DrKrupka.com

I want to take a minute and talk to you about checking your blood pressure. I had this discussion yesterday and it was suggested to me to do a video on it, and I think that's probably a good idea. I'll briefly go over mechanically how to check your blood pressure, but the bigger point of this video is to talk about how much data to collect to get an understanding of what's going on. So I'll get to that in just a second. As far as mechanically how to do it, I mean we all have the experience of going into our doctor's office or dentist or whoever, and you get your blood pressure checked and maybe it's good, maybe it's not, but it's a single reading and a single reading is never, well, I shouldn't say never. A single reading is generally not considered to be enough to make clinical decisions like should we put someone on medication or not.

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Now, there are readings that are so out of the normal range that you have to take action, right? But when you're talkin...

What is functional medicine? It's a question I get fairly frequently worth doing. A video on functional medicine to me is best described starting out by comparing it to conventional medicine or prescriptive medicine because that's what most people are familiar with. Anytime you do Teladoc or you get a sinus infection, you go to the doctor, whatever you're doing, conventional or prescriptive medicine in most cases. So it's all diagnosis based. It's about gathering up information on you. What are your symptoms? What are your signs like? Physical signs, symptoms would be like, I have a headache. A sign would be, look at this rash, right? They're a little bit different, but you get the subjective ones, which are the symptoms, the objective ones, which are the signs. You put that together, you add some lab work to it, and hopefully at some point you qualify to be labeled with a particular diagnosis.

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So you have your complaints, you gather the information, you...

I had a request to do an updated thyroid testing video, like what's in a proper thyroid panel and why do we do it and what do the numbers mean? So I'm kind of going to just go through the list. Name the test. What are the normal ranges for us, the functional normal ranges, why do we do it? What does it mean? How does it interact with the other tests? So if you have a thyroid panel either from me or from somebody else and you want to pull it up and go through it while I do the video, hopefully it'll help things make sense for you. But I think I've done these in the past. Someone was having trouble finding one, so they asked me to do an updated version. Here it is. So when you do a thyroid panel, the lab mixes it up and presents it in different chunks.

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So I'm going to go through it in the order in which your body makes and processes thyroid hormone from asking for it in the beginning, all the way to active thyroid hormone at the end of this. So you may hav...

Why would you choose a functional medicine approach to autoimmunity? So I think it's a good question. I had a couple of new autoimmune patients in last week. One of them was very aware of functional medicine, but didn't know that I was around so close. And so once someone clued her in, came to the office, we had a great visit. The other patient really didn't know much about functional medicine at all, but a family member had said, please go talk to Dr. Krupka. So we did. So interesting between the two. One, very aware, one unaware. So what is a functional medicine approach to autoimmunity? Well, functional medicine is all about root causes and a lot of other doctors, nurses, people out there, they just say that anything outside of the standard medical approach is just bs. And it's all hype and snake oil and don't listen to it.

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But hear me out, you didn't get your autoimmune disorder randomly. I know sometimes it feels like you did or your doctor told you...

As we're heading into fall, kids are going back to school, they're going to get exposed to each other and all kinds of things they're going to pass around, whatever. So I want you to be prepared for what to do, what to have on hand if and when the kids are exposed. So I'm going to start with a couple things to do in preparation for this and hopefully you're not watching this too late. Vitamin D is very important just like it is for adults. It's difficult to know what the kid's level of vitamin D is. I mean it's easy to do a blood test on an adult. You can do a blood test on a child, but you can reason with some children better than others and I certainly understand that. So if you can get your child to sit for a vitamin D blood test, ask your pediatrician for it or call us, we'll put in an order at Lab Corp.

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You can go by and get it done, but then you would know their numbers just like an adult. You want the child's vitamin D level number one to be above...

Hey there. So another installment obviously today I want to talk to you about kind of heading into the fall. Kids are going back to school. That means that they're going to be bringing junk home to the parents that they've all shared with each other at school. Parents are going to bring that to work. Then we all share with each other. So I wanted to take a minute and remind you, this is mid-August, but as we get into September and closer into October, we're going to be getting into bronchitis and sore throat and sinus kind of season. We'll have a whole round of allergies in the fall as well. So let's go ahead and talk about what to do to kind of prime your immune system and get it ready for this first, a couple of preventative things. Number one, make sure your vitamin D is where it needs to be.

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Vitamin D is hugely important for how your immune system functions, especially in its role of an initial response, anti-inflammatory, anti autoimmune, kind of ad...

Did Texas just take a big step toward normalizing root cause medical care?

In functional medicine, we're all about root causes, but prescriptive medicine generally hasn't picked up on that, right? So Texas just passed SB 25. So what that, one of the things, many things included in there is that nutritional education will be required in medical schools if they receive any money from the state of Texas. But if you dig deeper into it, that goes all the way down through high school and junior high and to some degree even into elementary, I think. But what I'm talking about today, at least in this part, is that at the graduate level, at the doctorate level and nursing schools and things like that, we'll have to teach some nutritional curriculum. So that sounds good. We've kind of complained for years that medical doctors get no training in nutrition, yet they seem to claim to understand lifestyle issues and health and chronic disease and all of that.

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We firm...

All right guys. The next one I want to talk about, I love this. I use a lot of this, have really good luck with my patients with this herb. I use it in a form called black cumin seed. The actual product name is black cumin Seed Forte. You can get it as an oil, you can get it as a dry herb, which is the one that I use. But if you've ever heard of black seeded oil and all of the amazing things that it does, black cumin seed or black cumin seed forte that I'm using is the whole herb. It includes the oil, it includes all the other co-factors that are in there, and it has been used for well over 2000 years. You can find documents about it being used. Ngel Satia is the kind of Latin name of the plant for black coen seed.

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It's rich, it's active ingredient, it's rich in something called quinone that has nothing to do with your thyroid, but quinone. Sometimes you'll see it abbreviated as tq, but quinone is what it's called. So if you've seen my blog post on berbe...

We've got lots of people taking statin drugs these days. Arguably one of the most frequently prescribed classes of medications out there. I know they're right up there with acid blockers. You've got statin drugs, like it's millions of doses or millions of prescriptions every year without a doubt, at least here in the us. So one of the things you need to understand is that sometimes the statin drugs you're taking are just draining your energy and you take 'em, you're on 'em for a while, everything's fine, and then you just start getting more lethargic. You're crashing in the afternoon, you're not making energy like you normally do. Eating doesn't fix it. It's not low blood sugar. It just doesn't seem to make much sense. Sometimes it's because of your statin drug. Now, that doesn't mean you have to go stop your statin drug. That's not what I'm trying to say.

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But one of the things that statin drugs do is they drain your energy, but they do it for a specific ...

Hey there. Alright, I'm going to start by saying something in life, right? I like to have a multi-tool with me. You can get a leatherman, Gerber, whatever. It's like a pair of pliers. It's got three or four knife blades, a file wire cutter, bottle opener. It's got things like that on it, like a modern version of a Swiss Army knife. So I keep one in the truck, I keep one in my backpack. If I go hunting, I have one with me. It's just a really compact way or efficient way to get a lot of different things done if you need to. Well, we also have those in functional medicine, a multi-tool of sorts. We have several of them, but absolutely without a doubt one of them, one of the best and probably one of the better well-known ones, at least as far as functional medicine practitioners go, is berberine.

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So berberine isn't extract of certain plants. You can get it from several different species, but it's an extract of those plants. I would consider it a very effectiv...