Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about insomnia and natural things you can do at home to get enough sleep. According to National Geographic, less than one-third of our population in the USA get enough sleep. Since sleep affects our mental state, the aging process, our immune system, and our body’s ability do detox toxic chemicals, it’s very important to get enough sleep. Pamela will tell us about phases of sleep, sleep hygiene, dangers of using prescription hypnotic drugs and how they lead to psychiatric problems, plus natural substances to help you sleep that target similar areas of the brain without the side effects. . Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld PhD

Date of Broadcast: December 3, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Wednesday, December 3rd 2014. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And in fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs.

I have her on every other Wednesday because she has so much information about the negative health effects of taking prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs and so much information about simple, natural things that we can do to help our health that I just want her to tell you everything that she knows. I learn from her every time I talk to her.

So today, we are going to be talking about insomnia. Are you having trouble sleeping? Well, it’s winter time, there’s hibernates, so I thought we should talk about sleep since this is a natural time for us to be getting more sleep and rejuvenating our bodies and that you absolutely need to sleep in order for your body to detox toxic chemicals. This is an extremely important subject today and so let’s just get started.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. It’s always great to have you. So what did you tell me about National Geographic said one-third, less than one-third of our population in the United States get enough sleep?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! And they just had a special on that just this last Sunday talking about the dangers of sleep deprivation and how the majority of the people are really driving around with insufficient sleep and as a result of it, are basically impaired.

And we see this quite a bit. If you look at the rate of car accidents and the rate of just accidents in general, it’s highly associated with lack of sleep. Most adults are going to need between seven and nine hours of sleep at night. The majority of the people in this country are probably getting six or less.
DEBRA: I think that that’s probably true. So what would sleep deprivation look like?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it can go in different phases. Chronic sleep deprivation will definitely age the person for one thing. Inattentiveness, these people tend to compensate by trying to drink lots of caffeine and coffee. And also, if you look at the very severe side effects of it, if someone goes several days without sleep, psychosis can set in and can really make this person end up in a hospital.

Sleep deprivation tend to really cause hallucinations. A lot of different things that are psychiatric symptoms that maybe if they’re people that see a psychiatrist as a result of sleep deprivation that’s been severe enough for a long enough period of time, these people might be misdiagnosed with depression and then placed on medication as a result of it.

So it’s really important to say that the brain needs this time to basically mop up and clean out the remnants of the day and get started fresh for the next day.
And what we also find is that people who have had chronic sleep deprivation – it doesn’t really have to be like you haven’t slept two days in a row. It can be six hours of sleep and that’s not what your body needs.

What we see is that it’s kind of like the brain is on fire and putting this in terminology, ‘inflammation markers’ in the circulation go up. And that’s why we know that weight gain is associated with not sufficient sleep. We find that this actually can have effects in memory and cognition and a lot of it is related to circulating cytokines that come in and out of the brain.

So it has some very, very serious health effects by not having decent sleep.

DEBRA: Great! Well, tell us about what are the different phases of sleep.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! So most people know a little bit about some of this. I’ll kind of go over some basic things. There are two types of sleep. There’s non-rapid eye movement and there’s rapid eye movement, which is REM sleep. REM sleep is known as ‘active sleep’ or ‘paradoxical sleep’. So this is the time when your eyes are actually moving underneath your eyelids.

So at the beginning of sleep, you’re kind of relatively awake and alert. The brain produces beta waves. But as the brain slows down, slower waves called alpha waves are produced. You’re not quite asleep at this time, but this is when you can have vivid hallucinations and ‘myclonic jerks’ where all of a sudden, you feel like your muscles move or your legs move suddenly. That’s what’s happening during that phase. That’s to be expected. We actually have a lot of that going on at night, but we only remember it maybe once in a while.

So stage one sleep is the beginning of the theta wave. And then stage two lasts about 20 minutes and then the brain activity called ‘sleep spindles’ and body temperature and heart rate slows. So this is asleep. Stage there is delta waves and deep sleep. And stage four is dreaming or REM sleeping brain activity.
What I thought was very interesting is that you actually go through this pattern where you start in stage one, you go to stage two and three, then you go back to two and then you go to REM and this gets repeated four to five cycles per night – and then the average REM time is 90 minutes.

