It’s the middle of winter and you’re exercising too little, getting too little rest, not eating as much fresh veggies or fruits, plus taking on too many commitments with work and your children’s activities. All of a sudden, BOOM! You’ve been hit with a flu virus. Actually you invited it with lowered immunity from all of the above, but what to do about that now?

The short answer is take Monolaurin. Monolaurin is a specific anti-viral that we carry at the Center because it is so safe and can be used by any age group, including infants. It contains the monoester of the fatty acid lauric acid. If that sounds foreign, it shouldn’t. One of the richest natural sources is breast milk, because Mother Nature provides anti-viral substances to the nursing baby through Monolaurin in breast milk. Since it works specifically on certain kinds of viruses, it does not harm our good flora (probiotics) in the human gastrointestinal tract.

Monolaurin works by dissolving the viral envelope of viruses that have a lipid (fat-containing) envelope, and thus inactivates the virus from being able to continue to infect. Those viruses that have a viral envelope include the Influenza viruses, Cytomegalovirus, the Epstein Barr implicated in mononucleosis and chronic fatigue syndrome, the Herpes Simplex I and II viruses that cause fever blisters and genital herpes, and the dreaded RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) that is so deadly to infants. Even the Rubeola Virus and Coronovirus are inactivated by Monolaurin.

What viruses are not susceptible to Monolaurin’s envelope-dissolving action? Those that don’t have a viral envelope, which includes the Polio virus, the virus that causes encephalitis, the Coxsachie virus, and pox viruses.

There are other sources of Monolaurin, such as coconut oil, but the concentration is not as great as is in the pure Monolaurin capsules. Concentrated doses of Monolaurin are what you need to quickly stop a virus from replicating and continuing to infect.

Dosing: If you are a very sick adult, take 3 capsules 3 times daily, either just before food or on an empty stomach. Since Monolaurin is non-toxic, you can safely take up to 6 of the 300 mg capsules 3 times daily. Children can take smaller doses 3 times per day, according to their weight. For children, you can open the capsules and stir the contents into food or liquid.

For chronic viral infections such as are often present with chronic fatigue syndrome and oral or genital herpes outbreaks, start with a loading dose of 3 capsules 3 times daily. When your symptoms are reduced, take 2 capsules 2 times daily indefinitely. It’s always good to wean down to the lowest dose possible that keeps you symptom-free, saving larger doses for times when the viral load is increased.

Monolaurin is a wonderful anti-viral, but don’t forget to follow all the other recommendations that Dr. Lieberman gives you tailored for your individual problems and medical history. For best results, lowered immunity, whether acute or chronic, needs to be addressed through a comprehensive treatment program.

I read an article in Readers Digest recently that really had an impression on me and I wanted to share it with you.

It was about a father and son who were watching the swearing in of the President. The little boy asked his father who the man standing next to the President was, as he too looked as someone of importance. The father answered that the man standing next to the President was the Vice-President. The father went on to explain that the Vice-President’s job was to assist the President in many important ways along with being the first in line of succession if anything should happen to the President. The little boy marveled, and asked his father, “You mean the President of the United States could be replaced… just like that?!” “Yes son,” the father replied, “…just like that.”

The moral is if the man who holds the most important job in the United States can be replaced just like that-remember to always be humble and thankful for what you have because no one is irreplaceable.

We occasionally talk about how each person is unique, but we may not always think about what that really means. If someone or something is unique, that means there is only one of them. We may all be alike in many ways, but there are other ways in which we are not like anyone else. Even identical twins are distinguishable. (Grammar fiends get annoyed when people say “very unique” or “more unique” because there are no degrees of uniqueness- either there’s only one of something, or there’s not.)

From a health perspective, this idea of individual singularity means that each of us has unique health needs. Whether we’re considering supplements, medications or other therapies, we each have an obligation to evaluate treatments in our own context. If your nutritionist recommends a particular diet, it is your responsibility to figure out how to customize the diet so that it will benefit you the most.

Many of our patients were brought up to do exactly what the doctor says, and it has taken them a while to realize that they will not get optimal care unless they participate in the decision-making process by asking questions, providing information and occasionally just saying no to recommended treatments… We see a lot of patients who have gotten into trouble by following instructions blindly, even when they anticipated problems with the recommendations. After patients try the typical menu of antibiotics, steroids, statins and/or anti-depressants that is on offer in most doctors’ offices, they can end up with worse problems than they had to start with.

It takes some courage to start asking questions, doing your own research, trying things on your own, and trying to honestly evaluate what things work well for you, and which aren’t so helpful.

