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Welcome to the Healing on Purpose podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Miriam Rahav. The content of this show is meant for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or health condition. Please discuss all information shared herein with your own personal health authority. I hope you find value in this episode. This podcast is also available on YouTube on the Healing on Purpose channel, should you want to look up any of the graphics, diagrams, or other visuals mentioned in the show. Links to the podcast and its YouTube channel will also be available on my practice website, rahavwellness.com. Please join me on my Facebook group, Healing on Purpose podcast with Dr. Miriam Rahav, to continue this conversation.
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Enjoy the show. Thank you so much for joining me today, where we embark or continue on a trajectory of healing on purpose in relationship with our body. Recently, in my own meditation, I’ve been thinking about how honest of an instrument the body is. It will tell you the truth. There are so many ways that we can anchor the truth, but being embodied is one of them. And understanding that our body is made by a divine creator. Its complexity is such that nothing but a divine force, in my own humble opinion, could be responsible for the infinitude of the creation of who we are. With that understanding, every day, we embark on a potential journey to come into relationship with ourselves, and therefore with the divine, and learn the truth, because the body is always telling us the truth. Now, one of the traps I’ve found in the medical training that I received is that it was telling the truth. Sometimes, however, perhaps too narrow of a scope, we can learn so much from a blood count and a comprehensive metabolic panel, and perhaps a lipid A blood study and blood sugar and a thyroid screen.
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In the functional medicine space, however, we learn that there is a lot more biological data that we can gather if If, for example, the honesty that your body is reporting to you with is not exactly reflected in what is our routine bloodwork. The point is the body speaks the truth, and If a particular study or a particular expert is not able to enter into the alignment to validate what it is that your body is reporting to you, there is perhaps an expansiveness needed, either in expertise in laboratory testing or something else, but the body is something that we can grow a trusting relationship with on our pathway to healing on purpose. Today, the subject of our conversation is bone health. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, mainly because there has been so little information available to us beyond the script that I heard over and over again in my medical training, which was calcium, vitamin D, weight-bearing exercise, and some medication. Admittedly, since I was in my training, there has been an evolution in medications. I am turning to a bone expert that I admire very much. I was introduced to Dr. Keith McCormick, at least his body of work, when I was in my first job in the functional medicine space.
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I had looked in the literature for more information on bone health because I saw in hospital medicine how devastating it was for someone to get a hip fracture. Through Dr. Mccormick’s work, who I will tell you a little bit more about shortly, I learned about About half of all women in this country will have osteoporosis in about 20% of men. That’s an overwhelming number. Certainly in medical training, you could be on the medicine floors taking care for someone who had a hip fracture and perhaps was not yet ready for surgery that needed to be medically stabilized, because my background was not orthopedics, it was actually internal medicine. We would meet with people who needed other in order to make themselves safely able to have perhaps a repair surgery. What I also learned from Dr. Mccormick, even though hip fractures are very dramatic, that by and far more common in osteoporosis are stress fractures of the vertebra. Those are the bones that actually make up the spine, and that those are frequently missed, even by radiologist. I actually just learned that while I was preparing to give this talk. It’s really incredible what Dr. Mccormick has done.
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He was responsible for the book that I used as my resource and everything related to bone health and bone physiology. It was called the Whole Body Approach to Osteoporosis. With all the innovation and the greater research available, his book has over 1,200 citations, books, 1,200 references to different scientific articles and papers. This is a magnum opus. Dr. Keith McCormick himself is a triathlete, an Olympian athlete who, at the age of 45, was diagnosed with osteoporosis and found himself in the endocrineologist’s office with an older woman and had questions about how he had there. The truth is that the answers weren’t forthcoming. He became the change he wanted to see, devoting himself to this issue. He came out with his first book, which is how I learned everything I really know about bone physiology. Yet in the functional medicine space, the bone physiology is so holographically identical with so many concepts and how the body is constantly in a balancing act, and that bones are a linchpin for physiology in terms of metabolic health, inflammatory health, immune health, hormonal health, as well as the more obvious, structural health. In and of themselves can be a hologram for everything else happening in the body.
