AMEN 2017: Are You Willing?

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Breakout Session B

Eddie Ramirez

Evidence-based Interventions to Tackle Dementia

We have lots of material to cover, and we'll be talking about a very hot subject.

In fact, I want you to remember when you were younger, if you remember, There was not so many people with dementia.

And as time is increasing, you know, we see more and more of that.

The only disclosure I have is I don't have any disclosures.

I do lots of research, many of that related to mental health.

I don't have time to talk about this research paper, so I'm just going to mention them briefly.

This 1 on how we're able to decrease benzos in our 10-day depression program.

How lavender oil is as effective as Xanax regarding anti-anxiolytic properties.

How activated charcoal, anybody heard about activated charcoal?

How activated charcoal is actually very good for spider bites.

And this 1 that came out in a journal of the American Heart Association, how we have been able to reverse diabetes in many instances.

This is a clinical case in which this patient, in a year and a half, was able to reverse diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and dyslipidemia.

This 1 on how plant-based diets is 1 of the best strategies for weight control.

This other 1 on how blood pressure responds very well to the intensive lifestyle interventions.

This other 1 on how plant-based diets are 1 of the best foods to control a diabetic.

And this 1, I just presented this yesterday, very interesting research on how sexual abuse tends to be much more prevalent among bisexuals, homosexuals and people questioning their sexuality.

This will come out in the Journal of sexual medicine later on in the year.

This other 1 on how doing things that go against your conscience is negative for your mental health.

And this other 1 on how sexual relationships outside of the context of marriage are related to higher levels of depression and anxiety.

This is in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

And this other 1 also, very interesting piece of research showing how bisexuals, homosexuals, and people questioning their sexuality tend to have depression levels that are more severe compared to those people that are straight.

I'm co-author in the book, Rethink Food, with Hans Diehl, Barnard, Greger, and S.

And if you missed the American College of Lifestyle Medicine just a few days ago, you missed meeting them.

George Guthrie is the new president of that organization.

So, very nice positive change is happening there in that organization.

Because of the research I do, I get invited all over the place.

Ni kwey shaw, po ton kwama, anyone Chinese?

This is in Beijing, China, Cairo, Egypt, Moscow, Russia, New Zealand, Norway, Iceland, Australia, Chile, Belgium, Puerto Rico, India, and many more places that we are sharing about that complete message that we have of healing.

Let me share with you these 2 resources before we go on.

If you want to find out the research I was sharing you and many more papers, it is here in this page.

And this is something that happens all the time.

A few days later I'm going to get an email and it's going to say, Doctor, I couldn't find the research you were showing.

And I'm going to ask him, did you wrote the address?

You can actually Google Francisco Ramirez Research Gate.

Just Google those 3 things, you will find that page there, Nedley Clinic and Wimar Institute.

People say that I actually look like him.

And also, I'm going to be sharing some other research studies.

You can find those here in this Twitter, twitter.com, A-V-R-D-M-D.

So if you're interested in some of those papers, just go to that page.

And Before going into that, I just want to mention to you what Isaac Newton said.

He says, if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

So what I'm sharing to you is a composition of many ideas from different universities, and this is the advantage of having the light of the inspired work.

As you start analyzing some of the protocols being promoted, there's some issues there that could be improved upon.

So I am talking about researchers in Harvard, Loma Linda, Buck Institute, UCLA, Massachusetts General Hospital, Cornell University, and some others.

So what I'm sharing with you this afternoon is a combination of all that knowledge on how to help people with dementia.

And see what happened is that our current paradigm of medicine is changing.

The old paradigm was you have a disease, you make the diagnosis, and there is 1 treatment.

So there is some sort of linear relationship.

But for some other diseases, this simple paradigm actually could be improved.

For example, in our paper that we publish on the hypothesis of our depression program, we use that multifactorial approach to dealing with the problem.

See, depression doesn't come about usually just because of 1 thing.

It is our hypothesis that there are 10 groups of causes and When somebody has 4 or more of those causes, you end up with depression or anxiety or other mental health problems.

So as you can see, you arrive to the same disease, but the trigger, the causes, happen to be multiple.

And it is our job as health care providers to try to identify those causes so that we can give the right type of care.

And this is something that in the literature, you're gonna find it under the name personalized medicine.

You have to adapt to the needs of the patients.

So it is actually quite easy to get Alzheimer's dementia.