At COEM, we use very few pharmaceuticals, but we are also aware that the treatments that we do recommend are not necessarily ‘one size fits all’. We have a good idea of what dose works best for most of our patients, but we know that each patient is unique, and may need more or less of something than the ‘average patient’. We encourage our patients to check in with Dr. Lieberman regularly to be sure that they are responding well to his treatment recommendations- if not, it helps to have patient input if treatments need to be tweaked to work better. The best judge of how well a treatment is working is usually the patient being treated, and so Dr. Lieberman is always learning from his patients.

For example, our standard recommendation for our allergy extracts is to do one injection daily for 10 days, and then drop the dosage schedule down to twice weekly. This works well for most patients, but some patients don’t do as well on the twice weekly schedule as they did on the daily schedule. Often they can move to an every-other-day schedule and do fine, but some of our really sensitive patients do best if they go back to a daily injection schedule. Because the allergy extract is designed to desensitize patients to their allergens, the schedule will usually be able to become less frequent while still remaining effective, but this also needs to be customized. And the best way to find out if you no longer need your allergy extract (or no longer need it as often) is to stop taking it (or take it less frequently) to see how you do.

At the Center, we encourage our patients to take an active role in making decisions about their treatment, and we also try to customize the treatments according to our patients’ unique needs, personalities and lifestyles. If you are too busy for intensive treatments, we try to prioritize and simplify, and try to help you figure out strategies for better compliance- we can’t tell if something is helpful if you only remember to take it every so often!

Our treatments work best when we communicate regularly with our patients, and find out what is- and what is not- working. And when a patient lets us know that Treatment A works best for them if they take 1 capsule twice daily instead of the standard dose of 2 capsules in the morning, we can learn from that and advise other patients to try it both ways to see what works best for them. If we then hear back from those patients that 2 capsules twice daily is best for them, that is likely to become our standard recommendation for Treatment A.

There are plenty of health professionals around who think they know what’s best for you because they got good grades in school, but wouldn’t you rather have a doctor who is constantly learning from his patients?

Do you “feel the need for speed?” I don’t. I want the world to slow down a little bit. That smart phone commercial where one person keeps telling another with the not-so-smart phone, “That’s so 27 seconds ago,” or whatever really annoys me. I don’t own a smart phone, and I do not feel deprived. I have a phone that does what I need it to do, usually. I own it; it does not own me. I feel no need to consult it to see what’s going on in the world. If I want to know what is going on in my little corner of the world, I ask. I talk face to face with another person, or at least over the phone in real time.

Dr. Lieberman walked into the testing room the other day, and nearly everyone in the room was focused on some device. He asked, “Why don’t you people talk to each other?” We have some really interesting conversations in the testing room. People connect with other people and exchange important information and life stories that help other patients realize that they are not the only person in the world with a particular condition or problem. Sometimes they just have fun conversations about things like pets and they share photos—o.k. usually the photos are on their cell phones—but there is a real human connection there. The other day we had 3 photographers in the testing room, one professional photographer and 2 serious amateurs. They picked each other’s brains and shared stories. Networking takes place in the testing room, and it can actually happen without the aid of a mechanical device.

I understand that in business speed is often important and having information before the other guy has it can be the difference between a business succeeding or failing, but there is more to life than making a profit. What good is it to make a pile of money if you don’t make time to enjoy life? In order to really enjoy life—the people and the world around you—you have to slow down a little and PUT DOWN THAT SMART PHONE AND THAT I-PAD.

I have an 8-year-old daughter who was diagnosed as being ADD 2 years ago. I had her ears pierced at 3 months old and not too long after that she developed this rash behind her ears. I assumed it was the metal in the ear ring and I took them out and never put them back in.

When the rash didn’t go away, I took her to her pediatrician, who told me it was nothing to worry about; she would grow out of it. When she was about a year and a half, it was not only behind her ears, but all over her head. I took her to her pediatrician, who told me it was dandruff and not to worry about it. Use dandruff shampoo. To me this almost made sense, because my husband has dandruff.

By the time she was 3, the rash was now in her ears, causing her ear problems: big flakes of skin coming out of her ears. They were bleeding, and itching and they hurt her all the time, along with itching of her head, bleeding of her scalp and pain. So I took her to a dermatologist. They told me she had eczema, prescribed some steroid cream, and said not to worry about it. They said she would grow out of it and be fine.

I had finally started to convince myself by age 5 that this was just something we were going to have to live with. The shampoo and creams and OTC meds would help to take the edge off but never once did it go away or clear up for any length of time.

At age 6 my daughter is diagnosed with ADD. The same month she turned 7, I started working for Dr. Lieberman. When I saw what he was doing with the ADD/ADHD patients, I wanted him to help my daughter. So I brought her in for an appointment. We did allergy testing, yeast eradication and supplements. When I asked him to look at her ears, he said it could be caused from an omega 3 fatty acid deficiency. He put her on DHA for her focus and mood and he hoped it would fix her skin issues as well.

