Hey guys, this is Dr. Shumard with the Integrative Wellness Center. I’m just gonna discuss a little bit about what we’re going to talk about today. And one of the focuses that we do in our practice is we really help patients who are dealing with diabetes. So today we’re going to be talking more about diabetes, the health risks that are not only common that we many people know, but also the health risks, risks that are going on right now. So let’s dive into that.

With type two diabetes, we all know about the typical health-related issues.

We have cardiovascular issues, heart attack, stroke, we have things like kidney disease, neuropathies, that can lead to amputations, and even cancer as it is related, so many, many systems that can be broken down with diabetes, and causing many, many health-related issues. So oftentimes, diabetics tend to have a shorter lifespan, they tend to have more complications. And what’s interesting is, these complications are typically going to be due to the underlying mechanisms not being addressed from traditional avenues. What do I mean by that? Well, traditionally, the mindset is that diabetes is due to the food we eat, and that is due to overweights, or because we don’t exercise and those things are true. Those things can be increasing the risk factor of diabetes. But oftentimes, we see people who have really good diets who eat really healthy and are still dealing with the diabetic condition.

There’s this phenomenon called cause and effect. With diabetes, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to have a diabetic condition just because you have a poor diet. We see individuals who are obese that don’t have diabetes and we see individuals who are super thin but develop diabetes. There’s never a specific cause and effect. Those things could be contributing factors. If you don’t exercise, overweight, or have a poor diet, you’re increasing your risk factor of diabetes and also increasing your risk factor for other conditions. In our office, we want to understand the underlying mechanisms involved. There’s something going on inside that individual’s body that’s not working properly. Because at one time in their life, they were able to regulate blood sugar. So what’s changed? Something must have broken down in their body where they’re no longer able to regulate their blood sugar. What might that be?

There’s more to this than meets the eye.

Traditionally, in a medical model, it focuses on the elevated blood sugars and tries to bring those blood sugars down with pharmaceutical drugs like Metformin or Glipizide. We have to look at things a little bit differently. Because if the medications were truly the reason, then you take the medication just for a little while and everything’s back to normal. But we all know that’s not the case. Many people who are struggling with this diabetic condition, know that when you’ve been given medication, it’s going to be a medication that you’re expected to take for the rest of your life. Now, that can be very frustrating for some people out there. So one person may start taking one or two different medications and next thing you know, 5 years, 10 years down the road, they’re taking 10, 12, 15 medications.

In my office, I have seen individuals taking upwards of 30 different medications every single day and no one even questions that it is not normal. Hopefully, those of you who are reading this in the future, think that it’s not normal. Something is wrong and broken there.We’re truly analyzing an individual, not based upon their symptoms, not based upon what type of medication they need, but truly understanding what’s going on. 

If you took your car to a mechanic, and the mechanic said, “Here, take this, give us your car, and let’s see how your car does come back in six months.” That sounds foolish, right? But if you took it to a mechanic that did a diagnostic check, like checked everything else, looked to make sure everything was working and functioning properly and found the areas that weren’t and told you, “this, this, this is not working, we need to fix those problems,” that would make more sense. And we’d be more comfortable with them. So why don’t we expect the same out of our doctors and our health? Why are we okay with just taking something continuously for the rest of our life and never understanding the true underlying mechanism? The true problem of what’s really going on? Well, that’s what we do here in this office. That’s what we do. We dig and we dig and we eve ntually uncover and unravel what is going on with that individual. I can tell you from my perspective, every single time I’ve been doing this work for many, many years now I’ve been in practice for over 15 years, that I’ve never seen two diabetics with the same underlying problems. They’re always going to be unique and different, their underlying mechanisms, their problems.

