 Welcome to sister power. I'm Sharon Thomas Yarbrough. This conversation is part of the sister power series coronavirus beyond surviving to thriving joining us from California Dr. Valencia Ray and from Chicago Dr. Patricia blessman Valencia and Patricia welcome to sister power. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. I'm Dr. Patricia Jones blessman. I've got 20 years of experience as a more than that 30 years of experience as a licensed clinical psychologist. I live in the city of Chicago. And I just want to say thank you Sharon for using this platform to empower and to educate your audiences. I really appreciate you for doing that particularly now in this season. In the last segment in the lessons and blessing segment you asked, what was my radical plan. And, you know, we didn't have enough time to go into it in detail. So, but anyway, a radical plan is one that leaves no stone unturned, meaning I'm going to do take do whatever I need to do by any means necessary to boost my immune system, be at a healthy weight and reverse any chronic illnesses. That's for me or any members of my family. Let's queue up that graphic. The reality is, it is not prudent to simply wait the estimated 18 to 24 months for a vaccine that might not be effective. Current flu vaccines are 10% and at best 40% effective, according to the CDC and this is their graph. Over the past 10 years increasingly, more Americans have been getting sick from hospitalized with and dying from the flu. The numbers for the 2017-2018 flu season are five to seven times that of what it was in 2010. Historically, African American people have consistently suffered more and died more from the flu over the past 100 years. This flu season is a wake up call and a clarion call to action. Now, in general, we don't have a healthcare system. We have a sick care system. I'm blessed to know Dr. Ray, who is among the leading cutting edge physicians specializing in integrative functional medicine. It's state of the art medical practice that focuses on promoting health and vitality. It is truly personalized down to understanding your specific DNA makeup with a thorough analysis and work up on how your unique body functions along with lifestyle and nutritional assessments. I'm fortunate to have Dr. Ray on my health team, and she will share with you in our audience the wisdom she has shared with me. So she's a part of my radical plan. Okay, so have added Dr. Ray. Okay, thank you Patricia for that lovely introduction and thank you Sharon so much for inviting me to be a part of this because this is really, really important to me as part of my life purpose and passion and it's really important and relevant for all times. So I'm a traditionally trained physician. I started my career as an ophthalmologist. I was an eye surgeon and many of the chronic diseases that I actually all of them really that I saw constantly because the eye would be involved. I'm now treating in functional medicine, and also it's a way of reversing diseases that the normal or the traditional system cannot access because we weren't trained. I had to go back and be fully retrained as a functional medicine physician, and then I've done other extra training beyond that. And it's not just about reversing chronic disease, although that's where we shine. And that's where we're very unique. It's also time for us to start this conversation about preventing chronic disease. And so that would include obesity and chronic disease, and obesity would be in this category too because it actually causes at a physiologic level a lot of the immune dysregulation that you're hearing in the news right now. So I think that this time is such a time for this that functional medicine is a blessing and a gift for us to have at this time. Oh, great. Well, Dr. Ray, what is integrative functional medicine? Okay, so integrative is more of a less descriptive term in that it's integrating traditional with different holistic practices and it's really quite subjective. However, it is more it's about integrating different parts, whereas functional medicine specifically is about functionality. It's about getting to the root cause of your symptoms. You see, everyone's symptoms are cry for help is the way I like to think about it in our body. And what we're doing when we only use appeal for an ill medicine is putting like duct tape over that symptom. We're saying be quiet, settle down, but it's not treating the underlying condition which is still causing deterioration at a functional level in your body. Wow. So how is integrated functional medicine different from traditional medicine in their approach? Okay, so first of all, and I'll speak for myself in that functional medicine, ideally is very systemic. So it's about mind, body and spirit. So different practitioners may have different levels of how much of that they're integrating in. But because I have this interest in brain and mind and personality and emotions and health and truly have believed for decades already now, that the mind and the body are connected. You know, it's not just cut off at the neck here. So when you have anxiety and you're going to affect your health, you're going to affect your body. And now we know from the cutting edge neuroscience research that your gut affects your brain. Your gut is communicating with your brain that your gut has a brain. So functional medicine is able to address that at a systems level, and we have a different set of testing. I'm just shocked as a traditionally trained physician for over 30 years that since I've been in functional medicine, I am not only reversing things that we were taught in medical school that are incurable, but it's a way to empower people to be able to understand how to create health, how to maintain health in a way that they