What No One Is Telling You About Lyme Disease
Episode 152
We're kicking off the upcoming month with the topic of Lyme disease. Through the lens of Integrative wellness, Lyme disease is not uncommon. But today on Integrative Wellness Radio along with our host & integrative health practitioner Dr. Nicole, we dive a bit further into what Lyme disease really is. Dr. Nicole talks about some of the misconceptions about Lyme disease and how sometimes conventional medicine overlooks symptoms. Tune in to the whole episode to get a better picture of the right testing suited. Interested in learning more about Dr. Nick & Dr. Nicole’s courses, memberships, or private work? Learn more at Integrative You . Have a quick question, Would you like to schedule a call, or just want to say hi? Text us at 732.913.0009. Our mission to innovate humans & Healthcare does NOT start and stop with us! This is why we are also dedicated to helping other practitioners in evolving healthcare too! If you are a healthcare leader and are looking to up-level your clinical + business excellence Learn more about our course membership: Limitless Healthprenuer and start boldly disrupting this industry! Noteworthy Time Stamps: 3:30 Limitations with research 7:32 You are a 'whole' person 15:49 Crazy amount of Lyme types & genes 20:44 Myths around Lyme 28:13 Lyme lives in connective tissue 34:58 It's not about killing the Lyme, It's about eradicating it 40:49 Lyme doesn't always live alone 55:42 Looking at the person as a whole
Topics: lyme, disease, integrative, whole, understanding, testing, unknown, wellness
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## What No One Is Telling You About Lyme Disease
- Lyme disease is often more complex and presents in more varied ways than commonly understood.
- Conventional medical approaches may overlook crucial symptoms or diagnostic markers.
- A comprehensive understanding of Lyme requires recognizing the body as a whole system, not just a site of infection.
- The diversity of Lyme disease types and strains adds to the diagnostic challenge.
Pull quotes
Imagine if medicine actually looked at you as a whole opposed to looking at you as a bunch of separate systems.
Nick and Dr. **Unknown:** Nicole to learn more about the top trends in integrative medicine to learn about what the limitations are with testing and what you can do to start your health journey.
We are back. **Unknown:** We are kicking off the month, uh, talking about Lyme disease.
Transcript
**Unknown:** I been up all night, no sleep. Imagine if medicine actually looked at you as a whole opposed to looking at you as a bunch of separate systems. Dive into Integrative Wellness Radio with Dr. Nick and Dr.
**Unknown:** Nicole to learn more about the top trends in integrative medicine to learn about what the limitations are with testing and what you can do to start your health journey. Sometimes I tend to lose myself when I'm out here on my own. Hi, everyone. We are back.
**Unknown:** We are kicking off the month, uh, talking about Lyme disease. Very excited to be talking about this because I feel like there are so many misconceptions when it comes to, uh, this concept of Lyme disease. There is a lot of limitations with the testing that is available, and there are so many, um, you know, different treatment modalities that exist, but there is such a lack of understanding the big picture and looking at the body as a whole, and also considering is this idea of killing, killing, killing the Lyme what we actually need to be doing. Um, and I'm gonna be going into some case studies that you guys can really understand a little bit more about so that you can really understand that sometimes that approach is great, and sometimes that approach can, um, cause you to run into some roadblocks.
**Unknown:** But tonight, you know, it's all about understanding the bigger picture. It's all about understanding you don't know what you don't know, and if you haven't had more elaborate testing than just looking at infectious disease, including Lyme, then you're not always gonna know the big picture as to why you're potentially not fully recovering from this condition. In addition to that, we're also going to be talking about a lot of the issues with the testing that exists, and I'm not necessarily talking just about this Lyme testing because many of you that are here already know you have Lyme, and you potentially went down a run-of-the-mill or, or a battery of different tests that took a really, really long time for you to finally figure out that Lyme was the big picture for you. But there's also more to understanding the other tests that potentially you still haven't had that could give you the understanding as to why maybe you're not doing as well as you'd hoped.
**Unknown:** And then obviously we're going to talk about strategies because I find personally with working with people that have Lyme, it is all about strategy. This is not about necessarily just doing this linear approach of let's just kill this organism and call it a day. It's definitely about supporting the body as a whole, and we're gonna get a lot more into understanding that. So for those of you that are listening, some of you might be new, some of you are not.
**Unknown:** Um, just a little bit of a background on Integrative Wellness Group and myself is that, you know, overall the reason why I do what I do nowadays and I think the way that I do is because I found that over time with all different trainings that I've done and the schooling that I went to, I kind of questioned, um, a lot of the things that I was being taught. I felt that not a lot of things always made sense, and because of that it kept me asking better questions and not necessarily just settling for the research. And I'm doing this quote unquote because what I've quickly found is that there is a lot of limitations with research, and it's also about who's funding the research and how many people were part of the research, and did they actually look at all of the environmental lifestyle factors of the people that were part of the research? So what I found was that if I was just gonna rely on research, I was gonna run into roadblocks with my patients, and I did in the beginning until I started to evolve my approach.
**Unknown:** So again, this is something that I've just seen clinically time a- again-- time and time again is people running into roadblocks, and that is what allowed me to fully develop into this integrative practice and to understand the big picture. And that's one of the reasons why I work with so many different types of people, but Lyme is definitely something that I've worked with for a long time now. Um, personally one of my mentors is Dr. Klinghardt, and it's not necessarily just because he was so big in the Lyme disease world.
**Unknown:** It was more so that he was a doctor that was thinking integratively, and he really said something to me early on in my practice, and he said, "Don't your-- Don't call yourself integrative if all you do is diet and supplements." And diet and supplements is really the foundation of what we call functional medicine, and my practice was always called Integrative Wellness Group. So it really made me stop and think, "Wow, there's a lot of pieces of the puzzle that I'm missing." And that was the case with my Lyme disease patients, it was the case with all of my patients. So I knew that I needed to learn more and think beyond just diet and supplements because how many of you that are listening, you've already been down that road. You went on the elimination diet.
