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Dr. Steven Hotze introduces our newest provider at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, Jason Gourlas, MPAS, PA-C. Learn about Jason’s journey to practicing holistic, functional medicine and the knowledge he brings to our practice to help serve our guests and get to the root cause of their symptoms. Jason brings his expertise on natural health care and also shares his knowledge of the dangers of mercury fillings and root canals, and how these dental procedures can harm your health and cause disease.
Podcast Highlights:3:27: I started researching alternative therapies to cancer and I realized that there were so many different things that I had not been taught in my conventional medical training about nutrition and herbs and lifestyle modification.
5:42: …many physicians that end up in natural approaches to health…most of those individuals that end up in this field had health problems themselves or had family members who had health problems. And they tried conventional means, it never solved the problem, and so they began to search and they found other alternative methods that they never learned about in medical school or in training.
9:00: Our focus here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, we have an eight-point treatment regimen: treatment of airborne and food allergies, yeast, natural thyroid hormone replacement, natural sex hormone replacement (women and men), treatment of adrenal fatigue, vitamin and mineral supplementation, and a nutritionally-balanced eating and exercise program to help people get to an ideal body weight.
11:58: They would place it (the dead root canal tooth) under the skin of the rabbit, of these rabbits that they were researching, and invariably, those rabbits would develop the diseases that those people manifested, and they would die. The toxic load was too much for the rabbits.
12:22: “The way to good systemic health is through good oral health. And the foundational piece of that is good nutrition.”
14:23: Well, so dentistry is the only aspect of medicine that actually leaves dead things in the body. So when you do a root canal, you’re drilling out the root, you’re drilling out the vascular supply, which is, a lot of people don’t think of teeth as living tissue, but they are living tissue. And there’s miles and miles of what are called dentin tubules in each tooth, and in those dentin tubules, bacteria reside.
14:51: And so, the bacteria love it because they’re what are called anaerobic bacteria or facultative anaerobes that live in an oxygen-poor, they thrive in an oxygen-poor environment, but their metabolic byproducts are things that are really dangerous to the human body.
15:08: They incite a whole new level of inflammation that has been associated with cancer, autoimmunity, cardiovascular disease, you name it.
15:54: So if you think about the far-reaching implications of damage to the mitochondria from these bacteria that are living in these dead teeth, then it’s no wonder that we’re as sick as we are today.
16:11: The bacteria are spread into the circulation, as are the toxins. And oftentimes this is what leads to the underlying coronary artery disease, which is caused by inflammation in the arteries. It’s not caused by cholesterol, it’s caused by inflammation.
20:38: …there are healthcare providers that take a view of your health through a functional integrative complementary lens, a biological dentist is a dentist that does that in the dental realm.
22:04: Mercury is highly toxic and it is incredible that the FDA and the American Dental Association allow mercury to be put in someone’s mouth. There are all kinds of warnings about mercury in fish, which contain a modicum amount of mercury compared to mercury fillings in your mouth.
22:26: And these mercury fillings, of course, can cause a host of health problems: neurological problems, cognitive problems, inflammation.
22:45: I’ve been told that if you have one filling and you threw it in a pond, a lake, a pond, that it’s an acre, you have fish in it, you couldn’t eat the fish because of the mercury.
22:56: But you can put it in your mouth and every time you chew, you have a mercury filling, it out-gases and you breathe in, that mercury gets in your body and that can cause a host of health problems.
26:28: I think the other thing I would encourage people is that fluoride is not your friend. And so, I’ve not used fluoridated toothpaste for probably 20 years and I have not a cavity.
27:03: And fluoride has been also known to be a neurotoxin that causes calcification to the pineal gland. And pineal gland is the gland in your body that makes melatonin, your sleep hormone, which we also know is profoundly beneficial for things other than sleep.
33:17: Well, I have to say that this is the finest organization that I’ve ever seen, actually. It works like a well-oiled machine, and even compared to the military. The people are professional, there’s a level of professionalism, a level of service that’s rare to find in any industry, and the guests are the beneficiaries of that.
