Dr Sarah Myhill

Jingle 0:00

Habits & health episode 49. Welcome to the habits and health podcast, where we believe creating healthy habits should be easy. Brought to you by an educator and coach for anyone who wants to create a healthier life. Here's your host, Tony Winyard.

Tony Winyard 0:20

Welcome to another edition edition of habits and health. My guest today, Dr. Sarah Myhill. She's a naturopathic physician, a former GP. She's written numerous books around chronic fatigue syndrome, ecological medicine, a book called the infection game, the paleo cookbook or a paleo ketogenic cookbook. The diagnosis and treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome, and many others. We have a very interesting conversation. Dr Sarah Myhill, how are you, Sarah?

Dr Sarah Myhill 1:10

Very well. Thank you, Tony. I'm looking forward to this morning.

Tony Winyard 1:14

And you're well you're not so far away from me. You're mid I was You were telling me

Dr Sarah Myhill 1:17

indeed. You're just down the road. If I'd known that before I'd crossed it down. We could have done this live.

Tony Winyard 1:24

But your your accent doesn't sound very well.

Dr Sarah Myhill 1:26

I'm not well, I mean, my family and North Londoners were bought up in well in in Hartfordshire and only moved here a few decades ago. And actually the local people here are largely well, they're all English speaking. They have a rat Misha accent rather than the Welsh accent.

Tony Winyard 1:43

For the people listening who maybe aren't familiar with your name? Would you give us a little background about what it is that you've done? And what it is that you do now?

Dr Sarah Myhill 1:52

Okay. Well, you know, I qualified in 1981, having been conventionally trained, you know, at Middlesex Hospital Medical School, I then went straight into general practice, and I worked as an NHS GP for for about 20 years. And during that time, I, I learned that modern medicine is not about identifying the root cause of symptoms. Modern medicine has drifted down the Big Pharma route, which is find a symptom and supply its symptoms suppressing medication, which in the short term gives a short term relief, but in the long term is disastrous. Because we have symptoms for very good reason symptoms are the signpost symptoms tell us there's something wrong and you've got to do something about it. And it's the symptom gets very nasty, when you don't do anything about it, then you should work even harder. And trying to tackle medicine, from that intellectual viewpoint within the NHS became increasingly difficult, because and eventually, during the late 1990s, I got my wrist slapped, because my prescribing budget was so low. And because my prescribing budget was so low, that made me a bad doctor. Now, obviously, I was treating people through diet and lifestyle changes. And, and then actually what really, there were several issues. But the last role was that I was told I would have to have Hepatitis B vaccination if I were to be allowed to continue in NHS practice. And I'd seen so many patients, patients who'd had serious illnesses and fatigue syndromes triggered by vaccination, I thought that's it, I've got to do my MC. So in 2000, I set up an independent medical practice. In fact, there's a bit of overlap with my NHS work, but by then I had enough work to make it viable. Now it is my view that all information should be freely available. And at that point, I set up a website, and everything that I knew or had learned about medicine I put up there. And that's where my problems really started. Because you would think that somebody who who was open and open to questioning and wanted to make that information freely available to all, you know would be would be applauded by the powers that be. And I actually found that the reverse was true. And in 2001, came my first General Medical Council investigation. Now there have never been any complaints from patients. All my patients very happy with what I do. Every single complaint has come from other doctors, health authorities or sometimes the GMC itself. And in consequence of all that I am now the most investigated doctor in the history of the General Medical Council. Not because I've done any harm, but simply because the establishment and the powers that be do not like my approach to medicine. They do not like the fact that I'm looking for disease causation. rather than symptom suppression with drugs, so anybody listening into this, as got to be thinking of as obviously your attorney has got to be thinking on those guidelines, we have symptoms, why do we have those symptoms? What are the mechanisms, those symptoms? And what tools can we use to reverse that pathology. And that's what medicine should be all about. And in fact, if you think about it, that formula applies to any situation, whether it's agriculture, whether it's engineering, whether it's health service, it doesn't matter, we ask, you know what the problem is, we identify the mechanism by which that problem has been has arrived at, and then that gives us an obvious treatment. And I have no difficulty with that logical project progression as I have you, and your listeners will have no difficulty as well.

