Episode #39: Interview with Mackay Rippey
Is the secret to alleviating back pain hiding in your diet? Discover how nutrition can impact your spine in our latest episode. 🍽️🌿🔍
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Show Notes:
Part 1:
Introduction of MacKay Rippey, an experienced acupuncturist and medical advisor.
Rippey's journey into acupuncture, influenced by family health experiences.
Discussion on the Taoist principles underlying acupuncture.
Explanation of how acupuncture addresses back pain through a holistic approach.
Part 2:
Exploration of the ileocecal valve's role in digestion and back pain.
Stress as a key factor in digestive issues leading to chronic back pain.
The importance of managing stress and improving digestion.
Negative impacts of long-term use of acid-reducing medications.
The complexity of the digestive system and the importance of a healthy microbiome.
Part 3:
Discussion on the harmful effects of aspartame and its impact on gut health.
The significance of a balanced microbiome in overall health and back pain.
Food sensitivities and their prolonged inflammatory response.
The importance of balancing calcium and magnesium in the body.
Personal anecdote illustrating the unique biochemical needs of individuals.
Recommendations for magnesium supplementation for back pain relief.
Key Takeaways:
Holistic Approach to Health: The podcast highlights the interconnectedness of bodily systems, emphasizing the importance of a holistic approach to health. Acupuncture, as explained by Rippey, is more than just pain relief; it's about aligning the body with natural laws for overall well-being.
Digestive Health and Back Pain: A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the connection between digestive health, particularly the ileocecal valve, and chronic back pain. Stress and poor dietary habits can lead to digestive issues, which, in turn, can cause or exacerbate back pain.
Importance of Nutrition: Rippey underscores the critical role of proper nutrition in managing back pain. He discusses how certain deficiencies or imbalances, particularly in magnesium and calcium, can directly impact muscle health and pain.
Individual Biochemical Needs: A key takeaway from Rippey’s personal experiences is the recognition of individual biochemical needs. This highlights the importance of personalized approaches in treating health issues like back pain.
Magnesium Supplementation: For back pain specifically, magnesium supplementation is recommended, with an emphasis on forms that are better absorbed by the body, like magnesium citrate. Topical magnesium applications are also suggested for targeted muscle relief.
Transcript:
Welcome back to Better Than A Pill. Today, I am so excited to have MacKay Rippey here with us
as a guest and MacKay has been practicing acupuncture for more than 30 years. He is the chief
formulator at Battaglia Life. He is a medical advisor at Zona Health Incorporated and the co
founder of Beyond Protocols, which is an education platform for functional medicine
practitioners.
So welcome MacKay.
Thank you for that warm introduction. You know how you wake up in the morning and you have
the feeling sometimes it's like, you know, I'm, I'm just not getting enough done . And then I
listened to that and said, wait a minute. I actually do a few things from that.
And then yeah, and not just, uh, a few things you do quite a bit and, you know, and, and I'm
excited to hear a little bit more about that. And you know, just for everybody listening today,
we're gonna be talking about nutrition and back pain. And we're going to be actually diving into
back pain from a different angle, a more nutritional and holistic point of view. So, you know, tell
us a little bit about all the different hats that you wear and how you got involved in your work,
MacKay.
Oh my goodness. So I've been doing acupuncture for more than 30 years, which means I'm
older than 30. And you actually got a really early start. I was the youngest person in my class.
And that was back in the time when you would say the word acupuncture and some people
didn't know what it was. That's how long I've been doing this.
And it really is divine intervention, grace, you know, a little angel tapped me on the shoulder. I
was reading about acupuncture. My dad was a patient. He had some literature around the
house. And one afternoon when I was home from college, I had a little conversation with myself
that went something like, you know, you could do this.
And then answered, yeah, I'm going to do this. It was like, okay, now what? So that was, that
was the thought process. I wanted to be an acupuncturist. So it wasn't any great weighing, you
know, pros and cons, you know, can you make money doing this? Any of that stuff? It's just like,
I'm going to go study with these people.
Because it was so fascinating. It was such a different way of looking at the body. And my mom
had serious mental health issues and the doctors kept saying, oh, yeah, we're just going to
bounce a few neurochemicals and she'll be fine. Uh, they never balanced the neurochemicals
and she was never fine. And so I was always looking for, there's gotta be more to this medicine
thing than the doctors, not, not letting on to, but that they just don't know about or not paying
attention to.
