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An article crossed my desk yesterday that I want to summarize and explain to you. It's about the antiviral properties of an herb called artemisinin. Common name would be sweet wormwood, but you see it as artemisinin quite a bit when you're looking at it in its herbal form. How does it have antiviral properties? Why do we care?

Artemisinin has been used for decades as an antiviral treatment, anti-malaria treatment in other parts of the world. We know it works. It has a good history, good reputation. Lots of people use it. It's very safe. But mechanistically, how does it do that? That's more what this article is dealing with. We know it works. Now we have a better idea how, but let me give you a real quick virology 101.

The way a virus works. First of all, it's not alive. You can't kill it like a bacteria. Antibiotics don't do anything for it. It doesn't work that way. It is a box that delivers genetic material. It lands on the outside of a cell, injects its genetic...

So I know you guys are tired of hearing me go on about pills and shakes every morning while we're going through this cleanse protocol, so I'm going to do something a little different this morning.

I had a patient in for, a new patient, for autoimmune issues yesterday, and she suggested, she had been watching some of these, and she suggested that I talk a little bit about what I explained to her yesterday, so I'm going to do that now.

When we have patients come in with autoimmune issues or inflammatory problems, there's a protocol I have. It's called a fix anything protocol, and it's just an acronym that gives us about 11 different areas of concern that we have to deal with if we're going to get the inflammation and the autoimmune issues under control. I'm not going to go through all 11, but I'm going to go through the heaviest hitters, the ones that we see over and over again,...

I had a patient come in a couple of weeks ago with an interesting situation on his blood work that I wanted to share. And this is all surrounding blood sugar, type two diabetes, A1C, that kind of stuff.

So he had had blood done at his previous doctor's office and came in for some general wellness work. And in going through reviewing his labs I noticed that there were some tests that I normally like to see that were not included in his labs. And he was told by his previous doctor that he was pre-diabetic and they had put him on metformin. So in looking through his labs and getting the new ones to fill in the blanks he had already shown up with a fasting blood sugar of about 106 and his hemoglobin A1C was sitting at 6.0. That's why he was told he was pre-diabetic.

So in doing our labs I looked at a few other things. His triglycerides were 165, which indicates that there's probably some problem with blood sugar and we already knew that, but we looked at his fasting insulin...

I had a patient mention to me, she had spoken to her family doctor about doing the cleanse. And, her doctor told her, "That's ridiculous. We have a liver and some kidneys and their job is to detoxify us, and you don't need to take a bunch of pills for them to do their job. It's what they do."

I've heard that before. It's a common discussion that happens. Generally... I have a truck that's designed to drive around and get me to work and back, but if I don't put gas in it, it can't do that. If I don't have oil in it, if it doesn't have transmission fluid or coolant in it, if the battery's not charged. There are a lot of things that need to be in place for that vehicle to do its job the way it was intended.

So, our liver and our kidneys are not all that different. They need certain nutrients, they need certain processes to work the way they're supposed to and to be supplied with lots of things.

Now, if we don't have, like magnesium, for example. Magnesium binds to certain...

So I had another patient I wanted to talk about, another interesting case. This one also has to do with blood sugar management, type 2 diabetes, that kind of stuff. So I just posted another one kind of in that genre. I figured I'd stick with the trend and throw another one of these up here.

This is an older gentleman. We've been working with him for a while. He does have a cancer history, and blood sugar is not well managed. We're running fasting blood sugars in the 150s, 140s most of the time, and that's pretty much with diet. Triglycerides tend to run in the 165, kind of 170 range. I like it below 100, so definitely not saying this is good blood sugar management. But we had seen worse on him. Hemoglobin A1C had been running in the upper sevens. Again, not where I'd like to see it, but better than it's been. We didn't have a fasting insulin, partly because I wasn't the one that ran the previous blood work, but that's kind of where we were.

Now, he had gone in for a...

I want you to understand when you were born, you were little bitty. I don't know. Your mom will tell you. Five, six, seven, eight, nine pounds, something like that. Now you weigh considerably more. Let's say, I'm guessing, let's say you're 115, 120 pounds, something like that. That's a difference of over 110 pounds from when you were born. That 110 pounds did not come out of thin air. You didn't photosynthesize it. It's not sunlight. That 100 plus pounds is from what you ate. Those were the building blocks to build who you are today.

Moving forward, you need to understand and ask yourself regularly when you see your food on the plate, "Do I want to build my body out of what's on that plate? Do I want to build my body out of steak and vegetables, or do I want to build my body out of mac and cheese and some crackers? Do I want to build my body out of McDonald's or Wendy's or Taco Bell, or do I want to build my body out of chicken and vegetables?" Those are questions we...

Another common question that came up is, how do you swallow supplements? Some people have trouble swallowing pills. And so I give this advice quite a bit at the office. It usually works very well. The two things I point out to people, one is, "You swallow chunks of food larger than those pills on a very regular basis." If you were to take a bite of something, chew it up, and right before you swallow it, spit it out and look at it, don't do this in public, it's bigger than you think. And you swallow that stuff all the time without an issue. So a lot of times it's your brain getting in the way, making you tense, making you think you're going to choke, and it keeps you from doing that. So be aware, you swallow bigger things all the time.

The second important note to make is that pills and capsules behave differently when you swallow them or when you put them in your mouth. So if I were to put water in my mouth and then drop a solid tablet in my mouth, that tablet is going...