(PRBuzz.com) April 19, 2013 -- Recently Dr. Bruce Fong, DO, HMD of Sierra Integrative Medical Center conducted an interview with Forever Young radio show. Forever Young focuses on health issues that effect overall aging and wellbeing. Excerpts from this interview are discussed below. Listen to the full interview here.
Dr. Fong has been a leader in understanding the appropriate medical application of the natural form of IGF-1 and deer antler velvet, especially the formula provided by Nutronics Labs, where Dr. Fong serves as Medical Director.
Deer antler velvet has been part of a pharmacopeia through traditional Chinese medicine now for thousands of years. Whether trying to slow down the aging process or trying to achieve peak athletic performance, the benefits of IGF-1 by Nutronics Labs is worth learning more about.
Dr. Bruce Fong was introduced to natural medicine and homeopathic medicine as a young child. To this day, he continues this tradition. Dr. Fong follows in the family footsteps of medicine and is rooted in the belief that we must heal and prevent human diseases and suffering, especially if we're trying to get to our optimal health levels and remedying the illness right at the cause of it. Dr. Fong has been on the forefront of alternative therapies for immune-related diseases, including special treatment plans which combine the best options for a broad array of homeopathic, internal, Chinese and traditional medicine. Dr. Fong is the director of Sierra Integrative Medical Center located in Reno, Nevada.
Dr. Fong was raised by parents who were very much pioneers and really not satisfied with the conventional allopathic way of taking care of problems. Specifically, he had a mother who was very ill at one point and his stepfather, Dr. Ewing Tang, had to discover different ways to get her back to health when all the more traditional, more conventional therapies actually failed. That was sort of the basis of things and his introduction to medicine. The integrative side of things began with an understanding of homeopathy, natural medicine, and finding the best of all things to see what works for the individual patient, the approach he employs today at Sierra Integrative Medical Center.
Dr. Fong considers that not every therapy works for every person the same way each time. He works with other physicians and medical professionals as a team, with the patient, to find the best choices and find the optimum combination of things to achieve and maintain health.
To Dr. Fong, we might want to redefine what performance enhancement really means. The recent media brouhaha around NFL player Ray Lewis and how this relates to IGF-1 is a good place to start a conversation.
An Informal conversation with Dr. Bruce Fong DO, HMD, Medical Director of Sierra Integrative Medical Center and Nutronics Labs, Medical Director
Concerning the primary component, IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor-1, there have been claims that there's no way that you could preserve it in the compound. To respond to this, Nutronics Labs, actually assays the material, guarantees the content amount of deer antler velvet. On the other side, after processing and putting it into the final product, they're trying to collapse individual folks that we supply to have actually assayed themselves, with high pressure liquid chromatography, one technique which is an industry standard and is used by a group called Now Foods. They have shown that there's actually, perhaps, just a little bit more than what Nutronics Labs displays on the bottle. In my experience, Nutronics Labs' product really does do all that it says it does.
For those concerned with animal welfare, it is important to clarify that unlike rhinoceros horn, where you have to kill the whole animal to get a small amount of the horn, IGF-1 is a renewable resource and animals aren't harmed at all when extracting it. Nutronics Labs exclusively derives its raw material from a group in New Zealand. What most people don't understand is that as part of the natural process, the deer actually lose their antlers every year and then come the springtime, they actually start to grow an entirely new rack of antlers from something the size of your thumb nail all the way up to the beautiful racks that they're well known for. If you harvest the racks at about mid-way through their growth cycle, which by the way, they grow the entire rack in about 100-110 days, which if you think about it, that's pretty amazing. If deer antler velvet is harvested during the middle of the growth cycle, say 50-55 days approximately, you have the maximal amount of these growth factors that are in there that are exactly what is the product of the IGF-1. Plus that's by Nutronics Labs and you don't hurt the deer doing that. I mean, you simply remove their antlers during their natural cycle, and they grow back the next year. It is an extremely humane way to harvest and it is to the benefit of everyone for the animals to be healthy, happy and livelong lives.
