2026 Flu Season Spikes w/ Paul Fulford | Plus Dr. Bonati explains Why Fusions are Bad

Welcome to American Medicine Today. I'm Kimberly Bennati, alongside Ethan Euchre and world-renowned orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Alfred Bennati. Exciting show to get to. Let's get started. Influenza is surging across the U.S., sending thousands to the hospital and hitting young children especially hard. And doctors are warning that the season has a long way to go. Joining us to discuss is returning guest Paul Fulford, healthy living expert and a leader in the field of medical treatment systems. Welcome to the program again, Paul. Thank you for having me. Certainly. So all this flu activity is at this very high level in, what is it, 32 states? What do we need to know? Well, I would say what stands out is the trajectory, you know, not the existence of the flu really. We expect flu every year, but what is different is how steeply cases and hospitalizations are rising, right? The hospitalizations nearly doubled in a week, and that tells clinicians that we're still in like acceleration phase, not the plateau. Clinically, this season, you know, there was early recognition, but the risk really matters, right? And I think that it's really shocking kind of how vulnerable the young children are this year. Obviously, most everyone has had the flu, but just describe the symptoms and, you know, sometimes because there's different strains, are the symptoms different? Explain. Well, yes. I mean, when it comes to the flu, like one of the things that you should be looking for, there's things that are associated with it, like fever, congestion, you know, pain, kind of weakness, right? And I would say that, you know, if you start to experience those things, most people think they can just wait and rest it out. It's so much better to just get checked and find out whether you've got it or not, because if you're feeling those things, there's obviously something off. And so what do you do if you start to feel sick? You said go in, but are there certain things we can take? What can we maybe bone up on so that we're not hit as hard? That's a great question. I would say prevention needs to be layered, right? You know, people talk about the vaccinations, and that remains an option for reducing risk. It's equally important, and I it's often underemphasized, baseline immune resiliency is going to help with exposure, you know, like basic things you could control, like sleep. You really want to make sure that you're dialing in just for overall health and longevity, metabolic health, micronutrient adequacy, and stress regulation. You know, there are things you can take, like antivirals, you know, and like Tamiflu, you know, if you start to really experience the symptoms. But after arrival of that is normally too late, you know, they modestly reduce the symptoms, you know, but when it's detected early, ideally within the first 48 hours, right? Over-the-counter medications can improve symptoms like fever control, pain, and congestion, but they don't really treat the virus. Back to the flu shot for a quick second. First off, do you recommend it? And B, you mentioned the, you know, the efficacy of it is actually pretty low, and we've actually talked to people from the CDC, and as I understand it, that like at the beginning of the year, they developed a shot for the fall, and they have no idea what the strain is going to be yet. Right, they do it based on the previous years, right? For your high-risk patients, I don't think it's a bad option, right? You know, I think, you know, 40 to 60 percent for them potentially is better than nothing, right? For your average healthy person, I don't know that doing it is necessary, right? Like I would rather see people more focused on, you know, getting baseline health dialed in over, you know, you know, being somebody that puts a Band-Aid on it when it happens. You know, there's, there's, you can overcome things so much faster when your baseline health is better. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. After this, you are watching American Medicine Today. Welcome back to American Medicine Today. We're rejoining our discussion with Paul Fulford. Wanted to shift gears too real quick because there was another story that came out about the beneficial compounds in chocolate and coffee. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so basically, it's the, the topic is, you know, and I love this topic because it's fun, right? The science is interesting. That study found an association, not necessarily proof that chocolate is a fountain of youth. And what it does suggest is people with higher blood levels of the compound called theobromine tend to show signs of slower biological aging on certain epigenetic clocks. So when you're talking about that, that's in dark chocolate. Are we nearing more just like pure cacao? Well, I would say that, you know, the more of that you can take in the better, but the more dark it gets, the bitter it gets, right? 