← ASCP Esty Talk
ASCP Esty Talk
Ep 290 – The Rogue Pharmacist: Understanding Autoimmune Conditions and Skin Care Challenges
00:18:13
Autoimmune disorders can lead to a variety of skin issues, and understanding these complexities is essential for effective care. In this episode of The Rogue Pharmacist, Ben Fuchs discusses common skin problems experienced by those with autoimmune...
Loading summary
Transcript9 lines
- [00:00]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
Calling all forward thinking estheticians, it's time to redefine the art of skincare and embrace a revolutionary approach that begins with your clients. Skin Cell Health. I'm pharmacist Benjamin Knife Fuchs WELcoming you to Truth Treatment Systems where beauty begins. At the cell we believe you're not just a beauty professional, you are a healthcare professional. You want to make a positive difference and you want to make a good living and we will help you do both. We're here to support your out of the box thinking and empower you to question traditional products, outdated formulations and old school ingredients. Imagine a world where solutions to the skin's enigmatic conditions lie just beyond the horizon. At Truth, we're not just a skincare brand, we're a movement that encourages you to explore better solutions and find that aha moment that changes the game. You are an artist and a healer of the skin and we're here to provide the canvas and the tools for you to create tailored protocols leaving generic ones in the past. Sign up now@Truth TreatmentsPro.com and receive two complimentary mineral rich electrolyte sheet masks. That's TruthTreatmentsPro.com where healthy skin is beautiful Skin.
- [01:09]
Lamp Probe
This podcast is sponsored by Lamp Probe. Lamp Probe is a popular esthetic tool that enables skin care practitioners to rapidly treat a wide variety of common minor skin irregularities or red MSI treated by Lamprobe include dilated capillaries and cherry angiomas, yellow MSI cholesterol deposits and sebaceous hyperplasia and brown MSI treated include skin tags and more. Lamprobe MSI treatments are non invasive and deliver immediate results. Lamprobe can empower your skin practice with these new and highly in demand services. For more information visit lampprobe.com that's L A M P R O B E dot com and follow Lamp Probe on social media. Lampprobe.
- [02:04]
Maggie Stasik
Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knight Fuchs. In each episode we'll explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. Maggie I'm Maggie Stasik, ASCP's program director and joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hi Ben.
- [02:20]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
Hey Maggie. Good to see you.
- [02:22]
Maggie Stasik
Good to see you. Today we're diving into the unique challenges faced by those with autoimmune conditions. What I'm most curious to know is how autoimmunity connects to skincare.
- [02:33]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
Well, of course you are, because you're all about the skin. So am I. I'm all about the skin, too, and so are estheticians. So autoimmune disease, auto means self, immune means immune. The immune system is the defense system. It ordinarily attacks the enemy. But if you have an autoimmune disease, the enemy becomes the self. And so this is a kind of mystifying condition. And doctors will say, oh, my gosh, we have no idea what causes it, and it must be genetic. Your mother had it, your grandmother had it, blah, blah, blah. Well, here's the deal. Whenever you have an autoimmune disease, you have some kind of toxicity that has gotten into the system. In fact, whenever you have an immune problem, and the term autoimmune, you don't even really need to say that because autoimmune issues are immune issues, meaning the defensive system has awakened, the body is in a defensive posture. So if you want to end a defensive posture, which is causing a problem, and by the way, inflammation is the calling card of the immune system. So whenever you have an immune action, you have inflammation. Inflammation disturbs biochemistry. And this is the problem with immune reactions and inflammatory reactions. And they're all defensive. If you want to stop a defensive response, what do you think you have to. Where do you have to look? An offending action. So you can't have a defend, you can't have a defensive response without an offending action. You have offense and defense, night and day, black and white, you know, heads and tails. Can't have heads without tails. You can't have a defensive response without an offending action. So anytime you have an immune problem, forget autoimmune, any immune problem, you have the body responding to an offending agent. If you want to end the body's response to an offending agent, what do you think you have to do? You got to find the