Revolution Health & Wellness

Episode 60 – SpectraCell Laboratories & Test

Episode 60 - SpectraCell Laboratories & Test

spectracell labs and tests

 

Speaker 1: 00:00 This is Dr Chad Edwards and you’re listening to podcast number 60 of against the grain.

Speaker 2: 00:04 Are you tired and fatigued? Are you frustrated with doctors because they just don’t seem to listen? Do you want to fix your pain without surgery? If you answered yes to any of these questions than we are the clinic for you, we offer prolotherapy prp or platelet rich plasma therapy and stem cell injections, ivy nutritional therapies, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and functional medicine, and gets you back on track to optimal health. Call our clinic at nine one eight, nine, three, five, three, six, three, six, or visit our website@wwwdotrevolutionhealth.org. To schedule your appointment today. Welcome to against the grain podcast with Dr Chad Edwards, where he challenges the status quo when it comes to medicine. We get into hot topics in the medical field with real stories from real patients to help you on your way to a healthy lifestyle. Get ready because we’re about to go, go, go, go against the grain. Hello. Hello. This is the Super Tall Marshall Morris,

Speaker 3: 01:00 and today I’m joined with Dr Chad Edwards, who is not super tall. He’s not as tall but much more handsome. He is the author of revolutionize your health with customized supplements. He served in the US army and he’s a board certified family physician. Dr Edwards. Welcome. What’s going on? Not a lot. I feel really good and I don’t feel optimal yet, but I know that this is the place to reach those optimal levels. Yep. That’s what we’re going to. That’s what we’re talking about. Okay. That’s what we’re going to get optimal. We’re. What are we talking about? Yeah, so I get a lot of patients, patients

Speaker 1: 01:35 that come in and see us because they know we’ve talked about this many times on the podcast. We, you know, they, they feel bad. They go to their doctor and the doctor said, well, we, we get a bunch of tests and your Tsh is normal and your hormones are normal and everything looks normal, so you’re crazy. There’s nothing wrong with you, you know, that kind of stuff. It’s just really, really common. So we have a process through which we get those patients that have seen five other physicians and we start working through how do we get to the bottom of why you feel bad and everybody’s a little bit different and we try to, I don’t want to say standardize it, but you got to have some kind of framework. Otherwise you get lost in the weeds. So, you know, the most common thing is I use a very comprehensive, I call it my full panel labs assessment, uh, and we’re, we’re digging into is kind of like a, if you’re going to go buy a car, you know, it’s kind of like kicking the tires and checking to make sure the windows rolled up and down and all the doors open and close and the trunk opens and closes and you open the hood and you look at the air filter and she kind of join a general assessment of what’s going on.

Speaker 1: 02:36 And of course the, the concept is, you know, in traditional medicine everything is disease based and unless you have a disease rather than really we do for you. Unless I can diagnose diabetes based on diagnostic criteria, then I don’t really worry about your blood sugar in it. And the same is true with any other disease there a site related or any other problems in our clinic, there’s a, there’s a total paradigm shift and we’re focused on health. We want people to be healthy, not we don’t want to focus on disease. We want to focus on health. So we want people to be as healthy as possible and we want to assess where they are on that spectrum. On one end is you’re about to die and you know, because your physiology is completely fallen apart on the other end is complete optimal and total health optimal performance, you know, the Olympic athletes, you know, these kinds of things.

Speaker 1: 03:29 And we want to be as far on that side as possible. And often getting to that point can require, uh, some, some interventions. There may be some problems along the way that we need to identify. So we’ll generally start with this, with this comprehensive lab assessment. We catch a lot of stuff on that one. And I would say 80 percent of our patients, we find what needs to be addressed or at least a way to get started on the plan in that lab assessment. Even if I couldn’t do those labs, just optimizing exercise, nutrition and the, what I call the three Rs, rest, sleep, recovery from exercise, making sure that you’re not just wearing yourself into the ground. We were actually on in, you know, in between recordings today, we were talking to be talking about that here in the clinic about how it written on the clinic and the, in the studio about how, uh, you know, some athletes will wear themselves down and their testosterone levels will decline or, you know, in a number of things.