Just eat lots of sugar, don't sleep enough, don't you ever do exercise, get rid of important hormones in your body, make sure your vitamin D is quite low, and you're going to end up with what some researchers call type 2 Alzheimer's.

And the reality is that, as I mentioned at the beginning, we are seeing more and more dementia on the myths that we have.

Stats tell us that 1 out of 20 people on 60 years of age and 1 out of 5 in people that are 80 will have dementia.

Now some people question, well, doctor, what's the difference between dementia and normal aging?

You could summarize this by the fact that as you age and a little bit reflection on your lifestyle, things start to slow down.

In other words, if you were very bright when you were young, you will continue to be very bright as you get old.

And I have bad news, if you were not so bright when you were young, unfortunately later on things will remain the same.

So dementia is not only a decrease in those processing abilities, but also this is accompanied by changes in personality and behavior, and as time progresses, things get worse and worse and worse.

And usually we make the diagnosis of dementia looking at different parameters, such as problems with the memory.

There's some standardized tests that you can run to find that.

And 1 of more cognitive domains such as language, motor activity, recognition, or the frontal lobe usage, the executive function.

And things get worse and worse with time.

Now, Alzheimer's disease tends to be the most common dementia.

That's why it's the 1 that you hear the most if you're not in the medical world, because it happens to be the most common type of dementia.

Dementia, there's many types, subtypes of dementia, but Alzheimer's is the most popular.

And then dementia goes through different stages.

Many times the person may not even be aware they're having troubles, but the people around them starts noticing, hey, there's something wrong with mother or aunt and so forth.

And if you do a physical exam at this level, you may not find much wrong unless you run 1 of these more specialized tests to find out that they're starting to have some cognition problems.

Then you start going into the moderate, in which you actually start even recognizing familiar things like your family and so forth.

And then the very sad stage of this disease, in which the person actually ends up losing the complete control of their world.

Chad Kreuzer

Fadia Kreuzer

The Gut-Brain Connection With Happiness, Depression, and Anxiety

Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity to study your Word and to study science.

I pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us.

We're going to start with something that many of you have heard about in, we're going to talk about, to begin with on the gut-brain connection.

In the Bible, you have the first area of the gut-brain connection that I know of or the first place spoken of is in the book of Daniel.

And you may have seen this before, but there's a book called The History of Epidemiologic Methods and Concepts.

And in this book, it says that Daniel chapter 1 is possibly the first clinical trial in all of recorded history.

And it says here, this is from the United States National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, the most well-funded medical institution on the planet, something like $26 billion budget every single year.

We see here talking about the evolution of clinical research, a history before and beyond by James Lind.

And in this article it says the world's first clinical trial is recorded in the book of Daniel in the Bible.

We're gonna do a quick overview, and most of you know it, so we're not going into any detail.

But you may remember the story in Daniel chapter 1.

Daniel's taken from Babylon, from Jerusalem to Babylon, and he goes into a three-year educational system whereby the king gives him his best food in the kingdom, which would have been probably a standard Babylonian diet, you know, a standard, probably animal-based diet with a mixture of maybe unclean foods or what the Jews would later on call common foods.

But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank.

Therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself." There were certain things that Daniel knew he was not to eat, And so he said, I'm sorry, I can't do this.

And so Daniel, this is where we have the first test in Daniel chapter 1, verse 12, where it says, prove thy servants or test your servants.

This is that first clinical trial that we know of in all of recorded history.

It says, prove thy servants I beseech thee 10 days and let them give us pulse to eat and water to drink.

And we know that pulse are simply things that are grown from seeds.

So Daniel and his friends go on a plant-based diet.

What is the result of this diet he went on in Daniel chapter 1 verse 18 to 20, it says, Now at the end of the days that the king had said he should bring them in, then the prince of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar, and the king communed with them, and among them all was found none like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

And in all matters of wisdom and understanding that the king inquired of them, he found them 10 times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm.

So what happened here is that Daniel and his friends as they changed their diet what is taking place within their diet which is affecting their guts seems to be actually impacting their brain.

Very, very fascinating And who would have guessed that this has actually been replicated in our day?

I'm going to show you a video clip here, just 1 second.

But the main thing that folks should be concerned about is how long you live and how likely you are to get disease.

There have been 3 major studies published on this subject, big meta-analyses.

