{"id":149891,"date":"2022-01-07T14:56:14","date_gmt":"2022-01-07T14:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/149891"},"modified":"2022-01-20T16:32:36","modified_gmt":"2022-01-20T21:32:36","slug":"how-to-make-diseases-disappear-rangan-chatterjee-tedxliverpool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/effectsofanxiety.net\/archives\/149891","title":{"rendered":"How to make diseases disappear | Rangan Chatterjee | TEDxLiverpool"},"content":{"rendered":"Translator: Queenie Lee\r\nReviewer: Rhonda Jacobs I can make diseases disappear. To be more precise, I can make chronic diseases disappear. You see, chronic diseases\r\nare the long-term conditions, like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, depression or even dementia. There are 15 million people in England who have already been diagnosed\r\nwith a chronic condition. So that means looking out amongst you now, there are probably\r\nabout 250 people in here who have one of these\r\nlong-term conditions. Just one of these alone, type 2 diabetes, is costing the UK\r\n20 billion pounds every single year, and I’m standing here before you saying I can make these diseases disappear.\r\n\r\nSee, I’m not a magician, I’m what the Americans call an MD. That’s not a magical doctor, that’s a medical doctor\r\nor what I call a mere doctor. You see, the reason\r\nI can make diseases disappear is because diseases are just an illusion; diseases are not real. In fact, diseases don’t really exist, at least not in the way\r\nthat we think they do. So 15 years ago, I qualified for medical school,\r\nand I was ready, I was full of enthusiasm,\r\nfull of passion, ready to go out and help people. But I always felt like\r\nthere was something missing. I started off as a specialist. I moved from being a specialist\r\nto becoming a generalist, or a GP.\r\n\r\nAnd I always got this nagging sense that I was just managing disease\r\nor simply suppressing people’s symptoms. And then, just five and a half years ago,\r\ncame the turning point for me. See, five and a half years ago,\r\nmy son nearly died. My wife and I,\r\nwe were on holiday in France with our little baby boy, and she called out to me,\r\nsaid ‘He’s not moving, so I rushed there, and he was lifeless. I thought he was choking, so I picked him up,\r\nI tried to clear his airway. Nothing happened, and I froze. She called out to me and said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to get to hospital’. So we rushed there; we were worried because when we got there,\r\nhe still wasn’t moving. The doctors were worried because they didn’t know\r\nwhat was happening. That night he had two lumbar punctures because they thought\r\nhe might have meningitis, and he stayed in\r\na foreign hospital for three days. What actually transpired was my son had a low level\r\nof calcium in his blood that was caused\r\nby a low level of vitamin D.\r\n\r\nMy son nearly died\r\nfrom a preventable vitamin deficiency and his father, a doctor,\r\nknew nothing about it. You see, as a parent that is a harrowing experience\r\nthat never leaves you. But I was a doctor, I was his dad; and the guilt that stayed with me,\r\nand is still here today, that changes you. So I started reading, I started reading\r\nabout this vitamin deficiency. And as I started reading I started to learn a lot of science – a lot of science that I did not learn\r\nin medical school, a lot of science that I thought: ‘Hey, this makes lots of sense to me. So I started applying this science. I started applying it,\r\nfirst of all, with my son, and I saw the amazing benefits. So then I started applying it\r\nwith my patients, and do you know what happened? People started getting better, really better. You see, I learnt how to resolve\r\nthe root cause of their problems rather than simply\r\nsuppressing their symptoms. Just over a year ago, I had the opportunity to make\r\na series of documentaries for BBC One where I got to showcase\r\nthis style of medicine.\r\n\r\nI’m going to tell you\r\nabout one of the patients – a 35-year-old, Dotti, lovely, lovely lady, but she was struggling with her health, weight problems,\r\njoint problems, sleep problems. See, despite Dotti’s best efforts, Dotti was unable to make\r\nany sustainable changes. So I went into Dotti’s house, and in the first week\r\nI did some blood tests, and I diagnosed her with type 2 diabetes. Six weeks later when I left Dotti’s house, she no longer had type 2 diabetes. You see, her disease had disappeared.\r\n\r\nSo health exists on a continuum. Okay? At the top right we’ve got disease, and at the bottom left\r\nwe’ve got optimal health, and we are always moving\r\nup and down that continuum. Take Christmas, New Year,\r\nfor example, right? We drink too much,\r\nwe eat too much, we stay up late; we probably start to move up that curve. But if we recalibrate\r\nin January and February, we start to move back down it again. We get involved in medicine and give you a diagnosis\r\nof a chronic disease … here, but things have been starting\r\nto go wrong … back here. See, when I met Dotti,\r\nshe was up here, she had a disease. You see, you can think of it\r\na little bit like a fire that’s been burning\r\nin Dotti’s body for years; it’s getting bigger till it’s finally raging out of control. At that point, I can say,\r\n‘Hey Dotti, you have a disease’.\r\n\r\nAnd I told her that,\r\n‘You do have a disease.’ But what caused it in the first place? The thing we have to understand is that acute disease and chronic disease\r\nare two different things. Acute disease is something\r\nwe’re pretty good at as doctors, we’re good at this. It’s quite simple. Okay? You have something like a pneumonia, that’s a severe lung infection. So in your lung you have\r\nthe overgrowth of some bugs, typically a bacteria. We identify the bacteria,\r\nwe give you a treatment, typically an antibiotic,\r\nand it kills the bacteria. The bacteria dies and hey, presto,\r\nyou no longer have your pneumonia. The problem is we apply\r\nthat same thinking to chronic disease and it simply doesn’t work, because chronic disease\r\ndoesn’t just happen. You don’t just wake up\r\nwith chronic disease one day and there are many different causes\r\nof chronic disease. By the time we give you that diagnosis, things have been going wrong\r\nfor a long, long time.