28:22: And fluoride competes with iodine at the thyroid gland level, but inside the cells it also adversely affects the ability of the deiodinase enzyme. You have an enzyme inside your cell that converts the inactive T4 to T3, that’s the active thyroid hormone, and it poisons the deiodinase. Deiodinase means removal of iodine, and it poisons that enzyme, so people aren’t able to make enough active thyroid hormone, T3, to have a good metabolic rate.
30:10: If you go to the material safety data sheet of the US government and you look up fluoride, you’ll see it’s a neurotoxin, it’s a carcinogen, it’s a dangerous chemical.
34:22: I believe that illness really comes from two things, and everybody has some degree of those two things, and that’s toxicity and deficiency.
35:44: Well, we’re pleased to have Dr. Gourlas here, Jason Gourlas, who’s our physician’s assistant…he is capable and I put him up against any doctor, any conventional doctor in the country. He’d be miles ahead of them because he studied this and learned natural approaches to health.
Podcast Transcription:Dr. Steven Hotze: Welcome to the program today. I’m Dr. Steve Hotze. You know, I believe that you and everyone needs to have a provider and a staff of professionals who can coach you on a path of health and wellness, naturally, so as you mature, you have energy, you have vitality, you have enthusiasm for life. It’s a pleasure today to introduce to you our new provider here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, Jason Gourlas, MPAS, PA-C. He’s got a very interesting background as a medic in the Army, and working in Korea with the army and then at Walter Reed Hospital, and then he worked for the Texas National Guard. He’s been in practice for how many years now?
Jason Gourlas: Over 26 years now.
Dr. Steven Hotze: …as a physician’s assistant. And he joined us several months ago and I’m just pleased to have him here because he has a very interesting background that resonates with me, and we’re going to talk about that in just a minute. Jason, tell us about yourself, where you’re from, where you grew up, how you got interested in medicine, and then take us through your history and how you ended up here at the center.
Jason Gourlas: Okay. I grew up in Ohio. I joined the military when I was 19 to get money for college and to serve my country, ended up going into the army as a medic, went to Korea, as Dr. Hotze said. I ended up at Walter Reed, and then through a variety of different circumstances, I decided that medicine was really how I wanted to spend my life. As a child, I was very much a science nerd. I also watched a lot of detective shows like Magnum P.I., and Simon & Simon and things like that, and read Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators.
So I was very interested in investigating things and I thought I would go into the FBI or the CIA, thank God I didn’t do that. But science and medicine actually scratched that itch that I had. And so, being a medical provider is really much like being a detective, to trying to figure out what’s going on with your patient. And so that was the route that I took, the military helped me to get to that place. After I got out of the military, I ended up in a variety of different circumstances.
I did family medicine, emergency medicine, I did neurotology, which is a balance and hearing specialty. And then, the vast majority of my career, I was actually in surgical critical care at a Level I trauma center in San Antonio. So I took care of the sickest of the sick in that 22 county area. The problem with that is, one, it’s very high stress and there were other family issues that I was going through at the time that heightened my own medical problems, which seems to be a way that a lot of folks end up in this…
Dr. Steven Hotze: Natural approaches to health, holistic or integrative-type medicine.
Jason Gourlas: Right. So being trained in emergency medicine and critical care, I was trained to think that I had the worst thing, which was going to be cancer. And so, I knew that the conventional medical paradigm didn’t have the answers that I needed – that cancer was essentially a death sentence. So crazily enough, I started researching alternative therapies to cancer and I realized that there were so many different things that I had not been taught in my conventional medical training about nutrition and herbs and lifestyle modification.
And so, with just a few changes of diet and my lifestyle, the abdominal pain that I had went away, the intractable reflux that I was taking two and three different medicines for went away, and I was hooked at that point. I realized that I loved the physiology that I saw in the ICU punctuated by adrenaline-filled codes and things like that. But the other thing that I noticed was that I was taking care of people at the end stages of disease, these were the sickest of the sick.
