Join Dr. Martin in today's episode of The Doctor Is In Podcast.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
Announcer: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin: Well, good morning everyone. And once again, welcome to another live this morning and we sure appreciate you guys coming on. We love you dearly. And thanks for making this program so successful and it would not happen without you guys. So as you get your notifications, if you want to say hello, we love that too. And we love our dear friends that can follow us on a daily basis in life. Okay, I want to go just because I answered this yesterday and I want to go back to it again because Yvonne's on with us this morning so this is answering, I think she was the one that asked the question about gluteal tendinopathy. Okay? And there's a couple of things here that I didn't even get into yesterday, but I thought about it afterwards and I answered because to some extent Yvonne's right. She says it's involved like hormones and menopause. Yeah, maybe. I'm not dismissing. I'm just saying that I've seen a lot of gluteal tendinopathy over the years in my practice.
And it's no fun under the sun because the glutes, your butt. When that hurts, those muscles, the problem is it's the tendons that attach into the hips. There's so little blood supply in there, guys. And when you have a lack of blood supply, when you have a lack of blood supply, that makes it hard to heal. I'll give you an example. Shoulder, you get a shoulder issue. Anybody ever had that? You get a shoulder issue. Well, what's the problem with the shoulder? Well, when you get a shoulder cuff, a tendonitis or whatever in the shoulder cuff, it's tough to heal. Why? It's an avascular joint. Not a lot of blood supply. Now, something I didn't say, and I want to say it, think of tendons too. And we talk about this when we talk about sugar and glycation because glycation damages not only blood vessels, but it damages tendons. It damages bones. It damages teeth. That's what cavities are. Glycation, it's sugar destroying your enamel. Well, think of that at the tendon level.
So I'm not saying it's everything because you can injure your glutes and you get a tendinopathy and it ain't no fun and it's not easy to fix. But one of the things in the diet, and this has happened with the reset. People have said over the years with the reset when they cut out sugar and they cut out the crappy carbs and their inflammation comes down and healing is better in the glutes. Well, everywhere, but specifically there in gluteal tendinopathy. Okay. I just want to bring that out because I didn't answer it fully, but they're no fun. And one of the biggest problems in gluteal tendonopathy is at night. When is it worse? And a lot of times at pain, you got pain in your hips and trying to sleep and no fun.
Okay, so I was reading a story. Let me just get this. But this guy, I was reading his testimony to some extent and he put it up. I can't even remember where I read it. His name was Mark Kaplan and he was a professional tennis player that had a heart attack at 52. And he was giving his testimony saying, "Listen, there was nobody he thought that was in better shape than him." And he made an emphasis on eating a low fat, very little if none, animal fat. And he avoided bacon and he avoided eggs or a little bit of eggs, not much. And it was kind of interesting. I followed every guideline of a dietician, he says. And then he gets a heart attack at 52. He was shocked almost killed him. And then he was put on a statin drug. You had a heart attack, you're going on a statin. Well, like I've said to you in the past. I know one thing in Ontario here where I am in Canada, the College of Physicians and Surgeons and you're a cardiologist and you don't put a patient on a statin drug after a heart attack, even if their cholesterol was normal, you can lose your license. You're putting a person on a statin drug and usually a blood thinner.
And like a friend cardiologist once told me, we give them a packet of medication on the way out of the hospital, a statin, a blood pressure medication, a blood thinner, what else? Anyway, I remember him telling me that. I said, even if their cholesterol was normal? Even if their cholesterol was normal, otherwise I'm in trouble with the College, okay? And this cardiologist I'm talking to you about was very skeptical that any of these medications would do much, but they just had to do it. Anywho, this Mark Kaplan back to him. Okay? So he was put on a statin drug and this is what happened. His daughter one day said to him, "You're not the same father," I'm quoting. "You're not the same father that I have known. You've changed." Well, here's his story. He was in pain all the time. His muscles hurt. He had cognitive problems, memory problems. And he said, "My personality to some extent had changed." He said, "My daughter woke me up one day talking and woke him up in the sense that he became aware. You know what? I got no energy. I don't feel good."
