Dr. Mazlen
We have an exciting guest today, Dr. Dennis Gersten. Dr. Gersten is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He practices psychiatry and metabolic medicine in Solana Beach, California and there he specializes in treating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in a variety of ways, but importantly, one of the ones he wants to concentrate or focus on today is the use of amino acids. He's also the author of a book "Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind", a spiritual program for mental fitness which is published by Random House. Let's go right now to Solana Beach, California. Welcome to our guest, Dr. Dennis J. Gersten.

Dr. Gersten
Dr. Mazlen, thank you so much.

Dr. Mazlen
Dr. Gersten, good morning and welcome to our show. Thanks for getting up early out there. I introduced you but I'd like you to give our audience some idea of how you got into treating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. What brought you into this?

Dr. Gersten
Well, I was trained as a traditional psychiatrist who saw basically psychiatric problems and did not deal much with medical problems until October of 1984 when I came down with pneumonia and when the pneumonia was essentially cured, I was not. I later found out, years later, that I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. So I was one of those early people who had that kind of experience that feels like you are losing your mind which is part of what the book is about, that I didn't know what it was and I didn't get better for years and years and years, so I began the search that many people listening to the show begin on their own, which is that they discover that their traditional medical doctor cannot help them very much so they become experts in the world's health care system. And that's what I did.

Dr. Mazlen
Well, that's certainly an interesting way to get involved and since you've gotten involved there are a number of issues and things that we want to talk to you about. You're treating patients in a way which might be construed as alternative when it comes to imagery as well. I notice from your material that you submitted that you do some imagery techniques, you do a variety of things, but you focus on an area which is metabolic which is the aspect of amino acids. What were some of your findings with regards to amino acids and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

Dr. Gersten
Well, I stumbled across a lab called Atron Labs in about 1982. It was headed up by a fellow named Don Tyson who is an amazing wealth of information about amino acids. So I actually had been treating my patients with amino acids years before I treated myself and I watched myself not getting better from this approach and that approach, from deep constitutional homeopathy to a whole variety of nutritional approaches and finally I said to myself, and this was clear into 1989, I said to myself, "You better start treating yourself the way you've been treating your patients for years." Now the amino acid approach... Sometimes I have a hard time explaining to people the power of the approach, but basically, there are 22 amino acids and they are the building blocks for the 40,000 plus proteins in our bodies. So that means, for example, with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a great many symptoms in your body are going to be metabolically completely out of whack and you've already discussed some of the symptoms and frankly, just to hear them again is terrible. It's quite a reminder, oh my God, this is such a terrible illness!

But there's going to be deficiencies, as you know, in terms of brain chemistry, that in terms of amino acid testing is going to show up in the precursors to norepinephrine, serotonin, etc. So, you'll find people with Chronic Fatigue who are deficient in tyrosine or tryptophan on a regular basis. The other important thing that I've seen over these many years is Chronic Fatigue is a multi-system failure. So some people focus on, for example, limbic system encephalopathy. What I've found is clearly, you have central nervous system problems, you have immune system problems, you frequently have GI tract problems and you have endocrine problems, problems with the adrenal, pancreas, thyroid and pituitary. So, I can't advise someone, for example, over the phone, and say "You have Chronic Fatigue, here is a package I will give you." I need to test somebody, because the testing is so complex it needs to be analyzed very, very carefully. And then I put together a program which is highly targeted and it may be an awful lot of supplements. People may be taking, you know, 10 different kinds of amino acids adjusted in correct ratios. So, you're not going to find two patients that are going to require the exact same thing.

Dr. Mazlen
Well, that fits in with what I've seen over 20 some odd years which is that all the cases of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are biologically individualistic, so your approach fits the schema that I have seen over these many years. You mentioned in some material that was on the Internet or in email that the main most commonly deficient amino acids were as you said the phenylalanine, tryptophan and tyrosine, all of which are involved in energizing the brain and the central nervous system. If you treat somebody with amino acids, you replace these things. Assuming that they are a responder, how long does it take usually for them to respond, more or less?