So this is pretty interesting. When you have to go through these different phases, setting an alarm – I know a lot of people have to wake up by an alarm, but if you think about it, you’re kind of jolting yourself out of sleep, right?

DEBRA: Yeah, right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So depending on where you were at that time, what I see in most people is they can try and get themselves to a point where the alarm isn’t suddenly waking them, where they’re actually getting to bed at a reasonable time so that if they need to have an alarm to get up for work, that it goes off and they’re really through most of their sleep cycle, that makes a huge difference.

But if you think about most people, they go to bed late, they procrastinate, then they set their alarm and they get up really early, they’re not going through all these phases of sleep. And then they get in the car and drive. And also, a lot of these people end up taking prescription hypnotics. We’ll talk a little bit about that, how this really changes the chemistry of the brain in an unfavorable way.

DEBRA: I know for myself when I used to go to school when I was a child, my mother would set the alarm and I’d have to be forced to be awakened every morning so that I could get to school by 7:30. I hated that. I just didn’t like that all.

And so now, it’s really important to me that I allow myself to fall asleep when I want to fall asleep. And then I wake up when I want to wake up. I think that that makes a huge amount of difference in terms of just allowing your body to do what it needs to do.

Sometimes, I think I should get up and work and then I think, “No. You know what? I’m just going to let myself sleep” and having that extra hour of sleep or whatever, just going back to sleep in the morning. It just makes a huge difference in how well I’m able to function for the rest of the day. You think, “Oh, I’m going to get an extra hour of work done if I get up early,” but I actually get more done if I sleep.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah, correct because what happens is the consolidation of memory – well, we want to just use simplistic terms, the mopping up of the brain. But basically, what the brain is doing during this sleep process – and you think about the rest of your body too. In the beginning, you were introducing about cleaning up toxic chemicals. The body during sleep basically gets ready for the next day. This is preparatory work that takes place in our sleep cycles. It’s cleaning up the brains. It’s getting rid of remnants of things from the day time that really are non-consequential.

And basically, what the brain is doing during this time is categorizing whether they need to save something or not. So all these little memories and things that we had – that’s why I think when people are studying for a test, studying just before you go to bed and really making an imprint on that will enhance your studying capacity when you take your exam in the morning.

So there’s a reason for studying just before you go to sleep because the consolidation, the memories, it’s going to start putting these memories, which are made of acetylcholine, it’s going to start compartmentalizing them in the brain. And the things that are non-consequential and not important is going to clear that out.
Also, if we’re talking about this from a detoxification point, the kidney start removing all of these excess remnants of metabolism from the day time. And that’s why when you go to sleep at night, you keep going to the bathroom. People get up and go to the bathroom when their bladder is full. The reason why is your center of gravity when you’re lying down changes. So during the day, your center of gravity is at a different location. It’s more central. But when you sleep at night, the center of gravity changes to the back of the kidneys.And this was designed intentionally so that the fluids of the body that are containing waste products will go to the kidneys during that time and leave.

So actually, when you think about it, your first void in the morning really contains all these things that have accumulated during the day that really were not processed at the time that you actually were drinking water and going to the restroom then.

So it’s really amazing the way the body decides that this is a time to restore, re-nourish and clean up things that can lead to diabetes, intellectual problems or cognitive delays. All these kinds of things are basically mopped up during this process.

DEBRA: Wow! I haven’t thought about it quite that way, but I think that you described it really well, that it really is not about being lazy or anything like that. It just really is that time for us to rejuvenate, for our bodies to rejuvenate and to have that rest.

We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about sleep and natural ways to sleep better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

She has very successfully gotten people off drugs. She helps people replace drugs that they’ve been taking with natural substances that can do the same thing. But the thing that really seems most important to me (having been somebody who has taken prescription drugs and also natural things) is that when you take prescription drugs, it might alleviate your symptoms, but they’re not healing your body. Pamela can replace those drugs with substances, natural substances that actually are repairing and healing your body. To me, that’s a huge, huge, huge difference. It costs less too and you end up with a better result.

