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High Blood Pressure Natural Treatment

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Hi, my name is Dr. Tom Rofrano from the Natural Medicine Clinic in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Today, I’m going to talk about natural solutions for high blood pressure.

Over the thirty years I’ve been in practice, I’ve seen countless patients in their 40s, 50s, and beyond with high blood pressure. One thing they seem to have in common is that they’re all on blood pressure medication.

So when I check their blood pressure and it’s high, and they tell me that yes, they’re on blood pressure medication, I ask them why—if they have hypertension and they’re on medication for it—do they still have high blood pressure? This is very puzzling.

Once you’re on one medication for hypertension, your body begins to adapt to it, and before you know it you’re on a second medication. You’re body is continually adapting because you’re not getting to the root cause of the hypertension. Instead, you’re just covering it up with medication and trying to force the blood pressure down.

We’re going to talk about getting to the root cause of hypertension and some simple solutions for lowering it.

Hypertension Is up in the U.S.

Almost 50% of Americans have high blood pressure, and just recently they came up with a new guideline. Prior to 2017, hypertension was classified as a blood pressure (BP) reading of 140/90 mm Hg or higher, but the new guideline classifies it as 130/80 mm Hg or higher.

So if you’re 130/80, that’s stage one hypertension (140/90 is stage two), which means that millions more Americans now qualify to be put on medication for hypertension. The usual recommendations—eating a healthy diet, maintaining a healthy weight, getting enough physical activity, not smoking, limited alcohol use—if those worked, then more than 100 million U.S. adults wouldn’t have hypertension.

Instead of the usual recommendations, we’re going to talk about a few solutions that can really help.

The Right Diet for You

I’ve talked about the FreeDiet™, which is free of the most common food allergens—those foods most responsible for inflammation, digestive, and other chronic health issues. You can download a copy of Phase 1 of the FreeDiet right now and get a list of these foods. Inflammation is behind so many chronic diseases, like heart disease, cancer, hypertension, fatigue, and on and on.

To illustrate, I had one case where a fifty-four-year-old patient came in with a blood pressure reading of 182/108. He’d followed the guidelines to prevent hypertension—didn’t smoke, didn’t really drink, wasn’t overweight, exercised regularly, and had a pretty healthy diet—but it wasn’t working. He went to his primary doctor and his cardiologist and they told him he needed to go on high blood pressure medication and cholesterol medication. They told him that it runs in the family, and there’s no way to fix it with diet, so he’d spend the rest of his life on this medication.

This patient didn’t accept that, because like I said, he was a healthy guy, and at the age of fifty-four, he didn’t want to be on medication the rest of his life.

I did an evaluation, ran some lab tests, which revealed some nutritional deficiencies and food allergies, both of which can be common causes of inflammation and hypertension.

Based on the patient’s results, I put him on the FreeDiet™, along with natural supplements to treat his specific deficiencies, and four weeks into treatment his readings were down to 111/71. He dropped 71 points in four weeks! He was down to normal blood pressure, and he also dropped seven pounds, even though he wasn’t really overweight. In addition, his cholesterol went down 34 points, and the other deficiencies that showed up in his lab work, like Vitamin D, Magnesium, and B12, improved.

The best part was that he was off all of his medication!

So diet is important, and so are supplements, but both should be specific and catered to the individual.

Reducing Physical Stress

Besides a proper diet and maintaining healthy nutrition, maintaining a healthy structure can also prevent hypertension. Stress to the neck, upper back, and shoulders especially can cause a lot of tension, which can lead to high blood pressure, difficulty sleeping, an inability to relax, and headaches.

I had another patient, a twenty-four-year-old male, come in with high blood pressure. He worked out regularly, wasn’t overweight, didn’t drink very much, and had been improving his diet. A couple months earlier, he started having these episodes of anxiety and high blood pressure. He ended up in the emergency room with his blood pressure over 200 points. He also complained of indigestion, cold hands and feet, insomnia, panic attacks, and headaches.

An evaluation and lab work revealed what was going on, and I put him on the FreeDiet™ and natural supplements, including the foundational ones, like vitamin D, magnesium, fish oil, a multi , probiotic, plus other supplements based on his specific lab work. This patient also complained about neck and low back pain, which we treated with muscle work and therapy.