**Unknown:** You, you know, you sacrificed, you tortured yourself. You took boatloads of supplements. You know, you, you were taking things three times a day, forty supplements each time, and you didn't get better, or you got better and then you hit a roadblock. This is the things that I hear on a day-to-day basis, so I knew that for me this was not about just giving you different supplements or a different dietary plan.
**Unknown:** This was about the bigger picture. So first and foremost, I always want to really give this insight to my patients, and obviously those of you that are here with me is it is not your fault. It is not your fault that you haven't been able to get better. It is not your fault that you tried the best Lyme protocol and didn't get better.
**Unknown:** It is not your fault that you were on antibiotics for one to ten years and you didn't get better. It is not your fault. It is very difficult to understand your body, and it is very, veryDisempowering when you try something and you give it your all and you fall on your face or you hit a plateau. So it is not your fault that you maybe at this point feel paralyzed, you feel exhausted, and you're just like, "I don't even know what to do anymore." So I get it.
**Unknown:** Trust me, I get it. But I want you to understand that there is information that you potentially haven't heard, and there is always going to be a reason for why you feel the way you do. So a couple foundational things that I think are very important to understand as we start talking more about Lyme is that, number one, the fact that we are always seeking the expert is definitely, in my opinion, a detriment. And what I mean by that is those of you that already know you have Lyme, you're usually seeking out the Lyme expert, the Lyme-literate physician.
**Unknown:** And yes, that is very important because understanding how to test for Lyme is, is a science in itself. But sometimes those Lyme-oriented doctors or those Lyme-literate doctors, they're, they have all the tools from a testing perspective, but when their, their tools for the treatment are very small because they might still be using antibiotics, but they might be pairing that with herbals as well or homeopathics. But the thing about it is that you are a whole person and we know through, you know, science research, and I know clinically that Lyme can affect anything. It doesn't always affect your joints.
**Unknown:** It can affect your gut. It can affect your prostate. It can affect your brain. So if we're gonna focus just on, you know, Lyme and not necessarily look at what is it affecting, do, do those organs need repair?
**Unknown:** Do you need neurological support? Do you need lymphatic support? Do you need detox support? Those are the things that are really, really important to consider.
**Unknown:** So it's not always about thinking that we're a bunch of separate systems, it's about knowing that we are an integration of systems, that everything is communicating with each other. And that brings me to this very basic point of a lot of physicians are just not always-- They understand physiology, but they're not always, like, thinking about it in the way of these systems are connected. And what I mean is that ninety to ninety-five percent of your serotonin is made in your gut. So if you have depression, but you also have IBS, how are we gonna treat your depression through antidepressants and not address your gut?
**Unknown:** It doesn't make sense, and this is one of the reasons why people hit plateaus or feel that they, there's something wrong with them and that they have to chronically stay on these antidepressants. So this is really a big part of the puzzle is that everything is connected, and when you're dealing with Lyme, it can go anywhere in the body, and that can create different cascades that affect other systems. Okay. So Dr.
**Unknown:** Klinghardt is one of my mentors, and there has been some things that he has said to me over time that has been, like, mind-blowing. And then it's on my radar, and I go into practice, and I'm like, "Holy crap, he's right." So one of the things that he said to me, uh, very early on is he said, "Eighty percent of your patients have Lyme disease." And I was like, "Uh, what? Excuse me?" And I was-- And at that time I was not doing the testing that I do now, by the way. So he said that, and I was kind of baffled.
**Unknown:** I was just like, "Okay, this is really interesting." And then I started to implement new strategies of testing, and I realized he was right. So I'm not saying this to scare you. The primary thing that you have to understand is that a lot of people have Lyme in their system, but it doesn't always mean that it's active, and it doesn't always mean that it's causing problems. So one of the primary things that I see in my practice is that people have had Lyme in their body for a really, really long time, and it took the one catalyst that brought it to the surface or activated it, and that catalyst could have been a loss of a loved one.
**Unknown:** It could have been burning yourself out because you were commuting, working in the city, you know, a high-pressure job, or it was a virus, or it was a parasite that you got from Mexico. There are so many variables. But I will tell you for myself is that I ended up having Lyme in my system. I never had joint pain.
**Unknown:** I was never bedridden. I never had the telltale symptoms, but what I had was these really random heart palpitations that would happen when I was young. And they would come and go. I would blame them on caffeine.
**Unknown:** I would blame them on, like, running on adrenaline, working in the restaurant industry. I would blame them on not getting enough sleep. And then it started getting to the point that I started to have fainting spells, but they were always very close to my menstrual cycle. So then I said, "Oh, well, it must be hormonal." What it turned out to be is that I had Lyme in my system affecting my pericardium, and that was being triggered especially when I was run down, burnt out, stressed out, et cetera.
**Unknown:** So there was more to the puzzle. But overall, I remember when I found this out and I was just like, "Wow, that is really significant." So for me, I never had a tick bite. I never had that. But once my family came in and we did all of our testing, it turns out that every single person in my family has Lyme in their system, and nobody has the same symptoms.
**Unknown:** My sister, unfortunately, ended up, after, um, having a vaccine reaction, ended up starting to have seizures. And we didn't know this at the time, but later down the line when we did her testing, once I got into this industry, we realized that what happened was that the Lyme was in her system, and it got into her neurological system and activated after the vaccine reaction. I'm not sitting here saying I'm pro or anti-vaccine. I'm just saying that at the wrong time, those vaccines can be extremely jarring to your immune system, and they can actually cause these different types of latent infections to come to the surface.So I want you to understand that this is not black and white.