And I realized that I wanted to be involved in their care prior to them getting to that point. And so, that wasn’t going to happen there and through that, I started researching different types of medicine, like functional medicine and integrative medicine. I said “That’s what I want to do,” and…
Dr. Steven Hotze: And so, you’ve gone on and done additional studies and been certified in functional medicine and American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.
Jason Gourlas: That’s correct.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Which is 180 degrees different than what you’d learned in conventional medicine. Now, it’s interesting, we have very similar paths. When I got out of medical school, I did a year internship and surgery and then went into emergency medicine for five years before I ultimately set up my own general medical practice. And that goes back, graduated in ’76, so that took me into ’81 when I set up my own general practice after being in emergency medicine for five years. And then by ’89, that’s when my father had his illness and that’s what, it was my father’s illness that really opened up the door for me to enter into natural approaches to health, and that’s how I ended up.
So we find that many, many physicians that end up in natural approaches to health, whether you call it holistic medicine. integrated or functional medicine, I call it natural approaches to health or natural medicine, most of those individuals that end up in this field had health problems themselves or had family members who had health problems. And they tried conventional means, it never solved the problem, and so they began to search and they found other alternative methods that they never learned about in medical school or in training. And they adopted those and they worked, and they said, “My gosh, I can think of hundreds of patients that have the same problem and I’m going to start treating them,” and you do, treating them naturally and they get well.
And you go like, “Why would I ever go back to pharmaceutical medicine?” It took me, Jason, about 10 years to flush my brain out, from ’89 till ’99, to completely flush out the pharmaceutical industry out of my brain because it’s so embedded, although I didn’t do pharmaceuticals in…probably took me 10 years until I just had a complete rejection of conventional medicine and the treatments that they use. That’s not to say there’s never an instance where you might not use a pharmaceutical drug, but in our practice here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, it’s as rare as hen’s teeth that we do that. So we use natural approaches to health.
Dangers of Mercury Fillings to Your Health
One thing about Jason Gourlas that really interested me was his background in studying about oral healthcare. This was really, very fascinating to me because over the years, I’ve heard lectures on the dangers of root canals. And of course, I knew about the dangers of putting mercury or amalgam fillings in the mouth in oral hygiene. I knew that was…but from the several lectures at in medical conferences that I had attended, not conventional medical conferences, but other medical conferences, I learned about Hal Huggins and Blanche Grube, Dr. Grube, and these very innovative dentists that had challenged the conventional thinking of dentistry, saying that the most important thing to have good health was to have healthy teeth, healthy gums, not have root canals, not have mercury amalgams.
So why don’t you tell us a little about your background? Because when you came, and I found out about this, I had just interviewed Dr. Blanche Grube on a podcast here, this has to be a couple of months ago, and it was fascinating. And she’s written a book, Chew on This, But Don’t Swallow. And she talked on the radio program primarily about the dangers of root canals and then about mercury amalgams towards the end of the program. So those are two things that I’m concerned that many of our guests, and we call our patients guests here, have problems that go unrecognized by conventional doctors.
And even us here, because that’s not our focus. Our focus here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, we have an eight-point treatment regimen, treatment of airborne and food allergies, yeast, natural thyroid hormone replacement, natural sex hormone replacement, treatment of adrenal fatigue, vitamin and mineral supplementation, and a nutritionally-balanced eating and exercise program to help people get to an ideal body weight.
But on top of that, over the years, we’d go to these conferences and I’d hear a lecture and I’d say, “Well, we have to tell people about these root canals.” And here at the practice, myself, my wife, several of our key members of our leadership team have visited biological dentists and had all our amalgams removed, since 20 years ago, got rid of the root canals and all that. So why don’t you give us a little background on that because I think that has been a missing element in some of our guests who don’t seem to get well on our program. And when others do, could easily be that the underlying cause of their problem has to do with poor oral hygiene.