offending agent. Simple as that. Now, whenever we talk about something triggering a defensive response in the body, what we really mean is the blood. When we talk about the body and something activating the defensive response, we're not talking about the defensive response in the tissue. We're talking about in the blood. The blood is a sacred space. And on top of the blood being a delivery system for everything, oxygen for nutrients for detoxification, the blood itself is an immune organ. It's packed with immunity and it's the highway for the immune cells. So when you have an autoimmune disease, something has gotten into the blood to activate a defensive response. Right? Step number one, right? So then the question becomes is how do things get into the blood? Well, there's only two main ways. If you inject, you can get things into the blood. And we know that injections, vaccinations or drug injections can activate autoimmunity. Because now you're in the blood, you can initiate a defensive response. The blood says, oh my gosh, who are you? And the immune system kicks in. The defensive system kicks in to get rid of the offending agent. But most people are not injecting through the blood. So the second thing is, how do things get into the blood if it's not injection? What do we always talk about? It leaks through the gut and through the intestine. This is not rocket science. It's a simple thing. And in fact, if you have an autoimmune disease, like say rheumatoid arthritis, which is a classic example of an autoimmune disease, we'll talk about skin in a second. They will actually look in the blood for what they call immune complexes or circulating immune complexes. They call them CICs. So what does that tell you right there? You've got an immune action in the blood. And if you're not injecting, it didn't just come in through magical pixie dust that some angel sprinkled on your head. It's obviously coming in through the intestine. This is a no brainer. Now there's 100 plus different autoimmune diseases and they keep discovering more. There's some 30, 40 million people that have these things and they're horrific. And if you go to the medical model, the only thing you can get is an immune suppressant. Now in the old days, the immune suppressants were steroids, prednisone, classically dexamethasone, various steroid drugs which are nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty drugs. In the pantheon of pharmaceuticals, they're among the nastiest. There's nastier, but they're among the nastiest. So 30, 40 years ago, they started to do research to see how can we knock out the immune system. Keep in mind, this is the strategy. We got an immune action, not let's find what's triggering it, let's shut it down. It's like you have an invasion into your country. Let's not figure out what the invader is. We, let's just tell the army to stand down. Oh, then there's no war, the army stands down. But now you have the invader coming in. So 30 or 40 years ago they started to maybe a little longer. 50 years ago, they started to look for alternatives to steroids. How can we shut down the immune system without globally shutting down all the steroid hormone chemistry, which is what prednisone did and created nasty side effects. So they came up with this strategy using genetic technology. And these genetic technologies involved creating chemicals that would shoot down the immune cells. The immune antibodies. Not the immune cells, but the antibodies. They call this recombinant DNA or they call them biologics. And if you watch TV, you can't go 10 minutes without seeing a commercial for these biologics. And they sing songs, they got Broadway musicals. I lost weight with Jardiance and Dupixent and Stellera. And there's all of these. Why are you seeing all these things? These are all the latest and greatest biologics that are specifically designed to shoot down the antibodies. Just like heat seeking missiles, they shoot down the antibodies thinking there's not going to be any inflammation, Never mind you haven't done anything about the toxicity in the blood. The medical strategy, the pharmaco medical strategy is let's just shut down the immune system. Let's shoot it down. The reason you see these commercials is because the margins, the profit margins are enormous. These things can cost you $10,000 a month for these drugs that cost pennies to manufacture. Do the math here. You've got millions and millions and millions of people on these drugs that cost $10,000 a month, which costs a penny to produce or five cents to produce. You can see we're talking about billions if not trillions of dollars in revenue and in profits. So the profit incentive, the money incentive, the economic incentive, the financial incentive to redirect people's attention away from the offending agent, away from the foods, away from the lifestyle