So if we have each and every diabetic that has a different problem, different issue. That must mean they require different unique treatments, all the way down to the diets. Of course, there’s no one size fits all diet. If you believe that, or have heard that, you’ve heard wrong information. Now, we could probably change. I could give you a diet right now, until you say eat this, and I guarantee it’s gonna lower your blood sugars. Well, if lowering your blood sugars is your only goal, lowering your blood sugar is your only objective, then the work that we do in our practice is not for you. Because of course, we want to see the individual’s blood sugar going down, but we want to actually help them get to a point where they may no longer need the medication, or they’re regulating their blood sugars on their own, giving their body, their own ability, their God Willing ability to regulate their blood sugar on its own, because we know that it can because you did it before in the past. It’s all about healing. It’s all about focusing on you what your body needs and not what is trying to change some mechanisms. So that’s good on paper. So we have to really look at things differently. I like to talk about looking at things from 35 000 feet down, and really the individual, not because you have a diagnosis of diabetes, not because you have a diagnosis of heart disease, or blood pressure, whatever those symptoms are, they are stemming from something else going on. Just like the roots of the plants, it has to be strong. And eventually, the tree grows and the branches come off that, there is no difference. If there are underlying problems, the roots as I call them, eventually something’s going to surface, and whatever symptoms are going to develop what should be the branches or the fruit, whatever you want to use as your analogy. So looking at things more uniquely for the individual, once you uncover that, once you unravel that, very simple, it’s very easy at that point to customize the proper nutrition the person needs, maybe they need some nutraceuticals or supplementation, some herbs that are specific to giving their body the ability to start healing again on its own. So that’s the overall focus. 

The body has the ability to heal on its own if everything is working to optimal function.

How can we help that person start healing on their own? We all have the ability to do this. If you want to challenge me on that, go and cut yourself, no, don’t do that. But if you were to cut yourself today or get a cut, do you have to do anything about that? Do you have to tell your skin to grow back? Do you have to tell your immune system, “Please fight the infection, grow the skin back, make sure everything looks good, come back to the similar color I was before”? All those things, absolutely, we don’t. The body has the ability to heal on its own if everything is working to optimal function. And that’s what has to happen. That is the focus of what we look at every single day is how can we help this person to restore function, so then they can go back to living the optimal life that they deserve to spend time with their family, their loved ones, and be here on this amazing earth for the rest of their life with a quality of life. Not hooked up to machines, not forced to be taking medications every single day that are potentially causing other underlying mechanisms and problems getting worse and creating other diseases as well. So when we focus on the person, we focus on their health, and we focus on what they need, that’s where we make these magical changes. Some people call it a miracle, it’s not a miracle. Your body is a miracle, your body is phenomenal at what it can and cannot do. Imagine all the things you’ve done in your life, right, all those things we did when we’re younger than we should have done and how we’re still alive in some capacity because our body is amazingly treated as that type of situation, and you will live a very healthy, long quality type of life. But if you don’t, it’s gonna be much more difficult. 

So, I also want to focus on a couple of things. As many of you probably know, we’re dealing with some pretty crazy stuff in the world right now with this virus that’s going on. Now the good news is that we are moving towards where things are starting to open up, people are able to go outside, we’re starting to build and enjoy our life. But one of the things that I want to focus on is that just because this virus may be potentially going away, doesn’t mean we’re out of the world specifically with diabetes. Now, a couple of things are number one, because these health issues, these health related issues, these correlating problems that are associated with diabetes are still going to be there. You’re still gonna have a risk of cardiovascular problems, you’re still gonna have a risk of neuropathies which can lead to amputations, still have risk of stroke, risk of kidney issues, all these things are still risk factors that need to be addressed. But on top of that, what if this virus comes back? We don’t know. No one knows. What if it comes back in the fall? What if it’s a regular thing every single year just like the flu, another thing for us to worry about now we hope and pray that’s not the case. But what if it is? So why I’m saying this is because there is no better time than now to make a change to make a conscious decision to give better health to improve your health, because I want to read you some of the statistics so bear with me as I look down on a couple things here. The one of the statistics was a study they did in the Journal of American Medical Association and I’m going to post this study in the comments below. So if you want to read more about it, you can. And this study was based upon some findings they found from New York, because New York as we all know, New York City was hit the hardest and had the most deaths than any other city, and even state for that matter. But what they found was the people that were most vulnerable to COVID-19 were individuals who have high blood pressure, who are obese and diabetic. The percentages were with high blood pressure of 57% of the individuals who were diagnosed with COVID-19 for high blood pressure, 41% were obese and 34% were diabetic. 

What’s interesting is, is that if you look at that, they all correlate with diabetes, right? People with diabetes typically have high blood pressure, not always, but there’s a percentage that they are going to have obesity issues or weight issues. So it just leaves your condition of diabetes at more risk. We also saw that the diabetic patients who were in the hospital there had a higher increased risk of getting on ventilators. Because the condition was just taken over by their body, seen as diabetic patients, people don’t realize that their immune system is usually more suppressed, they’re more vulnerable to their problems, because of the underlying mechanisms of what diabetes is doing to their body. We all know or if you haven’t known, and I’ll post this link as well, not only the study, but I’ll post the link that showed that the individuals who went on into ventilators had a very, very high risk of death in New York City. So many of them were getting to a point that they needed these ventilators because they were becoming so sick. And many of those who went on ventilators died. And a good percentage of those individuals were diabetic. So there’s another component here to this whole problem for diabetes. So again, taking your health in your own hands. 