are not dependent upon me. They can take these skills and go forward in their life with it and pass it on. So I think that's really important. What does functional medicine have to offer that is unique to facing coronavirus? Okay, so I'm going to talk about this in two pieces. One would just be like, what can you do right now for COVID in terms of a functional medicine approach? It would be working with natural foods and natural supplements and lifestyle. And some of just general tips that we know over time as Dr. Patricia Blessman just showed you that chart from the CDC, this is really not new. I've known for decades now that on average, anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 people die every flu season. So it's getting a lot of media attention to me. That's really the only difference because I've known this for a long time. And so as you see from that chart that is graph from 2010 to 2017, and we've gone beyond that now, what's that, 45 million? So it doesn't new. And so what I would say if in the middle of this, first and foremost, and I'm going to say this several times, we are very best to stop stressing. That is weakening your immune system. I'm going to say that again before the show is over. But on a typical, like, what can you take kind of level? Well, the vitamins A, D, E, C, A, D, E and C are very important. Vitamin C, while you may hear people say, well, there's no research, there's plenty of empirical science behind it. Now, you may not find a big double blind pharmaceutical sponsored research project on vitamin C, but it's helpful for vitamin as an antiviral and to protect you and to be an antioxidant. So that's something inexpensive. And without side effects, you can certainly address. And then there are things like some many people have not heard of in acetyl cysteine or NAC. That's good for respiratory upper respiratory. It's a supplement. It's an amino acid, liposomal glutathione. Some people have heard of glutathione, but I want to emphasize it needs to be liposomal, which is a special form so it can be absorbed. And other things that you can do just that in a general way are doing things like making fresh ginger tea and eating ginger root. Those old old fashioned natural herbs can really make a difference. Echinacea for some people can be helpful, but that's one that can have some controversy depending on your immune state. And then generally, I would just say natural B vitamins can be helpful. If you have an infection in COVID, you can go in a different direction. I won't get too far in that. But was there something you wanted to say? Well, you know, this is just wonderful information. I know mental health is physical health. But I have a question for either one of you to answer that one of my friends have asked me to ask you, how does stress impact the immune system? Okay, so what I wanted to give even are like five keys to immune resilience. And I'll say that to answer directly first that question is the adrenal gland think of that as like a central station of your body's system in general, that we know very little about as individuals running our adrenals far past what they should be. But in doing so, it's affecting our immune system directly because what happens when you are hitting the four key stressors which I'll cover it in a moment later here is that you are actually causing cortisol to be too high or something called adrenaline. That's where we get the name adrenal. So that is epinephrine, norepinephrine. And these things together affect the cortisol affects blood sugar level and the immune system. And when we are eating that food. So for example, I'll give you five keys and put it in this context is that one of the keys is sugar. Sugar is actually one of the four stressors to it will cause your adrenals become dysregulated in a regular. And it is very, very toxic Lee inflammatory. So sugar is something to avoid. And I know we have a lot of a sugar addictions out here so to speak. I used to be one of them. There are things you can learn in functional medicine naturally to ship that I don't I don't have the problem anymore and it's really been life changing right frankly. So that's one thing is avoid processed foods and sugar processed foods are inflammatory and that is that makes the immune system not happy either and affects the cortisol and in this whole response, because of many of the chemicals in it can affect things. A second key to stress regulation. Well, it's important to learn stress regulation stress in and of itself has its purposes in the right context. And frankly, being overly excited can stimulate the same type of immune response. However, most of us in today's society, we're not struggling with being overly excited. It's usually overly afraid or scared fear based we tend to be too focused on what we don't want in fear and the things that are going on right now. So that's keeping up to date and then turning it off because if you follow this category, I would recommend you return off the TV, because it's just literally stimulating your fight flight free stress response, literally weakening your immune response because when you dump all this cortisol in the stomach and norepinephrine and epinephrine, you literally are triggering reactions in the body where you may hear these terms cytokine storm for some people, you're triggering all that you're triggering inflammation. And that's why you and if you're doing that plus you're eating process food, plus you're staying up late, plus you're not getting outside and getting any fresh air and you're sitting all day. It's a perfect storm, you know, so be aware of that. A third key is this big piece around lifestyle. We are talking about changing lifestyle and using zoom in all of this but what I'm not hearing enough about is