Dr. Gersten
Well, I'll tell you this. A lot of people will feel results in three days. In terms of major results, 30 days and that's not an exaggeration and over a period of three months you begin to see very serious metabolic shifts. After 6 months I retest people. At that point they are going to be improved in so many areas that I can decrease the amount of amino acids that they're on.

Dr. Mazlen
So, actually, it helps them financially also, because they can take less. One of the things we are going to talk about after the break in a few minutes, I'd like you to compose a few theories as to why Chronic Fatigue patients are so deficient in amino acids. After all they don't all have eating disorders, they're certainly not all anorexics, they're not all bulemics, so you know, a question would arise from a scientific standpoint as to what might be going on. We're going to talk about that just shortly after the break. I wanted to ask you also when we get back and we start to talk about things in the second half of the show, a little bit about the imagery techniques and whether or not they're also effective.

Dennis, let me go right to what we were talking about before. Maybe you have a theory as to how this comes about.

Dr. Gersten
Yes, absolutely, will it be okay if I gave the 800 number regarding my book just briefly.

Dr. Mazlen
Surely.

Dr. Gersten
The 800 number is 546-6707 and that's where people can pick up the book "Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind" and the book covers so much of the mental and spiritual aspects of this illness. You know, how to deal with it. Obviously, you have a lot of people that are simply not cured. And so you need to work on your belief systems. You need to tap into your spirituality. You need to find whatever it is that brings you a sense of hope and strength to get through what is a pretty devastating change in your life, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Dr. Mazlen
I certainly second what you say in every way. And hopefully, maybe later on I'll have a chance to read the book and we can do a show later on in the spring about more of the details and I would welcome that. What about this theory that you have about the causation? Why are they so deficient?

Dr. Gersten
Well, the causation to me, again, it seems pretty obvious that Chronic Fatigue is what we doctors call the final common pathway. And you can get to that pathway through so many directions. You can get there starting with a major infection as I had, you can get there through environmental toxins, you can get there because the soil has been leeched of its nutrients since 1936. You know the US government has known since 1936 that the soil must be replenished of its nutrients, especially its nutrients every three years. So, we're lacking in those areas. I personally had an additional stress which was that I was on high doses of prednisone for corneal transplants, I had two corneal transplants, and we know that prednisone just wipes your immune system. I personally had some of those other strange associations. For example, there is an association of people who have cats with upper respiratory tract infections. Well, there's a higher incidence of people with cats with those chronic infections that have CFS, much more so than the average population. Then you have emotional stress, which comes in two forms. You can have either severe acute stress, just overwhelming acute stress or and this is something that I've seen since the beginning of recognizing this illness, people who were abused as children are far more prone to developing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Dr. Mazlen
That's fascinating. Do you have some data on that you can share with me after the show.

Dr. Gersten
I don't have data. It's just something that you know and I know. I have a theory about it which is pretty simple which is the early years of life when you have normal parental bonding, that love is both psychological and physiological. When you have severe abuse or neglect, and they both work the same way, you have a fracture in that trust and in that love and there's something that kind of claws away inside and it begins to erode the immune system, I believe, over a period of 20 or 30 years.

Dr. Mazlen
I certainly believe that. I used to be a consultant to a major psychiatric hospital for eating disorders and I used to make inpatient rounds with anorexics, bulemics and obsessive overeaters and there's no doubt that the immune system suffers under the kind of severe stress of childhood abuse, whether its emotional abuse, physical or sexual. You're right on to something there I'm sure. We need to talk about it more. What about doing some imaging with patients? Does that help to some degree?

Dr. Gersten
Well, yes, in terms of my protocol, in terms of mind-body technologies. Number 1, I have people find out how their mind actually works, how many thoughts they run per day and the average person runs about 15,000 thoughts per day in which at least half of those are negative. And we know that our thoughts turn into our emotions and our emotions turn into physiology. So, my starting point is to illustrate to people how the mind works, not in a Freudian sense, much more an Eastern sense. I have people actually count their thoughts over a 30 second period and then multiply it out and then figure out in a given day how many thoughts they're having. I then encourage meditation as a starting point and I find mantra meditation is the easiest and most powerful, so every patient who comes into my office will come up with their own mantra which basically will always come out as their belief system, not my belief system.