70% is where you kind of want to start if you're going to do it as sort of a therapeutic thing, right? When you get into that like 90%, it's a little bit bitter. Baker's chocolate. Blah. Yeah. Yeah. And what about coffee? Because I mean, Kimberly knows I suck down coffee like it's going out of style. Right. That's probably why neither of us get any rest. Yeah. This is true. Yes. I mean, coffee too, right? And I would say that, you know, there's a lot of different schools of thought on coffee. I would say one of the things you want to avoid is like the Starbucks holiday coffees, right? Because some of those can have like 50 to 70 grams of sugar, which is like eating two or three, you know, Snickers bars in your morning coffee. No way. Actually, like, you know, if you can palette it, dark roasts are better than light roast because they require less cook time basically. So there's less like char, so to speak, with the coffees. And then obviously when you're sourcing your coffee, you want to look at mold-free and organic. Why don't you tell us more about these epigenetic clocks that we have in cellular aging? Well, I mean, you know, that's where I'm a huge proponent for peptides. Peptides are things that we have naturally in our bodies, right? And there's a lot of research and interest in like, you know, the thymic and the immune regulatory peptides because the immune decline is one of the hallmarks of aging. Other peptides are studied for repair and recovery, you know, helping tissues normalize after stress or illness and oxidative stress, right? Rather than just suppressing symptoms. None of these replace your foundational things, like things that you can control, like what you're putting into your body. I mean, it's like in the tech world, it's garbage in, garbage out. You know, if you're giving yourself bad inputs, you're going to have bad outputs. When we're talking about like secreta-COG peptides that are like your CJC-1295-olipramoralin, your tesamoralin, your 191AAs, your IGF-1LR3s, when you're talking about those, you actually want to take those at night because your natural hormone production happens within the first four hours of your sleep, right? So if you're not at least getting four hours of sleep, you're doing massive damage to your hormones. Even if after you eat, especially dinner, because it helps with gastric emptying, just doing some form of activity is good, right? So we just had a flipping of the food pyramid, which is great, right? I saw that. And I think that's been needed for a long time. The way I was raised, the way y'all were raised, we realized that the food pyramid is kind of garbage at this point now with all the research. So all of those things affect aging, right? And there's so much that we can do just on things that we can control. And if somebody wants to take it to another level, I'm a huge proponent of hyperpeptides. All right. Well, thank you for the great advice. Thank you for joining us yet again, Paul Fulford, healthy living expert and leader in the field of medical treatment systems. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you all for having me again. I appreciate it. That's all the time we have for this segment. Make sure you stay tuned. We'll have more after the break. You were watching American Medicine Today. I'm Cory Couser. I'm from a little town called Woodstock, Virginia. I'm a plant mechanic for a wastewater facility and a water facility. That's taken quite a beating on my back, lifting and tugging and torquing bolts down. And because they're big pumps, it's definitely affected me over the years. The majority of the pain was in my back. And then because of the pinched nerve, it would radiate down my buttocks. And that's where my problem lied. And I would have a little bit of numbness in my foot, tingling like your foot was going to sleep. Over time, Cory's pain started to impact his daily life. I could probably average out about half a football field, give or take. And then I'd want to sit down, just, I'd sit down for a few, like a minute or two and then reset myself and do that. And then like, you know, of course, crawling around and stuff all the time, it, you know, it made it really difficult. The saddest part is it was holding my daughter. I couldn't, I couldn't hold her. That was my breaking point. I'd get to hold her and she wants to be held and I'd get about five, maybe 10 minutes to get to hold her. And then I have to put her down because my back would hurt so bad. Cory saw a local doctor and based on their recommendation, he tried a number of conservative treatments to ease his pain. Well, first physical therapy, physical therapy to see what was wrong and everything like that in order to get my MRI. I'd try to go put on a heating pad, just kind of recline back. And then that would help, but they'd only do so much. And then he wanted me to do the nerve blocker. That didn't work. And then the cortisone. And then he wanted to keep me doing the cortisone shots. Like he was kind of like I was too young for surgery. Unsure of how to proceed, Cory