the importance of lifestyle and your health and we have to be super duper mindful that just sitting in front of a computer screen all day and sitting and then letting, in fact, I want to say this right now, blue light, the bright white light from a computer screen after dark after dusk in the evening, literally is throwing off your circadian rhythm. I didn't know that. Say that again to our viewers because we're all addicted almost to the computer hours of the day, especially at night. Right. So on your phone, TV, computer, after, you know, an hour after sundown or so, you're, you're dropping your melatonin in your brain. Your melatonin helps you get a good night's sleep. It's anti inflammatory to the brain. People who have dementia often you will see low melatonin. What you can do is a simple practice. First of all, many of us have to stop all the technology. It's just not good for us. Now if we're talking, you're on the computer all day and now you're going to be on it in the evening. Well, you can, you can see where this is going. So if you get yourself from some high quality blue blocker, the kind of red lens to put on in the evening, at least that will help. And if you stop, you really need to stop at least an hour before bedtime or else you can disrupt the quality of your sleep as well. So lifestyle things include making sure you stay connected with people. There are tons of studies and their old studies and their current studies, but there's tons of studies that being socially isolated isn't healthy. So right now we have this social isolation going on. Well, make sure that you reach out and tell somebody by phone, write a letter, talk to them, get on Zoom, something, but don't isolate and hunker down and separate yourself from other people. Mamos humans, we are not made like that. That's, that is very abnormal. So I just that you need to connect exercise fresh air and what I call like the three hours restoration, you know, rest and recreate like restoration. So recreation and rest are three subtly different categories, but they're they need to be intentional. And then the fourth area I want to mention for immune resistance is this weight category. Be be aware that it's important that we deal with our detox inflammation. It's important that we learn that we can actually adjust our metabolism. That's something I didn't know we can adjust learn how to adjust our metabolism to become more fat burning. And that's how I got on top of my sugar addiction and lost weight and went back to my, you know, young adult weight is that's how you do it. And we didn't know that I didn't know that in traditional medicine. We don't even learn nutrition and traditional medicine at all. And then the last thing I would say what affects immune resilience would be your hormones. Your hormones are tied directly into your adrenals as well, because if your cortisol is running high, and you have all of this epinephrine, norepinephrine flying around, it can affect, especially in period menopausal menopausal women, it can really roll you off. It can affect thyroid very easily. So you can have high thyroid or low thyroid with it depends on which one as to what symptoms you have, but it can be anything from heart, palpitations and anxiety if it's too high to fatigue and cold hands and feet and dry skin and hair falling out. Now when it's too low. Okay, with Dr. Ray, we're going to take a quick break. We're going to take a quick 60 minute 60 second break and we'll be right back. Stay with us people. Aloha. I'm John David and the host of history lens on think tech Hawaii history lens deals with contemporary events and looks at them through a historical perspective or what we call a history lens. The show is streamed live on think tech Hawaii dot com. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then Mahalo and Aloha. Welcome back to sister power and our topic for today is Corona virus beyond surviving to thriving. And we have a medical doctor and a clinical psychologist and Dr. Ray, you were getting us some wonderful informative information about medicine functional medicine. So briefly, tell us what we received speaking about before the break we were talking about the five essentials. Yeah, so essentially five keys to immune resiliency. And in summary, you can hear that as you have, you know, listen to the recording earlier or the recording of this earlier. But it's essentially just understanding one what can you do now with cove it that can be helpful to keep your immune system strong and to what what are five keys you can do going forward to be aware of as you are moving forward because this won't be the last virus and there are five keys that we can do to support our immune system resiliency. Okay, great. Well, Patricia, you're a clinical psychologist. Tell our viewers. Have you found silver linings in these difficult times. Actually, I have Sharon. I guess in some ways I get to be, I think I get to go out of the, or I get to peruse the luxury catalog of silver linings. One of the, the biggest one is that my husband and I really started to get way more focused about health, our health, his health. Quite frankly, he has high blood pressure. And he's a bit overweight. I'm a bit overweight. And we've decided that, you know, this, you know, we really have to. This has been a wake up call for us to make some really strategic changes in our household, and with our son. Now, yeah, we know we get some pushback from our son, trust me, he is not liking the changes that are coming down the pipe but my husband are far more together about that. And that is a good thing. You know, God has given us these wonderful, wonderful bodies. And it's our job to be a good steward over these bodies that he has given us. And they are magnificent. And through Dr. Ray, I've