choices, away from the intestinal toxicity and towards Dupixent or Stelara or Jardiance or all these Alphabet soup pharmaceuticals that are designed to kill, to shoot down the antibodies is irresistible. And this is why, if you really want to make some money, invest in Pfizer or invest in Lilly or invest in these drug companies that are making these ungodly profits. The problem is the toxicity is still getting into the blood. Now in the skin. The skin is also very precise. Like everything in the body is precisely structured. So once you have toxicity, these immune complexes in the skin, you throw off the entire chemistry of the skin. If the toxicity affects, say the melanocyte and distorts the melanocyte, the pigment making cell, the immune system will attack the melanocyte and you won't be able to make pigment. What do we call that? Vitiligo if the toxicity affects the keratinocyte, the skin cell. Now, the keratinocyte cannot rise properly to the top. It doesn't get feedback to know when to stop rising. And you get plaques that form on the surface of the skin. What's that called? Psoriasis. And these are the two main autoimmune diseases of the skin. Although recently it's been. There are people who believe that even eczema is caused by this toxicity. And this is why I say it doesn't really matter whether it's immune or whether it's autoimmune. The mechanism is the same. So what do you do if you. Speaking of psoriasis and vitiligo, we'll talk about those as the main skin autoimmune diseases. What do you do? You go to the doctor. What's he going to give you? He's going to give you dupixent or stelara or in the old days they gave you prednisone. Nobody's going to think to address the stream of toxicity that's entering into the system through a leaky gut on top of food particles, literal food particles that can enter into the bloodstream. You can also get a molecule called histamine. I think we talked about histamine in the past. Histamine is a molecule that's not only made by bacteria in the intestine, it's also made by immune cells called mast cells. You can actually get particles of bacteria that get into the bloodstream. These are called lipopolysaccharides in addition to specific foods. So what do you do to address the defensive response? That's an autoimmune issue. You backtrack to the intestine. Always, always, always. And while you can get some symptomatic relief for psoriasis, there's pretty much nothing you could do for vitiligo from a topical perspective, because the plaques and psoriasis are on the surface. There is some stuff you could do to get some symptomatic relief. Salicylic acid, for example, may work. Antioxidants like vitamin C or vitamin E can sometimes work. There's really very little you can do for a topical perspective, above and beyond superficially taking care of the symptoms or the appearance. But it doesn't matter, because if you backtrack to the intestine, you'll cut the head off a snake. Now, there's other things you want to do in addition to doing, which we talk about all the time. And people have Got to be sick of hearing me say, do a food diary, an elimination diet. Notice when your psoriasis flares up. Notice when your vitiligo gets worse. Notice when you have bloating or gas or constipation or some digestive symptoms from specific foods, and then eliminate those foods. There's certain foods that are likely suspects, but it could be anything, really. Most likely suspects are dairy, eggs, grains, gluten from grains. There are molecules in vegetables and fruits called lectins. And there's various things, but it's best to just do a food diary and see where you're at. Interesting story. There was a lady named. There's a doctor named Terry Wahls. Dr. Terry Wahls. W A H L S. She had multiple sclerosis, which is one of the most hideous autoimmune diseases, affects people in the prime of their lives, mostly women. Terry Wahls had multiple sclerosis, which affects women more than men, and she reversed it. And she's a medical doctor. She wrote a whole book on it called the Wahls protocol. Now she talks about multiple sclerosis, but anybody who's got any flavor, autoimmune disease, ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, whatever, should read the Wahls protocol because she gives you a hand, a primer on how to eliminate autoimmunity. For her, it was multiple sclerosis. But again, it doesn't matter where the autoimmune attack is. It just matters that autoimmune antibodies are present. So what do you think she did to reverse her multiple sclerosis? And there's pictures of her with ms, and, you know, it's horrible. I don't know if you've ever seen Ms. It's horrific. And then after, with her simple little protocol, and she's riding a bike and she's hiking, and she just looks like a normal person. What do you think she did?
- [13:01]
Maggie Stasik
Changed her diet.