**Unknown:** This is not tick bite Lyme disease. It is not any of that. And what's even more fascinating about getting a bull's eye rash from a tick bite or having a bull's eye rash on your body, that's your second infection. Yes, your second.
**Unknown:** So that means it's already been in your system, and now it was activated by a new exposure. So, so many of us are walking around with Lyme, and we do not know. And again, this does not mean you are going to get super ill. This doesn't mean you're gonna be debilitated.
**Unknown:** It doesn't mean any of those things. It just means at the right time, with the right combination of stress, infections, viruses, et cetera, this can easily become a bigger problem. So this is really fascinating. Um, when it comes to spirochete, so Borrelia, which is what we call Lyme disease, is known as a spirochete illness.
**Unknown:** There are other types of spirochetes that exist. One of them is syphilis. So I will tell you a story very shortly about this. But when, uh, ear- very early on, they-- the only known spirochete was syphilis, and it was known to have twenty-three genes.
**Unknown:** So syphilis was known to be a very evolved type of bacteria. And then they started to find other types of spirochetes, and they came across Borrelia burgdorferi, which has thirty-two genes. So what I mean by talking about the genetics of Lyme and, and even these other spirochete illnesses is that these are species that are very evolved. They actually know how to manipulate your chemistry of your body so they can find a home, burrow themselves, and live there.
**Unknown:** They know how to shut down parts of your immune system. They have the ability to invade various tissues, and they also have the ability to hijack different pathways to move on to the next life cycle. So what I mean by this, and this was another thing that Dr. Kleinhardt said to me that I was like, "No freaking way." He said that, uh, prostate inflammation, prostatitis, uh, benign hypertrophy of the prostate, which is enlarging of the prostate, and prostate cancer, most of those cases have all been linked to Lyme disease.
**Unknown:** And the reason why is because the Lyme, the spirochetes, will live in the prostate, and once a male becomes aroused, then the spirochetes will move along the ejaculatory duct in order to put itself in the opportune environment to infect the woman. So these are organisms that have learned how to find different areas to hang out so they can move on to their next life cycle. This is crazy. So he said this, and I was literally like, "You gotta be kidding me." And then as patients came through my door with prostate issues, he was a hundred percent right.
**Unknown:** So this is crazy stuff. These are organisms that are very evolved. They are very smart. But even more interesting than this is that through research, they have actually found certain species of Lyme that have up to eight hundred genes.
**Unknown:** There is nothing in nature that has eight hundred genes. So this is the speculation about is Lyme a man-made substance? You know, was it originally created for germ warfare? We don't really know.
**Unknown:** But what we do know is that they have found types of Lyme that have eight hundred genes that are designed to kill their host. So this, again, is not the case for many people, but those people that are bedridden and debilitated from the Lyme, there is a possibility that they have a genetically ma-manipulated version of it. And in addition to that, spirochetes can survive hydrochloric acid. Hydrochloric acid is the, um, acid that's in your stomach to protect you from organisms, and it also is protected from up to six hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
**Unknown:** So when we are talking about, "Oh, if I boil my water, or if I cook my food, or I cook my venison," which I will talk more about, then it will kill off these organisms. It's not how it works, unfortunately. So venison, it's deer meat. Think about it, deer ticks.
**Unknown:** There is a huge correlation to eating venison and being exposed to Lyme disease. So guys, this is not about tick bites. This is so ridiculously beyond that. We are exposed to Lyme from, from mosquitoes, from, um, other biting insects.
**Unknown:** It's also can be sexually transmitted, and in addition, it can be passed from mom to baby. So this is why Lyme tends to run in families. One of the questions I ask my patients, "Does anybody in your family have Lyme?" They're like, "Oh yeah, my brother, my sister, whoever, my mom." And I automatically put on my radar, I need to test for this because this might be a possibility for them. So a confused spirochete diagnosis.
**Unknown:** So one of my patients, um, came in. She didn't come in actually too long ago. She was one of those patients that was extremely, extremely debilitated from Lyme. Um, unfortunately, she looked a lot older than she was.
**Unknown:** Um, she kinda settled for her joints to just kill. She powered through her massive, massive fatigue and just tried to engross herself with her, her job because she loves her job. Um, just so many gastrointestinal issues, fatigue issues, joint issues, uh, teeth issues, sinus issues. Like the list goes on.
**Unknown:** She had so many symptoms that she came through my door with. Um, this was a woman that was on constant antibiotics. She's done IV antibiotics. She's done, um, she had a PICC line for antibiotics.
**Unknown:** Like, she did the gamut of antibiotics. She was also very knowledgeable. She did other alternative therapies, but kind of like intertwined, um,Would do random supplements and things like that. Um, but she was really sensitive.
**Unknown:** It was really hard for her to do a lot of different types of therapies and even supplements. So as we went through and we started doing her testing, um, one of my technologies in my office, um, I can find things rather quickly down to the DNA level. So when I look at someone's DNA, it doesn't only look at their DNA, it also looks at foreign DNA. So we can pick up on different types of organisms like bacteria, fungus, spirochetes, et cetera.
**Unknown:** So what it turned out to be is that this woman still had massive amounts of spirochetes in her body, but the spirochetes were not from Lyme, they were from syphilis. Guys, syphilis is not just sexually transmitted, by the way. It could be from a mosquito bite, it can be from any type of biting insect. It can come from a lot of places.
**Unknown:** So this woman was being treated for Lyme, Lyme, Lyme, when indeed it was actually syphilis, which is definitely a different route of treatment. In addition to that, this woman had so many different rounds of antibiotics, which actually was a catalyst to why the spirochetes were spreading. Guys, I'll get there. I'm gonna talk more about the understanding of what the antibiotics, the role that they play.
