There’s a new breed of medical practitioners using integrative medicine to help patients overcome long-term medical conditions and chronic diseases. Proper hydration has become a fundamental component for many integrative medicine docs, including Dr. Adam C. Miller of Arise MD.
Dr. Miller is a rare combination of knowledge and experience. A dentist, cosmetic surgeon, anesthesiologist, and sleep specialist, Dr. Miller says he entered the world of integrative medicine by accident. “I became an integrative doctor without actually realizing that it was a type of doctoring. I was blending my surgical, dental and anesthesia background with traditional Chinese Medicine during my six years in Asia,” Miller said.
A surgical subspecialist and facial surgeon by training from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Dr. Miller, had the opportunity to work internationally with the French national fencing team early on in his career. Miller’s work ultimately led him to Singapore and Malaysia, where he developed a medical tourism program around anti-aging medicine.
But it wasn’t until Dr. Miller himself started suffering from intestinal parasites, adrenal fatigue, dental breakdown, pericarditis, and irritable bowel that the importance of taking an integrative approach became essential to his perspective as a practitioner. “The more I learned about integrative care, the more I realized that our medical system in the West is sub-specialized to a fault and has become too myopic. The cadre of specialists within the hospital-based model didn’t work for me. To get well, I had to use an integrative approach,” Miller said.
After his recovery, Dr. Miller realized there was a need to share his success with integrative medicine with other patients in the United States. Today Dr. Miller’s practice focuses on a myriad of treatment strategies such as how cellular nutrition, dental and gut health, stress management, hormonal balancing, sleep and circadian rhythms impact your health and help you win the aging game. In an exclusive interview with Hydrus Edge, Dr. Miller talked about the role hydration plays in helping our cells operate more efficiently.
Dr. Adam Miller talking about health, rest and integrative medicine on NBC’s The Morning Blend.
Cellular Nutrition: Why Cellular Nutrition Is Essential
The human body, at its most fundamental level, is composed of trillions of cells. And if your cells don’t get proper nutrients, they can wreak havoc on your entire system. Your cells are responsible for virtually every process that takes place inside of your body. Cellular processes such as ATP generation (how cells create energy) to DNA replication are all managed by biochemical reactions inside your cells.
According to Dr. Miller, if your cells become depleted of the proper nutrients, minerals, and water, they will fail to perform these functions and ultimately lead to damaged cells. When your cells are damaged, they can cause serious illnesses such as cancer. It’s critical therefore to have robust cellular-level nutrition to feed energy production and the manufacturing of enzymes in cells. But, like a busy Amazon distribution center, the working environment within the cell is equally important and often overlooked.
Miller says that the body will go to great lengths at a cellular level to maintain three parameters: alkalinity, temperature, and hydration.
Your cells’ organelles must maintain appropriate pH levels to function optimally and the body is continuously working to preserve their acid-base balance. Dr. Miller says that the optimal pH levels for cells are between 6.8 to 7.2. But due to stress, sleep-deprivation and a lack of minerals like Magnesium, caused by a deficiency in our soil, your cells are unable to maintain desired pH levels. The body then reaches into your bones and leaches out minerals to buffer the system, with the obvious trade-off being osteopenia or osteoporosis.
A second critical parameter for cellular health is your body temperature. Miller said your body has sophisticated mechanisms for maintainingn a stable body temperature. Whether through sweating or the release of antidiuretic hormone, (or other mechanisms) your body’s temperature varies only 0.5 C between morning and night. As vital as pH balance and temperature are to cellular health, it may be hydration that is actually the greatest determinant of whether your cells thrive or die.
Hydration & Cell Nutrition
Dr. Miller says that hydration is essential to cell health because it’s within the cytoplasmic liquid that many reactions occur. “Your cells have a fluid environment that needs to transfer a lot of chemicals in and out, such as getting rid of harmful toxins and bringing in minerals and cofactors that drive a citric acid cycle to produce cellular energy. If you’re dehydrated, your cells become raisins. When they are raisins, they don’t have the optimal fluid exchange of minerals and toxins, and the ability to create the energy currency ATP is inhibited. To put it simply, whether it’s a skin cell or myocyte (cells that makeup muscle fibers), or the periodontal cells around your teeth, you want plump cells. You want to be a grape, not a raisin,” Miller says.
Dr. Miller says that hydration can also impact cellular DNA and protein synthesis. “Cellular DNA needs to have a fluid and open environment to unravel and trigger the synthesis of proteins that then get shuttled out of the cell. If you don’t have hydration, all that cellular machinery gets bunched up and doesn’t work as well,” Miller says.
Dr. Adam MIller of Arise MD uses the ” treat” “optimize” & prevent” paradigm to deliver top health and results to clients.
Electrolytes Absorb & Move Water Across Gradients
According to Dr.Miller, it’s not just about drinking more water. You need to make sure that the proper minerals or electrolytes are also available because water moves across concentration gradients.
“To go a layer deeper, fluid and water move through concentration gradients. You need minerals like sodium, potassium and magnesium inside the cell to draw water from the bloodstream and extracellular spaces into the cell. Minerals inside the cell create what I call the dry sponge phenomenon. That sponge won’t stay dry for long. But, just widening the river or increasing water volume alone isn’t necessarily going to be enough,” he added, “I talk to patients all the time who say they are drinking tons of water and it seems to just be passing through them.”
While Dr. Miller says that there’s no gold standard for measuring hydration in the body; many of his patients felt an immediate and notable difference after taking Hydrus. “One of the remarkable things I found early on about Hydrus is that my patients while hydrating the same amount, they weren’t getting up to go to pee as often during the day and at night. I’m always looking for functional indications that we are achieving intracellular hydration. I think this is one such indication.” Miller said.
Dr. Miller says that modern medical approaches often undervalue the role of hydration in health. For many of his patients adding Hydrus to their daily hydration routine has helped them to manage chronic disease and achieve better health outcomes.
“I was told in medical school that 80% of seasonal flu cases are triggered by dehydration. In other words, the immune system isn’t as effective in a dehydrated state. When you consider that the human body is two-thirds water this shouldn’t surprise us. We become susceptible hosts in a dry state. The question has been, ‘are we getting adequate hydration?’ Hydrus is helping me answer the more important question, ‘are we getting adequate hydration where the cells need it most?’ I think, with Hydrus, we are finally starting to address the second question.
Hydrus is formulated to deliver the electrolytes your body needs more effectively than drinking water alone.
Unlike other hydration products, Hydrus contains Nanosomes™ or tiny nano-scale hollow sphere-shaped molecules made of phospholipids that encapsulate electrolytes and water. The phospholipids are similar to those naturally found in your cells’ membranes.
Compared to other hydration drinks, studies show that the science in Hydrus delivers about 50% greater water and electrolyte absorption than traditional sugar-electrolyte drinks.