After four weeks of treatment, his blood pressure dropped 39 points and he was down to normal. Since then, it has continued to go down even more, and almost all of his symptoms have cleared up and improved.

Natural Solutions Work

Whether it’s hypertension, fatigue, anxiety, or whatever chronic health issues you’re having, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be on medication to cover up the symptoms and not fix it.

If you’re the type of person who wants to get to the root cause and really understand what’s going on and find specific solutions to get better, know that it is possible. Almost every health problem has a solution; it’s just a matter of digging and getting to the root cause. You can find solutions and clear these things up. Remain hopeful—it can be done.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment or contact us. Download Phase 1 of the FreeDiet, and stay tuned until next week. Thanks very much!

Healing Thyroid Nodules and Goiter

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My name is Dr. Tom Rofrano from the Natural Medicine Clinic in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Today, I’m going to talk to you about a patient that came in with a  very, very, very, large thyroid nodule—goiter—and how we were able to help her shrink that by 30% in the first three months— and that’s just for starters.

Thyroid Nodules & Goiter: A Case Study

I’ve been practicing for over 30 years—chiropractic, nutrition, functional medicine—and I’ve seen over one hundred thousand patient visits. Lately it seems like more and more patients are coming in with autoimmune conditions, especially thyroid, a lot of nodules. This is just rampant, and we have a lot of these patients.

We have this one woman in particular, a 60-year-old woman, that came in. She happened to see a YouTube video I did with my wife last year where I was able to help my wife shrink her thyroid nodule by over 50% fairly quickly, and how we did that. She saw this and came in, driving quite a distance to get here.

She had this huge thyroid nodule that was over 9 cm. To give you an idea, my neck is about 13 cm wide, so that’s how big it was. This had been going on for about ten years, and she was just feeling miserable.

You have two ways to go with this. There’s the traditional medical route, which, for some people, that’s fine, they do surgery to remove the thyroid, then you’d be on medication for the rest of your life. She didn’t want to do that. She wanted to see if we could help her treat it naturally.

Whole-Body Analysis

The first thing we do in what we call our Functional & Free Program (a seven step program to identify your underlying root cause and provide long term permanent solutions) is Step 1, a whole-body analysis to determine what tests need to be ordered to figure out what is causing this, because you don’t just get a nodule or goiter for no reason, it’s coming from somewhere. So we do the evaluation to figure out the history and what tests to order to get to some underlying root causes.

As far as this patient’s complaints, besides this goiter, she was completely exhausted, with headaches, brain fog, depression, anxiety, couldn’t lose weight, and she was very bloated and swollen. She had neck, back, and joint pain, insomnia, sinus congestion, the whole gamut of digestive issues, and a lot of skin issues as well. She was just, from head to toe, really struggling.

Determining Root Causes

Basically we look for areas of physical, chemical, and mental stress. Under chemical stress, we test for three things:

  1.     Deficiencies

In her case, she had multiple nutrient deficiencies—nine, to be exact. Vitamins and minerals, plus an iodine deficiency.

Iodine is one of those things that can be very controversial because there are so many experts saying that iodine is terrible if you have thyroid issues or the thyroid autoimmune condition Hashimoto’s Disease, which she has. So, a lot of people say you shouldn’t take iodine at all and avoid it like the plague. People try to find iodine-free multiple vitamins because they’re afraid of it.

On the other hand, if you test for iodine, which we did with her, and it’s low, if someone is deficient (and she was really deficient), then it can be really helpful. As a matter of fact, iodine deficiency is and can be a primary cause of goiter.

So, she was deficient in nine nutrients, plus iodine (one of the lowest levels I’ve seen in iodine, by the way). So that’s one area, deficiencies. Two, we look at toxins.

  1.     Toxins

In her case, she tested high for five heavy metals, including mercury and led. Whereas many thyroid Hashimoto’s patients are iron deficient and anemic, she was the opposite. She had too much iron in her system. Too much iron is very toxic, like any other metal. Extremely toxic and can damage organs and every other part of your body. So her ferritin level, which represents stored iron in your body, was very high.

The third area we look at besides deficiencies and toxins is infections.

  1.     Infections, viruses, bacteria, yeast & parasites

Before she came to me, she’d been to a number of different doctors. She brought in 94 pages of labs and medical records from before she came to see me.