After a few months of being on it, I noticed that it did help with mood and focus. One day in an appointment with another ADD/ADHD patient who’s history was identical to my daughter’s, Dr. Lieberman said to the mother of the patient, “DHA should help with his skin problems.”

I don’t know why….but that night….I was at home cooking dinner and I wondered when was the last time I had to put medicine on Catherine’s ears?

I called her into the kitchen, and asked her, “How are your ears, baby?” She told me, “Fine Momma.”

I asked, “How is your head doing?” She said “Fine Momma, it doesn’t itch anymore.”

I looked at her ears and her head and for the first time since she was 3 months old, her ears were clear…..her head had no flakes of skin in it. When I put her hair up in a ponytail, no pieces of skin show through. So I asked her, how long have they felt like this. She told me a long time. That night when I was talking to my husband, we figured it had been at least 4 months since I had to clean her ears and put medicine on them. The only thing that she is on that would have helped with that is the DHA.

It is such a big mile stone for me, to not have to always be worried about how her ears are. And I know it makes her feel better. To think I would have just accepted that her ears and her head would be like that for the rest of her life, when it was such an easy fix. I owe it all to Dr. Lieberman! Thank you!

As we wrote in our last Blog 3 weeks ago, gluten intolerance affects up to 1 in approximately 130 people in the United States, especially (but not limited to) those whose ancestors came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Italy, or some parts of India. When an individual has gluten intolerance, he or she actually has an autoimmune-like reaction from eating foods containing wheat, rye, barley, spelt, kamut, and often oats. This reaction can affect the gastrointestinal tract, the skeletal system (joints, connective tissues, and bone density), the immune system, the muscular system (including the heart), and even the brain and central nervous system. Therefore, the symptoms can be quite varied.

Since gluten intolerance can play a part in other autoimmune diseases, it would be helpful to know what causes it. Although identifying all the causes can be a bit of a mystery, researchers have studied the following:

1) Genetics is believed to be at the root of gluten intolerance.

2) Injuries to the gastrointestinal tract from pathogens like viruses or yeast, can sometimes cause hidden or latent gluten intolerance to fully develop. Until approximately the last 20 years, this phenomenon was not recognized and it was presumed that gluten intolerance would always be identified in the first years of a child’s life soon after introducing cereal grains. Consequently, many adolescents and adults with symptoms of gluten intolerance had a great deal of difficulty getting diagnosed.

3) Undiagnosed gluten intolerance can cause more and spreading reactions as the person keeps consuming gluten, which can cause other types of autoimmune disease to develop as well. Gluten intolerance is NOT the cause of all other autoimmune disease, but it’s recognized that there can be an overlap between the two. When gluten is removed from the diet of individuals with gluten intolerance, other autoimmune symptoms have been noted to improve, sometimes dramatically. This connection is being studied not only by researchers but also by clinicians who are working to help individuals with autoimmune disease.

For more information about how to test and find if you have gluten intolerance, see our previous Blog or the excellent website www.celiac.org. Although the classic symptoms of celiac disease are those affecting the GI tract, keep in mind that gluten intolerance affects many other body systems. If you have chronic symptoms that have been diagnosed as autoimmune illness, consider asking your doctor to help determine if you have gluten intolerance. If you are truly gluten intolerant, you might find so many unexpected health improvements from this simple change of removing all sources of gluten from your diet.

With the New Year upon us everyone is taking a fresh new look at their health and cholesterol.

Lowering your cholesterol naturally isn’t really that hard, and the benefits will not only be lowering your cholesterol, but improving other areas of your life such as lowering blood pressure. Your lifestyle change doesn’t necessarily mean a drastic change. Gradually introduce healthy foods and nutritional supplements into your diet.

I know that sometimes I personally feel like I am in a rut by having the same dinner choices over and over. I am looking forward to the changes my family is making in our menus. For example, fish cooked in tin foil pockets with vegetables and a salad or chicken shish kabobs over wild rice are new options that you have once you reprogram yourself to think outside the box. These low-fat dinners take no longer to prepare than your conventional dinners and the benefits outweigh the extra effort.

Some cholesterol is made in your body by your liver and some comes from what you eat. For example, all meat has cholesterol whereas plants do not. Some cholesterol is necessary for good health but too much can cause high blood pressure, raise stroke risk and cause arteries to become narrow and clogged.

Some things that may help to lower cholesterol are Garlic, B Vitamins, Soy, Fiber, Chromium, Grape Seed Extract, and Vitamin C.

I’ve been learning a new job skill. Actually, I’ve been relearning a skill. We use thermology as a part of our diagnostic protocols, and I was involved in the program a while back, but we have added new technology to make the process more accurate. To me the program is a lot more complicated, so the task of relearning is a little daunting to me.

