INTERVIEW WITH VICTOR CARSRUD, D.C., AUSTIN, TEXAS

Posted By Marlene on 2009-12-07 07:32

Interviewer: It was a pleasure to meet Eric
you on my trip to Austin TX in October. Dr. Carsrud, when did you begin your medical practice, and what led you into the practice of chiropractic medicine and natural health, first of all?
 
Dr Carsrud: It's kind of a perfect storm of eventualities.  I was always exposed to alternative medicine as a child.  My mother, being a product of the Sixties, introduced me to the idea of accupressure, and I remember, some of my earliest memories -when I was about five, maybe seven years old, Mama was showing me how to do various accupressure points for headache release and things like that. 

I never thought much of it at the time.  I actually started down the path of conventional medicine, and went to grad school and was looking very seriously at going back to medical school after that, but I sustained an injury, actually, and tore my shoulders, and I went to an physician who said , "Well, you're going to need surgery".  And I said to myself, "I don't think I like that idea".  And I went and checked out the statistics on it.  The statistics said that the rate of recovery, the rate of repeat of a lot of shoulder surgery, is actually fairly high.  And my mother, being the good Sixties child that she was, said "Go talk to your chiropractor about it". 

So I went and talked to the chiropractor, and I said, "It is the rotator cuff" and he said "Yes!".  "Well, I'm going to need surgery", and he goes, "No!  I don't care what they said.  Give me two weeks, and if it's not better in two weeks, you still have the option".  It made a lot of sense to me, so he worked on me for two weeks, and two weeks later the shoulder was better, and there was no need for surgery!  And as I progressed down this path, I met some really phenomenal mentors, like Dr. Jack Kester in Missouri , and Dr. Frank Stroll in Chicago , and Dr. Klieber in Colorado , who kind of expanded on the idea that chiropractic philosophy says that "the powers that made the body should heal the body". 

And this not only applies to physical manipulation of the spine and the extremities and the muscles, but also applies to the underlying biochemistry, so you can apply that to nutrition, to herbalism, to homeopathy, and the idea of bringing the body back into balance by using the natural means, is the underlying philosophy that drives forward not only chiropractic but also most natural healing arts.

Interviewer: Dr Carsrud, why is osteoporosis so prevalent in our society?

Dr Carsrud: We’re the most overfed and under-nourished country on the planet, and that’s what it boils down to.  We have very poor nutritional choices, in our environment and in our in our diet; a lot of our nutrition has been leached out, we’ve got a lot of overprocessed foods, we’ve got a diet in the United States that’s very heavy in protein and saturated fats, which are terrible for the osteoporotic patients.  We’ve got a society which tends to keep people more inactive, which also degrades bones.  And then we pile all these pharmaceuticals on top, which lowers stomach acid, which inhibits the body’s ability to absorb calcium.  We’ve over-medicated, a lot of the side effects of these medications are to deplete the very vitamins and nutrients we need to stave off osteoporosis.  And then on top of this, we have a complete disrespect – this maybe a little strong, but we have a total disrespect for the natural way that ideally a woman’s body is supposed to operate.  The natural balance of estrogens and progesterones, the fluctuations over time, is very important to stimulate the bones for this growth and repair process, the balance between what we call osteoblast and osteoplast.  And as- we live in a country that has a rate ten times any other country for radical hysterectomies, and this lack of understanding of the minutiae of a woman’s endocrine system, has led to a lot of women who are either hypothyroid or don’t have adequate balances of progesterones and estrogens, who’ve been doing the wrong hormone replacement therapies or have been inadequately dosed.  There’s a consequence of signals to the bone to keep its density up that have been let go.  So you have a mixture of a lack of proper hormonal balance, very bad digestion, overlay of side effects of medication, maybe inactivity, and you’ve got the perfect storm to basically continue to deplete the bones in our elderly population.

INTERVIEWER: Now, let's discuss post-menopausal women.  I’ve been reading two strains of thought: one strain says, well, just because you’re post-menopausal, that doesn’t mean that you have to go into this bone deterioration syndrome.  But what are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Carsrud: Well, menopause is a natural transition later in a woman’s life, and I don’t think that there is- if you look at the way that menopause is handled in a lot of the other cultures around the world, they don’t have nearly the health issues that accompany menopause in the  American population.  In certain parts of Okinawa and in the Far East,  where a lot of the cultures that have a more active lifestyle, they have a more balanced diet, and they have a little bit more respect for, (and I’m using this term a little more aggressively than perhaps I should), they have a little more understanding of the natural way that a body’s supposed to keep itself active, and they don’t have nearly the problems with menopause that we do.  I think that it’s a natural transition point, it should not be looked at as the deterioration of the body, it’s a biochemical change.