Jason Gourlas: Right. So early on, in studying natural health, I was looking at a book, it’s called The Maker’s Diet. And in the Maker’s Diet, he mentioned a cookbook that is way much more than a cookbook, it’s called Nourishing Traditions. And that’s put out by a society called the Weston A. Price Foundation. The Weston A. Price Foundation advances the tenets of Weston A. Price who was a dentist that studied in the ’20s and ’30s, went around the world, actually, took about 10 years studying traditional cultures, ancestral cultures, and how what they ate affected their dentition.
And so, what he found was that the folks that stuck with their traditional diets, they had wide, broad faces with perfect teeth, and they were not struck with any of the diseases of modernity that we are experiencing today. But when their children strayed from that diet and from even just a half a generation to a generation, their faces were small and narrowed. Their teeth were crowded, they had all kinds of dental disease, like caries and gingivitis and things like that, and their general health deteriorated.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Deteriorated as well.
Jason Gourlas: Yes, indeed. And so, as a result of that, they would experience the need for cavities to be filled. They would have root canals being done, and in the society that he came from, that was a commonplace occurrence. And what they found is that as the dentition worsened and these interventions became prevalent, then the general systemic health of the people worsened as well. And so, he did some studies where he took root canal teeth and stuck them under the skin of rabbits.
Dr. Steven Hotze: He would take out the…
Jason Gourlas: At the root canal teeth.
Dr. Steven Hotze: …teeth. He’d take the root canal tooth, and they’d take it out and then do what?
Jason Gourlas: They would place it under the skin of the rabbit, of these rabbits that they were researching, and invariably, those rabbits would develop the diseases that those people manifested, and they would die. The toxic load was too much for the rabbits. And that was repeated over and over again. And so, he eventually said, “The way to good systemic health is through good oral health. And the foundational piece of that is good nutrition.” So that really became one of my passions, and so my wife and I became chapter leaders of the Weston A. Price Foundation in San Antonio. We gave monthly lectures on good nutrition, ancestral health, good oral hygiene, and the effects on systemic health.
Dr. Steven Hotze: So let’s just talk about this for a minute, talk about root canals and the dangers of root canals. Recently, in our newsletter that came out for Thanksgiving, I wrote an article about the dangers of root canals and in the upcoming issue, we’re going to discuss the dangers of mercury amalgams. So let’s talk about these one at a time. Explain to everybody why a dentist, and usually it’s an endodontist, they specialize in this, I don’t know if every…does every dentist do root canals, or…
Jason Gourlas: They know how to do them, but they typically punt to an endodontist.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. So there are probably millions of root canals done every year in the United States, and it’s a moneymaker for the endodontists. So when Weston Price came out with his information, which was ultimately adopted by Dr. Hal Huggins, who was a dentist out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, once they began to expose the dangers of root canals, there was a tremendous backlash from the endodontists. Now, why would there be a backlash?
Jason Gourlas: Well, because they were taking away their bread and butter.
Dr. Steven Hotze: That’s right. And so, tell us what Dr. Price and Dr. Huggins said was wrong with doing root canals. What would it cause?
Jason Gourlas: Well, so dentistry is the only aspect of medicine that actually leaves dead things in the body. So when you do a root canal, you’re drilling out the root, you’re drilling out the vascular supply, which is, a lot of people don’t think of teeth as living tissue, but they are living tissue. And there’s miles and miles of what are called dentin tubules in each tooth, and in those dentin tubules, bacteria reside.
And so, the bacteria love it because they’re what are called anaerobic bacteria or facultative anaerobes that live in an oxygen-poor, they thrive in an oxygen-poor environment, but their metabolic byproducts are things that are really dangerous to the human body. They incite a whole new level of inflammation that has been associated with cancer, autoimmunity, cardiovascular disease, you name it. If there’s inflammation involved in it, then they’re going to have a part in it.
