56: Lymphedema: Reduce Toxicity and Avoid Cancer with Dr. Loretta Friedman

by | Apr 10, 2017 | Podcast

Lymphedema, Reduce Toxicity, Avoid Cancer, Medical Intuitive, Functional Medicine Doctor

“10 million people in the United States suffer from some form of Lymphedema”

     Dr. Loretta Friedman     

Dr. Veronica Anderson, Host, Functional Medicine Specialist and Medical Intuitive interviews Dr. Loretta Friedman about Lymphedema and how to reduce toxicity and avoid cancer.

Are you experiencing inflammation, a musculoskeletal injury or chronic condition like cancer? For the past 14 years, Dr. Loretta Friedman has developed an exciting new form of treatment for patients with cancer and other chronic ailments called Lymph-Biologics.

In this episode, Dr. Loretta discusses Lymph, common symptoms and how to prevent Lymph system issues. You’ll find out ways to reduce toxicity and avoid cancer. Listen to the end for case studies that you may relate to.

Listen to episode 56 on iTunes here or subscribe on your favorite podcast app.

 

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56: Show Notes


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Time Stamps:

01:43 – What is Lymph?

02:49 – Common symptoms

07:35 – Preventing Lymph system issues

08:54 – Good watering filtration systems

14:33 – Is Lymph massage the answer?

17:08 – Women’s breast tissue irregularity

19:54 – Reduce toxicity to avoid cancer

23:20 – Hip replacement case studies

 

Full Transcript:

Female VO: Welcome to the Wellness Revolution Podcast, the radio show all about wellness in your mind, body, spirit, personal growth, sex, and relationships. Stay tuned for weekly interviews featuring guests that have achieved physical, mental, and spiritual health in their lives.

If you’d like to have access to our entire back catalog visit drveronica.com for instant access. Here’s your host, Dr. Veronica.

Dr. Veronica:  Hi, Dr. Veronica here, thanks for joining the Wellness Revolution. Today we are going to talk about Lymph, one of those areas that you said what? Lymph, that’s what we are going to talk about. I have with me Dr. Loretta Friedman who is a chiropractor but also a fabulous satisfied nutritionist and she is a seller too. We will talk a little bit about that but we are going to find out what is so important about lymph, you have probably never heard of it, you go to your doctor’s office they never talk about it and Dr. Loretta is an expert on this area.  So let’s get right into the interview.  Thanks so much Dr. Loretta for being on the Wellness Revolution.

Loretta:  Thank you Dr. Veronica for having me here today, I really appreciate it.  I love to talk about lymphatic system and lymphatic drainage.

Dr. Veronica:  So let’s first talk about lymphatic system and lymphatic drainage, you give such excellent analogies.  People may know about this from diseases like breast cancer when people get lymphedema and their arms blow up and things like that.  But give us a little background on what lymph is and why we should be thinking about it.

Loretta:  Ok, lymph is really swelling and inflammation anywhere in the body, ok, that is lymphedema and ten million people in the United States suffer from some form of lymphedema, it’s an amazing number.  It’s more people than muscular dystrophy and ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, people who suffer from Parkinson’s, people who suffer from multiple sclerosis and Aids combined.  So it’s a tremendous number of people who suffer with some sort of swelling or inflammation somewhere in there body that usually doesn’t get treated properly or doesn’t get addressed or, you know, they suffer with for years without getting any answers from the medical community.

Dr. Veronica:  So give me some examples where lymph has become important.  I mentioned the breast cancer and people getting the lymphedema of the arm but what are other areas where people may be having trouble with their lymph system and it never gets diagnosed and they don’t even know that’s the issue.

Loretta:  Exactly.  The symptoms that people most commonly suffer with that have lymphatic involvement that never really gets addressed are people who suffer from chronic headaches, people who suffer from chronic sinus conditions, chronic fatigue issues, women who retain water and are always having weight issues, men and women who suffer from all kinds of skin conditions, eczemas and legions, digestive disorders, people who have all kinds of reflux and heartburn.  This is all about inflammation of the digestive track that isn’t really being addressed with antacids and things to suppress and block what the stomach does naturally.  This doesn’t deal with the inflammatory condition of the tissue that’s causing all of these symptoms. One of the things that, asthma is huge, asthmatics all the inflammation, bronchial and the lining of the lung tissue is huge.  Asthmatics respond tremendously to lymphatic drainage and lymph treatments, where they are suffering and their asthma attacks are reduced tremendously.