One other statistic, I just want to go over real briefly. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with diabetes. So I hope this information was worth your while. And that was beneficial. And please post any comments or questions that I can be more than happy to answer if there are other topics that you want me to discuss in the future. As I mentioned, I believe as a doctor that the first thing that we should be doing is educating, doctors should be educating and they’re public, and they’re their patient’s more than anything else. So I also believe that as doctors, we are not the healers, right? All we are is the conduit to help you get to a point that your body can heal because your body is the best doctor and gives you the best healing. But with the information and knowledge and education that doctors like myself have, we can speed up the process and get you there faster. But I wanted to go over this one last little topic here or information. I found it very, very interesting, as I was looking at the CDC website, and I will post this link as well. And they’re showing the amount of deaths from February 1 through May 2, 2020. Now, obviously, in February and early March, the amount of deaths from COVID-19 were very low. But as we moved into the late March into April, the number of deaths started going up. But what’s really interesting is when you look here, we also see deaths from pneumonia and deaths from influenza. And both of those categories from late March through the end of April, the number of deaths of pneumonia and influenza dramatically decreased.

Now I find it very interesting because at the same time, the number of deaths of COVID-19 also extremely increased. Prior to that, the amount of deaths of COVID-19 compared to influenza and pneumonia were extremely low. But then things started changing. And why is that interesting, at least it is for me, is that were these deaths truly occurred due to COVID-19? Or were they actually pneumonia-related and because they were testing positive for COVID-19? Did they actually just say, well, it was COVID-19 because of similar symptoms, or maybe the test results showed that. Well, I mean, you can take that information as you will, but this is stated clearly on the CDC websites is not fake news. I mean, unless you believe that CDC is fake news. But that’s what we have as a guideline, the CDC on infectious diseases. So I just found this very interesting. And when you really start to look at the numbers here and what’s really going on, obviously, this is a very dangerous virus for many reasons that I don’t need to go into right now. But it just, I just find it interesting to know or to see that maybe the amount of deaths that we currently see in the US are actually due to the deaths of COVID-19. 

So again, going into this whole talk today, I really wanted to discuss more about diabetes, and the impacts of things like a virus or their underlying mechanisms that are going on in someone’s body and their risk factors to an earlier death. We all want to have a quality of life we all want to live with, be around for our families and spend time with our grandkids or kids or even just brothers and sisters. We have a choice. And that choice is to take your health into your own hands. Please do not rely on someone else to do this, do not rely on the medical system, do not rely on your health insurance. You don’t have to rely on anybody except for yourself. We have to take full advantage of what we have, and do whatever is necessary to help ourselves heal. If your heart is beating, if you have blood circulating through your body, and your brain is still functioning, you can heal. I don’t care how old you are. The difference is, how much are you willing to do? How much are you willing to change? Are you willing to change your lifestyle? Are you willing to make the changes that are necessary for you to get better again and get healthy? That’s the true question. If you’re in that mindset, well, maybe someone like myself can help you. But you have to take the first step you have to ask for help. You have to find someone like me, who can help you. 

Again, I hope this information was worth your time. I got over a little more than I wanted to today but that just happens when you have a topic like this that is so meaningful and so empowering that you want to make sure you get this out to the community. If you haven’t any further questions, comments, please post them in the comments, I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions or if you have any questions that you want to ask us directly, you can always call my office, I can put that information in the comments as well about how you can get in touch with our office. Or if there’s someone in your life that you know can benefit from this information, please have them read this article, share this article. And then they can always make their own choice if it’s the right time for them or not as well. I hope you guys are having an amazing week and one of the hottest days of the week. So be careful out there, get some sun, get some exposure, get some air as most super beneficial for our immune system and for our body. Keep your head up there. We’re moving into some brighter times in my opinion and I’m looking forward to an amazing summer. If there’s any other topics that you’re interested in me talking about, please post them as well in the comments. I’ll be more than happy to expand upon those and go from there.

Hope you guys have a great rest of your day and week and I look forward to seeing you soon. Take care.