So Pamela, I know that you are happy to talk to anybody on the phone about what they’re taking and what they could take instead. So what’s your phone number?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. I would be very happy to help any of you, even your children if they have any issues as far as medications or any behavioral issues. You can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s Botanical Resource.

And I really do everything all-encompassing. So cholesterol, blood pressure, mental health. I do a lot of mental health. So if you want to get off these prescription medications or you want to know some alternatives for depression or anxiety, for sleeping, I would be most honored to help you and your family.

DEBRA: And she’s really wonderful. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I am and I found out about her and invited her to be a guest on my show because she has such a great reputation here. Everybody loves here. Medical doctors recommend her. My medical doctor, when I told him that I was taking some things that she had given me said, “Oh, just take whatever Pamela tells you to take.”And that was the end of the conversation.

So I completely trust her. I have had wonderful results from what she’s advised me to do. If you’re having any kind of health concerns, I hope that you will call her and get some help too.

Alright! So as long as we’re talking about prescription drugs and getting off of them, why don’t you tell us next about the dangers of using prescription hypnotic drugs for sleeping pills?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Great, great. Great subject. So what happens is that someone will go to the doctor, they’re having some sleep disturbance and insomnia, maybe some stress going on in their lives and the doctors, the first thing that they’re going to normally prescribe for a lot of people is then benzodiazepines. That’s a class of drugs that includes Xanas, Ativan, Valium.

These medications have two problems with them. They have addiction; they have tolerance and dependence basically.

Tolerance means you need more medication to get the same effect. And dependence means, of course, that you’re dependent on it. And the dependence with these medicines is physical and it’s psychological, which is bad. It’s both aspects.

So when people go on these medicines, they need more medicine over time to get the same effect. And then when they try and take it away, they can have panic attacks, severe anxiety. And people are on long term benzos, it’s really very problematic. And most of these people, I’m sure given the opportunity, would have chosen not to be placed on them.

A good example of a hypnotic that’s been used forever really (probably, I don’t know, 34 years) is Restoril, which is Temazepam. It’s an old benzo drug. And if you look at these drugs – and I still see people coming in on those – the studies show after about threeweeks, it doesn’t work anymore. So say somebody that’s on 15 mg…

DEBRA: Only three weeks?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah! It doesn’t work. So they need more medicine and it’s that quick. In fact, they’d tell somebody that’s even using a benzo on a part-time basis or short period of time for an anxiety disorder, you’ve got a window of maybe nine to twelve days of taking it consistently, then after that, you can’t really be without it. It’s pretty quick.

So I don’t think people realize that tolerance and dependence show up rather fast. I don’t know if they’re necessarily warned about that.
And you have to be careful too because when you take these prescriptions, there’s cognitiveproblem associated with this – and memory. Remember we were talking about memory consolidation, this kind of messes with your head.

So people that have these and take these prescription hypnotics, there can be some hang over sedation. And especially with Ambien, which is a very common prescription hypnotic, when someone is given Ambien, there are lots of cases where people are sleep walking, they get up in the morning and they don’t remember the commute to work. There’s a lot of problems with memory and cognitive impairment as a result of taking Ambien.

And what scares more than anything is that you have a large of population in this country that are taking these every night and then they get up and drive a car to work. This is really frightening if you think about.

Now, the benzos are kind of going out of favor because of the tolerance and dependence, but I still see quite a lot of people that are on Ativan and Xanax for sleep especially older people where they’ve been put on that a long time ago and basically, now,they don’t have a choice, but to be on that.

So really, just kind of to regroup, there’s different drug classes of these anxiolytics, but they can be use for insomnia, for hypnotics. Taking these drugs definitely has some other aspects as well especially even looking at elderly people.

And we should really focus on that because we have a lot of elderly people that have sleep disturbances. Our sleep changes as we get older. It’s a more lighter sleep. And not only that, when you think about you and I, we run around all day, so when we go to bed, we’re tired. But the older people, they’re more sedentary.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right? So when I go to sleep, I fall into bed. They probably because they’re doing activities of daily living, they’re doing some shopping, they’re watching TV. I mean, they’re not really doing a whole lot.

