How to Get More of the Master Antioxidant, Glutathione

If you’re looking to raise your glutathione levels – and plenty of people are these days – you don’t have to look too hard for tips. Web pages abound, advising people to eat more sulfuric foods or take supplements or exercise more, or all of the above.

And these are all perfectly legit and helpful ways to get your body to make more of the stuff – a combination of the amino acids cysteine, glycine, and glutamine that’s found in every cell of your body.

Or you could take it through IV therapy.

IV therapy is an ideal way to deliver nutrients to the body. When you take oral supplements, some nutrients are necessarily lost through the long and arduous process of digestion. IV sends the nutrients right to where they’re needed – your body’s cells.

Known as the master antioxidant, glutathione is a pivotal part of your liver detox pathways. It contains sulfur groups which have a tendency to latch onto free radicals, heavy metals, and other toxins so they can then be excreted.

Of course, considering the range of toxins we’re each exposed to every day, it’s no wonder that many of us our lacking in this important nutrient. Restoring it intravenously, though, the high levels achieved amplify its effectiveness in activating other antioxidant and detoxification enzymes inside the cell and protecting healthy cells from inflammatory molecules.

Consequently, it can be considered one of the body’s primary defenses against illness. And not only does it support your body’s natural detoxing abilities; it supports a robust immune response, as well.

Glutathione also protects your mitochondria – the power plants of your cells. It preserves and promotes energy production at its very source. At the same time, research suggests that this ability may also play a role in protecting against chronic conditions such as liver disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

Glutathione – alone or with other nutrients – is one of the most effective IV therapies we have for “brain fog” and neurotoxicity. Taken regularly, it’s remarkable in its ability to help restore clearer thinking, sharper focus, and better concentration and recall.

Between this and the increased energy it can facilitate, it’s no wonder why this therapy can give a big boost to patients who are feeling drained, devitalized, and just plain maxed out. IV glutathione can be wonderfully restorative – a key player in anti-aging medicine.

And it’s just one of the options we offer here in our Los Angeles integrative clinic, convenient from Santa Monica and Beverly Hills alike. Check out some of the others we have available – options that can always be customized to your particular needs and health situation, whether you’re battling chronic illness or simply looking to transform good health into Radiant Health.

IV bags image by NIAID, via Wikimedia Commons

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Why Bother with IV vitamins when you can take them orally?

The answer is to follow the path nutrients must take to get to where they matter – inside the cell!

The difference between absorption of IV and oral vitamins is enormous.  Oral vitamins do have true benefit in ongoing maintenance and treatment.  They’re also effective in helping maintain the high levels of nutrients achieved with IV treatments.

But those nutrients must travel a laborious pathway in which many of them are lost.

That’s not the case with IV vitamins. They move directly into your body’s cells without ever passing through the gut.

In contrast, here’s the path that a single nutrient – vitamin C – must take once you’ve swallowed it:

1. Digestion in the stomach – where gastric acids, enzymes, and “intrinsic factors” may or may not be adequate or overly acidic.
2. Digestion in the small intestine – where fats, protein, and carbs are absorbed, and where essential enzymes must be present, unless there’s a problem.
3. Absorption in the large intestine – where mostly water and minerals are absorbed.
4. Transport of the nutrients to the liver for detoxification and processing.
5. Delivery from the liver to blood vessels going to the rest of the body.
6. Absorption from the blood vessels into the tissues and from the tissues into the cells.

Now, that’s a lot to absorb!

It’s also a pathway on which a lot of mishaps can occur.  At best, only a portion of the nutrients we eat can be delivered to the cells where our metabolism operates.  Patients with bloating, leaky gut, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or food sensitivities often lose many nutrients during these steps. Those taking high doses of vitamin C orally almost always end up with abdominal cramps and diarrhea before their blood levels come close to those of the IV formulas.

And almost all Americans – even those eating a healthy diet – are nutrient deficient due to soil depletion and other factors.  In other words, you cannot get the optimal Radiant Health level of nutrients you need by eating the right foods or just taking supplements.