So these are just a few of the conditions that nobody necessarily links back to being a lymph issue, I mean, very much are all about inflammation of the body, inflammation of those tissues which is all about the lymph.  Because the lymph is the immune response of the body.  The lymphatic system delivers the immune response.  So whether you have a sprained ankle and it swells like an orange or a grapefruit or you have a large cut somewhere on your body or you have pneumonia, all of that fluid that gathers in the tissue there, that swelling of your ankle like a grapefruit or an orange that’s lymphatic fluid.  All the oozing around the wound is all lymphatic fluid.  The lymph brings all of the enzymes and nutrients through the area that’s affected in order to help not only heal but also to knockout any infectious possibilities that might be going on in that area.  You know, if there is a bug or a foreign entity that could be involved the lymph comes to in order to kill and get rid of those foreign invaders and not allow it’s spread any further than it has to.

So the lymph is very very important system of the body that nobody talks about, not that nobody understands it but most of the time the medical community dismisses lymph and the lymphatic system and you see it most often with breast cancer sufferers, this is the problem. Women who have their breasts removed only now are surgeons being careful when they do the actual operation and the surgeries to try to not cut the lymph vessels, to try to preserve the lymphatic system not to remove, you know, forty lymph nodes, just to be precautious because the damage that it does postoperatively is tremendous and these women suffer for the rest of their lives needlessly because, you know, somebody was in a rush or the surgeon didn’t take the time or the care to you know, trace out the lymph vessels and not to damage them.

Dr. Veronica:  Ok. So before we get into more of the people who have issues with the system, we talked about some of the illnesses and states that can be associated with difficulty with your lymph system. Let’s talk about preventative measures, are there preventative measures that people can take at home with the normal state of life to make their lymph system stay healthy?  What can we do to stay balanced with our lymph system?

Loretta:  One of the things that affects the lymph system are toxics, ok.  Unfortunately we leave in a very toxic world.  So becoming mindful of what you are eating and what you are putting in your mouth and what your environment has in it in terms of, you know, what do you use to clean your clothes and what do you use to clean your house with, your office, you know, is it new construction, is your home a new construction, is your car a new car?  All of those things that we love and all those new car smells and you know, your couch smells and new carpet and you are new in a home they all have tremendous amount of chemicals tracked in the ……………..

Dr. Veronica:  So, Dr. Loretta tell us what we can do to prevent having problems, having issues in our lymph system.  Some of us we are not having problems now, we want to make sure we don’t get into problems, what do we do to prevent it before we get into people who already have the problems?

Loretta:  One of the main things that you really want to try and do is you want to try and avoid toxicity, that’s the biggest thing, toxins are all around us and it is difficult to not breathe in or eat or, you know, drink things that aren’t full of toxicity or chemicals or the environment is full of pesticides and more chemicals and the foods we eat are not necessarily health unless they are organic.  And even organic, you really need to read the labels and understand what that means.  You know, something says, you know, free range chicken, all that means is that it’s ……………………

Dr. Veronica:  so we are back again, we had a little bit of a glitch, Dr. Loretta here, to switch computers in rooms, you know how that happens sometimes.  But we are going to talk about right now again what do you do to keep your lymph system healthy?  So Dr. Loretta tell us what we can do to keep our lymph system healthy to not get into problems in the first place?

Loretta:  Here is the thing, toxins can block the inherent nature of the lymphatic system by attaching themselves to the lymph and not allowing the lymph to drain properly out of the ducts and the stagnation can cause anything from autoimmune diseases to cancers.  That’s the power of the lymphatic system and this is why you want it to drain properly.  What I like to tell my patients is one of the things that they can do to help themselves to move their lymphatic system is to drink plenty of clean water and clean water means, unfortunately it has to be spring water or it has to be highly highly filtered water, not just a breeder filter, not just going through a little charcoal but something that really takes out the microbes and the bugs and the heavy minerals and also the heavy metals.

Dr. Veronica:  Ok, wait, I have a question, this is really important because I was in a Facebook group other practitioners and we were talking about water filtering systems.  You said not breeder, not a little bit of charcoal. These are the ones that we traditionally know, can you give us some examples of good watering systems.  I have had a whole house covered with filtration system. I don’t trust anything at this point so I listen to people who really know and I see ones that are promoted by famous doctors, I don’t even know that they are really good.  So give us some example in your opinion of what is a good watering filtering system.