The other thing to consider is some of their metabolic byproducts are direct mitochondrial toxicants, or I guess I should say toxins because they’re coming from a living organism, they’re direct mitochondrial toxins and mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells. And not only that, but they regulate our immune system, they’re where our body has those cytochrome enzymes that break down toxins in our bodies and hormones are made in your mitochondria. So if you think about the far-reaching implications of damage to the mitochondria from these bacteria that are living in these dead teeth, then it’s no wonder that we’re as sick as we are today.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. And the toxins, of course, every time you bite down, these toxins are spread.
Jason Gourlas: Right.
Dr. Steven Hotze: The bacteria are spread into the circulation, as are the toxins. And oftentimes this is what leads to the underlying coronary artery disease, which is caused by inflammation in the arteries. It’s not caused by cholesterol, it’s caused by inflammation. Cholesterol is simply the patch, the band-aid that the body uses trying to patch up the inflammation caused by the bacteria or the bacterial toxins. And it’s interesting, as I’ve thought about cardiovascular disease associated with periodontal disease or with root canals or with mercury amalgams, the underlying cause of coronary artery disease is inflammation.
So if we have this inflammation, you’re going to end up trying to heal it up and you end up putting cholesterol plaques to heal up the artery wall, and then those plaques end up absorbing calcium to provide some rigidity to the walls. And this is the body’s way of keeping the arteries from tearing apart and breaking down, is to stabilize them with what we call atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries. That’s a protective mechanism by the body.
Now, it can be dangerous when you get narrowing of your arteries, you can throw a plaque in there and get a heart attack. So we do here, at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, we do CT scans of the heart to determine how much calcification the arteries have. And we give anybody 40 and above, we get a CT scan of the heart to look at the level of atherosclerosis or hardening in the arteries.
And I’ve thought this, and we see some people in their 50s and 60s just no, they have no…it’s zero. I’m 72, I’ve got no calcification in my arteries, which is rare for somebody my age, it’s probably less than 10% of the people in my age group would have clear arteries. But we have other people that are younger, they have it in the 500s to thousand range, or 1100 or 1200. And I’ve thought about, just recently that, and we’ve started to do this, is ask those individuals that have positive heart scans showing that they have atherosclerosis, “Have you had a root canal done? Do you have mercury amalgams?”
And then we’re going to do a study between the people that have no atherosclerosis and those people that have atherosclerosis, and what’s the difference in their dental hygiene, number of root canals. Do the people without any coronary artery disease, do they have root canals or not? I don’t have a root canal. I had one for about eight months, 20 years ago I let some dentist talk me into it, and then I heard a lecture and I said, “I just have to get rid of this,” and I’d already gotten rid of my mercury amalgams.
So we want to find out the people that have the atherosclerosis, do they have problems with root canals and mercury amalgams? If that’s the case, then we’re going to do a study here in our center and try to analyze between people with and without atherosclerosis, and see how much is related to the oral hygiene, which we believe is highly correlated. And this has been shown in other studies that Hal Huggins and other dentists and biological dentists do.
So if that’s the case, and I’m recommending now, and we’re recommending that if you have had a root canal and you have some kind of systemic problems, whether it’s heart disease, whether it’s dementia, whether it’s kidney disorder, whether you’ve got problems with the liver, you’ve got bowel problems, you’ve got joint and muscle aches and pains, you have arthritis, or any kind of disease, could it be that the root canal is the underlying cause of your problem? So we’re recommending that our guests see a biological dentist. Explain a biological dentist for us, doc.
Jason Gourlas: So, like there are healthcare providers that take a view of your health through a functional integrative complementary lens, a biological dentist is a dentist that does that in the dental realm. They have done extra training, there’s a variety of different organizations, such as IABDM, that are organizations that train and certify doctors in what are called, it’s called biological dentistry or safe or smart amalgam removal.
So they have looked at everything from heavy metal detoxification to different ways to address these issues in a way that’s going to be most advantageous for your health. And it’s kind of sad that these conventional dentists are taking out mercury amalgams, drilling out the mercury, giving a load of mercury to their patients and a load of mercury to themselves.