**Unknown:** But overall, I want you to understand that when you get diagnosed with Lyme, and you-- maybe it comes up in a traditional Western blot because the Western blot is picking up on certain antibodies. When you're talking about a Lyme spirochete and you're talking about a syphilis spirochete, it is very, very easy for those to be confused through traditional testing. And the other thing too is if you're a person that has had suffered with a lot of skin issues, maybe psoriasis, maybe really bad eczema, um, chances are if you've been diagnosed with Lyme or suspect you have Lyme, it might not be Lyme, it might be syphilis because syphilis is the great imitator of psoriasis. So it's very, very important to know that there are a variety of spirochete illnesses out there, and you might not be diagnosed properly.
**Unknown:** So some of the big things we're getting into tonight is all of the myths around Lyme. So number one, I've already kind of talked about this, but that Lyme only comes from a tick, which is a myth. The other one is that a blood test is good enough. Um, Lyme is the only part of the puzzle, which is very, very rare.
**Unknown:** Usually, there is a conglomerate of different things going on. That emotions don't play a role in having Lyme or get-- recovering from Lyme. Also, the biggest myth is that antibiotics are the most effective treatments, and that if you go antibiotics or if you choose to go herbal or nutraceutical, that it's just about killing the infection and nothing else. So we're gonna bust through all of these because these are all myths.
**Unknown:** So number one is where do you get Lyme from? So like I said about my story, I was born with it. Was it always active? No.
**Unknown:** It became more active later in my life when I had compounding stressors. Compounding stressors of being burnt out, being in school, working late nights in the restaurant industry, um, having severe mercury toxicity because I ate tons and tons of sushi and fish. Also then, um, because I ate so much fish, I also had a lot of parasite infections. So that perfect storm is what then was the catalyst to allowing the Lyme to become active and cause different cardiovascular symptoms.
**Unknown:** So the other thing is that it can be transmitted through deer ticks. Also, by eating deer meat, venison. If you're a hunter or you grew up in a hunting family and you're eating tons of deer meat, that is definitely a possibility for an exposure because again, you cook it. Nobody's cooking meat beyond six hundred degrees Fahrenheit, maybe on a grill.
**Unknown:** But it's still those spirochetes can withstand up to six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. So you're not killing it by cooking it. Fleas, mosquitoes, lice, spiders, anything that bites can be a carrier. You can get it through mom to baby, transplacental, can also be with breastfeeding.
**Unknown:** In addition, they are definitely finding that sexual transmission is a possibility. Um, and again, that's because it has an affinity for the prostate in a male. And then last but not least is the bull's eye rash is your second infection. Yes, your second infection with a slightly different strain because there are different strains.
**Unknown:** So this is extremely important for you guys to understand is that there are a variety of ways that you get this exposure, and if you are super sick and nobody can help you, and nobody's been able to figure it out, it's time to get better testing. So this is super creepy. Um, I actually dug into research of trying to understand, um, this transmission from tick to, um, to person. So number one, um, ticks can find you, us, dogs by exhaled carbon dioxide.
**Unknown:** So that's how they, like, launch onto us, is by picking up on exhaled carbon dioxide. The other thing that the ticks do is they secrete saliva, which is very sticky, and it glues in. That's why they're so hard to pull off. Um, they also administer a very special type of hormone that can counteract antibodies.
**Unknown:** So these antibodies are the things that will pretty much like-- we won't, um-- it'll shut down us getting itchy. So we won't, like, always be scratching and be like, "Ooh, I have a tick on us." That's why so many of us are like, all of a sudden in the shower, like, washing our hair, and we're like, "Oh my god," or whatever the case may be. And it's because it's not always, um, it's been-- it releases these different antibodies to shut down that itching inflammatory response. In addition to that, Borrelia has a really, really strong outside wall, which actually makes it really, really hard to kill by our own natural immune defenses, but it also makes it difficult to kill through all different other types of treatments.So it's very, very interesting how this all works because the deer tick alone outside of the, the Borrelia is just such an advanced organism.
**Unknown:** So myth number two is that the blood te-- a blood test is good enough. So there are so many different ways of testing Lyme. You know, don't get me wrong. Do I still run Lyme Western Blots?
**Unknown:** Yes, I do because insurance covers it, and I wanna see, like, does even one band come up? But the Lyme antibodies, like that cumulative test of the IgG or the IgM is a crap test. So i- the Western Blot i-- Western Blot is at least a step up. Um, IgeneX is also another, um, option that a lot of people have been using for a long period of time, and IgeneX is definitely a lot more of a sensitive test when it comes to testing for Lyme.
**Unknown:** But the thing about it is that IgeneX is still a blood test. So there's a couple of factors. Number one, weeks before you're gonna build antibodies to the Lyme. So if you're getting a b-- like if you're getting a tick bite or, like, finding a bull's eye rash, and you're getting tested with any less than eight weeks from that point, you're not gonna necessarily get a good reading.
**Unknown:** So people, like, go, and they get tested, and then the doctor's like, "No, you're fine." And then all of a sudden, it's like two months, three months later that they're starting to feel really poorly. So that's definitely one thing. The other thing too is that you can do a blood test, but the best thing to do is to provoke the Lyme. So one of the ways you can provoke the Lyme is by taking antibiotics and then doing your blood test.
**Unknown:** I don't really recommend that because there's no reason to take an antibiotic if you don't need to. You can also take, like, different types of natural, you know, antibacterials to provoke it. But honestly, the best way to provoke it is by pushing it out of its hiding places. So Dr.
**Unknown:** Klinghardt and Dr. Ruggiero put together this thing called the RK protocol, which is something that we use. We actually use it for testing, but we also use it for, um, uh, remedy making as well. But primarily what we do is we use an infrared light, and we also use something called sound wave therapy over all different lymphatic chains because lymph is part of your immune system.