Loretta:  Unfortunately I don’t think there is one, that’s the problem, ok, to be honest with you.  And the problem with the systems, I mean, you can spend ten, twelve fifteen thousand dollars on getting a filter for your whole house and the problem is, is that they are usually made in pieces and they two segments of the filter that are put together that house the interiors that have ionization or layers or filters, the problem is that the glue that holds the two pieces together that house the interior eventually starts leaking into the water system.  This is one of the biggest problems with these filters.  So that’s why I honestly can’t recommend one because they all start to break down or they all start to leach into their own systems eventually.

Dr. Veronica:  But, what do we do because you are saying none of them are good but we have to drink water so what do we do?

Loretta:  None of them are great, none of them are great.  So you want to get a filter that can ionize the water, something that can also get rid of heavy metals as well as I was starting to say and something that will, you know, get out impurities, so any possible microbes or bugs that might be, especially if you are using well water, you know, there are a lot of people who do use well water on their properties, they don’t use municipal systems.  You need to get sure you get the microbes out of your water.

Dr. Veronica:  What about bottled water, are there bottled waters that are better than others?

Loretta:  The bottled waters, yes, Nestlé puts out a filtered water that is just that, they take tap water and they run it through a filter and they sell it to us for five bucks a bottle, I can’t mention the name of the water because I can’t remember it actually, I would name it if I could, if I could remember what it was called.  You want to buy spring waters, you want to buy waters that come from a source, like Fiji or you know, Poland Springs although Poland Springs is a little more acidy than some people can tolerate.

Dr. Veronica:  What about like the, I am a fun of the mineral waters because I know a lot of people are mineral deficient so I like the Perriers and the Pellegrinos and the Avians and the ones that ones that are mineral waters.  What is your opinion about that?

Loretta:  The problem with the mineral waters is the fizziness of the waters because sometimes the fast fades that create the fizziness in the water can displace calcium in your body especially for women.  So it can lead to early osteoporosis, that’s the problem.  You always want to want ……… 0:15:25.8 or phosphates and calciums.  So if phosphates are high calcium gets leached out, you know, water, just plain water, you can put lemon in your water and you can put orange, fresh orange in your water and squeeze fresh grapefruit or slice of strawberries or cucumbers.  You can make your water exciting if you want to but bottled water needs to be plain, it needs not to have any fizziness to it.  It’s really not that great.

Dr. Veronica:  So in your opinion a flat water like an Avian will be a better quality that a fizzy?

Loretta:  And basically water should not have any taste, you know, I love people who say I don’t like the way water tastes, it’s like it doesn’t have any flavor, it doesn’t have any taste, that’s the point, you know, it’s just plain, it’s for hydration, it’s for nourishment purposes. People who don’t drink water age rapidly, that’s the downfall, their skins start to wrinkle, they lose …… 0:16:36.9, they start to dehydrate, they start to look like a mummy.  So it’s not good, it’s not good at all.

Dr. Veronica:  So the toxins and the dehydration will make you really look like a mummy quickly and not like those beautiful ones in Egypt that were well preserved.  If you want to be well preserved you need water and you need fat but not the bad fat that’s hanging off your body, the good type of fats is what I mean.

So let’s go on more to a little bit more about the lymph and when people have problems they say ok, well I am going to get a lymph massage and I know you elucidated that there is problems with these, they don’t actually get to the root cause of what is going on.  So lymph massage, talk about what that is and why it’s not the answer once you get into problems.

Loretta:  The problem with lymphatic massage, I actually like to say that l actually like to say that lymph massage is an oxymoron because it doesn’t address the underlying toxicity that’s causing the stagnation, that fluid buildup whatever it is in the body is due to toxicity, ok?  End of story, there is no question about it, there is no, you know, you don’t have to think that hard, make your head hurt. It’s like toxins attach to the lymph and cause blockage, they don’t allow the lymph to flow, they don’t allow the lymph to drain out of the ducts. So you come along and you are squeezing and moving and rubbing on somebody and that fluid is getting pushed around the body but it’s not draining the way it’s supposed to because you can’t address the toxins that causes stagnation to begin with.  You cannot move those toxins off the lymph fluid.  So now essentially what you are doing is you are moving all of the toxins that have let’s say built up in one area, like let’s say the arm, that’s contributing to somebody’s lymphedema or the leg that’s contributing to somebody’s lymphedema and now you are moving those toxins all over the body.  You are moving those toxins that aren’t draining, that aren’t getting out of the body, now you are distributing them all over, you know. So they can do as much damage as possible because these toxins are free radicals, these toxins are like little pacman looking to damage as much tissue and do oxidative stress to the body as possible.

