Revolution Health & Wellness

Episode 77 – Hyperpigmentation, Hydroquinone, and Better Options

Episode 77 - Hyperpigmentation, Hydroquinone, and Better Options

Hyperpigmentation

Speaker 1: 00:00 This is Dr Chad Edwards and you’re listening to podcast number 77 of against the grain.

Speaker 2: 00:04 Welcome to against the grain podcast 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 against the grain.

Speaker 1: 00:28 Hello everybody. This is Dr. Chad Edwards. Thanks so much for listening to us today. I’m very excited to be here with my good friend, sue. She is. If you haven’t listened to our previous podcasts, she is like the know everything about skin person when I don’t know what I need to do for skin stuff, which is a more common than I would like to admit a sue as who I call and she has been a walking encyclopedia so soon. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me chat. So we are the other day, you know, we’re getting ready to start a, um, a medical spa. We’re working toward, you know, doing more aesthetics and things like that were obviously already doing botox and had been using the as clinical line for skincare things for skincare benefit for quite some time. I’m a big fan, but I was looking at some lasers the other day and one of the things that we had talked about before, and you know, one of the conferences that we had been to Dr Havens had mentioned that.

Speaker 1: 01:31 And I think you had mentioned that we’ve talked about before, that one of the most significant things that we will notice as far as from an aging perspective is hyperpigmentation. So, uh, the other day I was looking at one of these lasers and they were showing me before and afters for a whole bunch of things. And uh, they, they showed a before and after for the hand and they had used this laser therapy on the hand and they had shown where the hyperpigmentation was essentially gone. And that was, you know, I would say that was, that was pretty cool. But the age appearance difference made such a huge difference. And I was like, I remember [inaudible] telling me about that and it was exactly right. The, the, the appearance of aging with this in this case with that hyperpigmentation was huge. So I thought it was a good idea.

Speaker 1: 02:23 And certainly when we were talking to Jennifer earlier today, she was like, Oh, you need to talk about hyperpigmentation. So today we’re gonna talk about some hyperpigmentation, uh, because, you know, obviously it revolution, we want anti aging and we want to look, feel, and perform our best. Uh, certainly taking care of the package that we’re given, you know, our skin is an important component with that. And uh, so what, what do we do or what have we done for, for hyperpigmentation in the past? Well, so originally, and this will shock most of all of you originally, the lightening product of choice

Speaker 3: 03:00 for hyperpigmentation list mercury, that of course went out of fashion really a long time ago when they figured out how toxic mercury was to your skin.

Speaker 1: 03:10 That when you told me that I didn’t know that and you told me that and I, uh, had to catch my breath. That stuff’s just awful. So I mean, I’m assuming that was at least, you know, that was several years ago,

Speaker 3: 03:24 many, many years ago. So as a replacement to that, um, they came out with a product called hydroquinone and hydroquinone has actually been used in the marketplace here in the United States for many, many, many years, probably more than 30 or 40 years as the treatment of choice for hyperpigmentation.

Speaker 1: 03:45 So we use this hydroquinone and I believe it’s by prescription. It is. And uh, so we put this stuff on her skin and it helps lighten these hyperpigmentation things. It does. Okay. Now how does it do that?

Speaker 3: 03:59 Well, basically there’s two components to most of what goes on with hyperpigmentation. There’s the hydrocodone product and then a retinae. So the hydroquinone product is meant to impede the melanin production in the Mylanta sites. In reality, what happens in the Mylanta sites is the hydroquinone kills the Malana sites and that’s how it impedes the production of Melanin. In the Mylanta side says you just kill him. Then the retinae was to slough off what’s on the surface of your skin.

Speaker 1: 04:33 Gotcha. So we’re using this hydroquinone that ultimately kills the Mylanta sites and it, it helps with that pigmentation. Now, if I remember correctly, or at least as we had discussed that originally we were supposed to do this for about three months. That was the original plan.

Speaker 3: 04:51 So in the original studies on hydroquinone, the ones that were done to get it as a product, the original study was putting a topical hydroquinone on the scan, rinsing it off, and then only using it for three month time period. The original study was never using it again in your life. It was three months and then you were done for good.

Speaker 1: 05:14 Okay. And so that’s what got it FDA approved.

Speaker 3: 05:18 So the FDA grandfather did and they really actually never did their own studies on it. This was a study that was done previous to the FDA. It’s control over things like that and they just grandfathered in because it worked and it had been used to use for a long time to thing.

Speaker 1: 05:33 Um, okay. So, uh, so to be clear, it’s never been fully evaluated as the FDA would evaluate things coming out today. No. Has so that that raises some questions for me and then there’s certainly some possibilities that there’s, you know, something more nefarious going on under the surface with hydroquinone that it may not be as healthy as we think.

Speaker 3: 05:59 Well, the thing that most people don’t understand is that hydroquinone is actually been banned and all of the other developed countries in the world. So you can’t buy it at all, not by prescription, but at all and all of the European Union. You can’t buy it in all of the Asian countries. You can’t buy it in Australia. You can’t buy it in South Africa, in the Americas it has not been banned, but other than the Americas, the rest of the developed world has put a total ban on it.