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Therefore, if you do have lower bone mass osteopenia or a more severe version of that, osteoporosis, in fact, we do need to look at hormones. We do need to look at the immune system. We do need to look actually at the gut. Probably more important than anything else, which is the point that Dr. Mccormick really drives home so well in his first book, The Whole Body Approach to Osteoporosis, and his new magnum opus called Great Bones: Taking Control of your Osteoporosis. He has written here a manual for each and every one of you to take charge of your bone health and your overall health. It’s the tome. It’s a large, thick book. I’ve been waiting to record this talk for you, and it’s taken a little bit just because I felt there was so much I needed to get updated on. In general, it will still probably make sense to speak in broader strokes because the book will be actually the most wonderful companion on your bone health journey. I really do suggest, and it really was written for For each of us as individuals taking charge of our health. Once upon a time in functional medicine training, I remember I was told that there would be potentially a lag between what we already knew in medicine in bench research and what would be actually put into action at the point of care, there could be well over a one to two to even three decade lag.
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Except if we have a health issue now, we cannot afford to wait those one to 30 years because the time is always now. That’s why we’re here on the journey to healing on purpose. Pick up your copy of Great Bones. Also, as I was preparing for this recording, I found that there were some other resources available online. I actually learned this through Dr. Mccormick’s website. I’m now sharing my screen to share with everyone that there is actually a bone health, an osteoporosis and bone health summit. Even as medicine may move slowly, individuals who are devoted to taking charge of their health, taking responsibility the way Dr. Mccormick did for himself and has extended it to the rest of the world, so too I see there is a summit. When I learned about this summit, it’s going to cost you $79. You’re going to get a lot of talks from a lot of experts. You can get videos and audios and transcripts. I learned about this from actually Dr. Mccormick’s website. This is my next stage of homework for myself, but I just wanted to let everyone know that this is available, morebonehealth. Bihealthmeans. Com. Healthmeans.
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Com. Morebone health. By healthmeans, one word. It’s three words and one, actually. Com. I’m really, really excited by this, by these opportunities for you to really learn about how everything connects, which is intuitive. Remember, the body is so honest. Dr. Mccormick talks about this. If your gut health is off and you’re If you’re not going to absorb properly your nutrients, then that’s going to affect your bone health. If your hormonal health is off and you’re stressed and your hormones are low because hormones have a direct effect on gut health, especially estrogens and testosterone. That’s going to translate. If you’re a menopausal, you’re going to have greater risk factors. Dr. Mccormick also speaks very interestingly in his book about fat. If you have a higher on your cholesterol testing, a higher LDL, which stands for low density lipoprotein, that has a bit of an inflammatory flavor to it. He speaks about higher fat, especially LDL, being an indicator for higher inflammation Here is the heart of Dr. Mccormick’s teaching, inflammation is the most important driver of bone health. That might be very surprising to us since we… As As I tell you about Dr. Mccormick, I’m going to show you his website, which is osteonaturalsoneword.
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Com. He has different posts here, and he also has a shop where he has his wonderful book, Great Bones, that I’m talking about today, as well as some very interesting and important products. Dr. Mccormick teaches that there are two main cell types of bone. There are actually four. But I’m going to speak about two. Again, I’m speaking in broad strokes. There is no way for me to capture the depth and the breadth of Dr. Mccormick’s excellent book, which is such a resource and guide to you. But I will speak about some, again, basic ideas. There are two bone cell types that we need to know about, one that makes bone, and that is called an osteoplast, and one that breaks takes down and remodels bone, and that’s called an osteoclast. The truth of our bone health is in the balance, as so many things are. Also important to know that bone is structural, It is also a reservoir for minerals, an important reservoir for minerals. In times of plenty, the bones can get mineralized. For most of us, we reach our peak bone density in our 30s. Then from there, bone density starts to decline.
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Back to osteoblasts and osteoclasts in the balance. What upsets that balance? Inflammation. Inflammation, inflammation, inflammation. There are specific mechanisms. Dr. Mccormick will speak to that in his book. He speaks about an important signal with the acronym wrinkle. He speaks about another important inflammatory pathway called NFkB, such that if you are inflamed, it skews the body in the direction of losing more bone mass. Furthermore, since the bones are a storehouse for minerals, the bones are very important in potentially balancing our blood chemistry because minerals are alkaline. Minerals are alkaline. Therefore, if your blood stream is more acidic, one of the things that the body will do is it will sacrifice long-term structural stability, that is our bone density and flexibility, for short-term metabolic necessity, because the body has to live, the blood has to live roughly at a PH of seven. Those minerals, the calcium and the phosphates that are alkaline, will be used in order to what what we call buffer or balance, the acid-based balance of blood. If we understand this, Dr. Mccormick on his website offers pH paper. What is pH paper? Ph paper PHA paper is a way that you can take, for example, and this is what Dr. Mccormick suggests, your most acidic urine, which is your first urine of the day.