And so the acupuncture conversation is basically a Taoist. I went to a Taoist school and Taoism
roughly translates as the way. And the idea is if you stay on the path, if you follow natural laws,
it's If you listen to your mom and your grandma, theoretically, you won't get sick, right? And the
more you deviate, the more you don't live well, the more you don't take care of yourself, the
more you don't honor your body and your mind and your spirit and the people around you, the
more you, you fall off the path and the more work it takes to get back on it and back to health.
That's awesome. You know, yeah, there's, uh, I'm sure so much involved just with, with the
acupuncture and, you know, in your experience working as an acupuncturist, were you treating
people with back pain? All the, it started out that way and it continues to this day. Your back pain
is one of those conditions that we all have from time to time.
And then for one reason or another, some of us, it sticks around, you know, it never resolves. So
we've all almost always had a pretty serious back pain episode, but again, it's, I get the people,
well, I get the people down the line. It's like they go to their doctor, they go see the chiropractor,
the massage therapist, the nutritionist, plus a couple other people.
And then they say, Oh, have you tried acupuncture? Yeah, but I don't like needles. And then
they finally get over that fear and then finally come and see me. But yeah, so it's, it's just, it's
everywhere and it might be one of those conditions where One of the things, let me backup half
a second here. So one of the things we talked about in acupuncture school, my training is that a
symptom is the body's conversation with you.
It's like a dog. A dog can only express itself in so many ways, right? It's going to chew something
up. It's going to make a mess on the carpet, or it's going to bark a lot, right? That's, you know,
that's about all it can do. And so your body only has a few signals too. One of them is pain. One
of them is pain.
And the back is such a central core area of the body that supports us. And when we get run
down, when we haven't been listening to ourselves for a while, when we've been stressed out
and not really taking care of ourselves, then the back is one of those things that begins to give
out on us and send signals.
And we ignore it. We take a Tylenol, we take an aspirin, but, and I'm sure as you talk about on
your show many, many times, that's like covering up the fire alarm, right? The smoke detector,
it's not curing the problem. Right. There are a couple of ways to cook. One is not to smoke a lot.
The other is like, I like to unplug the fire detector for a while.
Yeah. Oh yeah. I like how you put that. So that's, you know, so that, that would encourage
people. That's where I start with people. It's like, what is, what else is going on in your life? That
this back pain started sometimes back pain, just back pain, right? Somebody go, I had a young
woman come in and she had back pain and that's because she carried like 50 giant paving
stones in her garden.
And just, she just overdid it. Right. She was perfectly healthy, you know, went to Pilates, took
care of her nutrition, you know, took care of her mental and emotional life. She just overdid it.
Sometimes it is just. You know, what did Freud say? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but some,
but oftentimes I'll get the other end of the spectrum.
Like I had this other woman many, many years ago and she's, she taught me a huge lesson
about stress. So I always asked, you know, when I was younger, you know, tell me, do you have
stress in your life? You know, how's, how's things going? Oh, I'm fine. So we dive deeper into
her story and it turns out, and this is no joke, I'm not making this up.
This woman's 14 year old daughter was pregnant. Her 19 year old son was just getting out of
jail. She just put her parents into a nursing home. All within like three months. And I paused
there and said, I thought you said you didn't have any stress in your life. And she said, Oh no, I,
I just think I'm dealing with it fairly well.
And it's that, you know, the old saw the frog in the boiling pot of water, we don't know. And we
make adjustments and we make excuses and we go on and on and on. And at some point our
body shuts us down. And one of the ways it does that is to your back goes out on you. Yeah, no.
And I love the topic of back pain because I see that a lot.
And I think we, we talked about this before, is that, you know, like About 80 percent of the
population will respond to exercises and, and that's helpful. But then there's that 20 percent that
don't, right. And this is kind of where, where you're, you're coming in here from the standpoint of
what else can we do from a nutritional standpoint and, or, you know, also through acupuncture.
So I'm curious what, when you have clients that don't respond to exercise, what then do you
look for? So a lot of times, a lot of people are responding to, to the exercises. It's just, um, it has
to be implemented in a gradual fashion. But the outliers, the people that aren't, I would say
typically they are seeking out, um, additional treatment, possibly through services.
a lot of the time. Um, so they, so they may need additional, um, additional work there. Um, and
you know, so we're going about it at the angle of building up stabilization, um, working on
mobility, working on getting a strong pelvic floor, all the things that we need. Adding in fascia
release, um, and, and whole body strength, all those things.