Speaker 1: 04:31 Uh, and then I’m a recovering and reducing stress. So what stresses seems to almost be ubiquitous nowadays just because of the 24 slash seven lifestyle we lead. And we always have a cell phone where we go and people are always trying to get us and stuff. So the, uh, that will, if we optimize those things, then we’re going to fix a large majority of problems. But what do we do when you get that patient that comes in? We do the full lab assessment and we’re just not, we’re, we haven’t identified what it is, you know, there’s, there’s a number of conditions that are associated with nutritional deficiencies, you know, not getting enough nutrition. I talk about this a fairly extensively in my, in my book, revolutionize your health with customized supplements about nutrition and supplements and how do you know if you’re getting enough because there is a, there’s a study that was done.

Speaker 1: 05:27 Uh, let’s see. Let me see if I can find where this was a. So there was a study that was done on 162,000 post menopausal females and they followed them for eight years and that study showed that multivitamins don’t work or it’s at least suggested that, um, and they said that this was published in live science in February 2009, um, and, and also in the archives of internal medicine. And it said longterm multivitamin use has no impact on the risk of common cancers, cardiovascular disease or overall mortality in postmenopausal women. And I think there’s multiple reasons for that. One is quality of supplements. I don’t know what supplements that they used in this study, but in other words, standardized. I know this was probably, I haven’t read the study. I probably should, but I suspect that they, it was just a reported. Do you take a multivitamin and when you, if you read my book, I go into the consumer labs reports on the horrible quality of supplements.

Speaker 1: 06:26 I go into the, uh, the, uh, attorney general in New York and in February of 2015 where they ordered cease and desist or they had to cease and desist orders for Walgreens, Walmart, GNC and target on there privately labeled supplements because the quality was so bad that they were, um, they were violating law. So people will talk about, you know, they’re, they’re not FDA controlled. Uh, well the rfd control but as food and not as medications. So I would argue that one of the reasons that, that the studies show that there were problems is because of that. The second thing is in traditional medicine I was never trained how to optimize nutrition. I didn’t understand the nutritional problems, I didn’t understand how a disease could manifest because of a nutritional deficiency. Type two diabetes, if you have a chromium deficiency, it can cause type two diabetes.

Speaker 1: 07:28 If you have type two diabetes because of a chromium deficiency, you can resolve the type two diabetes by supplementing with high quality chromium. So you find the deficiency, fix it. They get better sometimes. Finding that deficiency if there is one, is like looking for a needle in a haystack. And as I tell my patients, sometimes we don’t even need, we don’t even know which haystack it’s in. You know, is this an environmental toxin? Is this a heavy metal toxicity? Is this a, you know, because of stresses and adrenal dysfunction, is it a hormone imbalances that thyroid is that there’s any number of things. So we have to start working through these things. So what I want to talk about today is a test that I really, really liked this test and the test is done by a lab called spectracell. Um, and this, uh, this test is a fantastic assessment of intracellular nutritional status.

Speaker 1: 08:26 And I get a lot of patients, you know, a lot of my patients will, will read Google and they’ll, you know, sometimes there are more educated on stuff than that I am. And many doctors are intimidated by that, but know we shouldn’t be. If we’re, if we’re educated and confident in what we know, why, why would it be intimidated by that? Uh, we shouldn’t be intimidated by that. I would encourage people to go look things up and educate themselves. Now there’s a lot of bad information out there, so just got to be careful and you have to consider the source on where the information from where the information comes. Um, but this test spectracell a, it’s a fantastic test. And I have seen some patients that came in, they had horrific nutritional deficiencies and they, um, they got a spectracell, we noted a deficiency. We fixed those deficiencies and it, it revolutionized how they felt.