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Collect a little sample of it or close thereafter, best effort, and see if you dip a tiny little piece of pH paper, the tip of it in some urine, where on the pH scale you land, where in the yellow zone, I just have this quick snippet here from Dr. Mccormick’s website of how you would interpret You would match the color of the paper that was dipped in urine to this little scale on the back of his pH paper that he’s selling here. You would see that if it’s more yellow, you’re more acidic. If you’re more acidic, friends, even if you are taking the osteoporosis medication that your doctor may have prescribed, your metabolic state, be it inflamed, be it acidic, will not be able to partner with that medication. It’s not that all medications are bad, but medications as an endpoint, yes, they have risk factors, by the way. Many of you may have heard that the family of medication called bisphosphonate, with Aldendronate being the generic name of the one that was most commonly prescribed when I was in training. Now the newer one, which is a injectable monoclonal antibody medication called Prolia, is the brand, or denosumab, that can also lead to excessive bone loss multiple spontaneous vertebral fractures if it’s discontinued.
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We hear about these things, and we get very nervous about what to do about our bone health. These are the kinds of questions that Dr. Mccormick gets. These are the kinds of questions that I get. I am trying to support people in understanding that bone health is part of a much bigger conversation, certainly within an integrative functional medicine practice about overall health, overall metabolic health, overall hormonal health, overall immune health, and overall inflammation. When you are inflamed, it turns out that you have that imbalance skewed towards the bone being resorbed and that medications can slow that cell type, the osteoclaste. However, the osteoclaste is not bad. The osteoclaste is, again, an important cell in our body that is in charge of not just remodeling, but also maintaining a certain flexibility so that you can have increased bone density after four years, let’s say, of osteoporosis medications so that you look better on the DEXA scan. Here’s an important point Dr. Mccormick, made in his book that I am going to implement starting on my Monday, my next work day, that he said, If we start losing bone density as early as our 40s, that he is choosing to have people get bone densitometry, Duxia scans.
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And by the way, he also teaches the history that these started becoming available in 1987. So a lot of doctors practice changes slowly, and we need to stay on top of these innovations. But this is a really important point, and I have not been doing this enough, insisting that my men and women start having a screening for their bone health in their 40s, and certainly by their 50s. Dr. Mccormick says that an appallingly low number of people even have any idea of what’s happening with their bone health. Now, in our practice, we look very closely at inflammation, very closely at hormones, very closely at gut health, and very closely at stress, and very closely at everything. But really adding that extra layer of a bone densitometry imaging sooner rather than later is a great idea that we are all welcome to ask our doctors for. Just because our doctors don’t suggest it, doesn’t mean that your doctor might not be suggestible if you make that suggestion and become proactive about your bone health and learn more about it. Dr. Mccormick takes laboratory tests, and he teaches you, the individual user, how to interpret them so that you can make your own risk assessment as to how much your bone health might be at risk.
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I just love that. He also teaches that a regular CBC has something that you can look at and that is really valuable to understand your your overall metabolic health. That is when you take the white count, which is your Department of Defense. Your white cells are a Department of Defense that have different subcategories. You can have a Department of Defense, you might have Ground Forces, and Air Force, and Marines, and Special Forces, and so on. So, too, your Department of Defense, or white blood cells have subcategories. One subcategory is neutrophil, and another subcategory is lymphocyte. What Dr. Mccormick teaches us to do is to look at the ratio between those. You want that ratio between one and two. You take the number of neutrophils and you divide it by the number of lymphocytes, and whatever that ratio is going to tell you about your metabolic health. That’s from our routine CBC, which stands for a complete blood count, then most of us get on an annual physical, and that, I guarantee you, I was not taught to look at in my training as an internist as a GP. You can become more knowledgeable about bone health and metabolic health markers in reading Dr. Mccormick’s book, then sadly, many of your doctors may be, or maybe you want to purchase a copy for your doctor, invite them to enhance their own expertise for their sake.
