forward to practicing on his own, and to resetting his nervous system to be able to enjoy this newfound feeling of relaxation..
A second woman who I saw was Patricia, in her mid-60’s. She was having severe bladder spasms and urge incontinence, and medications weren’t helping at all. She had come to the office so that I could inject Botox into her bladder to force the muscle to relax in order to stop the urine leakage. I was talking with her, asking about any underlying stressors that might be triggering such a dramatic physical response in her body. She shared with me that a family member had passed away a few years back and she was still racked with grief and conflict over their passing. These emotional issues were putting her in the exact same physiology that we’ve been discussing. We did TRE’s and she felt a huge weight lifted off of her, and left the office looking more relaxed. I am certain that if she continues the TRE’s, it will transform her body and mind, and certainly help the Botox work better.
A third patient, Emily, was a woman in her 20’s who was getting recurrent bladder infections. Typically in young healthy women, 1-3 days of antibiotics will clear up their uti’s. In this patient, each time she had an infection she required 2-3 weeks of antibiotics before the infection would feel better. This was very unusual to me. An ultrasound of the kidneys was normal, as was a cystoscopy looking at her bladder. I kept wondering to myself, "Why was it taking her so long to heal?" I wondered if she were in a state of chronic fight-flight, and whether this was affecting her cortisol levels and immune function. One thing I did find on the cystoscopy was that her pelvic floor muscles were extremely tense and tight. It was obvious that she held this part of her body in a spastic bracing pattern. Of note, when a person’s pelvic floor is super tight, this clamps down on the urethra and can cause burning with urination. Its possible that the antibiotics were working correctly, but the burning continued because of a chronically tensed and spastic pelvic floor. We did the TRE’s and she walked out of the office feeling a huge shift in her pelvic floor region and the burning around her urethra had gone away.
Gosh, I love my job.
Eric. B. Robins, MD
How And Why I Use TRE In My Medical Practice
I am teaching many patients per week the TRE’s. The reason why TRE’s are so useful is that, in my experience, they affect two of the underlying physiological reasons for why diseases develop in the first place. The first physiological underpinning of many diseases is that the body is in a state of chronic fight-flight over-activation. When this happens, there is an overproduction of stress hormones, and this can affect the health adversely in several ways. Stress hormones sensitize nerve fibers and lead to more pain in patients with chronic pain syndromes. They increase heart rate (think arrhythmias), throw off digestive processes (think GERD and irritable bowel syndrome) and affect urinary function. The cortisol abnormalities that are invariably involved with chronic fight-flight can affect the function of the immune system and may be related to inflammation and autoimmune diseases, as well as the tendency for some folks to always be sick, or to have difficulty healing. It can also affect blood sugar levels and be related to diabetes.
In our caveman ancestors, the fight-flight mechanism was turned on only for brief periods of time when there was an acute threat. The challenge is that now, due to technology and certain societal factors, the “smoke detector” part of our brain that looks for danger is constantly being activated and firing off the fight-flight mechanism. I believe that fight-flight physiology for many of us gets activated so often and for so long that it can actually enter an autopilot mode, and be challenging to turn off by conventional medical treatments.
The second physiological phenomenon that underpins disease involves the freeze mode. If a trauma is happening to us at any point in time in our lives and if during this we feel overwhelmed and helpless, then instead of fighting or fleeing, we will actually freeze and immobilize. It is as if we are tensing up to either protect ourselves from harm, or to somehow keep ourselves from feeling emotionally overwhelmed. One challenge is that, even after the threat is over, these bracing and tension patterns may persist in our bodies, running on autopilot. It is as if a certain primitive part of our brain tasked with “protecting” us doesn’t realize the threat has passed. So, later in life, when the same types of stressful situations arise (that triggered us when we were younger), those same protective muscle groups will become chronically tensed and spastic (think fibromyalgia, or chronic neck and back pain).
The freeze mode also involves over-activation of the parasympathetic nervous system and vagus nerve. The parasympathetic nervous system is normally responsible for “rest and digest”, however when over-activated for too long, it can wreck havoc. There may be over-activity of the bowels or bladder, or a heart rate that is too slow, or hypotension.
Many folks who have been traumatized have a combination of overactive sympathetic AND parasympathetic nervous system responses occuring at the same time. This is akin to trying to drive your car with your foot on the gas and the brake pedals simultaneously. You don’t need to be an automotive mechanic to realize that this would cause the car to wear out much faster (think premature aging, or chronic fatigue syndrome). I believe this combination of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems working on overdrive at the same time causes many of the dysautonomia syndromes that we see.
Everyone knows that the body is supposed to heal itself, but for many folks with chronic illnesses, this is not happening, and I would suggest that it is the factors that I’ve listed above that are the reason for this. And, ideally, if one could shift out of chronic fight-flight-freeze mode, and start relaxing patterns of chronic muscle tension and spasm, this would be good to help facilitate better healing in the body. For those of you with a bent towards eastern medicine, I believe it is these chronic muscle tension and bracing patterns that block the flow of energy in the meridians in the first place.
Eighty percent of the patients who go to a primary care doctor’s office have functional medical problems. The word functional means these patients have real symptoms and real complaints, but on physical exam and laboratory and x-ray studies, we might not find anything anatomically wrong, like a broken bone, a tumor, a ruptured appendix, a bowel obstruction, an obstructing kidney stone or prostate gland, etc. What I would suggest to you is that the physiological mechanisms that I’ve described above are what cause functional medical problems---too much fight or flight or freeze physiology, and too much muscle tension and spasm and bracing.