Tony Winyard 5:49

Well, and I mean, many of the experts and doctors who have been guests before you have some form integrative medicine and functional medicine and many similar types of approaches so very much. And you I know a couple of people that I've spoken to your you've also got some speciality. So I know that you're renowned in, I think it was chronic fatigue syndrome, and some other sort of conditions similar to that area,

Dr Sarah Myhill 6:18

indeed. And chronic fatigue is the worst treated condition in the Western world. When in the 1980s, I remember reading that the acronym ta TT tired all the time, constituted 40%, of GP consultations, then, of course, it's not 40%. Now, because people have worked out that the doctors are no good at that, you know, they they just fudge the issue, instead of asking questions, why is this person fatigued, they maybe do some basic tests to make sure there's no major pathology there. And then they dismiss the patient as being a hypochondriac. And I got started to get interested in chronic fatigue syndromes, and E in the mid 1980s. And throughout the 1990s, because, you know, I saw in a very fit healthy people, you know, sometimes Olympic athletes, sometimes English and British athletes, for me to top level who develop this condition, and that told me it certainly was not hypochondriasis. When I moved to Wales, in the 1990s, I started seeing many farmers with sheep flu, which essentially is a severe chronic fatigue syndrome induced by exposure to toxic chemicals. And I was really then asked the question, Why, what's going on here? Why are these people pathologically fatigued? And then I started seeing Gulf War veterans, again, with a clinical picture of chronic fatigue syndrome. Why what happened in the Gulf, that caused those patients to those fit healthy young men to become the pathologically ill? I saw over 200 women with silicone breast implants, who again, who presented with a similar clinical picture of chronic fatigue syndrome and inflammation.

And, of course, you can get so many clues from the history as watsco as is what is going on here. But, you know, let's leap forward to the here and now to the present day, you know, what, what have I arrived at now, and essentially, the clinical picture of chronic fatigue syndrome is characterised by pathological fatigue, which causes physical fatigue and mental fatigue. In fact, these patients, essentially, they have an early dementia. And patients with me, they have pathological fatigue with poor energy delivery mechanisms, and inflammation. So their bodies are inflamed for reasons of allergy, autoimmunity, or maybe chronic infection. So that's how I break it down. And the key point to remember about chronic fatigue syndrome, and Emmy is they are not diagnoses. They are clinical pictures. They're, they're groups of symptoms, and we have to ask the question, why we then have to break it down. So what makes fatigue pathological? What's the difference between normal fatigue because guess what you and I, you know, we're going to be tired at the end of the day, we can have a good night's sleep and the next tomorrow, we should wake up feeling fine. So the difference between pathological fatigue and normal fatigue is the delay aspect. People who are pathologically fatigued if they overdo things, they pay for it the next day. Now, that's a universal symptom, you know, Steve Redgrave, after he'd won his fourth gold medal, and had pushed himself to his limit, he would have had delayed fatigue that for him was pathological. But when energy delivery mechanisms are so awful, that you know you can't survive, you can't do your everyday stuff just staying up without getting pathological fatigue, then you know, you're in trouble. Now the starting point to treat me and chronic fatigue is to look at energy delivery mechanisms. And the analogy which I use is the car analogy. So if you're castigate, you've got to have the right fuel in the tank. And that's all about Dart and gut function, you've got to have the mitochondrial engine. And this is my special area of interest. And together, John Howard, we published three papers now, on mitochondrial function in patients with fatigue syndromes, then you have to have the thyroid accelerator pedal, and that determines how fast your mitochondria go. And new adrenal gearbox and the adrenal glands. If you know, gearbox allows us to gear up in response to stress. So in response to doing a podcast like this, then you don't have to have a few stress hormones functioning flight in order to allow me to perform so that I can inform and hopefully entertain that same time. So that's the analogy that I use to my patients. And I like that analogy, because because I get it in my patients get it. And it always starts with diet. Now, Dart is probably the most difficult thing that I asked people to do. But it's also the most important. And if you don't get diet, right, nothing else works. And the problem with Western diets is that they are high in sugars, and they are high in carbohydrates. Now, if you've got a perfect digestion, and young people do have much better digestion than the old Vegas, if you have perfect digestion, that will go a long way to dealing with sugars and carbohydrates. But it's so overwhelming. Nowadays, there's so much sugar and junk food and fast carbs and fruits and fruit juices pouring into our diets, that it changes our gut function. Now, just to talk about normal gut function, the human gut is almost unique in the mammal world, because the upper gut should be a sterile, acidic, digesting gut, just like my little dog who's sitting next to me, just like her gut for the businesses of absorbing, digesting and absorbing meat and fat. And then the lower gut, the large bowel should be a vegetarian gut just like my horse, you know, for the purposes of fermenting vegetable fibre. Now that gut layout allows us to eat a very wide variety of foods. And that's part of what has made humans so successful in the natural world. Because we can, we can, you know, I can consume vegetables, which my dog certainly couldn't cope with. And I could consume meat which my horse you wouldn't deal with either. Now, I say the upper gut should be a sterile, acidic, digesting gut. Now, if you overwhelm that the sugars and carbohydrates, then the bacteria and the yeast move in and they ferment, and the upper gut becomes an upper fermenting gut. And I now know without a shadow of doubt, that that drives much pathology, it causes a huge number of problems. The first thing is if your upper gut is a fermenting gut, then it will be full of bacteria and it will be full of yeast that the body is not used to, and they produce toxins. They produce bacterial endotoxins. They produce a fungal mycotoxins and all those poison the body.