learned, you know, just how magnificent this body really is if you feed it correctly, if you get what it needs, if you take care of it. I mean, we probably take care of our car better than we take care of our body. Yeah, right. Well, so I'm just saying that we're going to change the focus on that. And that that's a big silver lining. Just in having these conversations, you know, in the in the groups that I'm that I'm a part of I've been able to introduce other folks to functional medicine and Dr. Ray's work, as well as, you know, and to get a sense of, okay, what we're going to do to create healthier communities. We're talking about this more in the city of Chicago and watching the news about the number of the disproportionate number of African Americans that are dying from COVID here in Illinois and we're talking about how do we address food deserts, get access to food as well as raising the nutritional quality for people who live here in in the Chicago community. These are all conversations that need to be had and it's, and I think that some of the blessings that we are yet to see all of the blessings that are going to come forward. I agree with that. We're just, you know, I think that there's going to be something when there's going to be a new we're not going to go back to what we had because that what we had wasn't working. So whatever this new normal is, I'm looking forward to something that's going to be recreated, that's going to be regenerative, and that's going to be beneficial to all of us and not just to some of us. Thank you. Thank you. Well, Dr. Ray, how can viewers locate a functional medicine doctor if they live in another state outside of Illinois is in California. Right. So I'm licensed in California in Illinois and just to find me is my website, Valencia ray dot com. And then also I have a listing on the Institute of functional medicine and there you can find a functional medicine doctor in your zip code. And that was the I F M I F is a Frank Emerson Mary dot org. And when you go there, you can hit the click on find a practitioner and put your zip code in there. And that's how you can find people, you know, and other states and countries, etc. Oh, great. What role does safe play during this crisis as that's open to either you, Dr. Ray or Dr. Blessman. Yeah, we need we need to put ourselves in some type of safe mindset with all the news going on. You didn't briefly mention it for the people were just tuning in. If you can just briefly go over that fear is part of one that you don't want to live in fear at all. Yeah, so I'll just say real quickly. One easy thing to do is not to put in your face, the news that's negative that you can't do anything about because it creates from a neuroscience standpoint, you're creating a sense of helplessness, which is going to cause you to feel depression and throw off your immune system, etc, etc. And I will say what certainly keeps me rock solid is my faith. All right, me too. Hallelujah. Yeah, yeah, spirituality that can just be, you know, the piece of God that passes understanding. So at the end of the day, that's where I put up my main marbles on, and then everything else comes in a logic and whatever can come after that. Patricia. Okay, well, I'm in agreement that first of all, it's important that you just don't stay inundated with 24 seven obsessing over the news and attuning to that. You know, pick a couple of sources that you're interested in, or that you feel comfortable with, and maybe, you know, and limit it to no more than 90 minutes a day. I mean, and that's still a lot 90 minutes. But beyond that, I think what's important is to be able to take this time and figure out how you can make the most of it for yourself and for your family. What are you going to do that's going to be different. What how can you take advantage of this time together. For example, my son and I have really gotten into playing more board games. He's teaching me how to play some of his video games and it's been really interesting watching, you know, I mean just watching the things that he's interested in and connecting with him at his level and what he wants to do. My spouse and I are starting to do, you know, starting to have some deeper conversations we picked up. You know, games out there they have like questions and stems and you, you know, and you, you, you ask the question and you can have deeper conversations of, you know, around that. For example, you know, three months from now, where would you where would you, if you could go anywhere, what would you want to go and who would you want to go with something like that. You know, so there are, you know, creating it isn't it's vital that we can you create a sense of safety and a, as you say safe place. Yes, because emotional security is important, because that's what's going to keep you we can't be on this high edge all the time. We can't, you know, at some point we have to have some emotional equilibrium. Well, you thank you Dr. Ray. You know, we have so much information you ladies have so much good knowledge for us and and thank you so much Dr. Valencia Ray thank you Dr. Patricia blessman. We appreciate you in closing sister power conveys is heartfelt sympathy and condolences to all those who have lost loved ones and in many cases multiple family members. We pray for the restoration of health to those infected with this dread disease. There are lessons to be learned as to how our four parents face and overcame same tragedies through their spiritual faith through their unceasing demand for equal rights and justice in America and through various individual and collective acts of selfless service to those in need. From all of us at think tell kivayi and sister power please take care of yourself and each other. I'm Sharon Thomas yard bro.