**Unknown:** It's also your major filtration system. So if the Lyme is hiding anywhere, it's gonna hide in those areas. So we will use the infrared and the sound wave over these different areas, and then we will embark on using a DN- DNA PCR test, which is a urine-based test through DNA Connections. Honestly, at this point, uh, in the game, this is the, the standard.
**Unknown:** This is the gold standard of testing for Lyme. Uh, not many physicians know about this, but if you were to use the DNA Connections just by itself without doing the RK protocol, you're not always going to get, um, a positive reading or get an accurate reading, I should say. So the RK protocol can be used if you are gonna embark on IgeneX or if you're gonna embark on the DNA Connections. So again, this is not just about the test.
**Unknown:** This is about pushing the spirochetes out of their hiding place, so you can actually get an accurate reading because Lyme does not live in the blood. It lives in connective tissue. That's why-- That's the, the nature of a spirochete. A spirochete looks like a corkscrew.
**Unknown:** It corkscrews itself into tissue. So that's why it's not always coming up on the blood. So it's really, really important for you guys to know this because if you're like, "I feel like there's something missing about my health," you might not have had the best testing. So going back to this limitation in testing, this also applies to neurological Lyme.
**Unknown:** So spirochetes, again, they look like a corkscrew. They almost look like a corkscrew worm. So when you get a spinal tap to figure out do you have neurological Lyme because maybe you're having seizures or you're having, you know, other types of neurological disorders or even multiple sclerosis, then when they take that cerebral spinal fluid out, they're putting it under a microscope, and what they're looking for are these corkscrew-looking worms, the spirochetes. But unfortunately, when the Lyme is in the cerebral spinal fluid, it's not in the spirochete form.
**Unknown:** It is actually in a form called a bleb, and a bleb looks like a little blob, uh, a little circular blob of mucus essentially. So with that being said, if the technician is not looking for the right thing, they're easily going to say, "No, you do not have neurological Lyme," and then you will just continue having seizures and doing medication after medication, adding a medication, et cetera. So again, there is not just limitations on the blood-based testing and, and the systemic testing. There are also massive limitations when it comes to the neurological-based testing as well.
**Unknown:** So I had a patient, um, who came to me. She was about forty-eight years old, uh, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and a history of Lyme. So again, like another patient that was like, "I was so bad before that I'm kind of just, like, settled for most of my symptoms." But her fatigue was getting so bad that it was really actually difficult for her to do her job anymore. So she came in and was like, "You know, I really want to resolve my fatigue." So I don't know if you, you guys know, but one of the biggest connections to chronic fatigue syndrome is having a compromised and congested lymphatic system.
**Unknown:** So your lymphatic system is the major system of your body. It has all of your lymph nodes and your lymph vessels. You have lymph nodes from the top of your head all the way down to your toes, and these lymph nodes are in charge of gobbling up the bad stuff. So they help you to eradicate out viruses and bacteria and spirochetes and fungus and mold and all of these different things.But the, the easiest way that I can put this is that if you have a vacuum and you have...
**Unknown:** your vacuum has a filter, you continue to use your vacuum for weeks, you know, or days, days, weeks, weeks, et cetera, and the filter gets more and more full every time you use it. It's going to get to the point that you cannot continue to use the vacuum because the filter is at max capacity. This is a very similar concept to what happens to our lymphatic system, is the more and more and more it gets exposed to, the more and more congested it gets, and then it cannot do its job properly. So how this applied to this person.
**Unknown:** So this w-woman specifically was on antibiotics for seven years. And I was like, "Well, why? Why were you on it for that long? Like, if it wasn't working, why didn't they take you off or try a different approach?" And she's like, "Well, I-- it would help and then it-- I would go backwards, and then it would help, and then I would go backwards." So again, I will explain a little bit more of why this happens with the antibiotics.
**Unknown:** But she was on the antibiotics for seven years. So what I found through, um, one of my technologies called the Bioresonance, was that this woman pretty effectively killed a good portion of the spirochetes in her body. But the dead spirochetes and the dead Lyme were sitting in her congested lymphatic system. So this woman was very puffy, very inflamed.
**Unknown:** She's like, "I can't lose weight no matter what I do." She's like, "I could literally not eat for a week, and I'll still be this same weight." So the thing you have to understand is that you can kill the Lyme all you want, but if you don't have the mechanisms to get it out of the body, then you're gonna be in big trouble because dead Lyme is like carcasses lying in your body, giving off massive, massive amounts of toxins that are going to affect you neurologically, like extremely burden your neurological system. So she was on this boat of antibiotics for over seven years and just had dead Lyme sitting in her system. So the crazy thing about it was this was a bit early on when I was using the, the Bioresonance technology, and the Bioresonance, for those of you that are on here maybe heard about it because a friend told you about it, it's a very amazing technology because it provides you with diagnostic information. But in addition to that, it also has, um, the ability to do treatment.
**Unknown:** So her lymphatic system was so compromised when she first came to the office, and she was like, she literally could barely keep her eyes open, like she was suffering. So the nature of how I am, I was like, "I just wanna help her right now." So I, um, I did a little bit of treatment on her lymphatic system. So she came back on her second visit, and she goes, "So your machine works." And I was like, "What do you mean?" And she's like, "So I just wanna let you know that after you did treatment on me, I felt like I had Lyme all over again." She's like, "You're gonna tell me that I still have Lyme in my system, aren't you?" And I was like, "Yes." And there were tears because of, you know, it was like seven years gone down the tube. But obviously, you know, there was a solution, and we were able to really hone in on her lymphatic system and get that working properly, and that she was fully able to eradicate out the, the live and the dead, uh, Lyme that was present.