- [13:02]
Benjamin Knight Fuchs
Changed her diet. That's exactly what she did. Now, in addition to changing the diet that is eliminating problem foods, there are other things that you can do, such as strengthen the digestive system with things like probiotics, digestive enzymes. There's a wonderful product called hyperimmune egg. You know, I talk about youngevity, the company I represent, the nutrition company, they have a great product called i26 that kills excess bacteria, the wrong bacteria in the gut. This condition called dysbiosis, where you have disturbances in the bacterial population and different types of bacteria. Hyperimmune egg can help Fiber can help clearing out the digestive tract. Clearing out the toxins in the digestive tract. You can help build and strengthen the intestinal lining. When you have leaky gut, the intestine's inflamed. Vitamin A is phenomenal for that. Zinc can be helpful for that. Collagen peptides, building collagen and connective tissue can help. Strengthening the mucosa with seaweed. Product called fucoidin can help. Beta glucan can help. These are all at the level of the intestine. Then there are some really interesting things you could do for the skin specifically in terms of nutrition. And these involve fats, particularly omega 3 fats which are anti inflammatory. And omega 3 fats come from various sources. Fish oil, which has omega 3 fats that are non essential. DHA and EPA can help. Straight omega 3 fats from flaxseed or hemp seed can help. These are taken orally. Topically you're not going to get tremendous benefits. But taken orally. Vitamins A and D. In fact, dermatologists know that you can use a sun lamp for treating psoriasis or get out in the sun and treat psoriasis. Vitamin D is wonderful for a lot of skin issues, including psoriasis. Vitamin D has an immune modulating effect. Vitamin A is one of the topical treatments of choice for psoriasis. Because vitamin A retinoids drugs. If you go to the doctor, you get a drug version of retinoids, something like retinoic acid or Tazerac or something like that. They stabilize differentiation. And remember, psoriasis is caused by disturbances in how cells grow from the bottom to the top. That involves a process called differentiation, which involves transit, the movement from the bottom to the top. Vitamin A is phenomenal for that. And this is why retinol is such a wonderful topical ingredient for so many different things. And retinoic acid, if you get a prescription, I prefer retinol because you don't need a prescription for it. Retinol stabilizes the movement of cells from the bottom to the top. So you can use that topically. Selenium can be helpful. Selenium also has antioxidant effects. Topical zinc can help. And in fact Head and Shoulders and Selson Blue are both Sels and blue selenium and Head and Shoulders is zinc and they're used to treat dandruff. But you can also get benefits for treating psoriasis with Selson Blue and with Head and Shoulders. Vitiligo is because the melanocytes are so deep you don't really have access to them. So there's very little you can do with vitiligo and that's a troubling condition. And I don't know if you've worked with people who have vitiligo. It's very, very frustrating because there's nothing you could do topically. However, if you understand the mechanism and you always got to go back to the mechanism, you can, as I say, cut the head off a snake. You could end the problem right at the cause. And that's how we want to look at autoimmunity. Toxicity into the blood. Disturbing cellular activities in the skin, disturbing the movement of cells or in terms of pigment. Stop the toxicity in the blood through food modification, support digestive health, strengthen the intestinal lining. And then from a topical perspective, for psoriasis, vitamin A, vitamin D, and then for vitiligo, there's not much you can do topically. Use omega 3 fatty acids for their anti inflammatory benefits. And then topically for psoriasis, salicylic acid can help slough off the excess cells for the plaques. But you're really not going to be able to control the condition. Last thing I'll say is psoriasis especially is associated with cancer, heart disease, shortened longevity, other autoimmune diseases. And autoimmune diseases tend to happen in a complex. So there's comorbid autoimmune diseases. They're very, very serious and they need to be taken. They need to be taken seriously. Not on the skin, because we treat the skin somewhat cosmetically, not like it's just a superficial condition, but like it's an internal immune disturbance that could take years off your life and lead to horrible things down the road that you don't want to have happen. In fact, psoriasis and vitiligo and even eczema, which like I say, some people believe is an autoimmune disease, should be regarded as the idiot light on your car. And instead of taking a hammer and knocking the idiot light out so you don't have to look at it, we should be treating it as a sign that there's something wrong with our engine and we got to go in there and work on the engine.
- [17:54]
Maggie Stasik
That concludes our show for today and we thank you for listening. But if you just can't get enough of Ben Fuchs, the ASCP's rogue pharmacist, you can find him@truthtreatments.com for more information on this episode or for ways to connect with Benfuchs or to learn more about ascp. Check out the show notes.