So I think, my theory really, I think most people need to be tired to sleep.

DEBRA: Well, I think so too. I mean, I had noticed that recently (like maybe in the last month or so) that I had been a lot more physically active, that I’ve been doing things where I’m walking more, I’m not sitting at my desk so much, I’m not thinking so much, as much as I am out doing things. I noticed that. And I’m also working longer hours. So I have activities in the evening as well as during the day.

And by the time it gets to be 10 o’clock, I am just physically tired whereas I know before, there had been time in my life where if I wasn’t working long hours or I wasn’t intensely getting a lot of things done in the time period that I have, that I wasn’t as physically tired and it was harder to sleep. But now, it’s just like, “Oh, thank you. It’s bed time!”

I mean, we live here in Florida. Wesee a lot of older people and…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: They just sit around all day. I don’t want to say all older people sit around all day because we certainly have active seniors, but a lot of old people just sit or watch TV all day or they talk to each other or they play checkers or whatever it is that they’re doing. They’re not physically engaged in life to the degree that younger people are.

We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more about sleep, sleeping pills and what we can do naturally to sleep better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

So Pamela, let’s talk about some things that people can do to sleep better. First, I wanted to say that many, many years ago when I started researching toxic chemicals, one of my first, most exciting discoveries was that formaldehyde causes insomnia.

At the time, I really had insomnia. It was excruciating for me to go to bed at night because I would not sleep and I would just toss and turn for hours. It turns out that formaldehyde is the major chemical in permanent press finish and that if you have permanent press sheets on your bed as you’re lying there at night, you’re going to be sleeping in a cloud of formaldehyde, particularly if you just take the sheets out of the package and put it on the bed.

But even after you’ve been washing and sleeping, there still is formaldehyde. It’s lessening amounts, but still, for a very long time, the sheets are still emitting formaldehyde.

I had to put that together. Nobody had put it in a book yet that I had see. I had to find out in one book that formaldehyde caused insomnia and find out in another book that formaldehyde is in permanent press resin on bed sheets. And when I put those two things together, I said, “Oh, my God!” I went right down and found the only – at that time, there was only one brand of untreated cotton sheets. I managed to find it, put those sheets in my bed and I slept. I slept.

It was just like so wonderful to sleep after all those nights, months, years of not sleeping well because of the formaldehyde on the bed sheets. And now, for the past 30 years, I have only slept on cotton flannel sheets every night – not that there aren’t other types of cotton sheets, but I just love cotton flannel sheets. And even though I live in Florida, I would think it’s too hot for flannel sheets, but it’s not. It’s very comfortable to sleep on them year around.

So that’s my two cents worth on how we can sleep better, change your sheets.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re right. Chemicals affect a lot of what is going on in our lives. Let’s face it, people have those artificial candles burning in their houses. It reaches your eyes, your eyes water. Formaldehyde coming offof the mattress, coming off of the sheets, coming off of the carpeting, you are exposed to these things continuously. And that’s why when people, you go into a store to buy, that new mattress, no that’s formaldehyde offgassing.

So it’s pretty prevalent. A lot of people are very sensitive to it. And this can explain a lot of people’s sleep disturbances. Environmentally, their room is just not equipped for them to get a restful sleep. So that can even be part of sleephygiene.

Sleep hygiene, really, the study show a dark, cold room. You don’t have a lot of ambient light coming in from outside. You want to have comfortable clothes, comfortable sheets. Sometimes, they believe that protein or a carbohydrate snack. Make sure you have some food in your stomach. I’m not talking about a meal, but if you go to bed with your stomach hungry and it’s growling all night, you’re not going to really have some decent sleep. So you shouldn’t be hungry when you go to bed, you shouldn’t be full either. And then limiting alcohol consumption just before you fall asleep.

And screen time. A lot of people know that looking at the screen – and I tell a lot of people too, get your cell phone out of the bedroom because there’s constantly little emails and dings and those noises wake you up.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So really, it’s important to look at that. And the formaldehyde issue, I think that most people aren’t really cognizant of it. You and I know about this sort of thing. But remember, we weretalking about the kidneys and the mopping up of the body, what happens during that process is if you’re exposing yourself to these chemicals while you’re sleeping, you’re not really realizing why it’s interfering with the way you feel and function.