IGF-1 Plus, the product that we're talking about today from Nutronics Labs really is a deer antler velvet extract. Again, the deer antler velvet specifically is that fleshy, kind of mushy part on the inside of the harvested antler. In that antler, again, is this growth ... all these different growth factors that we have. Again, it's not just IGF-1. There are all kinds of other things that promote the proper growth of something. Many of those things help for maintaining normal growth so you don't have mutations, deformities, tumors growing because of the massive amounts of growth factors that are in there.
There are things like, for instance, transforming growth factor beta, which helps to maintain the normalcy, if you would, of the growing cells. IGF-2, for instance, also has neurogenic and productive and protective effects. IGF-1 contains naturally occurring chemicals, which increase red cell growth in the body. It has aspects that can help balance out hormones. There are bones growth stimulants in IGF-1. Literally, there's a whole myriad of things that actually help to rapidly grow this antler, but again, in a safe way.
Some of the main benefits we look for in considering IGF-1 are the same kind of growth factors that are in our bodies when there's a presence of growth hormone. There's a lot of good press about how growth hormone can help us to healthily age. The growth hormone can help us to recover all the different damage or insufficiencies that our bodies may develop as we grow older or suffer one type of damage or another. The IGF-1 Plus product actually, in a lot of ways, could be utilized as an inexpensive alternative to that because it can give you a lot of these really important growth factors and utilize them in a very safe manner.
In our work at Sierra Integrative Medical Center with IGF-1, we really clearly do see that folks do have better ability to exercise, better ability to put on muscle, better ability to recover from not only fatiguability of muscles, which was proven by a Russian biophysicist by the name of Arcadi Colten, who showed that their athletes, when they overstretch their muscles, have imbalances of electrolytes in the muscles and that the compound IGF-1 specifically help to rearrange those so that those derangements are corrected. It allows the muscles to heal, as well as all the other tissues. IGF-1 can promote speedy recovery from damage. It increases the amount of oxygen in the tissues. It brings nutrients into the tissues. It literally helps you to build up the way your body is supposed to build up.
There are numerous studies that do point to the fact that IGF-1 can help with the maintenance and possibly even the repair of heart tissue. There have been some double-blind studies done on folks with congestive heart failure that show that the utilization of IGF-1 actually helped to grow new muscles, and more importantly, helped the existing muscles to work better. One of the problems with congestive heart failure is that the muscle fibers are spread apart and they can't grab onto each other anymore and then be able to contract. IGF-1 has been shown to increase the communicability of those muscles to allow for better contractility of the heart, giving you a better ejection fraction (for other fellow physicians who may be reading this).
There have been studies at Mt. Sinai in New York that discuss, in an animal trial, that animals are given the IGF-2, not IGF-1, but IGF-2 is also in this product, along with other neurotropins, which again are also in this product, have been able to help form memory pathways a lot quicker. There was some hope with that kind of research that we can discover how the brain actually utilizes itself to make memories and to hopefully, at some point, hold some potential for helping folks with Alzheimer's and other dementia.
Recent research with that has shown that the IFG-2 and neurotropins could also help with repairing some damage from, say, concussive effects on the brain, i.e., in the NFL, I would listen to this since all of your players get hit every day. This is probably something that could help you to minimize any sort of long-term damage. The main thing that we always want to do is look after our folks who are in these particular situations, such as the NFL and other sports, to make sure they don't get hurt and we get to watch them and cheer for them and really celebrate their winning.
IGF, again, being insulin-like growth factor, could help with type II diabetes and with increasing the ability of receptors on our cells to utilize insulin. There have been studies also that suggest in male potency, it could actually help increase luteinizing hormone, which would result in the natural increased production of testosterone.
From the immune system standpoint, IGF-1 could actually help to moderate and focus the immune system to a certain degree and help it to get rid of the unwanted things and try to reduce some of the inflammatory cycles.