**Unknown:** So the thing about that now is I do not work on anybody's lymphatic system with my Bioresonance until I know they are, are doing other complementary detox services. So, um, so yeah. So she did amazing, and she really completely recovered. But, um, but it's just so significant because her story was just stood out to me so much because it...
**Unknown:** again, it's not about just killing the Lyme. It's also about can your body actually eradicate it out. And it's not just about the lymph. It's also about your liver, and your gut, and your spleen, and your tonsils, and all of those things as well.
**Unknown:** So it's extremely important to know that your detox pathways have to work properly to honestly get rid of this. The, the other thing too for those of you that are listening, I know that, um, sometimes as females, our spouse, husbands, whoever, um, male figures in our lives sometimes don't understand the, uh, significance of how poorly we feel. And they sometimes I think like they're obviously empathetic in the beginning because they're like, "Oh my gosh, you're really sick." And then once it goes on for a longer period of time, I find sometimes they're just like, "Is this in your head?" Um, "Are you faking it?" Like, "How can it be this bad?" So for those of you that are listening, I want you to understand that women are more symptomatic than men. This conversation comes up a lot with mold because what happens is, is, uh, a woman will come to me and she'll be like, "I'm sick and my kids are kinda sick, but my husband's fine." So he doesn't believe that there's mold in the house because he's like, "Well, if there's-- it's in the house, then why am I not sick and why is everybody else sick?" So of course, genetics can play a factor in that, but more than anything, it actually has a lot to do with our blood.
**Unknown:** So females tend to have a lower blood volume. They also tend to have lower, um, erythrocytes, and they also tend to lose more iron, obviously with their menstrual cycle. So no, it's not hormones. It's the loss of the iron.
**Unknown:** So overall, the thing that's important to know is that blood volume, which applies to women and obviously small children, plays a significant role in how symptomatic you are. So it's not that it's in our heads or it's not that anybody's exaggerating, it's really truly they feel worse because of the constituents of their blood.So another thing too about temperature is if you are a person that your temperature is running low, um, it is definitely important, I'm not say- gonna say just for Lyme, but it's important for you to get checked for infections because what happens is, is that different types of infections can actually start to hijack your body temperature because for every .2 degrees that your temperature drops, your pathogens, your infections can double. So these microbes can actually hijack your metabolism, and Lyme is very, very common for doing this. But the confusing part is you'll start to get really hot when you sleep because s- when you sleep your body goes into repair mode.
**Unknown:** So as you're in repair mode, your body is heating up and it's like you're thinking like, "Is this a hormonal thing? Is this a hot flash?" But really what it is, is it's your... it's almost like your body's trying to induce a low-grade fever to help your body fight off, uh, certain infections. So myth number three is Lyme is the only piece of the puzzle.
**Unknown:** So those of you that have been down this road with Lyme, you might already be aware of some of these co-infections. But I will tell you this, I never, ever, ever, ever had a patient come through my door that was a Lyme patient that only had Lyme. These are patients that have other types of co-infections like Babesia, something else called Bartonella, which I'm gonna explain. Um, these people have parasite infections, heavy metal toxicity, mold toxicity, dental issues.
**Unknown:** I'm not gonna say they have all of them, but there is usually some level of a combination, and it's really because different types of organisms wanna hang out together, and they wanna hijack your immune system together. So the thing about, um, this Bartonella, and I did this because I can't tell you... well, now because I'm a lunatic and I live at the beach, I like, I can I'm like diagnosing people from a distance constantly. But there are so many women that go, "Oh, I have stretch marks.
**Unknown:** Oh, I have cellulite." And then sometimes these women are like this big. They're, you know, 100 pounds. They've never, you know, had a major weight fluctuation, and there's no reason why they would have stretch marks or, um, you know, cellulite or things like that. And then the other thing with men is like the same thing.
**Unknown:** They'll have it on their love handles, on the sides of their abdomen, or they'll have other types of lines across their back going horizontal. So these marks, they easily look like a stretch mark, and we attribute it to weight gain, weight loss, like bad skin, whatever, but this is a telltale of Bartonella, which is c- no, also known as cat scratch fever. They call it cat scratch not because a cat scratched you. It's because it leaves marks on your body that look like a cat scratched you.
**Unknown:** So Bartonella is something that is a very common co-infection that lives with Lyme and then Babesia as well. Babesia is a big, um... it's technically a bacteria, but m- most, uh, they think it's controversial because it actually acts like a parasite. It has a tendency to eat all of your iron.
**Unknown:** So certain people that I've worked with that are extremely iron deficient, they've been iron deficient forever, and they've gotten infusions and taken supplements and taken medications, it sometimes comes back to the Babesia infection. So trust me, these infections are a lot more, um, complex than what I'm describing right now. But for sake of simplicity, um, the biggest point that I wanted to make to you guys is that Lyme often does not live alone. There are usually other types of infections, and it is very, very, very difficult to get rid of Lyme if you are not addressing parasites and if you are not addressing toxicity because parasites have a tendency to eat the spirochetes, and they also have a tendency to eat different types of toxicity.
**Unknown:** So if you're not going after the big organism and you're trying to deal with the smaller organism, you're going to be on a rollercoaster ride, and you're not necessarily going to get very far. So you always have to get tested properly to know if parasites are part of the puzzle. So the interesting thing about, um, emotions is that if those of you that have been listening this whole time, one of the things that I said is that sometimes when people have had Lyme in their system for a very long time, maybe they were exposed as a kid, maybe they were exposed from mom and it was passed to them, it doesn't always mean that it will become active. But it takes this catalyst that can allow it to become active, and sometimes that catalyst is an emotional trigger, a loss, grief, um, fear, whatever the case may be.
**Unknown:** But as we know, Lyme has a tendency to affect connective tissue. So I literally had this happen today. I had a patient who came to me with a history of Lyme, and one of the things that in her prior blood work she has come up positive for an ANA. ANA is an autoimmune marker usually representative of lupus.