And these meta-analyses, and only 3 big ones have been published, they show consistently that low-carb diets, in other words, low-plant food diets, high-animal food diets, consistently they show that they're associated with more heart disease and more death, more mortality.

If you look around the world and you look at these people in the blue zones, the average percentage of calories from carbs ranges from about 50% to about 80%.

Carbs are not the enemy, refined carbs are the enemy.

There have been a number of recent studies Dr.

First she did an observational study showing that plant-based diet actually significantly improves your depression and anxiety stress score.

So the mood actually is improved when you get the right amount of carbohydrates, but also the right type of carbohydrates and less protein.

Then she followed up with an interventional study, and that's where she took people who are not on a plant-based diet and put them on a plant-based diet for 2 weeks.

She also put them on a plant-based diet plus fish for 2 weeks to see which 1 would be superior.

And it turned out the fish diet wasn't any more superior than the carnivore diet.

But the plant-based diet, significant, dramatic changes, statistically significant changes in just 2 weeks in their mental ability.

We see when people go on this diet and drink plenty of water, get plenty of rest, follow these natural remedies that they, it's just like something snaps in their brain and it doesn't take like weeks or months.

Plant-based diet is key in our program for depression and anxiety recovery.

The results are outstanding because it's a comprehensive approach, not just diet.

We also utilize exercise and we're utilizing correct thoughts in a lot of different modalities.

I went on a plant-based diet about 5 weeks ago.

It's amazing because I even if they had had not told me he had the diet change the first thing I noticed was he was bringing his schoolwork in.

And my teacher has actually been bragging on how much better I've been behaving since I've been on the diet.

In class he wasn't getting as distracted, that he was paying attention, he was able to listen more closely, he was being alert, His discernment was better, he was more diligent, everything.

I can pay attention more, my mind is more clear since I've been on the diet.

And I also noticed he lost a lot of weight, I mean, but The main things I noticed was behavior.

A study in a middle school has showed clearly that switching the menu from animal source to plant source diet almost eliminated absenteeism, increased and enhanced attention and homework performance and performance at school.

It almost eliminated acts of violence as well as teen pregnancies.

And so they just feel better everywhere the blood flows, everywhere that perfect circulation goes, they feel better.

And every single day since I've been on a plant-based diet, the clarity continues to increase.

And my face continues to look younger and my body feels like I look more vibrant.

I've looked at pictures of myself before and after and I look 5 years older, even just 10 months ago than I do now.

What we eat does get turned into neurotransmitters.

It actually helps us or hurts us depending on what we're eating in regards to our brain chemistry and it plays a vital role in health of the brain.

They'll say within 3 or 4 days they seem to have clarity, they're alert, they listen in class better, they absorb more And they do better on their tests.

In fact, diet alone, studies show that diet alone will reduce your depression and anxiety scores by half just by dramatically changing your diet to a plant-based.

Now, we go for more than just half, and so that's why we have a whole program that includes more than this.

But just the diet alone will make a big difference.

You don't have to choose between high quality living and longevity.

It's the same program, the same new start approach to living, helps you live longer and it helps you live better.

Alright, wasn't that, were you all able to hear it?

How these young people's lives were changed.

And that 1 young man that we recorded, it was just 5 weeks.

And it changed his performance in school, his behavior.

So we're seeing this gut brain connection is really clear.

We saw that, Chad said, in the book of Daniel.

It worked for Daniel and his friends and now in today's age we're seeing it work also for young people today or not just young people but young and old alike.

So what is it about this gut brain connection that is so intriguing, right?

I mean, anywhere you go, people are just like, I want to know more about this gut brain connection.

Do you know the Bible, not only in the book of Daniel understood this connection, but also in Lamentations 120, it says, Behold, O Lord, for I am in distress, my bowels are troubled.

And you know, we laugh at that because I think we're so disconnected today with our mind and our bodies that we just think that's funny but they really I think understood that they understood the connection Jeremiah 419 says my bowels my bowels I am pained at my very heart wow how interesting and science is proving these things Did you know that approximately 90% of the information that goes between the vagus nerve and the brain, from the gut to the brain, through the vagus nerve, 90% of it is from the gut to the brain and not the opposite.

So whatever is going on down here has a big influence on what's going on up here.

And you're going to start to see why this is such an important connection.

Not only the Bible, but the spirit of prophecy tells us something very interesting.

