Dr. George Papanicolaou
speaker
129 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. George Papanicolaou’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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When she was a child, they thought she might have ADHD. But they decided not to pursue it. They finally did. She was put on a medication. She felt terrible on it. Stimulants, like Adderall or Ritalin. She was put on Adderall, and she did not like it, so she never used it. Through school, she happens to be very bright, but she really struggled. And at times, she got bullied.
She got bullied through elementary school, middle school, and she was oftentimes called dumb and slow and And she wasn't any of those things. She just had a really hard time focusing. Organizing was very difficult for her. And she created systems, but she had to work really hard at them. And she felt overwhelmed all the time. But there was a very high standard set for her. So she didn't complain.
She put her nose down and she worked at it. And one of the things that parents commented to me was, he's always fatigued. He's always tired. Well, if you had to work as hard as she did, you're going to be tired at the end of your day. And it's going to be even harder to focus when you try to get your work done. So she struggled through these things. And she also struggled with sleep.
Mine was always racing, hard time falling asleep. She would wake up in the middle of the night, oftentimes catastrophizing. And she also would find herself drawn to eating lots of carbohydrates and sugars. He found them stimulating and helpful during the day, and she was drinking more coffee than she should.
It creates the neuroinflammation. It creates the nutritional deficits. When you're not getting those things that you need, you're just compounding the problem. So she's just pouring gasoline onto the fire. Typically in conventional medicine, this is what happens. She, parents take her to her local physician before they come to see me.
And he wants to put her on an antidepressant and even told her to consider taking a stimulant again. And they didn't want to do that. So they decided to bring her to the ultraviolet center to see me. We're going to now take the functional medicine approach that we're going to dig. We're going to dive deep and we're going to do what we do.
We're going to look for the clues in those root causes, those deep dive insights. conditions, and we have all the tools to do that. One, I've seen thousands in my career of patients with ADHD, so I know what to look for. I know what questions to ask to find out about lifestyle, because it all starts with lifestyle. You've got to get lifestyle under control. What does that mean?
That means you've got to be sleeping. You've got to be exercising. You've got to be eating correctly. You have to manage your stress well. And you have to make sure you have good, solid connections and relationship with people. It's very important for people with ADHD. Those connections are very important.
So what we do is we always started the gut because there's a very strong gut-brain connection. And if you have an imbalance of that 100 trillion bacteria in your gut called the microbiome, this very important bacteria have to be in balance because they're really good guys of that group make things for our brain. They're also engaged in modulating some of the things in our brain.
So they make our serotonin, 90% of it, up to 90% comes from the gut. Dopamine metabolism can be altered by bacteria in our gut. It can be altered by our immune function in the gut.
So that gut-brain connection is really important because if you have neuroinflammation, I mean, if you have gut inflammation where you have leaky gut that will trigger the immune system into an inflammatory state or even into a state where it's making antibodies against self-tissue, That is going to cause neuroinflammation. It's going to activate glial cells or microglial cells.
And microglial cells, when they're activated by these gut processes, are going to then result in producing cytokines, which are inflammatory. They can also be balanced out and be anti-inflammatory, but oftentimes when we have this disorder of the gut-brain connection, we're having microglial activation and inflammation.
And so we did a stool test, and we also tested Claire for leaky gut. And the leaky gut test that I use also measures histamine levels in the gut and the enzyme that breaks down histamine levels in the gut. And in her case, she had a mild imbalance of her bacteria, but she had an overgrowth of candida, which is a yeast or a fungus. probably from the fact that she was eating all that sugar.
So that lifestyle of nutrition does play an important role in creating inflammation in the gut. Because now you've allowed candida to grow. Candida is highly immunogenic, highly inflammatory, and will definitely trigger the immune response and neuroinflammation we just talked about. But she also had an imbalance where she did not have enough of that enzyme to break down histamine.
So there's a chance that she's having histamine levels that are too high. and she's eating high histamine foods. And what that means is histamine can actually cross the blood-brain barrier, and there's histamine receptors in the brain. And when that histamine interacts with those receptors, it creates excitation, agitation, and it will actually worsen your symptoms of ADHD. She had that as well.
Exactly. So if you eat high histamine foods, avocado, garlic, onions, citrus fruits, and the like, if you... In the audience, if you're listening, Google histamine foods, make a list of them, and see what happens when you eat them. A lot of people with ADHD say, I get worse. My brain just gets fogged out. I get irritable. I get agitated. So she had that going on.
So right there, if I just started working on that with her, and exposed her to nutrition, got her eating cleaner, healthier foods, stopped having to eat sugars, having more fiber, polyphenols, aged foods, Right there, she's going to begin to feel a huge improvement.
I put her on a candida protocol. We use antifungals. In her case, I used botanical antifungals. And I gave her a probiotic that... actually had the ability to limit histamines in the gut. I gave her an enzyme to use if she was going to eat high histamine foods, and I gave her some glutamine to help clear up and fix the leaky gut. So Candida Protocol,
leaky gut protocol, a little support to help her digest your oxygen.
So we then do a pretty big deep dive into your nutrition, neurotransmitter balance, mitochondrial assessment, and all your nutrients. It's usually in one big test. It can be called an oats test. Other companies have different names for it. But you're looking at- Organic acids. Organic acids that are products of metabolism.
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