If you start to consume vitamins, minerals, and of course there lots of natural vitamins, minerals in foods, then those microbes are in the front seat, they get first pick. So they take all the B vitamins and the essential fatty acids and the minerals for their own metabolism, ie you Mel absorb those supplements. And I see so many people who have spent a fortune on supplements, but they've got enough of fermenting gut. This is feeding the bugs. Yeah, potentially, they're making the situation worse. And then those microbes when they ferment, they produce more toxins. So if you've got a yeast in the upper gut and you eat some fruit, it will ferment that to alcohol. It's called the auto brewery syndrome. Yeah, it's not rocket science. And it's not just ESA alcohol we get we can produce methyl alcohol profile alcohol, butyl alcohol, we can produce the lactate, hydrogen sulphide, ammoniacal compounds, a whole range of toxins, all of which poison the body. And the blood of the venous drainage of the gut go straight to the liver and the liver has to deal with that toxic load. And in dealing with that toxic load, it uses a massive amount of energy. One of the statistics I love to quote is at rest, the brain consumes 20% of our energy and the heart 7% of our energy at rest. The liver consumes 27% ie the same amount of energy, it's the heart and the brain combined, just to deal with that toxic load. So soon as you clean up the upper fermenting gut with a PK dark, we'll talk about that. As soon as you clean that up. You make more energy available to the rest of the body. So and there's a third major issue You hear at medical school we are taught, yes, the gas is full of bacteria, or rather the lower fermenting gases from a bacteria. And there they stay and don't cause any problems. Not true. We now know that gas is a bit leaky, and some of those microbes do get from the gut into the bloodstream. Now, a very good example of that is, if you brush your teeth, if I took a blood test from somebody, two minutes after they brush their teeth, I would find dental bacteria in the bloodstream. And that, of course, is why people with heart lesions go to the dentist are given antibiotics routinely to stop getting infected with your heart valve. But these microbes on the upper fermenting gut also get into the bloodstream. Now, from an evolutionary perspective, these microbes are not familiar. They shouldn't be there. And the immune system sees these unfamiliar, you know, foreign microbes floating around in the bloodstream and getting stuck in our joints and get stuck in our skin and getting stuck in in our connective tissue. And where those microbes get stuck, we get inflammation. And I'm now quite short, that many pathologies derived from allergy to microbes from the upper fermenting gut pathologies like temporal arthritis, polymyalgia, rheumatica, fibromyalgia, chronic urticaria, intrinsic asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, etc. So if if, if people listening to this podcast I'm quite sure Tony, you do the Paleo ketogenic diet because he wouldn't dare unless otherwise. If people listening to this podcast do nothing other than move to paleo, I no grains, no dairy because they are not natural foods, Paleo ketogenic, ie very low carbohydrate diet, they will be doing yourself a huge favour. Because we now know that doing that diet a is the starting point to treat absolutely everything. And it's also the starting point to prevent absolutely everything. So guess what? Am I going to wait till I get my dementia or my cancer or my heart disease? Before I start doing the PK da? No, I'm going to do it now. And again, people asked me why the PK diet, you know, and the answer is, because that's what primitive man's been eating for the past few hundreds of 1000s of years. That is the natural diet, and, and our bodies and our guts and our brains have evolved and consuming those foods. So that's what we should be eating. I know I've talked for too long, you're probably in between is going to be shutting me up. And I'm quite sure there are 1,000,001 questions that might pop out. So if you got anything, you know, please say so now before before you lose me in the in the distance.