And then what he did is started to get educated about everything about the heart. And he found out, number one, the side effects of statin drugs. And he said, "I got every one of them, including the brain fog and rhomboliothiasis," which is muscle pain. He said, "I was weak. I was exhausted. I wasn't feeling good." And at first he blamed it all on the heart attack, but no, it was the medication. And then he listened, Linda. He listened, Larry. He got self-educated and he saw the other side of it. He got off the broad road where everybody cholesterol, cholesterol, cholesterol, statin drugs, get on them, you have no choice, you're going to die of a heart attack. Well he already had a heart attack and he said, "I might as well be dead." And then he started to look into nutrition and he started to listen to guys like me who gave insight to the other side of the equation. Maybe it wasn't cholesterol after all, because like he said, his cholesterol was as far as the doctor was normal. He just was put on medication in case.
He said, "Well, what caused my heart attack in the first place?" He was a carboholic, never thought that way, never looked at that. He was a professional athlete. Tennis players are in tremendous shape. They have to be, right? Think of professional athlete. And he never saw the link between his diet and his heart. He never thought of triglycerides, which come from when your triglycerides are going up, you're a carboholic and you got trouble because your liver, the Costco parking lot is full, 100% full. And when it's full of fat that comes from sugars and foods that turn into sugar rapidly, the liver gets rid of the fat in the form of triglycerides. He had very low HDL cholesterol to go get those triglycerides. And it was an interesting story to read because he sort of self-diagnosed and he changed his diet completely. He thought that fat and cholesterol were bad in his diet. He avoided almost completely animal foods. He bought the lie of vegetarianism and high grain, high cereals, high carbohydrates. He bought it. He bought the lie.
And then he gets on a little narrow road of people who go against the well accepted narrative on the broad road. Fat makes you fat. Cholesterol gives you heart disease. And he started reading and studying on his own. And he heard guys like me that were introducing him to a new way, a different way. And in all due respect to the cholesterol maniacs out there, all due respect, you're wrong. And the number one reason I say it because heart disease is worse than ever. And so it was an interesting story how much better he felt when number one, he got off the statin drugs. I never tell a patient to go off statin drugs. I never do it. I'm not even in practice anymore. So you know what I mean? I would get patients to question their cardiologists. Ask them tough questions. "Why am I on this medication? Look at what my triglycerides are. I changed my diet. I'm doing well. Why do I need this medication? Give me the stats on whether this medication really works. I don't care if it lowers my cholesterol. I want to know if it works to prevent heart disease." It doesn't. Oh.
I had a lot of patients that came back to me after talking to them and they said, "You know what the doctor said?" Me, doctor. Don't question me. Me, doctor. You not. I remember a cancer doctor. Okay. I'm a cancer doctor. I'm questioning him. Who are you? You're not a cancer doctor. You're not an oncologist. Who are you? I don't answer questions. Me oncologist. Who are you? Okay. That's going to be your attitude, but today and I love it because people question before you saw me, you got a phone call and you got to fast and this and that before all the blood tests, whatever. But not only that, bring a notepad and ask questions. You're going to get Dr. Martin's attention. Bring a notepad and a pen and ask questions. So get your questions ready. And I'm sure you'll have some. You're going to get a lot of information, not only on the results of your testing, but doc is going to give you a plan. Now it'll all be written out. Okay? That plan will be given to you in easy to understand literature, but you're going to have questions. We invite you to ask questions. You know what the word doctor means? Teacher. That's what it means. Teach.
Anyway, I really like this story here of Mark Kaplan. I didn't follow his career as a tennis player, but I don't know if you've ever played tennis. I played some. Okay. Not that I was ever any good at it. But I played some tennis. It's not an easy game. It's tough. Pickleball is a lot easier in that sense, even though pickleball's a good game too. But tennis is tough. It's tough to be good at tennis. So I admire these guys. He had a heart attack at 52. It changed his life because he started questioning. He started questioning. I don't know if I accept all this here. I don't feel good. And why did I have a heart attack in the first place? Maybe I was doing things wrong. He found out he was. He was eating the wrong food and he was told all of his life that cholesterol was bad. And if cholesterol is bad, you're not going to eat much from the animal kingdom because that's where you get cholesterol.