So there's, there's many pillars to that. And so a lot of times, like you're seeing it, that can be all
people need, but the additional service, like, and, you know, I never had really thought about
acupuncture, you know, so, so that is something. New to me and understanding exactly how
that works. Right. I know a little bit about it.
Um, I, but I would love to know more from, from that standpoint when it comes to energy and
then, you know, we all know nutrition, good nutrition, having nutrition is good for our whole body.
So why wouldn't apply to the back, but I'd love to, to understand more specifically how that could
help. Perfect.
That's such a lovely setup question. Thank you so much. So I want to take you through
acupuncture and just, we'll just skip over the surface of it. We don't have time to dive in deeply
and then we'll get into some of the nutrition part of things. And then maybe we'll tie it off in a
nice, nice little bow at the end.
We'll see how, see how good we are. Excellent. One thing that's super interesting about
acupuncture and nutrition is that the Chinese Put together nutrition, our ability to, uh, feed
ourselves, to break down food, to absorb it and to transport it throughout the body and muscles.
So when you do have a deficit of nutrition, one of the areas that can show up is in muscle
strength.
And of course, back core muscles are such big muscles. There are some of the first to really
begin to fatigue and, and show a lack of a lack of care. And that's why, what is it that the number
at some point, 70, 80 percent of Americans will have had back pain in the past year kind of
thing. That's why those numbers are so very, very large.
The other thing that's interesting is there's an actual electric charge in tissues. So in the
muscles, in your liver, in your brain, and that's why you could do brain measurements and heart
measurements. Cause there's an electric pulse going through there, but the other organs also
have charges. We just don't measure them as much.
And. A healthy tissue has about 25 millivolts going through it, let's say a muscle, as it gets
injured, overused, lack of, you know, maybe it's spasmed up, you're doing a fascial release to try
and release it to get the blood flow to the area, and that electrical charge starts going down, and
then maybe becomes susceptible to an injury, so now you've got an injury on top of this
deficiency that was there, now to It's funny.
I'm working on my refrigerator right now to try and figure it out. There's this thing called a
capacitor that kind of holds a charge that helps the refrigerator get started. When you hear that
big roar in the beginning, when the, when the refrigerator gets going, that's the compressor
getting going. So, the muscles need an extra burst of charge.
They need about double the charge. If the body can't produce that, it's never going to heal. So
now you've got some tissue and maybe you've done some strengthening around the original
damage of the muscle. You know, maybe you've got to where you can kind of normally function,
but you haven't healed yet.
So you're carrying around this, this damage that's been done. And that's where acupuncture
comes in, it is like you can direct a charge. Physically to the area that needs it. And then trigger.
Trigger healing. So acupuncture isn't healing anything. But it's that capacitor kind of function
where it's given that extra boost of charge that the body can then switch into healing mode and
begin to recover.
So that's what happens when people. See us. I see this with young athletes a lot. It's like, they'll
have an injury. They'll get really, really strong all around the injury. And then they'll go to the first
day of practice or the first game of the year. We're by college here. So we have college athletes
and the injury will come back.
That's because it never healed. They got really strong around it. But that one specific move,
isolates that one specific muscle. You know, and that's why the story is like, yeah, I was, you
know, working all weekend. It was fine. I went to the office and dropped my cell phone and went
to pick it up and my back went out.
It's like the cell phone didn't break your back. It was everything that led up to it. So that's, that's
one thing that the acupuncture is doing is adding this charge specifically to the area that needs
it. So the healing can begin. So it's great. adjunct treatment to chiropractic, to massage, to
exercise, to when you have that situation where things aren't healing and there's nothing overtly
broken, right?
The doctors, if something's broken, you need to go see a doctor. But a lot of times there's, well,
we don't see anything. You know, have you tried Xanax? Oh, thank you. Right. We want to do it,
we want to do better than a pill. Yes, exactly. So that's, so that's the acupuncture and the, and
the digestion. Now, interestingly enough in the functional medicine world, and I don't know if
you've come across it, there's some physicians who think some functional docs who think a lot
of back pain is actual and ileocecal valve dysfunction.
Have you come across that? No. Mm-hmm. So the ileum, kind of the lair to simplify things,
oversimplifies things. The valve that connects the small intestine to the large intestine, they're
two different environments. You know, the large intestine is like your compost deep, right?