Tony Winyard 17:54

So me as you say that, that being so many different questions, and some into my mind and the obvious one being so. So someone does change to a paleo ketogenic diet. How long typically, I mean, it is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string, but how long would it take those symptoms to start to disappear and for the person to recover

Dr Sarah Myhill 18:11

remarkably quickly, you know, a few weeks you'd see a difference, okay? The problem is, is that sugars and junk foods are addictive. And what happens when we give up an addiction, we get withdrawal symptoms, that the caffeine addict giving up caffeine will and each initially feel they're weak and maybe headachy and a bit, you know, spaced out. But that will last a few days or a week or so and then they will feel much better. It's the same for any addiction. And the keys that start is to think of sugars and refined carbohydrates as an addiction. And if you're eating foods in an addictive way, then you have metabolic syndrome, you you and you are fueling your bodies with sugars and carbohydrates. And that is the forum has a diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol problems, heart disease, cancer, dementia, the whole shooting match. So once you've recognised that sugars are addictive, and it's very easy to do. If I take a dietary history from somebody I recognised within the first few seconds what the problem is if they Oh yes for breakfast, so we'll have a glass of fruit juice bowl of muesli, toast marmalade. All those things are sugars and carbohydrates immediately No. And what that means when they have that sort of breakfast is the mid mid morning. They're hungry, because that breakfast sent their blood sugar flying up, which of course is very dangerous to the body high blood sugar sugar is sticky stuff. It's sticky in the hand. If I pick up sugar, I'm putting my hands it's sticky. It's sticking the bloodstream to it sticks to things, and in sticking to things it damages and denatured them. So high blood sugar sticks to arteries and damages them. It sticks the brain proteins and damages them. In fact, dementia is now being called type three diabetes It's a sugar problem in the brain. It sticks to connective tissue and damages that too. We now know osteoporosis is part of sugar addiction. So it manifests in lots of ways. So the body cannot allow the blood sugar to run too high. So as soon as it comes up after that high carb meal, insulin is poured out. How does insulin bring the blood sugar down by shunting into fat. And therefore people running carbs tend to get fat very easily, then the whole metabolic drive is to laying down fat. So then the blood sugar starts to come down. Now, if you're eating sugar all the time, all the time the brain runs on sugar. As the blood sugar drops, the brain starts the planning. Oh, we're running out of fuel. It sends out the panic hormone. What's the panic hormone adrenaline? What's adrenaline do okay? It stimulates your fat burning. Initially, it brings blood sugars back up again. But adrenaline gets as high blood pressure. It makes us feel stressed, worried anxious. If you get an adrenaline spike in the middle of the night, it stops you sleeping. And we know that loss of sleep is a major driver of all pathologies. If you if you don't get good quality sleep and the right house, we know that a risk factor for cancer heart disease and dementia, it's symptomatic of that adrenaline spike. So and that drains by is a bit addictive, you know you because suddenly you've got a bit of energy. Okay, it's temporary. It's ephemeral. We know it's not going to last, but it runs out 11 o'clock. And then Asha graddic, goes and has a sweet drink, cup of coffee biscuits, bag of crisps, piece of fruit, whatever. Up comes the blood sugar again, and you're on that roller coaster. And to get off that roller case that does take a few days a very low carbohydrate diet until the body is running on ketones because ketones are the preferred fuel mitochondria. That's how they function best on. And we know we know that from years of just experience. I was fascinated to read that the Samurai Warriors before a battle they will fast for 24 hours because they know they function much better. And at a higher level when they're running on ketones. They have far more stamina. The world record for the furthest distance run in 24 hours is held by keto adapted athlete Mike Morton. And during those 24 hours, he ran 172 miles it's almost inconceivable listen to