If we compare the oral route to the IV route, here’s what we find:

Vitamin C and all the other essential nutrients in the combos we offer in the IV therapy we provide in our Los Angeles office  – not just straight C but also options such as glutathione and the Myers Cocktail – are delivered directly into the blood and to the cells. There’s no intestinal path required.  There are no challenges with intestinal absorption or delivery to the liver or transport to the tissues and then to the cells.

And there’s no loss of nutrients along that arduous pathway.

One more enormously important fact: The blood levels of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients given IV are many many times higher than the levels you get from taking them orally. This occurs without any of the stomach upset, nausea, diarrhea seen with too many supplements or too high doses.

With IV vitamin C, you get significantly more nutrients delivered right to where your body needs them: your cells. That means significantly better support for Radiant Health when you make IV therapies a regular part of your health routine.

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Medical Ozone for Healing? A Couple of Case Reports

“The world is facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance,” writes Dr. Robert Rowen in a paper just published in the journal Medical Gas Research.

Thousands of patients die yearly in the USA from infections that have failed to respond to anti-infectives. Alarms have been ringing about bacterial infection fatality resurgence, the end of the antibiotic era, a calamity in progress.

But where mainstream medicine keeps looking toward the possibility of new medications – or at least stemming antibiotic overuse to keep our current arsenal effective – they overlook one very important tool that exists in the integrative physician’s medical kit: ozone (oxygen) therapy.

As we’ve discussed before, ozone is kind of a supercharged oxygen. Instead of two-atom molecules – the form that the oxygen you breathe takes – ozone has a third atom. This makes it unstable – and what makes it a powerful antimicrobial.

But there’s more to it than that. As one 2017 paper put it,

copious volumes of research have provided evidence that O3’s dynamic resonance structures facilitate physiological interactions useful in treating a myriad of pathologies. Specifically, O3 therapy induces moderate oxidative stress when interacting with lipids. This interaction increases endogenous production of antioxidants, local perfusion, and oxygen delivery, as well as enhances immune responses.

As such, medical ozone – which is made by passing oxygen through a corona high arc discharge, resulting in a gas mixture of 1-5% ozone in oxygen – has a wide number of applications. Just as it can be harnessed for its antimicrobial power, it can also be used to relieve pain and support healing from chronic conditions ranging from coronary artery disease to autoimmune challenges to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.

It can also be used to take your current good health to a higher level by supporting robust immune function, improving circulation, stimulating oxygen uptake by the cells, increasing antioxidant protection, and stimulating mitochondrial function.

Or it can be used to treat infection, as in the tick-borne illness case Dr. Rowen presents in his new paper:

A 56 year old male presented with an acute right thigh cellulitis from a tick bite which occurred 1-2 days before. At presentation he was afebrile, but with a rapidly spreading rash on his upper leg….

The patient was a long-term patient of our clinic. He had received ozone from us 3 years before for Lyme disease (without antibiotics), and fully recovered. He was offered antibiotics to take immediately for medical-legal reasons but refused due to his past success with ozone therapy. He did depart with a written prescription upon my demand. He received ozone therapy by the hyperbaric method described above, receiving 144,000 μg over one hour at an average pressure of 1.9 ATA. He returned the following photograph two days later reporting that he made good on his decision not to take antibiotics. The rash began disappearing the following day and disappeared on the second day.

We’ve seen similar results in our own office, as well. For instance, there was one patient with chronic Lyme who incurred a classic bullseye lesion with abruptly increased joint pain and paresthesias (a prickling or tingling feeling caused mainly by pressure on or damage to peripheral nerves) while on antibiotics for her primary infection.

Dr. Joe immediately provided direct intravenous ozone therapy plus an additional antibiotic. Within two days, she reported feeling better. By the third day or so, the lesion had cleared.

This is much faster than antibiotics can typically take effect.

More, the patient reports that she feels better than she has in more than a year, and we continue to see her improve.

This is the kind of patient story we love to see unfold – and even more, love to share!

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