There's lots of bacteria. The whole microbiome thing, the small intestines, is a little cleaner than
that.
And it's the area in which. The body's absorbing a lot of nutrition before it gets, uh, down into the
large intestine. Those separate environments need to be kept separate. When that valve begins
to leak, a lot of times it'll leak because of stress. That's kind of the rest and digest. You know,
part of that is the valve's closed, the body does its thing in each area, and then it's able to pass
through.
When we're stressed, these valves tend to open up. And that's why when you're nervous,
sometimes you have to run to the bathroom. Right. Yes. Before you speak. Right. Before you go
out on a field. Before you, you know, run your half marathon. Before you, whatever it is, perform
in some way. It's like those valves are opening up.
From, from top to bottom. And sometimes it gets really bad, right? And you're getting nauseous
and things like that. But a lot of times it's just like, oops, I gotta go. That's stress. Now think of
what that's doing over time. If you're chronically stressed, like my female patient who had a
pregnant daughter and son coming out of prison and the parents going into the nursing home.
You extend that over time, these valves stay open. So now you get things like SIBO, right? You
get the bacteria, the yeast coming from the large intestine crawling up into the small intestine
because the door's not closed. The door's literally not closed. And then this starts causing
inflammation. And the inflammation occurs right around all those nerves going through the back.
So now you have a digestive issue that's causing back pain. And again, there's some functional
docs who think that a lot of back pain, chronic back pain, right? Not acute back pain, but chronic
back pain is this ileocecal valve dysfunction in which it's not closing completely. And there's
irritation there that needs to be taken care of.
So. Step number one, exercise, right? Reduce stress and get healthy and stronger with
exercise. And there's all the feel good hormones that happen with that. Number two is begin to
clean up your digestion. We have a digestive system. support supplement that I really like. I use
it myself. My daughter loves it. I can't get my wife to take it because she doesn't take anything.
Um, but my patients take it and it really helps, uh, settle and calm things down. And it works
from the top of the digestive system, all the way through into the large intestine. It can really, if
there's You know, I don't want to say if somebody's got colitis, severe colitis, they probably need
more, but if you have just minor chronic back pain and you've been dealing with for a year and
you're doing all the right things, it might be just one of these stress things that happened in the
past and think the inflammation didn't come down well enough, or that there is just some
ongoing stress that you need to work on, you know, with breathing exercises, again, with
exercise.
To, to bring it down. Yeah. So it's interesting listening to everything you just shared. It sounds
like, um, by cleaning up our digestion, um, that can have a profound impact on back pain based
on the dysfunction of what you, you know, that what the functional medicine doctors are finding
there between the small intestine and the low and the large intestine.
Correct. That's the primary focus. Yep. Um, and so. To clean up our digestive tract. So there are
ways to do that. And one would be, um, taking a supplement is what you're saying that can help
clear up the, the, the symptoms there. Is that correct? Yeah. And so, you want to do a couple of
things to help with inflammation throughout the digestive tract.
So number one is you want to be able to digest the food you're eating. So let's just leave aside,
you know, sensitivities. We'll get the gluten and dairy and things like that in a moment, but just,
let's just say you don't have any sensitivities and you know, your, your digestion as we age, and
as we get stressed out becomes weaker and weaker.
And that's just one of those facts. So we kind of need to recharge it. So sometimes we need a
little bit of help with enzymes to help break down the food that beats. So that's one of the first
things you can do, especially if you have chronic back pain, you can start with just a. Uh,
digestive enzyme to see if that begins to help.
And especially if they put you on Prilosec because you had some acid, some GERD, some acid
reflux. A, see if you can get off that as soon as you can, you know, responsibly, don't just go cold
turkey, talk and work with your doctor. But then if you can't, then you definitely want to be taking
in some additional enzymes to help break you down the food, break down the food.
Because of that. What the purple pill is doing is reducing your stomach's ability to produce
hydrochloric acid and break down the food. And that's, that's problematic if food isn't completely
broken down on the stomach and the Chinese talk about, it's the organ of rotting and ripening. If
the stomach doesn't do its job.
Oh, here's a fun fact. Do you know that your stomach can crack a Walnut? Oh, no way. Isn't that
crazy? No, that is crazy. Yeah. So when you're, you know, you're just, you're sitting there, you
know, after, you know, eating your, whatever that you ate breakfast, lunch, dinner, and just
sitting there relaxing your stomach's in there, like doing crunches.