some of some listeners may have heard of Dr. Ian Lane GP down in in the south, who is a type one diabetic. He controls his diabetes with a ketogenic diet. Or type one diabetics will need a little bit of insulin, but very, very little and it's constant. Anyway, not last summer. But the summer before he did a five day fast together with Matthew Pinsent and some other athletes. And during those five days, he ran 20 miles every day, three rounds from Winchester to Bristol. And during that time, his blood sugar's were absolutely level, he didn't run out of any energy. Obviously, he lost some weight because he was burning fat. But he was absolutely fine. And so with the other four keto adapted athletes at the end of that, it illustrates the point that we can achieve great things on ketones. In fact, that's how we function best running on ketones, our brain works better, our bodies work better. And by doing that low carbohydrate diet, we massively reduce the toxic load, we massively reduce the load from sugar. And from all products of fermentation that we talked about earlier. Just by reducing that toxic load, your liver has less work to do. And your mitochondria work much better. Again, I know I'm jumping ahead and forgive me for jumping all over the place. But mitochondria, that's my special area of interest. And I started to get interested in mitochondria in the 1990s. We learn about medical school, as I'm sure you did, as part of their second MB, you've got to struggle through your biochemistry. And as part of that you learned about mitochondria. And it's the sort of subject that you mug up the night before and chocolate biscuits and coffee. You regurgitate it on the examination page the next day, and hope you've done enough to pass. And the reason you do that is because in the 1970s when I learned all this stuff, I didn't know that it had any clinical application. In fact, we weren't told that it had any clinical application whatsoever. We But by contrast, now, mitochondria are now implicated in any pathology you care to mention. You know, we know they go slow in heart failure. We know they go slow in dementia. We know they're implicated in cancer, we know their central part of diabetes. So you know, mitochondria suddenly become you know, the most important pathological unit talks about in the modern world. But in the 1990s when I first started rethinking them, there was none of this stuff anymore. I was very lucky to work with the most brilliant biochemistry in the world, Dr. John McCarran Howard, who was a bio lab laboratories, and I put it to him that we needed a mitochondrial function test. That was the easy bit. The difficult bit was developing the test. And your John really should be given the Nobel Prize for biochemistry for his brilliance, he developed a mitochondrial function tests. And I started to apply this test to my patients who are not responding to the usual dietary interventions, micronutrient supplements and all that stuff. And because a very, very, very, very long story short and three papers later, we demonstrated that those patients with chronic fatigue syndrome or me, who had the most fatigue had the worst mitochondrial function, and vice versa. It's an almost a straight line graph. When we look to mitochondria function against disability, and this was done blinded, so I saw the patients and worked out their energy score in conjunction with them, the blood test weights John McCain and Howard and of course, the bloods are big and went somewhere and had no course he didn't know how fatigued those patients were, he just did the test. And then the results went to a third party to be number cruncher. And finally the paper was published. So it's a very powerful paper. And our third paper then looked at what happens when we could put the correct those mitochondria functions and mitochondria to say the engine into your car, they can go slow for a number of reasons. They can go slow because you've got the wrong fuel in the tank. Well, we've addressed that because guess what we put the right fuel in the tank, which is which are ketones. The mitochondria can go slow because they are deficient in some essential nutrient. Now in parallel with mitochondrial function test, we also did nutritional studies looking at levels of magnesium it may be three Kevin's IQ 10. But but but, and we found that common things were common. And there were five common deficiencies that came up time and time and time again, magnesium, vitamin d3,

SL, l carnitine. CO q 10. And D ribose. Are the five nutrients that we use to replace the deficiencies. And then we found mitochondria go slow because they were blocked by something. And guess what a very common thing was products of the fermenting gut. And we've already addressed that with our PK diet. But again, this is nice to fit in with those people I'd seen who've been poisoned. Because the Gulf War veterans were poisoned by organophosphates, sheep that farmers are poisoned by organophosphates. People experiencing spray drift poisoned by organophosphates. The nasty bit of biochemistry that describes mitochondrial function is called oxidative phosphorylation, so no one that they were that was inhibited by organophosphates, you know, it's not rocket science is it? So by identifying the toxins, and again, you get clues from the history, heavy metals, pesticides, or whatever, we found we could improve mitochondrial function reliably well, so that's the second bit. And at that point, I felt qualified to write a book on it, which I called chronic fatigue syndrome. It's mitochondria, not hypochondria. And I have to say that that title went down very well with my fatigue patients. So then we have to look at the control mechanisms. Because, you know, you could have, you know, a Formula One car with rocket fuel in it. But if the accelerator pedal and the gearbox didn't work, you wouldn't go anywhere. So the next thing we have to look at other control mechanisms. Now, the underactive thyroid is probably one of the worst treated condition in western medicine, not my words, but the words of Dr. Kenneth Blanshard. American endocrinologist who's written several books on the subject. He estimates that maybe up to 40% of Westerners are, are deficient in thyroid hormones. We are seeing epidemics of hyperthyroidism, even the conventional endocrinologist in this country will tell you, well, about 1% of the population receive thyroid hormones, but they know about 10% actually need treatment and that diagnosis has been missed. So, in my books, I talk a lot about the characteristic symptoms of the underactive thyroid, and how you can treat it yourself with natural interventions. The point here is you have to bypass doctors, because doctors are a break they get in the wave of treating the underactive thyroid well, because they will only diagnose that on the basis of blood tests. And then often there's only one part of the blood test they look at which is the TSH of the TSH is normal. Nothing wrong with you rubbish, rubbish rubbish. So, we then look at the say the thyroid accelerator pedal, and then what then we then concentrate on the adrenal gearbox. This allows As to gear up in response to stress. And don't laugh now, my lovely publisher, Georgina, who bless her prints, everything that I write, has asked me to do a thyroid adrenal book. And that is my next project. So I can send you the early chapters if you think they would help. But that's the overview of the patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. And then we have to look at the Emmy patients and the Emmy patients, they've all got chronic fatigue syndrome, they've all got four anti delivery mechanisms, but they've also got inflammation and inflammation is switched inflammation occurs when the immune system is busy. Now, the immune system is an obviously a central part of our health. And what we want is an intelligent immune system that switches on in response to an acute infection deals with that, you know, busily inactively and and gets rid of that virus or bacteria or fungus, whatever it is, and then goes back to a dormant state state again. Yeah, but so many of the Emmys the immune system has been switched on and hasn't been switched off. It continues in an inflamed state, in response to a chronic infection that it has not dealt with efficiently. The immune system can be switched on. And the analogy I like to use is the immune system is our standing army. Yeah, imagine the body is the country and the immune system is a standing army. Now, of course, we want to swing it into action. When Napoleon invades you know, we want to sweep him off the beaches before he you know, gets