DEBRA: Well, you know, it’s – I forgot what I was going to say.Okay, go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Even the mattress, I know for myself, the mattress that I have at my house – I mean, I bought this quite a while ago. It’s an organic mattress and it’s made with wool or organic latex…

DEBRA: I have a wool mattress too, Pamela. Another common…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I know! The whole frame is not made with any varnishes. I love it! It’s green sleep. I’ve had it for – I don’t know, probably ten years. That’s the best thing I ever bought. And it’s just completely chemical free.

DEBRA: Yeah, I have a wool mattress and it’s the best thingI ever bought. I just love it. I just love my wool mattress.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Look at us. Look at this, the two ofus. People who are probably listening to this thing, “Oh, they planned this.” I mean, I didn’t know she does what she has done.

DEBRA: No, we didn’t.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And here I am, I had to order from Canada. It came down from Canada. It came down from Canada. I had to custom order and it came from Canada.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s really a great investment in your sleep and your comfort.

But I kind of want to talk a little bit more about the medication and the fact that when people are having sleep disturbances, they need to realize that perhaps stress an anxiety during the day are affecting your sleep too.

So let’s look at it from a mental health perspective. We address the chemicals and the comfort and the dangers of some of the prescription (and we can talk about the dangers of the prescriptions for hours), but I want people to realize that when you go to sleep and you’ve done all the sleep hygiene things, but if you have a lot of stress in your life and a lot of people really, you have overwhelming stress –

This is what I find in my business, that the people come and the first thing if I say, “Are you stressed?”, they just lose it. They’re like, “Yeah.” It’s just that a lot of people work full-time and they have to take care of their home, they have children, maybe they have elderly parents. The stresses of life perhaps have gotten more extreme I think in recent years for a lot of people especially with the economy in some places.

So I’m a big advocate of using calming fish oil to calm the brain and some of the racing thinking that’s associated with not being able to turn the brain off. So there’s a product by Nordic Naturals, it’s called ProDHA. They have two of them, their professional line, ProDHA and ProDHA 1000, which is the higher octave of that and is much stronger.

ProDHA, I take that myself, has a calming effect on the brain, but it’s not making you sleepy. So what it does is it turns off a lot of that subconscious worry that people have. “I need to add something to the list of things to do,” you know what I’m talking about, these constant thinking in the back of your head.

I also noticed with the higher docosahexaenoic acid that are in those products, you have a lot more vivid dreams. You can remember your dreams. And I really put this together because DHA is very active in the brain. Customers, I remember, were coming back to me after they’ve taken it and saying, “Does this make you dream vivid dreams?” and I said, “Well, DHA has a lot of activity in the brain and it would make sense that that would be the case” and then I started noticing myself when I switched to that product as well.

So if people has sleep disturbances and they’ve done all these other things or cause from stress, you would want to be on omega 3’s anyway, customizing your product that would be specifically towards more restful and relaxing sleep, but also that you’re not kind of being spontaneously upset about things during your daily life, during the day. I’ve noticed that this has really taken the edge of being stuck on traffic, things don’t go your way. Things that normally could be aggravating for most people, I think that this would be highly helpful.

DEBRA: Yes, it’s so interesting about how you can take natural substances and have them affect how you think and how you feel and your ability to do those two things. When I see that from taking a supplement, I start thinking about how – oh, I hear the music, so we have to go to break. I’ll finish my sentence. Sometimes, I get so interested in what we’re saying, I don’t even look at the clock.

Anyway, let’s go to break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’ll be back in a moment.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

I mentioned before, Pamela that you talk to people on the phone and can help people get off their prescription drugs and also recommend natural substances to people for virtually any conditions, so why don’t you give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So you can reach me at my pharmacy here. I’ll be glad to help you with any particular need you have about a supplement or a question about the drugs you’re taking or to remove those medicines from your life.