Speaker 1: 09:14 Um, so here’s just a couple of examples of some things that are associated, some conditions that are associated with nutritional deficiencies. Things like pain syndromes like fibromyalgia, uh, some headaches, insomnia, fatigue, hypo thyroid, cognitive dysfunction. So things like your brain’s not working well, Alzheimer’s, dementia, those kinds of things. Um, so something like widespread pain. There are, there’s multiple references for these and I won’t go into all of them, but there are associations with thing like carnitine Coleen and also tall searing vitamin D, vitamin B, one and vitamin B, two, a antioxidant, zinc, magnesium, selenium, cocuten. All of those things can be associated with widespread and chronic pain. Anybody that has a, a, a chronic pain issue should be screened for nutritional deficiency. In fact, here’s a question for you. You Ready? I’m ready. Okay. I was born ready. All right. Male and female. Patient with a history of chronic pain and lengthy treatment using opioid therapy. So like morphine, demerol, you one of those things, a percocet Lortab should be considered for screening, for deficiency of which of the following. This is going to be a, b, c, d, or e. okay. Vitamin B, two, which is also known as Riboflavin. B, Testosterone. See Vitamin D, D, a, and B or e, all the above.

Speaker 1: 10:40 Which which should they be screened for? Yeah. I’m going to go with. I’m going to go with C, it’s all of the above. They should be screened for all of them. They should be screened for vitamin D deficiency, which we see very commonly in our clinic. They should be screened for vitamin D two, I’m sorry, b, two B as in boy a riboflavin and testosterone because all of those contribute to pain. Exactly. Okay. And we don’t think about some of those things

Speaker 3: 11:08 because that’s not top of mind. You think of a vitamin B, two, correct me if I’m wrong. Is that what gives you energy or what does that contribute to? What does it mean to you?

Speaker 1: 11:18 All of the b vitamins can help in the energy delivery process in different, in different steps. So you know specifically for the pain and I don’t know the mechanism. I can. Sure I can look into that. Maybe we’ll do a podcast on that one day, but all of those things need to be looked into,

Speaker 3: 11:32 but the point is, is most of those are, you think top of mind vitamin C. Okay, I’m getting that from orange juice. That’s our vitaminK , you know, for, with my ski, with my skin or whatever it is. You don’t think of those things, uh, as typical pain, vitamins are contributing to pain. So that’s why. That’s why the underlying

Speaker 1: 11:54 root in pain is significant. Exactly. Okay. And then we go to something like headaches. Nutritional deficiencies often associated with headaches, vitamin B, three, carnitine lipoic acid, Alpha lipoic acid, vitamin C, b, 12, full laid a glutathione, magnesium, vitamin D, calcium [inaudible]. Again, co q 10 again, so you know, we’re seeing some repetitive things. Something like insomnia, vitamin B, one or thiamine, vitamin B, three, Niacin full eight and B, six, vitamin B, 12, magnesium, zinc, copper, oleic acid, vitamin A. I get a lot of patients. In fact, if they’ve got an insomnia, one of the first things that I’ll do is make sure that they have good magnesium intake. I may use a magnesium supplement. There are several different ones that I’ll look at a, but we also consider looking at their levels. Chronic fatigue. We got chromium. We also, we mentioned chromium and associated from diabetes a minute ago.

Speaker 1: 12:44 Zinke asparagine, Biotin, glutamine, Syrian cocuten. Again, a fruit toast intolerance, I mean we’ve got multiple of these things, magnesium, antioxidants, vitamins a, e and d, vitamin C, all of your b vitamins, carnitine, something like cognitive decline. So as we age and every now and then I’ll get a patient that comes in and they say, I’ve got a family history of dementia and I don’t want that. So, you know, nutrition, nutrients that are associated with cognitive decline as we age. Got Alpha lipoic acid is a very potent antioxidants and cognitive decline can be a, um, an oxidative stress problem. So Alpha lipoic acid can be very important for that. B-Vitamins, carnitine, coleen chromium, copper Gludethyon, also the master antioxidant, a glutamine and disparaging and asa tall oleic acid, which is an omega nine fatty acid, like your Omega threes, but an Omega nine, Syrian vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, you know, you’ve got all of these different things that you’re like, what, what in the world?