you gets to the Tower of London and grabs the crown jewels, so get rid of it. But what we don't want is our standing army to start attacking harmless tourists, you know, harmless tourists that might be doing some good harmless tourists like food, you know, like pollen in the air, those things don't cause the body any harm whatsoever from an allergy point of view and a massive cold allergy. So people reacting allergic to foods, that's that stupidity, that's an immune error. That's a big mistake. And worse than that, you can get a case of what I call Civil War when the our nanny army attacks itself. And that's called Auto immunity. And that's you know, the the immune system suddenly decides that the thyroid is an enemy and attacks it destroys it suddenly decides that lining of the gut is an enemy attacks, it destroys it and autoimmunity is very bad news. And the big thing that switches on autoimmunity better than anything else is vaccination. And this is why it's so worrying at the moment that we're seeing, you know, epidemics of vaccination. And we will see epidemics of autoimmunity that will follow that, you know, we're in a very dangerous situation at present, already, autoimmunity afflicts about one in 20 of the population that is far too high, or rate source media are increasing exponentially. So those are the three categories of inflammation that I'm looking for. In somebody who's got me. Again, I've talked far too long. You're very nicely sitting there smiling at me as if I'm doing the right thing. But again, is it making sense I want this to be a conversation, not me just rabbiting on, because I know I can.

Jingle 33:18

We hope you're enjoying this episode of the habits and health podcast, where we believe that creating healthy habits should be easy. If you know a friend or a loved one who might be interested in learning simple habits to improve their health, then please share this podcast with them. We also invite you to subscribe and to leave us a review on your favourite podcast app. Now, back to the show.

Tony Winyard 33:42

Also, one of the things I want to go back to is you talked about the addictive nature of the of the sugars and so on and, and so in theory, it's easy if people are able to switch to a ketogenic diet, Paleo ketogenic diet, then the symptoms will go but but because of the addictive nature, many people aren't able to sustain that. So when people do struggle to try to switch what how are the best ways to help them?

Dr Sarah Myhill 34:12

Well, you know, the answer is it's, first of all, don't switch it for another addiction. The best example is stopping smoking. Very often people stop smoking, and they switch. They swap nicotine addiction for sugar addiction and they get fat. And we've all seen that people who've given up smoking. I mean, the awful thing with addiction is there is no easy solution. And the shameful thing is addiction is how we deal with stress. So when we are stressed by something, we have unpleasant symptoms, and we use addiction to mask those symptoms. And it's again it's short term gain long term pain. And the whole thing is there is no easy quick solution for it's just willpower. And but what I can say is the longer that you can stick with it, you know, the better Now addiction, all addictions, they are good servants, but bad masters. So I know I'm a potential alcohol addict, I love the stuff. But I don't drink at all at home. But if I have a party is some friends come round, you know, I have a couple of glass of wine. And guess what, you know, I'm much easier, I'm much funnier, my jokes are much better, you know, we have a fun time. But I know I have to get on the waggon the day after. And it's the same with sugars. If you can consume sugars in a non addictive way, use them occasionally maybe as a flavour enhancer, usually the occasion for joy, but get off them routinely, then you'll be doing yourself a big favour. And you know, I agree with you there isn't there is no easy solution. It is willpower. I mean, people think if they pour money at it and take lots of supplements, they can get round it, but it just ain't like that. So, you know, I wish I had an easy, yep, you can do this, and you'll feel much better, but it doesn't work. Even artificial sweeteners are a problem. Because you know, the body is intelligent. And if it tastes something sweet in the mouth, it will anticipate a sugar rush, it will pour insulin in anticipation of that. And you will get all the metabolic problems of high insulin and high adrenaline following sweeteners because they say the the body's intelligence, so even they are not a good substitute. And that's why sweetness of signally failed in people trying to do calorie restricted diets. You know, they don't work because, in fact, they just keep the addictive nature going.