I grew up before computers were a part of everyone’s daily existence, so learning to use computer technology has always had a fear factor attached to it—fear of failure, I suppose. Once I put the fear aside and try to think of the learning experience as an adventure, things seem to go a little easier. God willing, I will conquer this new threshold of the computer world.

Here at COEM we offer many of our patients a whole new world of treatment options. I’m sure some of them feel like they are taking a great leap of faith when they try the things that Dr. Lieberman recommends. He doesn’t tell them to abandon traditional treatments if they are working, but he does offer alternatives which often produce successful results where conventional medicine has failed.

We look for the cause of the illness in order to develop the treatment, and sometimes the treatment involves major changes in a person’s habits and perceptions. The prospect of making these changes can often be a little frightening, but if the fear can be mastered, and the patient accepts the responsibility for their own care with Dr. Lieberman’s guidance and the help of the COEM staff, the results are usually very positive.

This is the catchy heading on an excellent article found on the Celiac Disease Foundation website (www.celiac.org)

It’s a worthwhile question to ask, especially here in the U.S. where the incidence of gluten intolerance may be much higher than is currently diagnosed. Ireland is the country believed to have the highest incidence with 1 in every 100 people having this disorder, Italy 1 in every 250, the United Kingdom 1 in every 300, and the U.S. 1 in 133 to 1 in 500 (depending upon a person’s original ethnic background). Even in the Punjab region of India, as well as Pakistan, the Middle East, and North Africa, there are high numbers of people who are affected. [Source: www.foodreactions.org/gluten/]

Misconceptions about gluten intolerance still persist, so most individuals rarely think of gluten intolerance as a possible cause of problems for them if they don’t have chronic diarrhea, malabsorption, and weight loss. Actually the symptoms of gluten intolerance can be quite subtle and diverse, such as poor iron absorption and resulting anemia, poor calcium metabolism and resulting early-onset osteopenia and osteoporosis, Vitamin K deficiency and chronic menstrual hemorrhaging, sometimes chronic edema and weight gain, persistent fatigue, and the more common intestinal bloating and IBS. Since gluten intolerance damages the villi of the small intestine where nutrients must be absorbed, we can see why the symptoms can be so varied, depending upon the nutrients most affected and the extent of injury to the intestines.

Unfortunately many people think that a trial or two off all gluten (found in wheat, oats, rye, barley, spelt, and kamut) is enough to self-diagnose this problem. They think of it as a “gluten allergy” which should be easy to identify, like other allergies, with 4 to 7 days of avoidance. Actually avoidance of all gluten for at least one month and preferably 3 months is the better way to begin to see how much healing is possible with a gluten-free diet. Gluten is a hidden ingredient in common foods like soy sauce, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, sauces of all kinds, bottled salad dressings, all cereals or breads or pastas unless clearly labeled “gluten-free,” and many other foods, so a strict gluten-free diet for diagnostic purposes takes some planning, knowledge, and vigilance.

Another common obstacle to identifying gluten intolerance occurs when individuals suspect this problem and begin to limit how often or how much gluten they eat in order to see if they feel better. If they improve, they decide to take the next step of going to the doctor and having a Celiac Disease lab test performed, which is based on blood antibody levels such as anti-gliadin antibody, anti-endomysial antibody, and anti-tissue transglutaminase antibody. If the results come back negative, they begin to eat gluten again and are totally confused when they start feeling worse. The difficulty is that blood antibodies can begin to die down within 7 days after avoiding gluten (although it takes much longer for healing of all the villi occur), so the antibody test may yield a falsely negative result unless gluten has been eaten daily optimally for 4 weeks prior to the test. In addition, some individuals don’t seem to produce positive levels of those particular antibodies that can currently be tested, yet they still are symptomatic when eating gluten-containing foods. With gluten intolerance, perhaps there’s a place for a scientifically conducted test of strict avoidance for three months, if it seems to help. However, this approach would need to be discussed with one’s doctor.

Despite these obstacles in identifying gluten intolerance, if individuals do find gluten is a source of their diverse and subtle problems and avoid gluten, they may be rewarded in equally diverse and subtle ways. Not only are the problems caused by nutrient deficiencies listed above usually able, in 6 to 24 months, to be reversed, but other autoimmune processes related to gluten intolerance may be prevented or more successfully treated. Depending upon the individual and how important gluten intolerance is in his or her own case, these can include hyperthyroidism (Graves’ disease), Crohn’s disease, neurological disorders with Parkinson’s-like symptoms, intractable migraine headaches, Lupus, and even multiple sclerosis.

It’s always worthwhile to ask, “Are You the One?” when it comes to gluten intolerance. For more information, please see the websites listed at the beginning of this blog.