**Unknown:** And she goes, "Well, nobody ever said anything about it, and nobody ever told me that it was relevant. In addition, nobody was able to tell me, like, what is this actually doing to my body?" So again, our testing, one of the testings being the bioresonance technology, actually revealed that the Lyme was affecting her right kidney, and it was inducing lupus in her right kidney. So the connection between Lyme and lupus is that what is lupus? It's a autoimmune attack on your connective tissue.
**Unknown:** The primary thing that Lyme affects is going to be your connective tissue. So it makes sense that if the Lyme is burrowed in the connective tissue, that the immune system is going to do its job, come to the scene, try to kill the Lyme, but unfortunately it is going to damage your connective tissue in the interim, which then on paper shows up as lupus.So the point of me telling you this is because in addition to that, it would be like, well, why? Why did this patient have Lyme that was mainly affecting her right kidney? Of all the places, like why there?
**Unknown:** So the thing about it is that as we asked better questions, it turned out that there was an emotional tie to this. So first, kidneys are associated with fear. In addition, the right side of the body is associated with a male figure. So she actually had a domestic violence issue with a male figure that she feared for her life in that time that that happened.
**Unknown:** So the point of me telling you this is that this was a catalyst as to why the Lyme got into the kidney and started to cause damage is because there was this other deeper rooted layer. In addition, this woman also is in a very hostile work environment dealing with all different types of criminals and doing counseling. And she has been attacked by male figures many times and like kind of like has a state of fear that she lives in. So this is extremely, extremely eye opening because again, this is not just always about your physiology.
**Unknown:** This is not just about kill the Lyme, kill the Lyme, kill the Lyme. It's not even just about detox, detox, detox. Sometimes there are other layers that nobody is acknowledging. And also I understand that this is not everybody's expertise.
**Unknown:** So when we talk about, you know, where is the Lyme affecting you? Hands, what are you holding onto in your life? Your gut, what are you not willing to eliminate of your life that is lungs? What are you grieving?
**Unknown:** Your kidneys, what are you fearing? Knees and ankles, what are you, what's holding you back from moving forward? There's so much significance in these different parts of the body. And also in addition to that, this is Chinese medicine.
**Unknown:** Like this is not my opinion. This is not like bogus. This is Chinese medicine. And that has been around a lot longer than conventional medicine.
**Unknown:** Okay. So some of you that are listening are probably aware that they are now acknowledging something called post Lyme syndrome. So the thing about antibiotics is that that is the conventional approach to Lyme is let's use hardcore antibiotics and kill the Lyme. And most commonly it's doxycycline.
**Unknown:** The thing that you want to understand is that Lyme, again, being such an evolved organism, it has two different, and that's actually not true. It has three to four different forms, but the two most common forms is round body cyst versus spirochete. Think of a round body cyst as a little tapioca pearl, essentially. And then the spirochete is that corkscrew looking worm.
**Unknown:** So the, when you get infected with the Lyme, whenever the case may be, it moves around as a round body cyst and it figures out where it's going to plant itself. It usually goes for vulnerable tissue. So if you were a basketball player and you have banged up knees, it might go for your knees. If you've had kidney stones or chronic UTIs, it might go for your kidneys or your urinary tract.
**Unknown:** If you've had chronic gut issues, it might go for your gut. It depends on the person and it depends on the immune system. So it goes from round body cyst. And then as it figures out what tissue it is going to manifest in, or I should say plant itself in, it then hatches into the spirochete and corkscrews itself into the tissue.
**Unknown:** So what they are now realizing is that through the antibiotic therapy, that when you threaten the Lyme, it goes from spirochete and it reverts back into the round body cyst. So by the way, when it's in spirochete form, you have a boatload of symptoms. You feel really crappy, tired, fatigued, joints ache, all the good stuff. Then when it reverts into a round body cyst, because it's threatened by the antibiotics, that is when it is asymptomatic.
**Unknown:** So AKA you're taking your antibiotics and you're like, oh my God, thank God I feel better. I finally feel better. So what's happening is that the round body cyst, the reason why it reverts back to that when it's being threatened is because the shell of the round body cyst, the immune system can't penetrate through it. So what they have now found is that depending on the antibiotic, that it will actually multiply the amount of round body cyst while you're on the antibiotic.
**Unknown:** So you go from, okay, I have spirochetes, let's threaten them with the antibiotic. They revert back into the round body cyst. Then you're pissing it off. So now the round body cyst start to multiply.
**Unknown:** And then you come off of your antibiotic and anywhere between four, eight, or even 12 weeks later, you start to feel crappy again. And you're starting to feel crappy because you've more than doubled the amount of round body cyst that are now hatching back into spirochetes. So when it comes to the use of antibiotics, it is now known to be a failed treatment. The funny thing is, is go to many infectious disease, Lyme literate doctors, and they are not up to par on this information.
**Unknown:** So with that being said, it's not just about killing the organism or the infection. It is about supporting the pathways to get it out of the body. This is the most common thing that I see when I work with patients that are coming to me after a variety of different doctors. If it's medical doctors, functional medicine doctors, et cetera, they've been through the gamut of different types of treatments, supplements, therapies, et cetera.So we carefully test your DNA for what does your body need to heal.
**Unknown:** Is it lymphatic drainage? Do you need to have support for your liver, for your kidneys, for your, your, um, spleen? Uh, is your gut working properly? Are you pooping?
**Unknown:** Are you not pooping? All of these things are significant because if the Lyme cannot get out of the body and the immune system cannot scavenge out the organisms or the toxins from the organisms, then you're not going to get better. This is not, again, my opinion. This is what I see day in and day out.