INTERVIEWER: What happens to a lot of women, is they are pretty much bought and sold on this concept of the, of hormone replacement is going to fix their situation.  Do you hear that a lot?

Dr. Carsrud: I do hear that a lot, and I’m not entirely opposed to hormone replacement therapy.  I feel, as we’ve talked before, that you’re going to have hormone replacement therapy it is absolutely essential that it be done with bio-identical hormones, by a practitioner who is amenable to the idea of balancing that out with natural factors as well.  The hormones are part of the issue but not all of it.  Hormonal supplementation needs to be done, and whether that’s by bio-identical hormones or phyto-progesterones, any of these need to be balanced out with proper lifestyle changes.  It’s not a single magic bullet.  It is part of a multi-faceted approach to be able to deal with hormonal issues, menopause, osteoporosis and lifestyle changes.  It’s not the magic bullet, everybody’s who’s looking for a magic bullet is gonna get sold the Brooklyn Bridge.  Beware anybody who says it’s a cure-all because it’s not gonna be!

Interviewer:  Exactly.  All right, let’s talk about diabetes now, and what’s the problem in America?  Why is it so rampant?

Dr. Carsrud: Like osteoporosis, it goes back to ‘you are what you eat’, or in this case, you are what you digest or fail to digest.  We have a sedentary society that is not moving, so it’s not burning off a lot of the calories that it’s bringing in.  Most of the calories that are in the standard American diet are empty calories, and the body doesn’t know what to do with that, and it’s getting saturated with all this extra sugar and all these extra simple carbohydrates.  We have the Standard American Diet on top of which we add these extra chemicals – the big insidious one for me is high-fructose corn syrup – that saturate the body, with all these, you know, these simple sugars and simple carbohydrates, and that eventually the poor pancreas says, “Look, I give up, you’re eating these large meals, you’re giving me stuff that burns very quickly and degrades very quickly”.  The pancreas eventually gives up trying to produce enough insulin to deal with it, the body becomes insensitive to insulin and goes into diabetes.  And we’re seeing- and you combine this with people not exercising, kids sitting on the couch and playing video games as opposed to going outside and playing, and you end up with a society where “adult-onset diabetes” is now occurring in populations as young as ten and eleven.  It goes back to how we are eating and how we are exercising that off! Like energy that goes into the machine, energy that’s used by the machine.  If we’re not utilising that energy and we’re continually feeding in a lot of bad things, diabetes is the natural way that the body starts breaking down.  How you treat it, it’s very easy.  You start eating right.  You start eating a diet that’s what we call low-glycemic index, or a mixed-glycemic index, the fundamentals of which are in diets like the Mediterranean Diet and the Paleolithic Diet.  We’re mixing in fats and proteins and complex carbohydrates like vegetables, as opposed to doing entirely simple carbohydrates like grains and starches, potatoes, and sugars.  Certainly there’s a component of that, you can have it but at a much lower level than we’ve got.  This low-glycemic index eating kind of allows for a longer burn, so sugar is delivered over a much longer time period, so it’s an even distribution between meals, and then you supplement that with having small mid-meal snacks, so instead of eating actually less, you’re having breakfast, small mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, dinner.  This allows a long continuous burn of glucose throughout the day, the body is not overly stressed, it’s not dealing with too much sugar in their diet, and that even burn over the day is a lot less strain on the pancreas, and you have an even distribution of insulin throughout the day and this is the basis that you use for treating cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and honestly, a lot of ADHD, because the kids are reacting to too much  sugar and then a crash afterwards, The underlying part of this diet goes back to, we’re designed to be hunter-gatherers.  We kind of have this low-grade, graze throughout the day, we never have any large meals but multiple small meals throughout the day that burn that give us that natural energy, as opposed to the high, fast burn that we get through a lot of these carbohydrates.  The traditional American breakfast of sitting down to a bowl of sugar-frosted cocoa bombs, the cereal with the glass of orange juice on the side, all that’s carbs.  That’s all it is, it’s pure carbs, and all we’re doing is loading ourselves up on a lot of sugars that eventually crash afterwards.