Tony Winyard 36:37

Hmm. You've mentioned about one, a couple of books that you've written, How many books

Dr Sarah Myhill 36:42

have you written, oh, gosh, seven or eight now, I think.

Tony Winyard 36:46

And so when when was the last one.

Dr Sarah Myhill 36:49

The most, or the most recent one, which actually do to come at any day now is called Green mother. And green mother is all about the application of ecological medicine to preconception care, pregnancy, child, the birth process, child rearing, weaning, sleep, and so on and so forth. And I don't laugh now, but I first wrote this book in 1982, when my daughter was born, and then it never got anywhere and I got busy and Ralph forgot about it. And it just so happened that a very a neighbour moved in cliff, the hill over a hill over there, became a very good friend and the soulmate, read my book on diabetes immediately got the hang of that and and put yourself in a paleo ketogenic diet. And Michelle and Pete have been trying for children for some time and failed. But within a few months of doing a Pk dot and taking my supplements, Michelle conceived, so she continued the dark through her first pregnancy, baby Bob's was born. And she continued the dark PK that through pregnant through breastfeeding, and has continued to wean feed Bob's and more recently at a number twos come along a paleo ketogenic diet. Now, what's so fascinating about that is those children, they don't have any carbohydrates, so their blood sugar will be absolutely level, they're happily running on ketones. That means they never get hungry. That means they sleep. And both girls from about the age of, you know, 12 weeks and earlier, go to bed at seven o'clock in the evening, and sleep through solidly till eight o'clock the next morning. In fact, Michelle has to wake them up at eight o'clock, otherwise, they would continue to sleep. And in addition to that, they also sleep another three hours in the day. So Michelle has not had any nighttime, she's she's having a normal sleep routine. She can have an evening to herself, because they're asleep by seven o'clock. She says often get up early at eight o'clock and go riding up at five o'clock in the morning and go for a ride because I know they're not going to wake up and guess what they never have. I think Bob S has woken up twice once when she had a tummy bug. And once when he had a bat fly into the room and the bat worked, but Bob's has never woken up. And then she's a very talented artist so she can continue to work in the afternoon because the children are asleep them. And those children are still so laid back there just so easy in all respects. I mean, when I went to go and state, I mean, unfortunately they've moved back to Dorset now. But you know, when I go and stay with them, you know, I sit at the table and this they're there too. And they're listening to the conversation, and they're not screaming and crying and Michelle's quite tough with them. You whack the finger out and if they started to behave, and they just accept that, and they're just lovely, calm, healthy children not being vaccinated. Yes, they get no coughs and colds, but they get rid of them very rapidly with simple nutritional techniques. And they're not up and down. They're not shaking tremulous. So they don't get hungry. They don't need snacks. They really are a different breed. So green mother is how we should be applying all this stuff. And of course there's much in the book about the Paleo ketogenic diet to our children because that's how primitive man races children. Alright, rather primitive woman raised her children. Yeah, they ate exactly the same food for the adults.

Tony Winyard 40:05

And so I gathered in that approach means because so many children now have asthma and various allergies and many other conditions. So that would address those sorts of issues. Of course,

Dr Sarah Myhill 40:17

prevention is far better than cure. And, you know, we can link the rising increased rates of asthma directly to vaccination, because we know vaccines switch on algae and switch on autoimmunity. But if you've got a healthy immune system, vaccines are rendered irrelevant. We just don't need them. In fact, I address that whole issue of vaccination in green mother, and devote a whole chapter that having acute febrile illness in childhood is very desirable. It trains the immune system. Yeah, children been having acute febrile illnesses since the start of the development homosapiens. And they're an essential part of training the immune system. And if you've got good nutrition, with vitamin D, and vitamin C, and all that, you will have no problem whatsoever from your months or your measles or your chicken pox, it doesn't matter, we should get all those infections. And the important thing is getting those infections in childhood protects you from cancer and heart disease later on in life, very clear associations read between malignant brain tumours, for example. So it's part of normal growing up, it's part of the normal education of the immune system. And we should be educating our immune system with these infections. And we should be giving the immune systems the energy that it needs to fight. And we do that with the diet and good sleep, and the tools that it needs to fight. And we do that with good nutrition, a good, you know, whole wholesome diet with lots of vitamin C, and lots of vitamin D, and B vitamins and selenium and zinc and all else. So I explained all that in, in green mother.

Tony Winyard 41:56

And so is that book out now?

