Power Up Your Brain (21 page)

I had to consciously focus on taking deep, regular breaths because my oxygen-saturated body hardly needed any of this stuff to perform its survival functions. Next, I wanted to test episodic memory recall. Episodic memory refers to recalling a time, a place, and the feelings experienced; it is, in a sense, like traveling back in time and reexperiencing events. I knew that it was easy to do this with emotionally charged memories, as I remembered many of my patients reminiscing about all the times when they wished they had done things differently in the past, as well as a few times I would like to have done things differently myself. While all of these emotionally charged memories were readily available to me, I chose to focus on my childhood. I could easily revisit events of my past and recall feelings of that moment—when my dog was hit by a car, or when I went swimming in the ocean at the age of five and my cousin cried, “Shark!” and I breathlessly got out of the water.

Yet, there was a period of my childhood, between the years of eight and ten, of which I had very little recall. Because I had lucid recall of most other times, I suspected that I must have suffered some kind of trauma for my mind to block out these years. I could feel my heart racing as I decided to try to pry open these gates of memory that lay locked in my subconscious.

I recalled my grandmother and imagined myself with her. My grandmother had always been a solid presence in our home, even during the tumultuous times of the Cuban Revolution, when there was fighting in the streets and a great deal of family bloodshed. Soon, to my surprise, I felt tears running down my cheek. I recalled the fear I had felt as a child, knowing that militiamen could come at any time and take my parents away. Yet, I was witnessing that time as a grown man, observing the frightened child sitting on his grandmother’s lap. Both of us were there, and I spoke softly to the boy and told him that he would be okay, that nothing would happen to him or his loved ones.

At the end of my HBOT session, I mentioned to David how important it was for me to remain alert and
breathing deeply
in that oxygen-rich atmosphere, instead of watching a movie or going to sleep, as many other patients did, which would reduce the amount of oxygen intake into the system. And I decided that, for the next session, I would attempt even more complex tasks under the influence of pure oxygen.

GLUTATHIONE: MANNA FOR MITOCHONDRIA

Here again we shout the praises of glutathione, which, in addition to playing a critical role in detoxification, has also been termed “the master antioxidant” in human physiology. It is so important that scientists often measure cellular glutathione levels as an overall indicator of cellular health. And nowhere is its power more important than in the protection of the brain. While the brain represents only 2 percent of human body weight, it consumes up to 20 percent of its energy calories when at rest. This disproportionately high level of metabolism and production of free radical by-products puts the brain at great risk.

No tissue, including protein, DNA, and fat, is immune to risk from free radical damage, and fat is of special concern because it comprises 70 percent the human brain’s dry weight and because it is one of the most difficult tissues to protect from free radical damage. Fat is actually a delicate chemical, and, when it is damaged by free radicals, it basically becomes rancid. In the brain, this translates into compromised function, which limits the ability of neurons to communicate with each other.

As we’ve mentioned before, free radical damage underlies all degenerative conditions of the brain, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), multiple sclerosis, and even generic brain aging.

In addition, the danger of free radicals is twofold. First, as mentioned, these reactive chemicals directly modify the various tissues that they attack, rendering them unable to function properly. Second, free radical action initiates apoptosis, through which the cell unlocks DNA-encoded instructions to commit suicide. So the antioxidant protection offered by glutathione deserves center stage.

Not only is glutathione a powerful antioxidant in its own right, but it also regenerates another important brain antioxidant: vitamin C, which recharges the brain’s allotment of the powerful fat-soluble alpha-tocopherol, a member of the vitamin E family.

With its connections to so many other health-related chemicals and vitamins, glutathione is a prime focus for brain researchers around the world.

David:
My Introduction to Glutathione

“Fibromyalgia,” the lecturer claimed, “is essentially a disorder of mitochondrial function. This explains why these patients are fatigued and why they are mentally fogged. Because the mitochondria aren’t working up to speed, there is an accumulation of toxic by-products of metabolism in the soft tissues, and this explains the pain.”

It was way back in 1997 when I attended this lecture offering an alternative medicine approach to what was becoming a fairly widespread medical condition.

Unfortunately for many patients suffering from this disease at that time, mainstream medicine flat-out denied its existence.

When standard laboratory tests failed to show any evidence of abnormality, primary care doctors tended to conclude that the problem was “all in the head.”