INTERVIEWER:      What do you see as the role of whole foods (wholegrains) and vegetables in our diet?

            Dr. Carsrud: We need whole grains in our diet I don’t even mean whole grain breads, because those aren’t complex enough, doesn’t have enough of the native fiber left in them.  I certainly think that when it comes to those grains, the ones you mention, the long grain rice, the millet and the quinoa – being from Texas we have difficulty pronouncing .  These are all much healthier alternatives, because they not only give you complex forms of carbohydrates , not the simple forms, but these also allow for an increase of fiber, which helps stave off things like colon cancer.  But I do think that they need to be balanced out.  We were never designed to eat a meal that was entirely just carbohydrates, which is why when you have the quinoa, you always have some salmon to go with it, you always have some avocado to go with that whole-grain rice, maybe you’ve got some olives, you know, some good healthy sources of fats and proteins to help balance those out.  And then of course you have your vegetables on the side.  You always make sure you’ve got- in my opinion the rawer the better – you know, spinach and broccoli, cauliflower.  All of these, you know, if they’re going to be cooked, just steam them very lightly, make sure you’re not steaming out all those good vegetables, but a good, balanced meal has got all those things in it, complex carbohydrates, fats and proteins.  I don’t mean a burger, I mean good, healthy sources of fats and proteins.

INTERVIEWER:      And tell me your typical- we’ll wrap up by talking about your patients.  Give us a profile of who they are, and are they mostly baby boomers, and what is the majority of the issues that you see in your practice, Doctor?

Dr. Carsrud: Well, I’ve got kind of a bi-faced practice.  I’ve got the two ends of the spectrum.  On the one end of the spectrum I have people that are very well-informed, they do a lot of reading, and are very proactive about their health and understand the idea of wellness and preventative health.  These are people that come in, they take their vitamins, they’re well-read on it, they need some fine-tuning, and they run the gambit – anywhere from people in their eighties who have been following this all their life.  I see a lot of baby boomers, most of them have been raised on this idea of being more preventative in their health.  I’ll do a little bit of nutritional counselling with them, I’ll do a bit of chiropractic, a little acupuncture.  It’s basically, it’s a tune-up, it’s a wellness process, trying to keep their bodies operating optimally.   These are people that typically don’t like vaccines, they typically- and even if they do, they’re very well-informed and they’re very selective about the ones they get.  They tend to watch their diet, they tend to understand a lot of these things.  And a lot of this is where ideal healthcare needs to be – this is the preventative measures, this is keeping people as healthy as possible so they don’t develop these issues.  And that’s where I really operate more as a family practitioner, you know.  I’ll see entire families, from, you know, the newborn all the way up to Grandma, and everybody in between, trying to keep them operating well.  And seeing them as families is actually very important, because families support each other in terms of their diet and lifestyle.  And you can’t treat an individual if their family is totally against the healthy lifestyle, which is why, you know, the families that I see that are coming in, they’re eating right together, they’re exercising together, are really much healthier in the long run.  The other group that I see are the people that have been disenfranchised by the conventional medical establishment, that are tired of being through the wringer, that have either decided they are going to leave on their own, because they’re tired of getting worse and worse and worse, or they’ve been misdiagnosed and mishandled, and they’ve been essentially kicked out because they’ve got no other options.  And these are people that we have to handle, to some extent, with kid gloves, because they’re already disenfranchised, they’re already a little depressed, they’re already have health issues, and we’re having to rebuild their idea that there is help on the horizon.  Now these are the people that we really get some dramatic effects from, these are the people that- the stakes are a lot higher, we’ve got a lot further to go.   

INTERVIEWER:      To conclude our interview, Doctor, do you think healthcare reform is heading in the right direction?

 

 

 

 

Dr. Carsrud:  I really don’t.  I think most of the healthcare reform we’ve seen so far has been mostly concerned with the underlying issue of who’s paying.  Who’s paying and how often they’re going to pay and how much we’re going to get paid for, it’s all about the money.  And I think the underlying problem is not one of economics, I think the underlying problem is one of overall philosophy.  We have been more reactive than proactive, the idea of wellness that I have seen in the program so far has been more screenings, as opposed to actual prevention. We have to focus on prevention and preventative measures to reverse the major health issues facing Americans today!

visit: www.excelonhealth.com

 

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