The number here at Botanical Resource is 727-442-4955. I would be very happy to help you or any loved one in your family or even a friend, anybody you know. My business is really word-of-mouth. I’ve been doing this for 20 years probably. It’s really very positive and I think you’ll find your results to be very good.

DEBRA: Very good. And just give your number just one more time.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So it’s 727-442-4955. And as I’ve said previously, I would really be honored and happy to help you or your loved one.

DEBRA: Great! So tell us about natural substances that people can take that will help them sleep better.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Alright, good. So there’s lots of different products in the market and I’m going to talk about some of the ones that actually can work.
So a lot of people use theonine. There is limited data on that as a hypnotic and sleep. I personally don’t use it. So I’m going to go through the pros and cons of the products I like. I don’t really think that that works as well. It does work for some people, but not for the vast majority.

Now Valerian is very popular. Valerian does have components that put you into deep sleep, but it has a really nasty smell. And if you’ve ever smelled it, it smells like dirty, old socks.

DEBRA: I’ve never smelled it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it does, it does. It smells like dirty, old socks and I’m not kidding you. If you buy a bottle and you open it up, you’ll know exactly what I mean. So some people can’t get past the olfactory problems associated with that product.

My personal favorite is passion flower. The reason why I like passion flower is that it works like the benzodiazepines receptor products – the Xanax, the Ativan, the Valium – but it’s a partial agonist to the receptors. So when you take these benzodiazepines, the agonist has an affinity towards the receptor. The receptors are proteins and cells and that’s how drugs work.

So when you take Xanax, which a prescription that has addiction and tolerance, it binds to the receptor and it changes the chemistry and the cell and that’s how you get calm or that’s how you sleep. What the passion flower does is it has partial activity. So it goes on the receptor, it goes off the receptor. It goes on the receptor, it comes off the receptor. And when you’re doing this, you have some pharmacological advantages because you don’t have tolerance and dependence, but you have a highly effective product because it really binds right to the receptor pretty reproducibly.

I use that to get people off the medicine. By using that and few other little supplements, we can kick the drug off and the body is kind of faked off. It doesn’t know if the drugs are on or the supplements are on. So if someone really has pretty bad insomnia, passion flower is going to be the strongest product that you’ll probably be using in the natural realm.

DEBRA: I was taking passion flower. You gave me some passion flower and it worked very, very well. And then there was a day – I took it for about a month or so. I still have a bottle of passion flower in my nightstand.

After about a month, I thought, “Well, let me just see what happens without it.” And since then, I just haven’t even needed to take it because I still get my seven to eight hours of sleep every night. It got me through a period of time when I wasn’t sleeping very well. And then I know that I have it right there in my nightstand. If I’m not sleeping, I can just take some.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah. That’s the best way to use that. I mean, somebody that has chronic insomnia and they’re not responding – and you’re on a few supplements too that we were just balancing the chemistry of the body. So the sleep disturbance would eventually go away. That’s what we would expect. But the good part is that we’re looking at trying to use the chemistry of the body and what we know about pharmacology to use these products in a responsible manner so that you’re not having these tolerance and dependence and these addiction properties.

And so passion flower is really a liberating product because you can use it for a certain period of time and like in your situation, sleep eventually started to come on a normal cycle and was much more reproducible and much more serene so to speak. You got better sleep, so you didn’t need it anymore, whereas if you had gone to the doctor and he had given you a benzodiazepine, you wouldn’t be able to stop it.

And that’s the beauty of using herbal products that work in a pharmacological basis. When you decide to target things based on the receptor on the brain and you’re trying to get a therapeutic outcome using the drugs, you might get an outcome, but you’re also going to have a negative outcome in the fact that you’re eventually going to need it to sleep every single night. And that’s not what we want for people. We want people to be able to make a choice.

DEBRA: Right, right. Absolutely.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So also too, there’s a product called Perfect Sleep that I like a lot. It’s a liquid tincture. So sometimes, people don’t want to swallow a capsule, they want to hold it underneath their tongue. That’s by DesBio. That works really, really well.

And that has some things that also help our hormones as well especially if someone has menopausal issues or so forth or depression, it has some other serotonergic activity as well. It might help for the person that maybe has sleep disturbances as a result of depression. So that product works really well.