Speaker 1: 13:47 Uh, I mean, how, how in the world are we gonna make sure that we’ve got good nutrition. How, how do you make sure that you’re taking enough? And I, the last thing I want is a patient to leave my office and they’re on 25 supplements, uh, or 25 medications or optimal health is exercise, nutrition and the three r’s that, that’s where most people’s optimal health lies. So focusing on that is what we need to do. The problem is we can’t get optimal health or nutrition most of the time or many times. And I go into that in the book. Uh, and, and why is that the case? So how do we assess for this? And let me, uh, let me ask one question. We’ll ask the question, we’ll go to break, we’ll give the answer if that’s. Love it. All right? Uh, so in, in trying to determine what’s the best way to assess optimal nutrition. So the question is a micronutrient analysis from lymphocyte intracellular fluid is considered more accurate than serum hair fecal or urine samples because you’ve got four options. One, it’s an early warning sign of leukemia to it can be tested in your doctor’s office. Three, it most closely resembles the patient’s micronutrient needs. If the sailor level or d, it is reimbursed well by most third party payers, meaning most insurance companies, so we’ll go to break, I’m guessing d, but the answer

Speaker 2: 15:17 right after the break. Vertical limit fitness, constantly strive for better, better mind functioned, fitness capacity and community. They accomplish this through bodyweight bootcamp style classes and high intensity functional fitness classes from group classes to private training. Vertical limit fitness elevates your health and wellness while helping you become able to do anything and prepare you for everything that life may bring along. Call nine one eight four, zero nine one six, three, three or visit their website@wwwdotverticallimitfitness.com. For more information and to sign up for a week of classes. All right, right.

Speaker 1: 15:51 We are back. Dr Chad Edwards here and we’re talking about the spectracell test and Dr Edwards had kind of teased us with a question here and we’re going to get into the answer. Yeah. So we’re gonna we’re gonna. Repeat the question. So, and I’ll explain the question a little bit just because there’s some big words bigger than kindergarten kind of works. Yeah, thank you. Alright, so the micro nutrient analysis, so we’re measuring micronutrients, which are your vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and things, so micronutrient analysis from lymphocyte interest, sailor fluid, that’s the fluid inside white blood cells is considered more accurate than serum hair fecal or poop or urine samples because he had a. it’s an early warning sign of leukemia b that can be tested in the doctor’s office C, because it most closely represents the patient’s micronutrient needs at the sailor level or d it is reimbursed well by most third party payers before the break, I guess be.

Speaker 1: 16:50 Yup. You guessed d and You will be wrong. Okay. So the issue is that most closely represents the patient’s micronutrient needs at the cellular level. So there are, you know, when I was, you know, just kind of doing my normal inside the box medical practice and I wanted to measure someone’s b12 status. I would get a serum b 12 level. That doesn’t give me an idea of the intracellular nutritional status of the patient. It says that there are 12 levels rep, but there’s always a question of did that get into the cell to get where it needs to be and that that remains to be seen. I would argue that when that lab test is, is normal, it doesn’t necessarily help me when it’s negative, they’re too low. When it’s normal, it doesn’t mean they’re sufficient. So to me it just leaves a lot of, a lot of questions out.