So strong to, to literally grind down the food that you eat. So we don't think about that. So if it's
not able to do that job. Then, you know, then you have other problems. So the small intestines, a
little bit more of a delicate organ, not super delicate, but a little bit delicate. And it's where the
body absorbs everything that it can, but also it's where it has defenses and keeps things out.
So it has a little villain. It has a nice lining of mucus on it that just keeps everything clean. And if
this is all working properly, it's just this beautiful dance of. chemicals in your immune system,
you know, and that's where your body takes in things and says, Oh, yes, this is, you know, this is
a piece of pineapple.
This is, uh, uh, hamburger. This is, Oh no, this isn't natural. This is microplastic. This should not
be absorbed into our body, and passes it on down. So then once it gets most of it, we extract
what we can with a small intestine, then it goes into the large intestine and that's the whole
microbiome thing.
And that's, you know, if you're a gardener and you've ever composted anything, that's what's
happening inside your large intestine. And it's, we're just now beginning to understand what's
going on there. There's so many microbes down there. They're so interactive in a healthy gut,
there's hundreds of thousands of them in an unhealthy gut, it gets down into, you know, if you're
really bad off the single digits of the diversity of the different types of And, you know, every time
we take an antibiotic and.
that. And goodness knows, sometimes we really need them. But every time we take that hit or
every time we're taking food. This is an aside if you're drinking Diet Coke. Or just once. Flat out.
One of the reasons, there are lots of reasons. One of the reasons which I learned 30 years after
the fact, was to give me true confession time ready for my favorite snack, even after I was
trained as an acupuncturist.
Was a diet Coke and a bag of peanut M&Ms. Okay. So I had a high school lacrosse coach told
me, he said, look, what I heard him say is don't drink regular Coke, drink diet Coke. What he
was saying, if you have to drink soda, that's what he was saying. He's like, don't drink soda. But
if you have to. Get off the sugar.
So in high school, I switched over and I really liked the Bernie taste of Diet Coke. So I drank it
for years and years. And yes. Aspartame is a mild antibiotic. So every time I'm doing that it's
going down there and killing off the delicate gut microbes. And that has changed my health over
the years, without a doubt.
Um, including making, you know, keeping off weight a struggle now. And it was always really the
skinniest kid in the class. And no, I'm not right. A lot of that is, is, 30 years of drinking diet Coke,
which I thought was, well, it's not harming it. Right. In the early Atkin days, he's like, ah, it's fine.
It's not fine.
Uh, the aspartame is bad, bad news. So if, if you were on the fence about stopping, you know,
it's like, let me push you over. It's like, just get off it as soon as you can. It's. It's not good. So
anyway, back to the microbiome. So, and that's where I'm taking probiotics. That's where taking
prebiotics help right there.
And that's where in serious cases, they're doing, uh, fecal transplants. It's really, they're taking
out all the bad stuff and putting in somebody else's microbiome, hoping that that will change
your health. And there's some really interesting studies about that. They also began to run into
problems with it as well.
Cause you can transfer a disease as much as transfer health. So that's a little less excitement
than there was about that, I guess, 10 years ago. But so that, so that's kind of the trip through
the digestive system. And when any of those pieces aren't working well, that's where you get
this ileocecal valve.
Cause that's where any part of that, that's not working in harmony, the digestion gets, gets
inflamed. Down there, down there. And it can happen in other places too. So you have other
symptoms, but particularly down low where the small intestine meets the large intestine that can
cause back pain. Now, if you, if you have standing inflammation, right.
And you don't handle gluten well, you don't handle dairy well. You don't handle beans. Well, you
know, the list can go on, on eggs, nuts, you know, just depends on, on your system, your
immune system, what it's been attuned to and what, what you're struggling with. And the other
thing I'd like to say about that, sorry to jump in too much here.
Um, but we're on one of my soap boxes. Can you tell? You're fine. Go ahead. Go ahead. Is that,
let's say for example, you are gluten sensitive and you said, Oh, I just had a little bit, you know,
and you didn't have too many symptoms because you've been doing really well. So a couple of
things about that.
One is I like to tell my patients how much. If you've got a severe peanut allergy, how much
peanut dust do you need to have an allergic reaction? Like almost nothing. So it's not, if you're
gluten sensitive or dairy sensitive, it's not so much the amount. And yes, of course, it does
matter, but even a little bit can be a big insult.