And then it's interesting now because even in the article that I read about him, he starts talking about insulin. He never knew how insulin and insulin resistance the pre-diabetic state of the body, how that leads to a cascade of problems like inflammation. Inflammation, guys, is silent. People think, "Well, I don't have inflammation. I don't have any pain." No, no. If you have a sore joint, you have inflammation in there. You have a sore muscle, you have inflammation in there. There's no doubt about that, but you can have silent inflammation in the body. As I speak right now, many of you might have and you don't even know it. Well, if your insulin resistance is high, one of the effects of that is inflammation. What starts, for example, in the blood vessel because sugar's in it and sugar is left unattended and slowly the blood sugar rises. Now, you might not even know that if you're not monitoring it in a sense. But sugar left under tended destroys blood vessels. Well, the body says, "Okay, I got to heal now." So it sends inflammation. It sends extra blood supply, extra enzymes, extra inflammatory markers, cytokines to the area.
See, it's not cholesterol guys in a blood vessel. It's not cholesterol. Cholesterol's not the bad guy. Sugar's the bad guy and sugar creates inflammation and it might be silent. You might not even know it. And the only way to know it really is to get a blood test that doctors don't even do very much. And it's called your CRP. Ask your doctor. Okay. Don't ask them if this drug is good for you. I hate those commercials. Ask your doctor if, and for the next 10 minutes they tell you about the side effects of them. I watched a commercial. It was an autoimmune drug. And then one of the side effects is it causes autoimmune disease. I'm not kidding you. I just about fell off the couch. Ask your doctor if this drug is good for you, but it might cause autoimmune. Well, I thought you were taking it for autoimmune. Oh, and call your doctor if you're dying because it could kill you. It said that at the commercial. Some people have died from taking this, but don't worry. Call your doctor.
I know I get crazy sometimes. Okay? But back to what my point was, ask your doctor to do specific tests. You don't ask so often you don't get. People, they rely on their physicians. I understand that. It's part of nature. They have a MD after their name. You don't. Somebody put it on you yesterday. We can question our doctors. You better question your doctor. And look, you can still be nice, right? But a doctor that can't be questioned. Change doctor. Now that's not always easy. Okay? I get it. Especially in Canada here. But ask your doctor for a CRP test. If I could do commercials on TV, that's what I would do. These are tests that I want you to get. Ask your doctor. And this is what this Mark Kaplan was doing. He was questioning everything. He was told one thing. He bought it. I had a heart attack, had to be my cholesterol. Then he found out it wasn't his cholesterol. He found out he had insulin resistance. He found out he was a carboholic. He found out he had inflammation in his body and he demanded a CRP test. I want to know. C-reactive protein. Been around for a long time. I think it was invented, if I'm not mistaken, 2000, 1999, maybe even before that a little bit.
I remember reading about CRP a long time ago and how good it is to know what your inflammation, because it could be silent. And sometimes the doctor go, "Well, you don't have autoimmune. Why do you want to know your CRP? You don't have pain. Why do you want to know your CRP?" "Because I want to know. I want to know if that silent killer is in my body. I want to know. I want to know what my triglycerides are. I want to know what my HDL is. I want to know what my uric acid is." "You don't have gout. Why do you want to know uric acid?" Well, because it's a marker. I want to know my vitamin D levels. Well, you don't have osteoporosis. What do you want to know that for? Because vitamin D is a lot more important, doc, than you think. And I want to know. I don't want to guess. I want to know. I want to know my B12 levels. What do you want to know that for? Because I want to know. I tell you, guys, ask your doctors. If I could change the commercials on TV. I'd say, "ask your doctor for these blood tests." Okay? "Ask your doctor about the statin drug that he wants to put you on." Ask well, what are my triglycerides? That statin drug's not going to touch my triglycerides. Why do I want low LDL? Who says? That ain't saving me. Who says?
Guys, the story of Mark Kaplan, a professional tennis player competed at Wimbledon. Got to be good to get there. You got to be a pro and you got to be in the top whatever it is at Wimbledon, right? Interesting story. He changed his thinking and he's never felt better. That's the moral of the story. Okay. What's Friday? Q&A. See, we don't stop answering questions. I probably answer a question every day. Okay. A lot of our podcasts come as a result of the questions you ask. That's why we love Q&A. So send your questions into info@martinclinic.com, info@martinclinic.com. Guys, we love you and those blood tests that I want you to take are in the book, Sun, Steak, and Steel and don't forget that. Okay? Love you. Talk to you soon.
Announcer: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!