So this is the problem, that’s why I said lymphatic massage is an oxymoron, it’s not a benefit, it’s not helping.  You may reduce the circumference of size of a lymph but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are moving the lymph fluid out of the tissue.  You are actually moving extra cellular fluid out of the tissue and it’s a very complicated thing, so I am not going to explain what the differences between the lymph and the extra cellular fluid but you are not really treating the issue or the problem.

Dr. Veronica:  So, let’s talk about a bit about women and their breasts because a lot of women have breast issues and they have them all their life and they worry about it and they are concerned it’s going to turn, whatever they have going on, fibrocystic breasts or a lumpy breast or whatever that they are going turn into the dreaded C word.  So talk to us a little bit about women and their breast tissue and what it has to do with the lymph system.

Loretta:  So, any woman who experiences lumpy bumpy tender breast has toxicity in her system.  Whether the toxicity is environmental ….. 0:20:47.3 or it’s hormonal imbalance, it’s something within her own system.  Those are toxins, when you have elevated estrogens and progesterones in your system, they can get to toxic levels where they cause lumpy bumpy tender breasts, not just when you are getting your period or in and around your period but you can experience it all the time.  Or you can get it around your cycle.  The point is, is that that lumpy bumpy tenderness can be relieved very quickly.  Lymph that addresses lymph biologics, lymphatic drainage that I do that addresses the toxicity component that is causing the stagnation in the breast tissue can be relieved in a couple of sessions.

I have treated women who had tender breasts, history of breast cancer in the family, very concerned, very upset and, you know, one session of lymph biologics and that lumpy bumpy tenderness is relieved, tremendously.  So you know, the problem is, is that for women toxins get stored in our breast tissue. Breasts are lymphoid tissue and there was a study that was done in 2014 showing that when they tasted women’s breast tissue, women like you and myself, just the average woman the breast tested positive for eighteen different dangerous chemicals that all cause cancer.

So this is very very significant because we are walking around with all these toxins in our breast tissue and these toxins are just waiting to cause autoimmune diseases and cancers.  This is why breast cancer is on the rise, this is why the numbers are so high and nobody is addressing these underlying toxins, nobody is telling you you have to get rid of toxicity in your breast tissue.

Dr. Veronica:  So let me just ask, this is an interesting question, so there are women who have a genetic predisposition that they can be turned on and they can have breast cancer.  We know that there are genes associated with it.  I want to take those women out for a second, let’s say the rest of the population, so the people who have the BRCA gene or these other breast cancer genes are relatively a smaller segment of the population and they have to be monitored and dealt with a little bit differently.  So I want to take that away for a second.  But for the other women who don’t have the genetic predisposition, what are you seeing or what is your theory that makes the difference between women who are getting breast cancer and women who are not getting breast cancer?  It has nothing to do with people running and getting mammograms or screening for early disease but there are women who they get it and other women who don’t get it.  So what are you seeing as a difference?

Loretta:  What I am seeing as a major difference is lifestyle.  Women who exercise, women who eat right, women who keep their weight at a certain level and don’t fluctuate thirty and forty pounds up and down and yoyo diet, these are the women who tend to not necessarily get as much toxicity into their system which in turn creates breast cancer.  And it’s not a guarantee, I mean, you hear it all the time I eat right, I exercise, I don’t understand why this happened because it happens, you know what I am saying?

Dr. Veronica:  I mean, there is what I call, this is my medical intuitive side, that spiritual, emotional component that can switch on certainly the triggers in the bodies.  So that is one thing when people say I did everything right, well, there is something that switches it on, we know that, read the biology of belief about that too because we know a lot about this now.  It’s not so simple though always to switch it off and this is why they are practitioners, they help you do this because one of my observations is you have people say but I am doing everything right, but in my observation everybody isn’t really doing everything right, even as practitioners use other practitioners to figure out what am I not seeing that makes me have a problem. So whenever I hear somebody say I am doing everything, in my head I am like well, I am sure that you are not bet if you believe that and you don’t want any help that’s fine.  If you are coming and you say but I am doing everything but I have got something missing, help me, that’s a different state of being.  So there are other factors that involved besides just the physical factors, just what you are eating and how you are exercising that are switching on and off your disease process.

So lymph biologics is what you, you have this wonderful, now, if you want to see Dr. Loretta go to New York, fly into New York, everybody loves seeing New York city, so fly into New York and get this treatment for the breast, for the lymphatics for lots of condition that can help you even if you don’t know that you are having a problem.  So let’s talk a moment about the lymph biologics and give us a case study or two, maybe something that’s relevant in a man and something that’s relevant in a woman about what lymph biologics can help them with?