And the other thing, it can take up to four weeks for things to calm back down again. After a
single cheat. So if you're cheating once a week, you're not, your, your system is never calming
down, you're inflamed from the inside out, and you're more likely to have things like chronic back
pain from this ileocecal valve problem.
Yeah, no, the ileocecal valve is very fascinating. It's the first time I've heard of it. So that's really
interesting to hear how that is correlated to the back pain. And definitely. Get it when it comes to,
it makes sense improving the digestion because of the level of inflammation in the microbiome
that can affect other areas of the body.
And I know that to be true, but it can affect the back obviously, right? And, and so, yeah, that
totally makes sense. And yeah, food sensitivities, all that. I, I get that a hundred percent. And I
know that a lot of people, even myself included, are dealing with that. And, um. And trying to
figure out our digestive systems.
And, you know, what, when it comes to like, is there anything nutritionally that you've seen that's
helpful, like specific foods or anything like that when it comes to treating back pain? I'm just
curious. So let me tell you a story. So I would, I would start with, uh, calcium and magnesium.
So at the same time.
And so here's the story. I was down in Florida. Uh, with the lacrosse team I was coaching at the
time. And helping out a lot of the young women that are having cramps, you know, we're coming
from the North. We're now in the South. So they're dehydrated, and they're just working harder.
And so they're having cramps.
So I'm recommending, you know, I'm like the witch doctor. Assistant coach was like, here, try
some magnesium. They're like, oh my goodness. This is amazing. And on the flight home, I get
a call from one of my daughters and she says, mommy was in the emergency room. It was like,
Oh no. And she was having back spasms.
It's like, okay. So on the way home, I stopped off and picked up some magnesium citrate and an
old fashioned laxative liquid magnesium. And come home. She said, yeah, you know, I went to
the ER last night. I'm feeling terrible. I've got these horrible back pains. It's kind of okay right
now. I didn't want to take anything till you came home.
So they gave her the standard cocktails of muscle relaxer and Tylenol and whatever else was in
there. And I was like, okay, here, you know, take this magnesium and everybody knows, I'm sure
all your listeners know, magnesium is the mineral that helps muscles relax a hundred percent. It
helps muscles relax.
They use it for heart attacks. I mean, to relax the heart muscle magnesium, that's what it does.
So I gave her a swig of the magnesium within 30 seconds. She was writhing in bed. With the
back spasm. And I'm like, Oh wow. These really are bad back spasms. You poured here, right?
You know, 10, 12 minutes, calm down.
Okay. This is just really bad here. Take another swig of magnesium. Yeah. You can imagine
what happened, right? We're, we're still married. She didn't kick me out after this. She had
another spasm within 30 seconds. It was clearly magnesium. So I'm racking my brain out.
Cause I had just spent two weeks passing out magnesium.
Like it was candy. And with miraculous results, like what's going on here. What's going on here?
So let me pause here and say magnesium for most people will help your back. Just we're, we're
all deficient in magnesium. We're just almost all of us, almost a hundred percent of us are
deficient in magnesium.
The muscles, your brain. I Need magnesium to calm down. Magnesium sits in one of the
calcium transporters. So calcium is a mineral that activates nerves, activates muscles, activates
any cell. And if the magnesium sits in this transporter, it blocks the calcium from coming in. So
that's one of the ways it works.
So you need enough magnesium to balance rest and activity. If you don't, you have problems.
Except for cases like my wife, some people are, we're all biochemically individuals. She needed
it, it turned out more, more calcium. So there's these funny cases where it's not so much that the
person is deficient in magnesium.
It's that the balance gets off and she has become deficient in calcium. So adding more
magnesium made them balance more. Now she wasn't frankly, like she wasn't having brittle
bones, anything like that, just in a functional way. So we went back, went back to the store, and
got some calcium chews. She took that, that ended all her cramps.
And after recovering from just the muscle soreness of having back cramps for a day, um, she
recovered. And so I really started looking into the balance between those two. So every once in
a while people need more calcium. And we've, we're starting to see more and more as dairy
becomes more of a problem for lots of different reasons.
People aren't eating as much. And we do have people who are calcium deficient or the
magnesium calcium balance is off like 90 percent of the people, magnesium. It's a wonderful
thing. It's still recommended to almost all of my patients, but every once in a while, It's, it's the
calcium, it's the calcium and it's invisible.