Dr. Mazlen
You allow them the choice.

Dr. Gersten
It comes out as their religion and spiritual traditon. Number 1, the mind has to be slowed down, you know you need to start to have peace of mind through some form of meditation the analogy I like to use is that the mind is like a garden. Meditation is weeding the garden and once the garden is weeded, then you want to begin mental imagery, which is planting the proper seeds in that garden.

Dr. Mazlen
Do you go into that in the book?

Dr. Gersten
Yes, very much so.

Dr. Mazlen
So, for members of our listening audience, since the book is published by a major publishing house it will be available to them in most major book stores or they can order it.

Dr. Gersten
Right, I would say the order of importance: number 1; mantra meditation, number 2; a whole host of stress reduction imagery techniques, number 3; I developed a pain control imagery technique years ago which is very powerful, it drops pain by about 40 percent in about 5 minutes and this is something when you learn it you do it throughout the day as pain arises, because again that's another major problem.

Dr. Mazlen
Pain is a major stressor for patients.

Dr. Gersten
It's a major stressor. And then the deepest imagery work is what are called symbolic imageries. And those are the ones, they're not canned, they're not formula. They're the kind where I would say to someone, you know, get in touch with everything that Chronic Fatigue is to you, what your thoughts are, what your body feels like and allow an image to emerge that represents Chronic Fatigue and that symbol can be anything in the world. It can be alive, not alive. It can be a person, an animal, an object and then you actually enter into kind of a dialog with that symbol. And that gets so deep it transcends 10 years of psychoanalysis literally.

Dr. Mazlen
Well, that's certainly an advantage if that can be done. We're going to head for another break in a minute or two and I just want to say that when we come back I'd like you to have a number for the listening audience where they can contact you in regard to your therapeutic approaches such as the amino acid therapy. Your information is a treasure house and we obviously can't cover it in one show. I'm going to invite you on the air to join with us again, as I said, I'm going to read the book and I'm going to make sure I'm prepared to go into more of the details when we get back on the air.

Dennis what about a number for getting information on the amino acid therapy?

Dr. Gersten
My office number is 619-794-8814 and the number for the book is 800-546-6707.

Dr. Mazlen
Also, obviously, we're going to have Dr. Gersten on as a guest, hopefully, again in the spring because he has a great deal to say and there are many things to learn from his experience. Just one final thing, in terms of treating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you did mention though when I spoke to you privately that most patients are somewhat an individual and they respond differently. Not everybody responds to the amino acid therapy as well as others.

Dr. Gersten
That's correct. The one reasonable study that's been done with a control study with 50 people showed 75% were either cured or had a dramatic response, 15% had a moderate response and the remaining 10% had little or no relief. I would say the biggest problem I have is the people who are chemically sensitive, you know the people who you give them a teeny, teeny amount of any nutritional supplement and they react to it. Those are the ones that are really tough, those with environmental illnesses and severe chemical sensitivities.

Dr. Mazlen
So, they obviously fall into the 10% failure group because they just can't really complete their therapy as desired.

Dr. Gersten
Right, they are a very tough group.

Dr. Mazlen
It's very interesting. I want to ask you something. In your experience since you've been following this disease so long, are you seeing what would seem to you to be more cases of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome outside of the fact that more people are aware of it?

Dr. Gersten
Yes, I would say I am seeing more cases of it and I think there's a lot, as Dr. Majid Ali, who's in your neck of the woods there, who wrote the Canary and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and he feels like we're approaching an epidemic in the next century. And so what I see, of course, is a lot of people with full-blown Chronic Fatigue and I see a lot of people who are right on the edge and if they continue down their current path they're going to have Chronic Fatigue. There are an awful lot of folks like that.

Dr. Mazlen
Well, that fits in with what I've been also seeing because I have been treating the disease since the early 1980's. I think there's a problem accruing with their immune systems. So, your work is extremely important for us to follow.

Transcribed by Carolyn Viviani carolynv@inx.net