Dr. Steven Hotze: To themselves.
Jason Gourlas: And it’s really a travesty. And it’s hard for me to believe that a whole organization can think that you take a mercury amalgam before you put it in somebody’s mouth, or you take it out of somebody’s mouth, and you have to treat it with the utmost care as a biohazard, but then when you put it in somebody’s mouth.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Mouth, that you don’t have to worry about it.
Jason Gourlas: …that it magically becomes okay? It’s sort of ludicrous.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, it is. Mercury is highly toxic and it is incredible that the FDA and the American Dental Association allow mercury to be put in someone’s mouth. There are all kinds of warnings about mercury in fish, which contain a modicum amount of mercury compared to mercury fillings in your mouth. And these mercury fillings, of course, can cause a host of health problems: neurological problems, cognitive problems, inflammation. It can cause a host of health problems. And yet, the ADA says, “Well, they’ve really never been proven to cause problems.” But if you had that same amount, I’ve been told that if you have one filling and you threw it in a pond, a lake, a pond, that it’s an acre, you have fish in it, you couldn’t eat the fish because of the mercury.
But you can put it in your mouth and every time you chew, you have a mercury filling, it out-gases and you breathe in, that mercury gets in your body and that can cause a host of health problems. So we recommend, as a matter of fact, I had a dentist that argued with me about this, and when he talked to me, his hands quivered like this because he had some kind of senile tremor in his hands. And what was that from? That was from all the mercury he’d been putting in, I’m sure that’s what caused this problem. Goes like, “Mercury doesn’t cause any…it’s not a problem.” I said, “Why are your hands…”
Jason Gourlas: No, they don’t know what causes this, right?
Dr. Steven Hotze: So anyway, I wanted each one of you to understand that having Jason Gourlas here on our staff really brings this whole concept of oral health into our medical center, into our practice, which is going to help us better be able to get you onto a path of health and wellness, naturally. And if you contact us, we can give you the name of biological dentists that we have used, that we have vetted, that will help you get your oral and dental health up.
By the way, if you know anything about farming, when farmers go to buy animals, particularly cows or particularly horses, the first thing they look at or one of the key things they look at is they look in their mouth, they look at their oral hygiene. And if it’s unhealthy, they don’t buy it because they know the animal’s going to be unhealthy. That’s where the old expression, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Well that’s kind of an insult. You’re saying, “I want to see if your horse is healthy before…you’re going to give me your horse, but let me check and see if it’s healthy.” So you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth because he may have bad teeth. And so you don’t want to say “I don’t| want your horse, thank you, but no, thank you.”
Don’t look at gift horse in the mouth, accept it, thank them for it. But when you go to buy a horse, you’d be sure to check their teeth, when you go to buy a nice steer or cow, you make sure to check their teeth, and that’s what the farmers do. And that’s the same way in humans, that we need to have good oral hygiene and we want to encourage that. And Jason brings that expertise into our practice to keep us on track so we don’t go like, “Yes, let’s get all excited about keeping people’s oral hygiene up.” And then all of a sudden, it drops off the radar screen, which it’s done over the years, but it’s not going to now.
So I want you to be encouraged about that and want to encourage you to make sure you get your oral hygiene squared away. Get rid of the mercury amalgams. You literally pull out your teeth that had root canals and your dentist will say, “Oh, they sterilize those.” Well, they don’t. They’ve been proven and you can send off and do tests on this, and you can find out that indeed all these root canal teeth that are dead are filled with anaerobic bacteria that cause a host of health problems. So that’s something I wanted to focus on this first interview with Jason. You want to add anything else on top of this? We’re going to come back in another interview and talk about some other treatment modalities that you bring to the practice.
Fluoride is Detrimental to Your Health
Jason Gourlas: I think the other thing I would encourage people is that fluoride is not your friend. And so, I’ve not used fluoridated toothpaste for probably 20 years and I have not a cavity. So I think it’s a fallacy to think that fluoride protects you from cavities. It’s really your diet that’s the biggest driver of cavities and poor oral hygiene. And so, brushing your teeth twice daily using natural dental floss and maybe even doing some oil pulling is probably a better way to go about it.