Yeah. That's interesting. And she, and she had to get tested to figure that out though. You know,
obviously well tested, uh, not clinically, but in, in, in real life. So we did, we didn't do any testing,
uh, just, just to be clear, but with hand or magnesium, she cramped canter calcium and she was
fine. The interesting little thing is, we're on a farm here a little.
This is a gentleman's hobby farm and my father in law keeps some cows here. He was milking
and, and we, so we had some raw milk around. Some pure healthy grass fed raw milk. And she
was drinking that interestingly enough. He had stopped milking like two or three days before she
had this spasm. So her body was at a point where it found a new set.
And she was like, yeah, we really like this nice, healthy load of calcium. So part of it was she
stopped a certain food and, and things changed. So sometimes, you know, sometimes it's the
smallest, it's the smallest little thing and food digestion, stress all play a big role in it. And I'd like
to add, exercise is critically important.
Most of us are weak, especially after COVID. We sat at our desks for three years. You know, it
wrecked us, wrecked their backs, then we started standing up and now our feet hurt. So, you
know, we all got weaker, so we all need to get stronger. However, if you, again, back to this
charge ideal, if you have a muscle that's injured to the point where it can't heal itself, you can try
and exercise it all you want.
It'll never recover. And that's where you get strong around an area, but then, you start having
these periodic back spasms. You know, the periodic like and periodic meaning once a year,
maybe twice a year, if you're unlucky, maybe even every other year, but that's where you've got
super strong all around this injured muscle, this injured tissue, but have never got to the core
and never.
And so that's where more like fascial release if it's a spasm to help get the blood flow into that
area can help, but sometimes even that's not enough and you really, you need to do something
like acupuncture, something more intense. Yeah, I know. Thank you for sharing that. And that's
where, so, so much information here.
So taking away like, yeah, so there are other things we can do if we're not getting, you know,
results from exercise, obviously for back pain. This has definitely been so much value that you
shared. And, you know, the electrical charges are fascinating because I've always wondered
how to do acupuncture. How does it help from a muscle standpoint?
So you're basically, Yeah, absolutely. Let me see in my mind, if I'm getting this kind of correction,
you're through the charges, you're kind of targeting the muscle that's not responding, able to
respond or get strong with, okay, that's awesome. Yeah, it's simple enough to understand. Like
it's just a battery that's run down and, you know, can't, we all have battery operated tools now.
And if the batteries run down, it doesn't work. Yeah, no, thank you. And one last question before,
before we finish up, you know, magnesium is. There's different forms, right? And so I'm just
curious as to when it comes to back pain, because I know for sleep, for example, magnesium
glycinate is what I'm talking about, is there a certain type of magnesium or back pain that you've
seen a lot of?
That's an excellent question. My bottom line would be as long as it's not magnesium oxide,
you're probably okay. And the magnesium oxide simply because it's not well absorbed. There's
nothing evil about it. It's not poison or anything like that. It's just the, doesn't get, doesn't get
through the small intestine.
The body says, eh, we don't like this so much. So you're only absorbing something like 6%. So
magnesium citrate is fairly, is better absorbed. Uh, threonate is good. He said the glycinate,
they're, they're different forms and, you know, depending on how more exotic you get, the price
goes up. So one, a good place to start is magnesium citrate.
The other thing you can do is they're magnesium based creams. And oils, which are just kind of
like a salt solution that you can put topically and that bypasses the digestion. And so if you're
deficient in magnesium and your back muscles need magnesium, it, and your heart needs it to
the body's going to say, Oh, let's send it to the heart first.
Okay. So, you know, it'll take, take more of a while as you're. as opposed to just putting it locally,
topically, then it'll go through those muscles more quickly. So if you're giving it a try, and you
know, you think you're magnesium deficient because you've got some of the other symptoms,
headaches, constipation, trouble sleeping, stress type of things, then you want to do it
systemically.
You want to take some orally, but then you might also want to try some topically as well. Thank
you so much. And thank you so much for everything that you've shared today, McKay. This has
been great. It's been great having you on. And for those of you listening that want to learn more
about McKay's work, I am going to include the link to his website here in the episode.
And if there's any, um, any other way people can reach you, MacKay, um, you can let us know
now too.
If you're interested in, uh, getting hold of me, you can just go to www.mackayrippey. com, which
is my page and fill out the contact form. Thank you.
Thank you so much. And I have put that website link that you just mentioned in the episode.
Remember we do new episodes every week on Wednesday, and I look forward to having you
join me then.