Dr Sarah Myhill 41:58

It's I think, I think it is out now, I'm not sure when the it's almost certainly on my website. Because we started sending it out for Christmas, because we knew people would want want it for Christmas. But it's officially launched in the next day or two. But if you go to my website, you will certainly be able to get the book from there.

Tony Winyard 42:15

And for overseas listeners would is it available on say Amazon? And so

Dr Sarah Myhill 42:20

yes, I'm not sure if Amazon got it yet, but we send books overseas. I mean, unfortunately, the post is a bit more. But I do have a lovely publisher in America called Chelsea green. And they will stop that book for certain and that will go out to the American and Canadian department. So it should be available widely.

Tony Winyard 42:39

And speaking of books, is there a book in your life that you can think of this really moved you for for any particular reason?

Dr Sarah Myhill 42:49

I think probably Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which I read in the early 1970s, you know, when I was doing a levels or a levels, and that, to me was a real eye opener, I remember thinking, Gosh, at that time, what we are doing on this planet is just not sustainable. In fact, the first book I wrote, I called Sustainable medicine, or one of the early books, I've now replaced that with ecological medicine. But it made me realise that the everything that we're doing in this world, every activity is just not sustainable. It's just not compatible with a healthy world. And, of course, this sort of medicine, I'm practising now ecological medicine, functional medicine, sustainable medicine, naturopathic medicine, it doesn't matter what we call it. The point is, is all done in accordance with the rules of nature. And that's very empowering. Because, you know, by practice medicine, everybody has I call it the rules of the game, and the tools of the trade to heal themselves. And it all started with Rachel Carson bless her.

Tony Winyard 43:54

If people want to find out about found more about you, Sarah, where where's the best places to look? Website social media.

Dr Sarah Myhill 44:00

So well, if you just go to DrMyhill.co.uk my website, most of my information is there freely available on my website. Some people prefer books, and all my books are there, and there's a whole range of them. There's the infection game. There's the energy equation, which which looks specifically about those issues. And what has proved very popular is I run all workshops, and anybody can join them, you can buy tickets, and then you get me talking all day from 9.30 in the morning to four o'clock in the afternoon with a break for lunch. And I limited to 20 people. And any point anybody can ask any question by just waving their hand and I go through all these regimes that people need to do to empower themselves to allow them to heal themselves, because there aren't enough functional doctors like you and me around to do this individually. And actually, they do work remarkably well. And if people if If people don't get a response to that early, then follow up workshops I do, where I limit that to six people, and we more intensively concentrate on individual people symptoms. And I do it in groups like that, because we can cover so much more ground. And people learn by repetition. Of course, it's all recorded. So you can then listen to that subsequently. But people learn by repetition. And when they see that they're not the only person in the world, there are other peoples like them who have similar problems and similar questions and the same answers. That's hugely empowering. So that'd be a useful start for somebody who really wanted to move things on inexpensively.

Tony Winyard 45:36

Sarah, just before we finish, and it's it's been a delight, but just, you know, I've had to be respectful of your time. Is there a quotation you particularly like,

Dr Sarah Myhill 45:47

I am a great fan of Winston Churchill, I've just been reading his autobiography again. And in that Churchill says, My education was only interrupted by my schooling. And I think that's wonderful, because schooling at the moment at schools, and dare I said, medical education is not an education, it's a brainwashing. And I reckon I use in my everyday practice, maybe 5% or less of that I learned in medical school 95% Of what I practice, I have learned, since from books from people like you, from my patients from asking the right questions. So what I would say to people is, there's so much information available, and it's in you can educate yourself. And that's an essential part of recovering getting well. So don't rely on traditional schooling, which asked, which are brainwashing, you know, use the resources available to educate yourself to learn it for yourself, and then work it out. And that's what Winston Churchill do,

Tony Winyard 46:51

It's been fascinating. So, really appreciate your time. So thank you very much.

Dr Sarah Myhill 46:56

My pleasure. It's easy when you have a good interviewer, like you who asked all the right questions.

Tony Winyard 47:06

Next week, episode 50. And my guest is Silke Maria Haas. She is an energetic coach and healer who has more than 25 years of experience helping people with physical, emotional, mental and spiritual problems and being a natural seeker of Truth. She went to India at the age of 18, and discovered yoga as a way of life. And from that she's been helping many students with medical problems. She trained as an osteopath and naturopath. And so we hear a lot more about that journey. And what has happened since then and how she helps people in now. So that's Next week, episode 50 with Silke Maria Haas. If you enjoyed this week's episode with Sarah Myhill, please do share the episode with anyone who you feel would get some real values, get some value and benefit from it. And hope you have a great week.

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