And fluoride has been also known to be a neurotoxin that causes calcification to the pineal gland. And pineal gland is the gland in your body that makes melatonin, your sleep hormone, which we also know is profoundly beneficial for things other than sleep. It’s an antioxidant that’s at least five times more powerful than vitamin C, and we use it in cancer patients and things like that. And so, we don’t want your pineal gland to become calcified, we don’t you to ingest these neurotoxins that haven’t really been proven.
Dr. Steven Hotze: And on top of that, on fluoride, and I wrote about it in my book, Hypothyroidism, Health & Happiness, fluoride is a halogen, it competes with iodine. Your thyroid hormone contains either four iodine atoms, and here’s the hormone, here’s the thyroid hormone, it has four iodine atoms, that’s called T4, or it has three, that’s the active. T4 is the inactive, T3 is the active thyroid hormone. It has iodine atoms. Iodine is a halogen, so is fluoride, so is chlorine. If you remember your periodic table back in high school, there was a column, and the column was the column of halogens and had chlorine, it had fluoride and it had iodine and several others in that.
And fluoride competes with iodine at the thyroid gland level, but inside the cells, it also adversely affects the ability of the deiodinase enzyme. You have an enzyme inside your cell that converts the inactive T4 to T3, that’s the active thyroid hormone, and it poisons the deiodinase. Deiodinase means removal of iodine, and it poisons that enzyme, so people aren’t able to make enough active thyroid hormone, T3, to have a good metabolic rate. Their blood levels may be fine, when you look at the blood, the T4 level, which is inactive, may be totally fine, but you have to have T3 inside your cells and you have to have deiodinase enzyme functioning properly to be able to convert the T4 inactive to the T3 active thyroid hormone.
And they put fluoride in the water. Now, what’s very interesting about this, back in the 1960s, late ’50s and ’60s, there was great controversy across the United States about adding fluoride to the water. And I can remember watching on TV city council members, back when I was a little kid, 9, 10, 11, on Saturday, watching the city council meetings where people were demanding that they don’t put fluoride into the water. And there was a big controversy about it.
Well, about 70% of the municipalities in the United States add fluoride to the water. And it’s said the reason they were going to do it is because the chemical companies said, “Well, it will help protect against dental cavities. There’s a place in the country where it has high levels of fluoride in the groundwater and the people have less cavities, so we need to put fluoride in the water.”
With fluoride, it’s a toxin. If you go to the material safety data sheet of the US government and you look up fluoride, you’ll see it’s a neurotoxin, it’s a carcinogen, it’s a dangerous chemical. And if you go and take your toothpaste out, look at your toothpaste on the label of your toothpaste on the box or on the toothpaste tube, there’s a box there that says, “Warning: If more ingested than you put on your toothbrush, call Poison Control or go to the emergency room immediately.”
Now, why would you brush your teeth with something that, if you swallowed it, you’d have to go to the emergency room and call Poison Control? Because it has fluoride in it, so you need to use a non-fluoridated toothpaste. And there’s several of them on the market. We sell Spry Toothpaste here, but I’m sure in any one of the stores you can find a non-fluoridated toothpaste, but that’s what we recommend doing.
And we also recommend that you filter your water, don’t drink the fluoride in Houston’s water here, and in all the major municipalities in the country, they have fluoride and they brag about it. Well, I use reverse osmosis in my sink, and so we don’t have fluoride in the water, but that fluoride, and here’s what happens, it poisons the thyroid hormone, that is the active thyroid hormone, it poisons the enzyme that converts T4 to T3, the active thyroid hormone, so your metabolism goes down.