She was positive for many different viruses, including Epstein-Barr, very common with Hashimoto’s and nodules. When I did additional testing, we do comprehensive stool testing, she had bacterial overgrowth in her intestines and she also had yeast overgrowth. I often see yeast overgrowth and Hashimoto’s/nodules together, I mean almost every Hashimoto’s patient we have has yeast overgrowth. That went on with her chronic sinus issues and her skin issues.

Besides deficiencies, toxins, and infections, as if that wasn’t enough—because you don’t want to just find one thing, when someone comes in with an over 9 cm nodule, there’s going to be a lot of things going on—then we look at a fourth category, food sensitivities.

  1.     Food sensitivities/allergies

She was sensitive to ten different foods, plus gluten. She had a very significant gluten sensitivity. She also tested positive for leaky gut.

With these gut infections going on and eating gluten, that can cause leaky gut, which then in turn makes you much more sensitive to all foods, and can cause autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto’s.

In addition to that, she was sensitive to a number of chemicals, including one that she was exposed to on a daily basis working in the cosmetics industry. It was over twelve different specific things we found.

Treating Root Causes

So what do we do from there?

  1.     The FreeDiet™

Basically, I put her on a diet. We call it the FreeDiet because it’s not only gluten free, but it’s free of gluten, grains, sugar, yeast, corn, dairy, soy, legumes, eggs and GMO’s. It’s a diet to help reduce those foods most commonly responsible for inflammation and gut issues and really allow your body to heal.

If you’d like a complimentary copy of the FreeDiet™ – Phase 1, click here. 

  1.     Natural Medicine Formulas

I put her on a number of different supplements to help with these deficiencies she was having. Iodine as well, yes, relatively high doses of iodine. Again, don’t run out and take iodine. You need to test first to figure out if you need it and how much.

So I have her taking that, as well as different herbal remedies to address the yeast overgrowth and very powerful probiotics for bacterial overgrowth. Also, as a supplement to address the elevated heavy metals and iron, I had her start doing infrared sauna to help sweat out these toxins. I also advised she start avoiding exposure to chemicals at work.

She also had adrenal fatigue, adrenal stress, her numbers were really off there, on top of everything there. And her hormones were off—her estrogen and progesterone ratios were way off. I prescribed adrenal adaptogenic herbs to help balance out her adrenals.

  1.     Lifestyle Changes

I recommended some stress-relieving lifestyle changes as well.

The Results

So we put all that together, followed her along, and retested to make sure that things were improving. Just this week, I had her 3-month ultrasound report back, since we’d ordered one initially, and I’m happy to say this over 9 cm nodule/goiter shrunk by 30%. She had three other nodules that all shrank an average of 30%. So overall, the size of the goiter and the nodules averaged 30% reduction in three months, so we’re both thrilled about that.

And this is just the start. I’m planning on continuing on this path, and reaching out, and continuing to see it shrink. She’s obviously thrilled, because number one, all of her symptoms have cleared up, you know, fatigue, aches and pains, headaches, and the 50 other things she came in with. Also, this huge mass on her thyroid that changed her voice, made it difficult to swallow, and, understandably, made her very self-conscious was visibly shrinking, so she’s very happy about that, and I am as well, and all of us here at the Natural Medicine Clinic.

So just know that for any chronic health issue, whether you have thyroid nodules or goiter or Hashimoto’s, or other autoimmune conditions or other chronic health condition, you have a choice. You can choose to live with it, or maybe take medications for this and that, or surgeries, and that’s one choice. Or you can choose health, you can choose to really look into what the underlying causes are, address those, and then be provided solutions to have you get better.

Thanks for joining me today and feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want notifications of new videos. And if you click on the link to the FreeDiet™ – Phase 1, we’ll send that right over to you. I look forward to giving you further updates. See you next time. Take care.

Better Brain Function & Hormones

How do Hormones affect Energy, Brain Function and overall health?

All hormones including estrogen, progesterone and DHEA can affect brain function and overall health.  But here we are going to focus on testosterone in honor of the all the men out there. Actually, low testosterone can occur in women as well.

Symptoms of low testosterone include:

  • fatigue
  • depression
  • anxiety
  • irritability
  • moodiness
  • lack of focus and concentration
  • memory loss
  • low sex drive
  • sexual dysfunction
  • infertility
  • increased body fat (especially belly fat)
  • reduced muscle mass and strength
  • increased risk of cardiovascular disease
  • decreased bone density

Another low testosterone condition is gynecomastia, which is development of breast tissue in males, especially in older men and teens.