learned about the Benati Spine Institute from his coworkers. They recommended me to come down here to the Benati Institute. Everything was going really good for him. One was five years post-op and the other one's about two and a half years. I looked him up, all the reviews, everything was good. After submitting his MRIs for review, he spoke to Dr. Benati and learned he was a good candidate for the targeted Benati spine procedures. So that's when we talked to Benati and we sent down my MRIs and he said, yeah, he said, I can do it. He said, I can fix you up. I set up my appointment. After arriving at the Benati Spine Institute, Cory received a physical exam and had updated MRIs taken at their on-campus imaging center. Having an MRI here on site, you know, it's just a walk right down there. So it was very pleasant. People down there are great. They got me right in there. I told them I was a little claustrophobic. They accommodated. They got me through. The exclusive Benati spine procedures are performed incrementally using conscious IV sedation. This technique kept Cory comfortable, awake, and able to communicate with Dr. Benati to ensure the source of his pain was eliminated before he left the operating table. Getting to see everything firsthand, it was, I did enjoy that. It was, you get to see him do the procedure. My wife got to come in and watch the procedure and talk to me. So that made it, you know, that much more comfortable. I had a really bad pinched nerve. Dr. Benati was able to get in there and get everything freed up. Hold it there. No pain here? No. No pain here? No pain in your butt? No. All right. Cory was surprised by how quickly he was able to be up and walking so soon after surgery. I have a lot more mobility, less pain. Based on his experience, Cory is confident in recommending the Benati Spine Institute. I'd recommend Benati to anybody who had back pain and who wanted some good answers and be fixed right. I 100% recommend him. Top-notch guy. Now pain-free, Cory is looking forward to enjoying quality time with his daughter again. I want to, you know, for say grow old with my kid, not be old and have the kid, I want to be able to chase her around, pick her up, play with her. And that's just my biggest goal right there. And have a better quality of life of mobility and getting around for work and everything else like that. To see more stories of recovery just like this, search for the Benati Spine Institute on YouTube, Rumble, Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Roku, and Amazon's Fire TV. Welcome back to American Medicine Today. I'm Kimberly Benati alongside Dr. Benati. So Dr. Benati, why should we not choose fusions? I am practically an individual who has a poor experience on patients that they have fusions. A patient who has a fusion is being practically pushed in that direction and the information is very poor. Why the fusion is a bad idea? When you talk to the patients, the patient tells you, is because my back is unstable. That is a clear lack of information. When we talk about why not a fusion in somebody who has a normal back and then have a procedure performed like a laminectomy or some type of a decompression, and then suddenly they decided that that is unstable, it's impossible. That word of instability is an excuse to do the fusion. So the major trouble here is the fusion is more than anything an income-producing type of a situation for the medical profession and for the industry. When you have a situation when the patient comes to see a doctor with a back problem, there are certain clear conditions, or they are herniated discs, or they are some type of degenerative changes, or they are degenerative disc diseases, or they are abnormalities that they affect the canals, creating some type of spinal stenosis. Then that area makes the nerve kink, and that kink of the nerve is the symptomatology. If you just fuse and you don't correct that, patient has pain for a long time. So you need to create a system to correct that element. Now, if you correct that element, you don't really need to fuse it. We can correct these problems in our institute with a minimal type of an exposure and with a minimal time of a compromise. Those patients can walk immediately, have totally regained their locomotion, and totally regain the status of normal activities. They don't need to have pain medication. They don't need to have physical therapy. They don't need to have anything that compromises their normal life. It's going to be also less expensive, and it's going to be immediately a possibility for the patient to return back to work. If you would like to learn more about the Benati spine procedures, visit benati.com. Thank you for watching American Medicine Today. If you would like to see previous episodes, make sure you download American Medicine Today to your favorite streaming device. If you have any comments or questions, contact us at the numbers below. Or you can tweet at DrBenati using the hashtag AmericanMedicineToday or hashtag AMT. We would like to hear from you.