\r\n\r\nSo when I met Dotti\r\nand she had her ‘diagnosis’, her blood sugar was out of control, because that’s what people say, many people say that type 2 diabetes\r\nis a blood sugar problem, but they’re missing the point. There is a problem\r\nwith blood sugar in type 2 diabetes, but type 2 diabetes\r\nis not a blood sugar problem. The blood sugar is the symptom,\r\nit’s not the cause! If we only treat symptoms\r\nwe’ll never get rid of the disease.\r\n\r\nSo when I met Dotti, I said, ‘Dotti, you’ve got a problem\r\nwith your blood sugar. Dotti, for the last few years your body has become\r\nmore and more intolerant to certain foods. At the moment, Dotti, your body does not tolerate refined or processed carbs\r\nor sugar at all. So you’ve got to cut them out. So what does that do? Well, it stops putting fuel\r\non Dotti’s raging fire. But then we’ve got to work out\r\nwhat started the fire in the first place? And what was the fuel\r\nthat caused it to burn for so long? In most cases of type 2 diabetes, this is something\r\ncalled insulin resistance.\r\n\r\nNow insulin is a very important hormone, and one of its key functions is to keep your blood sugar\r\ntightly controlled in your body. So, let’s say you’re at the bottom left\r\nin optimal health, like all of us in here, and you have a breakfast\r\nof say, a sugary bowl of cereal. What happens is your blood sugar goes up, but your body releases\r\na little bit of insulin, and it comes back down to normal. As you move up that curve, you are becoming more\r\nand more insulin resistant; that means you need\r\nmore and more insulin to do the same job. And for all those years\r\nbefore you get anywhere near a diagnosis, that raised level of insulin\r\nis causing you a lot of problems. You could think of it\r\na little bit like alcohol. The very first time you have a drink, what happens? Say, you have a glass of wine,\r\none or two sips, maybe half a glass; you feel tipsy; you feel a little bit drunk. And as you become a more seasoned\r\nand accustomed drinker, you need more and more alcohol\r\nto have the same effect; so that’s what’s going on with insulin.\r\n\r\nYou need more and more insulin\r\nto have the same effect, but that insulin itself is problematic. And when the insulin can no longer\r\nkeep your sugar under control, at that point we say,\r\n‘Oh, you’ve got a disease’; at that point, you have type 2 diabetes. So what causes this insulin resistance that then causes type 2 diabetes? Well, there are many different things. It could be your diet. It could be that your diet\r\nfor the last ten years has been full of processed junk food. That could be a cause. Or there’s something else. What if it’s the fact that you\r\nare chronically stressed? Work stress, emotional stress, perceived stress. For me, just seeing\r\nmy email inbox sometimes, that’s a stress. See, that raises\r\nlevels of cortisol in your body, and cortisol, when it’s up,\r\nraises your sugar which causes insulin resistance. What if it’s something else? What if it’s the fact\r\nyou have been sleep deprived because you are a shift worker? See, in some people,\r\none night’s sleep deprivation can give you as much insulin resistance\r\nas six months on a junk food diet.\r\n\r\nWhat if it’s the fact that as you’re\r\ngetting older, you’re losing muscle mass? That causes insulin resistance. Or what if it’s something to do with\r\nsomething we call your microbiome? See, inside our body,\r\nwe have trillions of bugs living there, and the balance of those bugs\r\nis critical for our overall health. If you have a disruption to that balance, you can get the overgrowth\r\nof certain bacteria, and on their jacket, these bacteria have something\r\ncalled lipopolysaccharide, or LPS. And what that does\r\nis when it gets in your blood, it causes insulin resistance. You see, the problem is there are many different causes\r\nof insulin resistance, and if we don’t address the causes\r\nfor that particular patient, we will never get rid of the disease. That’s what I did with Dotti, and that’s why six weeks after I met her, she no longer had a disease. What about something else\r\ncompletely unrelated? What about depression? You see, one in five people are going to get depression\r\nat some point in their lives.\r\n\r\nSo what is depression? There’s no blood test for depression; there’s no scan for depression. Depression is simply the name\r\nthat we give to a collection of symptoms. But what causes the depression? Well, we know that\r\nmany cases of depression are associated with something\r\ncalled inflammation. Now this isn’t the same inflammation\r\nas if you trip up, you sprain your ankle, it gets red, it gets swollen,\r\nit gets hot for a few days. But this is entirely different.\r\nThis is chronic inflammation. This happens when your body thinks\r\nit is under constant attack. Now, King’s College London three weeks ago\r\npublished a study on this. This is current up-to-date stuff. Patients with depression, if they had high levels\r\nof inflammation in their body, they did not respond\r\nto antidepressants.\r\n\r\nTake a step back,\r\nit sort of makes sense, doesn’t it? Because an antidepressant is designed to raise the level\r\nof a chemical in your brain. But what if the cause of your depression is actually coming from your body\r\nand the inflammation that’s in your body? Surely, it makes more sense\r\nto address that. See, what causes this inflammation? Well, your diet plays a part in that, your stress levels play a part. Chronic sleep deprivation. Physical inactivity. A lack of exposure to the sun\r\ngives you vitamin D.\r\n\r\nDisruptions in the gut microbiome. There are many different things. If we do not address the cause,\r\nwe’ll never get rid of diseases. Diseases are the symptom. What about something else? What about Alzheimer’s disease? See? We’re all living longer, aren’t we? But we’re scared. We’re scared that as we live longer\r\nand as we live older we may have to live with the devastating\r\nconsequences of things like Alzheimer’s.\r\n\r\n