There’s a homeopathic product (especially for children and for adults too). It’s called Neurexan. It’s from Heel. It’s a German company. Neurexan has a lot of data behind it. And what’s nice about Neurexan, it says clearly in the label it’s for overactive minds.

It really probably can be used in tandem with the Pro DHA for people that are having this obsessive thinking, worrying about the day, all these pressures that are on people today. The idea that we have to just fall into bed and turn everything off is very difficult for most people. They really can’t do it. So that’s a really good tool.
I want to mention one more thing and we’re going to talk a little bit more some of the natural stuff quickly. But there’s a higher incidence with elderly people using prescription for sleeping, hypnotics that they have a higher co-morbidity and mortality. They have a higher chance for a severe fall or fracture. And when we know when elderly people have fall and fractures, there’s a lot of co-morbidities that is caused, problems that all of a sudden, they end up with an infection, they’re in rehab, they’re not doing well and then they die.

So if you’re young or even if you’re older, if you want to try and preserve your health and your quality of life, reaching for the prescription hypnotics first before you tried some of the natural products and used the correct dose – because sometimes people, I’ll say, “Try this passion flower” and they’ll say, “Well, I’ve tried that, it didn’t work.” Well, it depends what product you’re using, what dose you’re using. And Debra, that’s really what it’s about. I select that for you for free. I tell you what to take. You’re not just going to randomly grab something.

DEBRA: No. I really want to really emphasize this point because you can go to a natural food store and look on the shelf and buy passion flower or whatever, but the difference is Pamela understands about dose because she’s a trained pharmacist and she has all these decades of experience. And so she can tell you exactly how much to take. She understands exactly how dosing works in a way that we who are not trained don’t understand this at all.

You can’t just look on the back of a bottle and say, “Take one pill.” She knows exactly how much you should take, she compare you with exactly the right product. And the products that she carries in her pharmacy are products that she personally has been using with her clients for years and she knows what works and what doesn’t work. She can help you make that decision instead of spending hundreds of dollars on products that you won’t know whether they work or not just because you’re trying them because you read them on a magazine article.

She really will give you a very precise recommendation based on her knowledge and experience. That’s one of the reasons why she’s just so incredible.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. And that’s important to realize. I really respect people’s time and money…

DEBRA: And she really does.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I really want the best for everybody. It’s not about, “Okay, I want to mail you something.” It’s not about that. The things that I suggest like the passion flower product that I ended up deciding on ultimately, I probably used five different ones with different people and I just kind of decided to looking at what is actually in there, how it’s standardized, how many milligrams, what’s actually working as far as feedback.

I’ve been doing this long enough. I know if people are coming back and saying, “It’s not working,” a particular product, “I just don’t want to use it anymore,” I move on to something else. There’s a lot of products that are very popular, that there’s a lot of advertising around, but I found that they just don’t work very well for people and they’re expensive and I just don’t carry them here.

So it’s really about selecting something that’s appropriate for the person. Especially if they’re drug naïve or not drug naïve and they haven’t had anxiolytic prescriptions, but especially the person that’s tittering on the edge and needing to have prescription therapy and the doctor or the practitioner is pushing for it, you really need to look and see if there’s some other things you can do instead.

And this encompasses not just the sleep that we’re talking today, but your blood pressure, your cholesterol, all these different things. Depression, anxiety, ADD, ADDHD, OCD, all these things can be helped very effectively with the right supplements, the right dose and just a few simple things.

DEBRA: Yes, they can. Now, we only have less than a minute actually, so I just want to slip one more thing in here and that is to say that being a registered pharmacist, Pamela can order and sell natural supplements at professional prescription grade that they cannot sell in the natural food store.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: And so you’re getting a completely different kind of supplement when you go to her than if you’ve been in a natural food store.
Okay, so we’ve got 15 seconds left, so give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, yes. It’s 727-442-4955 and as I’ve said previously, let me help you with any of your questions. I would be glad to answer those. I’m here full service for you.

DEBRA: Okay, great. And Pamela will be onagain in two weeks and every two weeks after that for an undetermined period of time. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

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