And had we read this quote a number of years ago, we would have scoffed at it.

But today cutting edge science is showing us that it is true.

It says the abuses of the stomach by the gratification of the appetite are a fruitful source of what?

James Tarin

The Despised Rx

Dear Father, we're so grateful that we can be learning together, sitting at the feet of the great physician.

Tiran freedom and wisdom as he's speaking to us.

We thank you for hearing and answering this prayer in Christ's name.

So as you can see, the topic, or the title of my talk is The Despised Prescription.

And we're going to dive in and figure out exactly how I derived that title.

So my talk today, a lot of it is centered in pediatrics, at least the opening part of the talk.

I just graduated a family medicine residency in Fort Worth, Texas.

But as part of that, I have seen a lot of pediatrics and am currently actually covering for a pediatrician in my locum tenens job.

So My world at the moment seems to be very saturated with pediatrics.

I've been covering them for a month and I also have 2 private pediatric patients that I come home to at the end of the day, too.

So I think God in his wisdom brings very good lessons at a timely fashion into our lives.

So we will talk about really just kind of recognizing the chronic diseases that we're starting to see in our pediatric populations really as a spillover of what's happening in our adult populations.

And we'll talk about really just screening and diagnosis of certain conditions in pediatric populations.

We'll also discuss why does this matter and if there's anything that we can do as health care professionals to change this.

And last but not least, which is primarily the meat of our talk, is to really talk about how we can do this, more so through the power of a living personal testimony, really enable our patients to have better health outcomes.

With that being said, let's again pause for a word of prayer before we start.

Dear Lord in heaven, we thank you so much for the privilege of being here.

We ask that your Holy Spirit would be present here, Father, that as we learn together and reason together, Father, that you would give us wisdom on how to cooperate in your work of healing in this age.

So like any good medical talk, we will go ahead and start off with a case, which was a patient that I saw myself in my senior year of residency.

He came to me for a well child check, a seven-year-old Hispanic male, And most of the time before I go into a patient's room, especially a pediatric patient, I always look at the growth chart.

That's what we live by as providers for pediatric patients.

And so I started with my nutritional inventory, which is what I always do with my pediatric patients.

And so I just found he was really taking large amounts of milk and juice on a daily basis.

And also, dad said that he admitted that he would take him to have donuts on a couple of days before dropping him off at school in the mornings.

Soda was frequent for him and he also had several fast food meals during the week and they estimated that maybe he was watching an hour or so of TV and having screen time.

And I think that this is a very conservative estimate of what parents will tell you in a visit.

And so when I looked at his growth chart, for weight at least, that's where he was at.

And I wish I was lying when I said that that's the majority of my patients.

And so you can see he has been, so to speak, off the charts for weight for a long time.

But we do not really categorize weight in pediatric populations based on their weight solely.

And essentially, I'll draw your attention to an overweight pediatric patient.

It's any patient above the 85th percentile for their age and gender.

And so this is exactly what my kids' growth chart has looked like in terms of BMI.

And I will tell you right now, I've been seeing kids exclusively for an entire month.

And probably 8 of my 10 patients, their growth charts look like this before I go into the room.

So it's always like I'm always preparing myself for kind of the same speech that I've had to give over and over for these past weeks.

Series

Breakout Session B

The Gut-Brain Connection With Happiness, Depression, and Anxiety

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Unusual Living

Food As Medicine

1h 9m

Question & Answer

27m

Is There a "Doctor" on the Farm?

Healthy Soil, Healthy Plants, Healthy People- Another look at GMO’s and Pesticides

57m

Ag and Your Health

Plants and Gut Microbiome – What’s the Connection? Part 2

42m

Misc

Strange Slips: The Parable of the Plant

58m

Full Circle Garden

Full Circle Garden #1

1h 14m

Agriculture and Education

4. Manual Labor and Agriculture in Education

1h

Breakout Session 2

GMO’s: Where are They Not?

58m

Intensive: The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap

The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap- Part 6

48m

Home Gardening

The Original Garden “Tool”: Seeds - Their Significance, GMO/Hybrid/Heirloom/Open Pollinated?

1h 9m

Track 4 Seminars

Eight Weeks to Wellness, Part 1

1h 15m

Ag and Your Health

Plants and Gut Microbiome – What’s the Connection? Part 1

51m

Sound Doctrine