Loretta:  So, I recently had a, you know, you see a lot of lymph issues are with people who have hip replacements, ok, common enough, you know, single or bilateral hip replacements. I have two patients, one female, one male.  The female is 72 years old, she had a bilateral hip replacement done a few years ago. After she had the hip replacement done, she developed lymphedema in both lower legs, so below the knee in both legs all the way to the ankle, to the feet and the left leg was particularly the painful, ankle very very painful.  She started seeing me, she would go on this …… 0:27:38.3 because she lives all the way out in Long Island and her daughter lives in Staten Island.  So it’s a five hour car ride to and fro.  So sitting in the car all day and then getting there and then sitting in the car coming back, by the time she would get home the legs were oozing, ok, the lymph fluid was literally oozing through the tissue and she said it wasn’t painful but that’s a very high source of infection.  That can turn into an infection very very quickly, major, major infection.  So, she came to see me and from the first lymph biologics treatments, now, the treatment that I use is a three part light wave with an oscillating frequency.  It’s very very gentle, it feels like almost nothing. It’s  a very light touch because the lymph system is very superficial, it’s right under the skin so you don’t really want to press too hard because pressing too hard collapses the lymphatic system.  That’s another reason why lymph massage doesn’t always work well because they press too hard.  From the first time she saw me her legs have never oozed again.  Initially I did a series of eight sessions with her and her right leg went down to normal, left leg went to almost normal, just a little bit of redness and swelling around the ankle but no pain at all in both legs and the she got busy, she couldn’t come in for a little while and unfortunately the left leg swelled up again.  The right leg not so much, the right leg responded and stayed relatively normal.  The left ankle really started to pain her again. She came in, I have seen her maybe five or six treatments and again left leg is almost normal, left ankle no pain but again the oozing has never returned at all even with the long trips no matter what she does, you know, done.

Male patient, in his 60s also had a right hip replacement and his left lower leg blew up with lymphedema.  Then he had his left hip replaced and the left lower leg remained swollen.  He saw everybody, he went to see people, they put a stent in his lower leg, a vascular stent for his lymph. Totally unnecessary, you know, unbelievable that they did this, you know, could have really caused him a serious problem if something had gone wrong with his vascular system on top of the lymph swelling.  I have only seen this gentleman four treatments so far and he sits in synagogue on Saturday.  He is very religious so he sits on hard bench with his ankles crossed and his legs are tacked a little bit the bench and this caused him a lot of discomfort.  The last time that I say him for treatment this pain was much less and he responded to the treatment almost immediately, the circumference of his leg and foot reduced itself.  So the fluid started draining almost immediately.  Instead of having that fluid not only drained but stay drained out of the tissue not to come back and that happens with not only doing the lymph treatments but also usually putting somebody on a metabolic detox as well.

Dr. Veronica:  Wonderful. So I am just going to interrupt because I want to tell people how they get in touch with you if they want to get in touch with you because this is a if you need to get this treated somebody who knows what they are doing has to treat you.  This is not my area of expertise at all this is why I brought on Dr. Loretta.  So Loretta where can people find you?

Loretta:  I am located at 80 5th Avenue, Suite 1204 in Manhattan, that’s between 14th and 13th Street on 5th Avenue.  So I am on 14th Street and 5th right in the heart of Union Square and my phone number is 2122435515.

Dr. Veronica:  And your website, just because you know, this is a technological age, your website is?

Loretta:  synergyhealthassociates.com.

Dr. Veronica:  And people will see that in the show notes, synergyhealthassociates.com.  Dr. Loretta I want to thank you so much for giving us that education on the lymph and maybe we will have you back soon to talk more about some other nutritional areas that people think they know buy they really don’t know.  Thank you Dr. Loretta Freidman.

Loretta:  Thank you Dr. Veronica, I really appreciate it.

Female VO: Thank you for listening to the Wellness Revolution Podcast. If you want to hear more on how to bring wellness into your life visit drveronica.com. See you all next week. Take care.

 

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Medical Intuitive, Functional Medicine Doctor, Functional Medicine New York, ManhattanDr. Veronica Anderson is an MD, Functional Medicine practitioner, Homeopath. and Medical Intuitive. As a national speaker and designer of the Functional Fix and Rejuvenation Journey programs, she helps people who feel like their doctors have failed them. She advocates science-based natural, holistic, and complementary treatments to address the root cause of disease. Dr. Veronica is a highly-sought guest on national television and syndicated radio and hosts her own radio show, Wellness for the REAL World, on FOX Sports 920 AM “the Jersey” on Mondays at 7:00 pm ET.

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