As is so often the case with “modern medicine,” fibromyalgia became validated as a true medical condition only when pharmaceutical manufacturers developed a drug to treat it. These days, doctors simply write a prescription, and the drugs are flying off the shelves.

But the idea that problems with mitochondrial function play an important role in this disorder has maintained traction over the years, at least with more enlightened physicians who are concerned with treating the underlying causes of disease, rather than simply focusing on symptom management.

Shortly after the lecture, I returned to my office in Naples and began to reassess my approach to fibromyalgia. Coincidentally, at that time I was investigating a variety of techniques designed to enhance mitochondrial function and turned my attention to glutathione, a chemical normally produced in the body that protects mitochondria and maintains their function. My research revealed that glutathione could be administered intravenously and was approved as an emergency treatment for acetaminophen overdose. I was soon able to find a supplier and, before long, began to treat our ever-growing number of fibromyalgia patients with injections of glutathione, often with immediate and dramatic success.
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One September afternoon, I had the opportunity to evaluate a patient who, unfortunately, not only had fairly advanced fibromyalgia but Parkinson’s disease as well. The latter had compromised his ability to walk to the extent that he was wheelchair-bound. We moved ahead with our newly discovered treatment for fibromyalgia and administered glutathione into his vein.

What happened next forever changed my practice of medicine. About 20 minutes after the injection, this patient got out of the wheelchair and began to walk around the office. I, along with my entire office staff, stared in amazement until we noticed tears flooding his wife’s face, at which point we all started crying, too.

My mind was racing. What had happened? Then it came to me: it was already well known that Parkinson’s is basically a mitochondrial disorder, so treating him with glutathione was actually targeting the root cause of the disease. As I would come to say in many lectures over the years since, “We treated the fire, not just the smoke.”

Louis Pasteur once observed, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and I was, and remain, grateful for this chance event with this patient as my mind, deeply involved in the science of mitochondrial biochemistry, was “prepared” to connect these two seemingly disparate puzzle parts.

I soon uncovered research that demonstrated that, in addition to the fact that Parkinson’s is a mitochondrial disorder, postmortem analysis had proven that the brains of Parkinsonians were actually deficient in glutathione! Furthermore, Italian researchers had, just one year earlier, demonstrated dramatic and long-lasting improvements in Parkinson’s patients who received intravenous glutathione. The researchers reported, “All patients improved significantly after glutathione therapy, with a 42% decline in disability. . . . the therapeutic effect lasted 2–4 months. . . . Glutathione has symptomatic efficacy and possibly retards the progression of the disease.” And yet, perhaps because it was not a patentable drug, no one had gotten the word out to the tens of thousands of neurologists who treat Parkinson’s patients every day.
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After this original epiphany, I began to treat my Parkinson’s patients aggressively with this new approach—with continued success. I incorporated compelling videotaped examples of Parkinson’s patients before and after glutathione therapy into various lectures I was presenting to my colleagues around the country— primarily complementary-minded groups, who responded wonderfully, with acceptance.

Interestingly, several times over the years, mainstream neurologists accused me of hiring actors to stand in for actual patients in these glutathione videos. These challenges always brought to mind these wise words of the Belgian Nobel laureate in literature, Maurice Maeterlinck: “At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past.”

Over the ensuing years, the science surrounding glutathione exploded, and we began to incorporate this powerful natural substance into a large number of our protocols, from combating the common cold, to treating multiple sclerosis, to preventing nerve damage in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy. And, as of this writing, I have trained several thousand doctors in the United States in our simple protocols of glutathione administration.

GLUTATHIONE: MORE THAN AN ANTIOXIDANT

Glutathione, in addition to its critical antioxidant function, performs a wide variety of other life-supporting functions. Christopher Shaw, a neurobiologist at the University of British Columbia, stated in his anthology
Glutathione in the Nervous System
, “Many of these reactions are crucial to cell survival. . . . One hypothesis [that of radiotherapist Dr. John A. Holt] has even suggested that glutathione is responsible for the origin of life. While this latter view seems likely to reflect scientific hyperbole, it may be difficult to overestimate the central importance of this molecule in the biochemistry of living cells.”
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These functions include the synthesis, protection, and repair of DNA; the synthesis of protein; the transport of amino acids; the metabolism of toxins and carcinogens; immune enhancement; the activation of enzymes; and the elimination of damaging heavy metals.