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What else do I want to tell you about this book? I told you about inflammation, acid-based mineral balance. I also want to talk to you about blood sugar. Blood sugar and imbalance in blood sugar are an incredibly pervasive issue in our country. It is estimated that over 60% of us are prediabetic or diabetic. What this means on a cellular level is vitally important because it turns out that the problem here is that when we have a body is exposed to a lot of glucose over and over, over again, we need it. But our average body needs just about, over the course of a day, a teaspoon of glucose. There are some estimates that the average consumption of glucose in this country is about 31 teaspoon a day or 31 times what we need, and that’s just an on average. What happens is when a cell has repeated exposure to glucose, it says, too much of this is not good, and it starts blocking that glucose signal. We call that insulin resistance because the mediator of how much glucose gets pushed into cells is a hormone called insulin. If we develop resistance to insulin as a means of protecting the from too much glucose getting inside, the problem is that that same insulin is also a key for many other key nutrients getting inside the cell, including all of our B vitamins, including our minerals, folks, minerals, minerals, minerals, including our amino acids.
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Bone is a type 1 collagen, which is actually made up of proteins. There are very specific amino acids that support our bone health, including Arjanine and Ornithine and glycine. The transport of key amino acids into our cells is also blocked with insulin resistance. Also our essential fatty acids, EPA and DHA, main source that we know of is fish oil. Insulin resistance, prediabetes and diabetes is a state of profound deficiency for all tissue, including our structural tissue. This is just another reason that metabolic health is so tied to overall health. Here’s another nuance/caveat, if you will. That nuance is that there is an important hormone that is involved in our cellular repair. It’s named is growth hormone. When we are small, growth hormone is very important in helping us grow in stature. When we are older, growth hormone is what is involved in repair. If we have injury, if we have inflammation, if we have something called oxidative stress, our ability to recover from that has everything to do with our nutrition, and our nutrition and our gut health work hand in hand, and our nutrition and our hormones work hand in hand, and our nutrition and our hormones and our gut health and our ability to repair.
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Therefore, how we age all go hand in hand. There are tons of mediators and details to this. But understand in broad strokes that if you are just taking a calcium supplement and vitamin D and taking an endoporosis indicated drug, that that’s not going to be enough, not to heal from the inside out. I’m just touching upon some major broad breast strokes to get us excited and motivated and proactive about this subject, and that now, as opposed to when I was in training, there are more and more resources. I also wanted to say that I’ve been using Dr. Mccormick’s supplements, and as far as I know, because I’ve asked him And by the way, he’s just the nicest, most wonderful, most generous human being. I’ve written to him, and he’s just written back with answers. He’s so special, and you can consult with him directly. I really love his line of supplements, and I’m just going to hover over his osteostem because he explains here that the osteostem is the heart and soul of his supplement line. It’s a formulation with antioxidants vitamins, and medicinal herbs really designed to aid in the reduction of the chronic inflammation and encourage normal bone metabolism.
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If you’re looking for a place to start in supplements while you gather information, while you grow your I would say that osteostem is a good place to start and maybe pH paper. You and your own home can develop your own little laboratory so you can really get the upper hand on understanding, Well, where am I? Am I too acidic? Is in the morning? And what do I need to do in order to get myself more alkaline? The answer is, of course, some changes in diet. Also, you’ll learn in Dr. Mccormick’s book that how we breathe affects our our acid-based balance. And so deeper breath. And deeper breath, well, what supports that? Movement and exercise. There’s so many beautiful tie-ins. It is really a way of studying the entire body through the bone. It’s fascinating, and it’s valuable, and it’s brilliant. It is not spoken about, taught enough, along with so many things that we are invited through understanding our body as an honest reporter, how everything connects. That really is our divine design, and the one we’re invited to really inhabit in our consciousness more and more as we deepen our journey to healing on purpose.
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Thank you so much for joining me. I hope this conversation was valuable to you and is setting you on a more and more empowered path through your bone health to your overall health. With all my love and gratitude, Shalom.
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Thanks for listening to the healing on Purpose podcast today. I hope you found this information helpful, and I encourage you to share this episode with others who may also benefit from the information shared. Please consider rating and reviewing my podcast on Apple Podcasts so more people can find this information. I also invite you to join the Healing on Purpose podcast Facebook group to continue this conversation. I’ll see you there.