Speaker 1: 17:42 So then what do you do if you want to know the real or the the, the best assessment from a functional perspective, you know, we’re not, we’re not measuring a level here, we’re not getting your [inaudible] level in Santa, it’s five to 10. That’s not what we’re doing. We want to know how are your cells performing with or without this nutrient. So that’s where the spectracell test comes in. This is a really, really cool test. So basically we draw your blood and we draw your blood in, in the clinic and we’re going to send it off to the lab and the lab is going to culture the t lymphocytes, white blood cells, and when they culture that they incorporate radioactive thymidine. Now we’re not giving the patient obviously, but when, when you’re incorporating that radioactive thymidine, it’s kind of a tag or a tracer so we can actually assess the DNA of the cells.

Speaker 1: 18:36 And then since we’re adding that in, we’ll see what cells are new or you know, how much of the DNA is new and how much of it’s old. So we’re looking at the growth of that. The maximal growth rate is 100 percent, uh, which is optimal. That’s what we consider optimal now. So that is considered the control. That’s the standard. That’s what we’re looking at now. They’re going to perform the test for every single nutrient that we’re looking for there in, in the mill, you, the, in the environment where we’ve got the cells we are going, they are going to have an environment deficient in the one nutrient they’re testing. So let’s say they’re testing vitamin D, well, they will have everything else the cells need minus the vitamin D, so they will remove a micronutrient from the medium and then they’ll repeat the test and they’re gonna measure that growth rate by DNA synthesis.

Speaker 1: 19:31 Again, some of that control was 100 percent, uh, and the growth rate is, um, if the growth rate is limited by removing the vitamin D, we think there’s a functional assessment. They actually repeat that test and add the vitamin D and You know, if we’ve got above 55 percent, then we’ve got a functional deficiency in Vitamin D. and the cool thing is, is they do that for all 34 micro micronutrients that they’re assessing all your b vitamins. They’ve got other vitamins and minerals, like an asa tall wearing a glutamine, oleic acid, got all those kinds of things. You’ve got vitamin other vitamins and minerals, which is vitamin A, d, e, andK , we’ve got magnesium, manganese, zinc, copper, you know, all of those kinds of things. It’s not a, it’s not a complete list of everything. I’m not going to read down the whole list, but then we also get a full list of antioxidants, a including gludethyon and lipoic acid or that alphabet book as what we talked about, vitamin C, Vitamin E, selenium a plus we’re getting chromium and how your, how your body interacts with glucose, and then we’re getting overall antioxidant function which measures independence of each of the individual antioxidants.

Speaker 1: 20:42 And we’re also looking at the white blood cell immune response. Uh, so are your able to mount an immune response? So there are several functional tests, uh, in this, in this task. I mean, it, it’s, it’s a fantastic test if you want to know how your functional nutritional status looks, are you taking enough supplements? Are you getting enough nutrition? This test does a really good job of answering that. I’ve been using this test for several years and I really, really liked this test.

Speaker 1: 21:15 So I’m going to ask you another question. I’m killing the question so far over to, okay, I love it. Maybe you’ll get this one. You know, by the way, if on the other one, the answer that one you go with the one that’s too long to be wrong. Okay, so c was too long to be wrong. You got to go home learning. You’ve got to go with the one that’s too long to be wrong. Oh, okay. So the question is the following micronutrients have an important entered dependent function in the production of ATP at the cellular level. So we’re talking about the energy production and when found deficient in the setting of chronic fatigue symptoms, consideration should be given to supplementing both. So in other words, you may find a deficiency of one, but you might want to consider giving both. So you have asparagine and glutamine, B12 and folate, zinc and copper or selenium and magnesium.

Speaker 4: 22:08 Hey,

Speaker 1: 22:10 asparagine and glutamine as your, as your answer. Yes.

Speaker 1: 22:14 And I understand where you’re coming from, but no, it’s be 12 and full, laid be 12 and fully both of those. And remember your b vitamins are very important for energy delivery, for energy production and energy delivery. Your [inaudible] and full late are both b vitamins. So there’s your answer. So you’re wrong. I was close. All right, so I may come back to another question here in just a minute, but this test is, again, it’s looking at a functional assessment of your nutritional status. The, the test does have a cost. The cost depends on, I mean, you’re looking at anywhere from, you know, uh, you know, in the 150, 180 $200 to $25 range depending on the clinic. Uh, and up to, I think the cash prize for it, I’ve seen it as high as $600, but there’s a couple of insurances that doesn’t cover it as well.