I’d like to take a moment to discuss back pain since it is a "real" disease and also a metaphor for some of the factors we are describing. As you may or may not know, about 90% of chronic back pain is not caused by slipped discs, spinal stenosis, or spinal arthritis, although these anatomical findings are frequently found in the MRI scans of back pain patients. What is very interesting is that if you do an MRI scan on 100 middle-aged people with NO back pain, 65% of them will have the same findings. So if it’s not the disc, the spinal stenosis or the spinal arthritis that’s causing the pain, then what is causing it? Well, according to physical medicine expert Dr. John Sarno, the cause of most cases of musculoskeletal pain is chronic tension and spasm of the muscles. When a muscle is chronically tensed and spastic, there is less blood flow and relatively less oxygen going to the tissues, and this can cause severe pain.
Dr. Sarno used to see some of the worst chronic pain patients in the world. Most of his patients had had their pain for 10-30 years, most had had laminectomy surgery and epidural injections and years of physical therapy, but their pain persisted. With this group of patients, ones who nobody else was able to help, who had failed all means of conventional therapy, in an academic setting, he claimed to have an 88% cure rate, and an additional 10% of his patients were much improved (i.e. 50-80% better).
You might be wondering how Sarno was able to get such fantastic results with patients who no one else could help. Well, he started off by asking better questions. He asked himself, “Why are the muscles tensed and spastic to begin with?” What he found is that folks would unconsciously tense the muscles to prevent themselves from feeling certain emotions that weren’t safe to feel when they were younger, growing up in their family of origin. I know you must be saying to yourself, “This is very similar to what I just read above, about how folks develop patterns of chronic muscle tension and bracing when they are young, to help protect them from feeling what would otherwise be overwhelming emotions.” Some of these muscles freeze and stay frozen. Others will tend to tense up again later in life when certain situations begin to elicit the “unsafe” emotions.
In Sarno’s case, the way that he was able to get such fantastic results with his patients was by teaching them a mind-body approach. He would basically tell them that, when they were having pain, to ask themselves, “I wonder what I’m angry or anxious about?” Once the answer came to them, they were to allow themselves to feel their emotional truth without resisting it. They didn’t need to act out on their emotions, but they didn’t have to repress them either.
In my medical practice, a cornerstone of mind-body approach involves using the TRE’s because they address both physiological components underlying most diseases. If folks are frozen, the TRE’s seem to unfreeze them and shift them out of parasympathetic overdrive, and help to relax chronically tensed and spastic muscles. If folks are in a chronic fight-flight state, the TRE’s seem to help them to shift out of this, gradually and over time, into a state of normalcy (which we call “social engagement”).
So whether my patients have insomnia or migraine headaches, palpitations, GERD or irritable bowel syndrome, bladder over-activity, chronic back spasm or pelvic pain, fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, the TRE’s are my main recommendation, in addition to whatever else I prescribe within the standard care of practice. Sometimes the TRE’s start working very powerfully in the first session, other times the results show themselves after a few weeks or months of diligent practice. I remember oncologist Dr. Bernie Siegal once wrote a book entitled, “How to Live Between Office Visits.” If I were to write a similar book, I’d recommend doing the TRE’s between office visits because they address the higher level cause of many diseases.
I will now give 3 examples of how I used TRE’s with patients during one recent week in my office. The names and identifying information have been changed to protect confidentiality.
James was a 40 year-old police officer with groin pain that wasn’t responding well to standard medical treatment. I explained to him that, oftentimes, the pain was due to nerve hypersensitivity in a certain part of the body, and that, at a higher level of truth, this was secondary to an over-activated fight-flight stress response. I also told him that in folks with chronic pain, the surrounding muscles were tense and tight, and this tendency to spasm could be related to past patterns of how he had learned to handle stress and tension in his life (to protect him from feeling uncomfortable emotions). I taught him the TRE’s and he had amazing tremors. When we were finished, he looked confused and befuddled. It took us a few minutes to figure out this strange new sensation that he was noticing in his body---it was RELAXATION and it was completely foreign to him. He left the office looking very forward to practicing on his own, and to resetting his nervous system to be able to enjoy this newfound feeling of relaxation..
A second woman who I saw was Patricia, in her mid-60’s. She was having severe bladder spasms and urge incontinence, and medications weren’t helping at all. She had come to the office so that I could inject Botox into her bladder to force the muscle to relax in order to stop the urine leakage. I was talking with her, asking about any underlying stressors that might be triggering such a dramatic physical response in her body. She shared with me that a family member had passed away a few years back and she was still racked with grief and conflict over their passing. These emotional issues were putting her in the exact same physiology that we’ve been discussing. We did TRE’s and she felt a huge weight lifted off of her, and left the office looking more relaxed. I am certain that if she continues the TRE’s, it will transform her body and mind, and certainly help the Botox work better.
A third patient, Emily, was a woman in her 20’s who was getting recurrent bladder infections. Typically in young healthy women, 1-3 days of antibiotics will clear up their uti’s. In this patient, each time she had an infection she required 2-3 weeks of antibiotics before the infection would feel better. This was very unusual to me. An ultrasound of the kidneys was normal, as was a cystoscopy looking at her bladder. I kept wondering to myself, "Why was it taking her so long to heal?" I wondered if she were in a state of chronic fight-flight, and whether this was affecting her cortisol levels and immune function. One thing I did find on the cystoscopy was that her pelvic floor muscles were extremely tense and tight. It was obvious that she held this part of her body in a spastic bracing pattern. Of note, when a person’s pelvic floor is super tight, this clamps down on the urethra and can cause burning with urination. Its possible that the antibiotics were working correctly, but the burning continued because of a chronically tensed and spastic pelvic floor. We did the TRE’s and she walked out of the office feeling a huge shift in her pelvic floor region and the burning around her urethra had gone away.
Gosh, I love my job.
Eric. B. Robins, MD