Literally, there are many aspects to the scientific breakdown of IGF-1 that have potential positive health benefits. For instance, superoxide dismutase, those enzymes that helps to clear free radicals via the liver. There are all kinds of longevity effects.
As we get older, our body, one kind of doesn't make certain things as much as it used to, so the growth factors in the IGF-1 Plus includes some those things that we know would be declining. A lot of that comes not just from natural aging. Unfortunately, a lot of it can come from xenobiotic exposures, environmental toxins, etc. They just basically drive our body down. Our body tries to deal with those things, and a lot of times we sort of burn ourselves out and we're not able to keep up with it. Poor diet doesn't help with that. As we do get older, sometimes we do need to be able to supplement these things.
With aging, sometimes it's also an issue of utilization, such as in type II diabetes. We don't utilize our insulin very well anymore because our body becomes insensitive or resistant to it. Sometimes there might be some fact of that bears onto the IGF base product as well, and so we're also talking that this particular compound potentially has the effect of increasing our sensitivity to being able to utilize the IGF properly and, again, help us to manage our aging properly. The IGF-1 product from Nutronics Labs is probably the best thing I've ever seen for aging.
Sierra Integrative Medical Center deals primarily with a lot of long-term degenerative diseases, chronic diseases. These are things that aren't always every day something that you could go to your primary doctor and that they could immediately identify. They tend to be a combination of factors that build up over time. At Sierra Integrative Medical Center, we really spend a lot of time in our first appointments with patients just trying to play detective, find out what these underlying problems are and really then go after them--the source problem, not the secondary symptoms.
After we've done this kind of comprehensive diagnostic work with our patients we may use an array of conventional and alternative therapies, such as immune stimulation, sometimes bio-oxidase, sometimes orthomolecular, maybe a combination of all the above. We eventually focus on extensive detoxification during their treatment course at Sierra Integrative Medical Center through all these therapies. The bottom line is eventually you eliminate those things that make you sick, but then you've got to shift gears to rebuild the body.
To bring it back around, IGF-1 Plus from Nutronics Labs is one of my mainstays that I send home with patients.
About Sierra Integrative Medical Center
Sierra Integrative Medical Center optimizes health service by drawing from all schools of medicine. We utilize scientifically proven conventional treatments in combination with alternative therapies that are designed to strengthen the body so it can heal itself.
Our services are designed to provide a holistic healing approach with a broad range of healing modalities, including but not limited to homeopathy, natural and biological medicines, behavioral medicine, nutritional therapies, orthomolecular integration and neurotherapy.
We emphasize preventive protocols, so as to avoid recurrence and the development of new problems.
We are always open to accommodating patients. If you have a specific request, please contact us to discuss your health treatment or health protection plan.
www.SierraIntegrative.com
About Dr. Bruce Fong, HO, HMD
Dr. Bruce Fong was introduced to natural medicine and homeopathic medicine as a young child and continues with that tradition today. He has followed in the family footsteps of medicine and currently heads the Sierra Integrative Medical Center located in Reno, Nevada. Centered on integrative medicine, Dr. Fong's practice is rooted in the belief that optimal health may be achieved by determining and remedying the root cause of illness through a combination of conventional and alternative therapies.
Director, Sierra Integrative Medical Center
Director, Nutronics Labs
About Nutronics Labs
Nutronics Labs first introduced deer antler velvet to the United States over 17 years ago. Its unique formulation and liposome delivery system ensures a 98% absorption rate. For the first time Nutronics Labs is selling this unique formula directly to the public at an extraordinary low price. We supply deer antler extract to the following companies: GNC, American Nutritional, Biozone, Synergy Nutritionals, Now Foods International, S.W.A.T.S. (The Ultimate Spray), Cal Comp Nutrition, Maxlife Direct, National Gym Association, Andecyn, and Longevity Plus.
Contact:
Media contact: Pamela B., pam.thumbler@gmail.com
Business contact: Sierra Integrative Medical Center, 775-828-5388
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