Speaker 1: 06:30 So as, as we talk about on this podcast, the, the number of toxic chemicals, the number of the amount of junk that we’re exposed to, I believe is a huge contributor to how we are and how our health is impacted. And you look at, as we’ve talked before, when you look at, you know, the Asians walking around Paris and they’re eating what we would consider junk pastry shops on every corner and they’re walking around with their French bread and it’s just part of their life, but they don’t have the, at least the appearance, they don’t have the same appearance as when you walked down the street. And in America they look very different. I have not worked in France, so I can’t say that from a health perspective. Um, you know, I see a difference, but they serve. There certainly is an appearance difference. And then we also know from studies like the French paradox that we would argue that their nutrition is worse than ours.

Speaker 1: 07:25 They eat more saturated fat and sugar and all this junk and yet they don’t have the same level of heart disease. And I believe that this is a big major contributor because of things like this. And we’ve talked about the hair products that um, you know, then my friend Dj is, has formulated and trying to detoxify. And so this stuff is yet one of the other many chemicals to which we’re exposed in this case intentionally that is, is detrimental. And I understand it can, uh, even at normal use we see toxicity with liver and kidney stuff. Well that’s what the studies show. So the, that’s not, that’s not like the vaccine movement saying, Hey, it might cause this. We’ve got studies showing that it causes,

Speaker 3: 08:08 you can find them easily in the medical literature. That’s fact. If anyone ever wanted to see a paper with a really great bibliography on it about hydroquinone, you could go to his clinical ias clinical.com and search under the clinical papers. And there’s a really well researched paper on hydrocodone with a complete bibliography of where the information came from.

Speaker 1: 08:30 Yeah. And that website under the, the, uh, clinical resources. Is that A. Yeah. Yeah. Science, it sounds a, there’s a, there’s a lot of information there. And I would encourage anyone to go look at that because the, uh, the data is there, we just, we just got to know it. So the, um, so this stuff we probably shouldn’t be using this, but since we’re only using it for three months, is it that big of a deal?

Speaker 3: 08:55 Well, if people were only using it for three months, it wouldn’t be probably that big of a deal. The problem is, is that here in the United States, nobody uses it for just three months. I know people that have been using it continuously for nine years, nine years is a lot of time to have a relatively toxic chemical being applied to your skin every day.

Speaker 1: 09:17 That’s unbelievable. So why if the studies were only three months and uh, and there’s toxicity with longterm use, why in the world would we continue to use it?

Speaker 3: 09:29 We continue to use it for two reasons. One, most people don’t know, have never seen the studies on it. And the second reason is, is because there is so much inflammation left over in the cells. When you buy the use of hydroquinone, when you go off of it, you end up with what they call post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation. What that means is the inflammation is causing new hyperpigmentation. So you go off of it, you end up pigmented again in a way that you weren’t really expecting, that you thought you’d gotten rid of.

Speaker 1: 10:01 So you go on a medication to stop the hyperpigmentation and you stop it and you get more pigmentation. That’s correct. So that’s like, that’s like taking Afrin nose spray so that you don’t get congested and then you get hooked on it and you’re on it for three months and then you can’t get off of it because that’s, that’s uh, that’s amazing. So we shouldn’t basically, we should not be using hydroquinone at all. It’s toxic. And obviously in, in our clinic we want to get off as many toxins as possible. Um, so this stuff, in my opinion is, is bad news shouldn’t be using, it, shouldn’t be exposing to a, shouldn’t be exposed to it. It should probably up at, you know, from my relatively libertarian political perspective, we, I’m not in favor of governmental intrusion any way, but if we banned anything, I’d almost say legalize marijuana and van hydroquinone.

Speaker 3: 10:51 Well, you know, we here in the United States and don’t really think about banning the toxins that we’re putting into our environment because we see them as making our lives easier. Uh, unfortunately, longterm they don’t make our lives easier.

Speaker 1: 11:08 Yeah. And they kill our liver and kidneys. Um, okay. So we’re gonna take a break for a minute and when we come back, we’re gonna. Talk about if we don’t use hydroquinone and that’s what we used. What should we do? So come back to do is have the break and we’ll cover all that stuff. 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 to get 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. All right, we are back with the amazing sue talking about hyperpigmentation and how bad hydroquinone is for our skin because it can cause more hyperpigmentation and how bad it is for us because it can cause liver and kidney toxicity. At least that’s what the studies have shown and. But we’ve got a lot of patients that want an anti aging approach. They want younger looking skin, they want to be healthy from the inside out and certainly they want to look younger. So what do we do?

Speaker 3: 12:27 Well, so in these clinical line, we want to do healthy things for the skin. We’ve talked about this in the past, but we have as a product to help with the people with hyperpigmentation. It’s actually a system. There’s two products in it called white lightning and white lightning addresses. All of the pigmentary process from start to finish. So you, you are addressing enough of the pigmentary process that you can control your hyperpigmentation with something that’s still healthy for your skin.

Speaker 1: 12:58 Love it. So we’re looking at addressing the underlying problem instead of the manifestation of the problem. This almost sounds like what we do from a health perspective across the board.

