Importance of Magnesium and How It Can Improve Health Conditions
Presenter: Neal Howard
Guest: Dr. Carolyn Dean
Guest Bio: She’s an M.D., an educator and author of more than 30 books, including ‘The Magnesium Miracle’. Dr. Dean is one of the first to see the coming health issues associated with people not getting their RDA of the nutrient magnesium.
Transcription
Health Professional Radio
Neal Howard: You’re listening to Health Professional Radio. I’m your host, Neal Howard. Our guest is Dr. Carolyn Dean. She is an MD, an educator, and author of more than 30 books, including “The Magnesium Miracle”. Dr. Dean is one of the first to see the coming health issues associated with people not getting their RDA of the nutrient magnesium. Hello, Dr. Dean. How are you today?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: I’m very well. Thank you very much.
Neal: What is magnesium?
Dr. Dean: Magnesium is a mineral that’s required in the body. It’s one of the top four minerals. It helps muscles to relax. It helps neurons in the brain, nerves all over the body, to complete their firing functions. It helps metabolise protein and carbohydrates and sugars. It does maybe thousands of things. As far as I’m concerned, magnesium is the most important mineral in the body.
Neal: Some of the symptoms that are related to what we commonly know as those culprits, diseases and conditions, are also indications of simple magnesium deficiency … talking about blood tests that are not addressing magnesium. Not addressing the magnesium – does that mimic other illnesses?
Dr. Dean: Yes, that’s a very good point. Because when I try to indicate to people that there was difficulty with getting blood tests, and how do you determine if you have low magnesium … I think in the second edition of the book, I put a hundred factors that could make you question your magnesium status.
What I came up with is a person drinking more than seven alcoholic drinks a week, that can drain your magnesium. If someone is always angry, if they have angina, if they have anxiety, if they have apathy, or arrhythmia. Even asthma – the small bronchial tubes lined by muscles that go into spasm can be one cause of asthma.
If they have imbalances of their other minerals. If they have diarrhoea, you could be losing magnesium. People with IBS can be magnesium-deficient. I go on and have, as I said, a hundred of these factors, and I’ve blogged about this as well – just questioning if someone has anxiety, why don’t we look at their magnesium status first?
If we give someone Prozac, which contains fluoride, then we’re actually causing them to lose more magnesium, and they’ll presumably, if part of their depression is from magnesium deficiency – you take Prozac, their magnesium status is further compromised. They’ll get more depressed, and you’ll just want to put them on another medication.
All of these symptoms … insomnia, for example. If a person has insomnia and they’re given sleeping pills, those pills aren’t going to help them if it’s caused by magnesium deficiency. And insomnia is fairly common with magnesium deficiency – and the scenario would be that someone is … their muscles are tight, as I mentioned before. When your magnesium is low, you can’t relax your muscles. You have a relative excess of calcium. Your muscles are tense.
Tensing up all your muscles right now, and just feeling that for a few seconds, you just feel your muscles tighten up. You feel irritable. Your jaw is clenched. Well, if you’re lying down in bed trying to sleep and your body is tight like that, you’re never going to go into deep REM sleep. You’re never going to get enough restoration in your body. You wake up tired. You wake up irritable. Then, your day progresses, you don’t have energy.
Even fatigue is a huge red flag for magnesium-deficiency, because as I’ve mentioned earlier, if your adenosine triphosphate requires magnesium in order to be created, then without magnesium you don’t have enough ATP, you don’t have enough energy, and you just come across as fatigued and apathetic.
Neal: My wife would probably raise an eyebrow at discussing her on the air. But, unfortunately, she suffers from migraines, as many, many people do. As far as migraine, headaches, how can magnesium, or at least checking magnesium levels in blood tests by her physician, how might that give him some insight?
Dr. Dean: Yes. Migraine’s an incredibly difficult condition to treat, because it’s just such severe pain, and you just try to stop the pain. Well, I’m writing the third edition of my “Magnesium Miracle,” right now, and I’m putting in there a new section on migraines. I talk about my hero in migraine therapy, Dr. Alexander Mauskop. He’s had enough clinical success, and published enough papers on migraine treatment, to give us his latest paper. It’s called, “Why All Migraine Patients Should be Treated with Magnesium.” That’s the title of his paper.
Neal: Okay.
Dr. Dean: He goes on to make the case that if you can give someone intravenous magnesium in the middle of a migraine, you can break that migraine. You don’t have to just use IV magnesium. You can be giving people oral magnesium and you can prevent migraines. I also talk about using extra Vitamin B6 along with magnesium. B6 helps the absorption of magnesium. There are dozens of papers on magnesium and migraines. Unless you keep up on the literature, as I do, very much focused on the magnesium literature, you could overlook these things.
Oftentimes, what I find from people who read my blog or email me after they read my book, they’ll say, “Yes. I took your book to my doctor, and they were quite amazed that I’d been able to treat my … fill-in the blanks … arrhythmia, migraine, PMS, insomnia, arthritis, IBS.” They say, “I was able to treat this.” And the doctors who listen to their patients and learn from them, they’ll say, “Well, that’s a very inexpensive treatment.”
Neal: A very inexpensive way to gain knowledge, as well, is listening to your patients.
Dr. Dean: What these folks do is they’ll go off and they’ll start searching the internet – chest pain with leg cramps with … they’ll put in a lot of features of their symptoms and find out, “Man, that sounds like magnesium deficiency.” They will start self-medicating, and they will feel better.
Actually, in the case of magnesium, self-medication is not going to cause them serious problems, because there’s a fail-safe with magnesium. If you take too much magnesium of any form, you will get the laxative effect, or you’ll get diarrhoea, and you’ll lose the excess magnesium that you’ve built up.
Calcium is not like that at all. When you take calcium in excess, it will give you constipation. What happens next is that calcium will precipitate out in your arteries, along with your cholesterol, and cause arteriosclerosis. It can cause heel spurs, gallstones, kidney stones, and actually, it can cause breast calcifications.
Three recent studies out of New Zealand, I think they’re published in the British Medical Journal, showed us that women who just simply take calcium supplements are at higher risk for heart disease, because that calcium is precipitating out. They’ve been taking it for osteoporosis prevention. They’ve been ignoring or not been told to take magnesium along with it, which helps direct calcium properly to the bones, it helps to keep bones from being brittle, so that when these women, at a certain point, they become calcified and start experiencing side effects, it’s never diagnosed that it’s actually an underlying magnesium deficiency.
Neal: Our guest has been Dr. Carolyn Dean, magnesium expert, one of the first to see health issues associated with the nutrient magnesium. Her book, “The Magnesium Miracle,” and her website, NutritionalMagnesium.org.
You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio. I’m your host, Neal Howard. Transcripts of this program are available at www.healthprofessionalradio.com.au. We’ll have much more health information for you. Thank you.
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