Speaking of teen boys with low testosterone, they can also develop depression and other emotional problems, low energy and failure to develop muscle mass as a result.

A young man in his early 20’s came in to the Natural Medicine Clinic complaining of   gyneocomastia, low energy, weakness and depression for many years.  As a teen, he was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and ADD, and on put on many different medications.

I ordered lab tests which revealed a very low testosterone level of 220.  This was just under the lab normal range of 280-1100, but  way below the optimal testosterone level of above 550 ng/dl for adult men!

What if this was discovered years ago as a teenager?  Could he have avoided years of misery?

So what are the causes of low testosterone and why is it so prevalent?

  • too much sugar in the diet
  • excessive alcohol consumption
  • nutritional deficiencies
  • excess stress, which raises cortisol
  • endocrine disruptors found in plastics, pesticides and other chemicals
  • medications like statin drugs and beta-blockers

Also, having low cholesterol below 150 can result in low testosterone, as cholesterol is a precursor to testosterone and other hormones!

A while ago, I saw a 70-year-old male patient who was suffering from severe depression, exhaustion, low self-esteem, fear, worry, anxiety, insomnia and weight loss.  His doctors ran multiple tests and put him on antidepressants, but he was still feeling terrible. This was in addition to statins and the many other prescriptions he was taking.

I ran additional blood tests which revealed a “normal” testosterone of just above 400 but below the optimal levels of 550. His cholesterol was “normal” at 128 but well below optimal range of 150-200!

After putting him on a personalized nutrition program, he made a dramatic recovery and he was soon back to feeling good again.  His doctor was even able to take him off antidepressants and some of his other medications.

So what are the solutions to low testosterone?  You don’t necessarily need to do injections, patches or slather gel all over you.  Often times, testosterone levels can be raised with natural treatment.

Our natural testosterone support protocol includes:

1. Complete lab testing to measure testosterone and other hormones, and to identify what other factors may be involved, such as adrenal and  thyroid dysfunction, vitamin deficiencies, etc.

2. The FreeDiet™ which includes  plenty of good quality proteins, essential fats, vegetables and some fruit, and avoids soy, sugar and grains.

3.  A customized nutritional program to ensure you’re getting the proper vitamins and minerals.  The most common deficiencies we see with low testosterone are zinc, magnesium and vitamin D.

4.  Herbal remedies for testosterone support.  Adrenal and thyroid support if needed by including DHEA,  adaptogenic herbs and glandulars.

5.  Stress reduction and getting plenty of sleep is very helpful as well.  Remember, high cortisol can lower testosterone.

6.  Exercise, including high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and weightlifting are both extremely important for optimizing testosterone.  Be aware that over-training, too much or the wrong types of exercise, can have the opposite effect and lower testosterone.

7.  And lastly, avoid xenoestrogens which are chemicals that have estrogen like effects. Some of the ways you can avoid these endocrine disruptors are by:

-storing your food in glass containers instead of plastic, avoid using plastic in the microwave, avoid most non-stick pans.

-use natural cleaning products in your home and natural personal care products such as shampoo, sunscreen, toothpaste, and lotions.

-avoid artificial food additives and eat organic produce, dairy and meats whenever possible.

If  you or a family member has any of the above symptoms and would like to have your hormones checked, email us at info@nmcwellness.com  or call us  at 561-627-5800.  We would be happy to help you get treatment for low testosterone levels in Palm Beach FL.

Yours for Optimal Health,

Dr. Tom Rofrano

 

 

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    Chiropractor Palm Beach Gardens, FL
    2401 PGA Boulevard Ste 132
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    Palm Beach Gardens, North Palm Beach,
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    and West Palm Beach.

    Content on this website is based upon the opinions of Thomas Rofrano, D.C. and is not considered medical advice. It is designed to be a sharing of knowledge and information from the research and experience of Dr. Rofrano and his community. Dr. Rofrano encourages you to make your health care decisions based upon your research and in partnership with a qualified health care professional. Dr. Rofrano is a chiropractic physician and offers physical and nutritional support and guidance to those seeking alternative or complementary care to traditional medicine. His care is not meant to replace that from your primary doctor and specialists but rather to help you on your path to achieving life-long vibrant health.

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