Speaker 3: 13:09 Well, it is. I mean, what you want to do is I say this all the time, if you make your skin healthier, it looks better so you’re just addressing the healthy part of or the unhealthy part of pigment. What you all may not understand is that once you get pigment in your skin, so you got a bad sunburn when you’re 12 years old and now you have pigment that you may not necessarily be able to see unless you went and got an ultraviolet photograph done of your face, but you’ve got pigment sitting there just waiting to come up because you spent more time in the sun, so once you’ve got pigment, what you do as a process is you impede its appearance on your skin pretty much for the rest of your life because it never goes away. It doesn’t have to be unhappy, unhealthy process and it doesn’t have to be hard. This is two products, one product in the morning that’s a pump, one product at night. That’s four drops a sunscreen and you’re done. That’s pretty much a simple process, I will say without the sunscreen though, all bets are off.

Speaker 1: 14:10 We’ve talked about century many times. I’ve, you know, for our listeners, if you want to hear more about sunscreens and we’ve got a podcast featuring sue where we’ve talked about, you know, the damage the skin can do to our skin that sun can do to our skin and, and how that whole thing works and how good healthy a skincare can come about and how we can protect ourselves from the, uh, from the sun without being exposed to these toxic chemicals and get absorbed and cause all kinds of problems. Because we don’t want any of that. No more toxins. Just say no to toxins. I’m so white. Lightning is addressing the underlying problem and certainly using the SPF, we’re bringing it full circle and to prevent more sun damage and hyperpigmentation and all of these kinds of things. So who, who is it good for? Certainly we do. We do a lot of hormone replacement and the clinic and some women have concerned about these hyperpigmentation things and you know, the Melasma and the mask of pregnancy is, you know, as, as a kind of the board word, a buzz phrase, so who can use it, who can’t use it, how do we use it?

Speaker 3: 15:14 Everyone can use it. That’s the good thing about it is if your complaint is that you have pigment on your skin that you don’t like, the appearance of everyone can use it is not contra indicated for anyone in. That includes people that are pregnant. You can use it during pregnancy. So it’s gonna, it’s gonna. Take care of the mask of pregnancy. When it starts to come up, you can use it if you’re a darker ethnic skin type, which is unusual. Most darker ethnic types cannot use very many products which would help with their pigment and pigment badly from lots of things. So it pretty much, if you got pigment, this is a great product for you.

Speaker 1: 15:53 That’s awesome. So you talked about the, a one pump in the morning, four drops in the at nighttime. Uh, how so then that’s all we need to do in addition to the SPF. That’s all we need to do, at least for the pigment perspective. Obviously there’s a lot of things that I would recommend just from health of skin in general. Um, but how quickly will we see results? What should people expect?

Speaker 3: 16:14 So it’s kind of one of those things where you really can’t tell how long it’s gonna take. Some people can see a difference in their pigment. I’m an incredible difference in their pigment in as little as two weeks. Some people, especially people that have been on a lightning product, are going to see their results in about three months. We will use three months as the test. You should see some improvement to your pigment in three months. But I will say that people have been on hybrid hydroquinone for some period of time. It’s an you have to go about going off of the hydroquinone, very similar to how you would go off of say prednisone. So it’s a slow transition off. And during that transition off, you also need to be putting a huge anti-inflammatory like pro heel on the scan to cut down on the post inflammatory hyperpigmentation as you wean yourself off of the hydroquinone. Then once you’re off and you’ve got your inflammation under control, which you can, of course I’ll do it at the same time. Then the white lightning is a good option for everybody.

Speaker 1: 17:25 So basically if you’re on hydroquinone, we want to start tapering off. That’s just applying less and less, less and less over a couple of few weeks. And we’re going to add the pro heal at the same time at the same time. And so lots of good anti-inflammatory, topical, anti inflammatory things. Good Vitamin C, I think a pro here.

Speaker 3: 17:42 No vitamin C and olive leaf so, and sink. So it’s got lots of antiinflammatories. Okay. And so we’re applying that trying to prevent or lower that inflammation as we’re coming off the hydroquinone. And then once we’re off of that, then we transitioned onto the white lighting every day. And, uh, we’re looking at three, give it a three month window to really see how you, you’re going to do. Now again, people that have been on something for years, I probably not going to go, oh, this little bit of residual hyperpigmentation that I’ve got is going to go away because if you’ve been on hydroquinone for nine years and you’ve still got a little residual hyperpigmentation, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s not gone away, but I can keep it at the same level and that’s you’ve gotten it to an acceptable level, which is why he stayed on that product for so long so I can keep it at that acceptable level. Got It.

Speaker 1: 18:38 All right. Any other words of wisdom for anyone with, with hyperpigmentation and wants to optimize the health and appearance of their skin?

Speaker 3: 18:45 Stay out of the sun.

Speaker 1: 18:47 We’ve talked about that many times too. Guys, thanks so much for listening. So thank you for being here. Appreciate you guys for listening. And so as always, I certainly appreciate your wisdom when it comes to skincare. You guys have a great day and have a great weekend. Thanks for listening to this week’s podcast with Dr Chad Edwards. Tune in next week where we’ll be going against the grain.