Speaker 1: 23:14 And so it’s a little bit more expensive for those. Um, the, and it might depend on your location, but, uh, as of now, there’s two insurances that I know of, uh, that, uh, it’s a little bit more expensive and, but all of the rest of the commercial insurances, medicare currently at the time of this discussion, you know, everything is changing because who knows, with, uh, with politics in general, uh, and obamacare and all of the impact of all that crap. Um, so, uh, there is a cost associated with the test or not everyone wants to do the test and we certainly understand that. We do that in our clinic. We can do it at anytime it’s a blood test, simple blood out, send it off to the lab because they’re culturing white blood cells. It, it is a very finicky test and it’s not uncommon.

Speaker 1: 24:02 So this is just, if you come to our clinic and you get this test done and we tell you the date, it didn’t process well, it’s not uncommon that your white blood cells didn’t grow well, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. It doesn’t mean anything like that. It could be the way the wind was blowing that day. Uh, it, we may just need to repeat the test. Usually we’ll repeat it up to three times. If we don’t get it on three times, we assume for whatever reason your white blood cells won’t proliferate. Uh, to the extent that we can get the test, that’s extremely rare. It’s not that uncommon that we’ll have to repeat it a couple of times to try and get that. So that can be frustrating, but understand it was nothing wrong with the way it was drawn, the way it was necessarily handled, although those could be factors, um, but sometimes it just doesn’t work well.

Speaker 1: 24:45 And so sometimes we’ll just get more blood and see if we can do it that way. Okay. So let’s, let’s do one more question. That was my last chance at redemption. Yup. Last, last chance. Last chance workout. If we were on the biggest loser. Antioxidant. Monitoring and supplementation is important and slowing cellular, aging and apoptosis particularly. Which of the following is important for antioxidant supplementation? You Ready? I’m ready. Gludethyon co Q, 10. Selenium, vitamin E and C or all of the above. It was for, for which, what’s the question? Anti Antioxidant Monitoring and supplementation is important in slowing cellular aging, kind of an antiaging approach and a pop ptosis, particularly Gludethyon, cocuten, selenium, vitamin ENC or all of the above. I’m going with all of the above. You are the man. Yes. I should’ve made it like a winner. The winner takes all this is all worth all the points.

Speaker 1: 25:59 That’s me. Every time I go to the Dixie stampede, it doesn’t matter like the north versus the south, whatever, it doesn’t matter like the whole thing. It doesn’t matter because at the very end, if whoever wins the last one went to the whole thing, winner take all winner take all. It’s crazy. Um, so anyway, uh, you got it right. Strong work, Gludethyon, cocuten, selenium, vitamin E, vitamin C, they’re all very important antioxidants. They’re very important in slowing cellular aging and a pop doses. So I wanted to spend some time talking about the test spectracell, how we can evaluate nutritional status a little bit about why and some of the disease processes that are associated with micronutrient deficiency, how we can identify that and how we can fix

Speaker 3: 26:44 Dr. Edwards. It’s a pleasure to hear a little bit about what you’re using to evaluate some of these things. We hear a lot about the diseases and the deficiencies and alternative, um, alternative therapies and ways to fix these things. But it’s cool to hear specifically what we’re using to identify one of the things in route to optimal health. And that’s this spectracell test. That’s awesome. Absolutely. And by the way, where I got my data, a hundred and 37 references a hundred and 37 scientific references, validating some of the stuff that I was talking about. Boom, Dr Edwards. Thank you so much, man. Have a great day. Thanks for listening to this week’s podcast with Dr Chad Edwards. Tune in next week where we’ll be going against the grain.