Well, what does this lead to? Well, since 1960, when 15% of the population in the United States was overweight, half the people were obese, 7% of the population was obese. Currently, in America, 70% of the population is overweight, half those people, 35% of the total number of Americans, are obese. Now, that’s a huge number. Now, you compare that to Europe, Europe is 15% overweight, 7% obese. They don’t permit fluoride in the water in Europe. And you go to Europe and you go to France and they give you not just a basket of bread, they give you carts of bread, drink wine… You go to Italy and they have pasta and pizzas and all that. And you look at the people and they’re thin and trim.
I remember I went, we were in the airport in Paris traveling to Rome, and I remember walking around and going, “Man, these people are so thin. They’re healthy.” Well, that’s because they don’t put fluoride in the water. So anyway, I’m glad you brought that up. So you want to make sure that you don’t have fluoride because you don’t want to poison your thyroid gland.
Treatment at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center
So tell me, on our program, our eight-point treatment program we have here, tell us about your background. You’ve read about this, studied it. Tell us about your impressions now that you’re with us here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. What differences do you see than you saw in other practices? What have you noticed it’s different, not just with the treatment, but the way we treat our guests?
Jason Gourlas: Well, I have to say that this is the finest organization that I’ve ever seen, actually. It works like a well-oiled machine, and even compared to the military. The people are professional, there’s a level of professionalism, a level of service that’s rare to find in any industry, and the guests are the beneficiaries of that. And so, the eight-point treatment plan gives you sort of a template on which to, a foundational way to treat folks. Now, that doesn’t mean that we don’t treat you as an individual because everybody’s a little bit different, and to try to put a round peg into a square hole doesn’t help anybody.
But it’s helpful to look at treatment through that rubric so that you don’t miss things. And it really looks at gut health, and it looks at the inflammation through the treatment of allergies. I believe that illness really comes from two things. And everybody has some degree of those two things, and that’s toxicity and deficiency. And so, sometimes toxicity is yeast overgrowth, and sometimes deficiency is a problem with minerals, or it could be a problem with inadequate thyroid production or sex hormone production. And so, we listen to you, we take your history and that that’s really, backing up, listening to folks is really the crux of good medical care because it’s when you listen to people, they’ll tell you the story. Their story is full of those clues that I was looking for when I was a detective…
Dr. Steven Hotze: Right.
Jason Gourlas: …trying to be a detective. And so finding those clues, those clues in physical exam, and then we use laboratory testing in a way that’s a little bit more refined than your typical doctor. There’s all kinds of clues that you can pick up in high levels of enzymes or lower levels of enzymes as far as nutrient deficiencies. And so, giving the body what it needs in order to have an adequate and appropriate metabolism and to be able to utilize the enzymes that it was designed with to function appropriately, those are all factors and tenants that you’ll experience here that you may not experience someplace else.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, we’re pleased to have Dr. Gourlas here, Jason Gourlas, who’s our physician’s assistant, and he sees patients under the authority and direction of myself and Dr. Ellsworth. But he is capable and I put him up against any doctor, any conventional doctor in the country. He’d be miles ahead of them because he studied this and learned natural approaches to health. And so, I’m pleased and honored, really, to have him on staff. He’s a great addition.
Not only does he understand our eight-point treatment regimen, which is treatment of airborne and food allergies, and treatment of yeast, and treatment of natural thyroid hormone supplementation, and balancing out your sex hormones and treating for adrenal fatigue, and vitamin and mineral supplementation and a nutritionally-balanced eating and exercise program, but now, we’re adding to it good dental hygiene, and I think we ought to make it a nine-point treatment regimen so that we remember that, that that’s what we want to do. We want you to be healthy and well.
We also have anti-aging. We do anti-aging, and we also here at the practice do aesthetics, so not only do we want you to feel well, we want you to look well and have a good facial appearance and be youthful and rejuvenated, and just so you’ll have a much more enjoyable life.
Well, thanks so much for joining us today, and thank each one of you for joining us. If you’d like to have a consultation with Jason Gourlas, MPAS, PA-C, then please contact us here at the office at the number on the screen, which is 281-698-8698. Thanks for joining us today.
Jason Gourlas: Thank you.
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