**Unknown:** It is extremely important that you use very specific strategy when you're trying to work with Lyme. So, um, this patient was, uh, pretty interesting. So fifty-three-year-old woman, she came to me with multiple sclerosis. She was diagnosed in her early forties.
**Unknown:** Um, she had pain, neuropathy, and then she started to have, um, falling spells. So a lot of that, like, coordination and falling is usually connected to MS. So, um, when she comes to me with MS, that's not my priority is to be like, "Oh, you have MS. How are we gonna treat MS?" My priority is to figure out what led you to having MS.
**Unknown:** Like, what's the bigger picture behind this? Because if we can figure that out, we can reverse engineer this, and we can actually provide you with a solution as opposed to just saying, "Hey, we're gonna shut down your immune system because you're having an autoimmune attack on your myelin sheath." Like, that doesn't cut it, in my opinion, because that is like, well, why? Why is that attack happening? So this-- I-- when I do my history, I'm asking questions back to childhood w- to when they were even born.
**Unknown:** So one of the things that came to the surface is that, um, she had tons of ear infections as a kid, ton of pen- penicillin antibiotics. So for those of you that don't know, penicillin is made from penicillium, which is toxic mold. So if you have an allergy to penicillin, amoxicillin, or ampicillin, you have mold toxicity in your body. That's just the way that it goes.
**Unknown:** So this person specifically had tons of penicillin, had a penicillin allergy at this point as an, uh, as an adult, which meant that she had mold toxicity, and this is before my testing. This is just because I know what I know. In addition, three concussions from skiing and sports. The other thing was growing pains as a kid.
**Unknown:** This was the kicker for me. Growing pains as a kid. Growing pains, most often what I see is when these kids have Lyme in their body, and they're having tons of pain in their joints because of the Lyme organism. It's not necessarily just because they're having growing pains.
**Unknown:** So if your child is having growing pains, please get them better testing so that you don't completely miss this and then later down the line they end up with something more significant. So overall, the big picture behind this person was that she had Raynaud's phenomenon, heart palpitations, and arrhythmia. So that-- what that means to me is that this person has circulatory issues. If you have Raynaud's and you're not getting proper circulation to your hands and feet, then that means that you are not necessarily getting proper circulation to your head, which means your brain.
**Unknown:** So multiple sclerosis is a neurological condition, so we need to consider if the brain getting enough oxygen because of circulatory issues. In addition, mild headaches from neck pain. One of the things that we found is that she had spirochetes in her gums that worked their way into the jawbone, which the spirochetes were obviously from Lyme, which was then getting into all of the lymphatic system of the neck and causing her to have neck pain that PT and physical therapy and, um, chiropractic, none of it helped. Also on top of it, we had cold sores.
**Unknown:** Cold sores means that not only do we have a Lyme situation going on, we also have a viral situation going on, which is from the herpes simplex virus. Also has a ton of stress on the actual, um, neurological system. Then in addition, we found the growing pains were connected to an undiagnosed Lyme infection, and here's the kicker, is that her third child, she went into preterm labor after their pertussis vaccine. She didn't realize this until I was asking better questions.
**Unknown:** But what we realized is that with everything going on in her system, so she had circulatory issues that weren't terrible, but definitely some issues with getting proper circulation to the brain. She had dental things that she just attributed to bleeding gums. Neck pain she attributed to sitting behind a computer. Cold sores, oh, they're not bad.
**Unknown:** They only come once in a while. Growing pains as a kid, no big deal. Obviously, you know, we-- I'm an adult now. We've moved on from that.
**Unknown:** History of skin cancer, using tons of sunblock, obviously trying to be proactive. Then also a little blood sugar instability, getting a little shaky and lightheaded when she, you know, didn't eat for a while. So all of these things were brewing in the background. Then she got pregnant, which is a stressor on your body in the first place.
**Unknown:** And then she actually went into a preterm labor, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back for her. Everything came to the surface, and that's-- it was, uh, two months after that the MS diagnosis was, um, was made. So the point of me telling you this story is that, you know, this was a multiple sclerosis case that was connected to Lyme, circulation, blood sugar, a variety of different things. So again, it's about looking at the whole person, putting the timeline together of how they got where they are.And it's impossible for you to know any of this without the right testing.
**Unknown:** So I'm here to tell you, you don't know what you don't know. I know that I did not know what I didn't know before I did testing. I was cruising through life thinking that I was healthy when in reality all I did was settle for feeling really crappy. And with that being said, I was able to be extremely proactive in my own health and prevent something really serious, um, coming or coming my way later in life.
**Unknown:** So I think it's really important for us to stop accepting our new normal and blaming it on bad genes, um, or just blaming it on, you know, there's no cure and, and you know, you just have to live with this. And again, I'm not saying-- like what I'm saying for, for those of you that are here with me because of Lyme is that, you know, we get over the debilitating, debilitating symptoms of Lyme, and then we just kind of settle, well, like I'm never gonna feel a hundred percent because that's just not in the cards for me anymore, and that is not true. It's just there's other pieces of the puzzle that haven't been addressed yet. All right, guys, it was so great for you to be with me, especially for those of you that have been here the whole time.
**Unknown:** Um, I really just wanna let you know I love doing this because, um, it's such an educational experience for all of you. But, you know, once you're able to really understand your own body and get your own testing done and really know what your body needs, like that's when this becomes a breakthrough experience. Um, it's really, you know, why I get up every day to do what I do because it's just so amazing to see people's lives change, um, for the better. But I thank you guys for being with me, um, and I really hope to see you in the future.
**Unknown:** And then definitely, um, if you are interested in learning more, check out our strategy call. If you missed the link, you can always hop on our website and chat with, uh, Lisa in our client services department. All right, I hope you all have a wonderful night, and I will see you soon. We thank you for being a listener and subscriber to Integrative Wellness Radio.
**Unknown:** If you're looking to learn more about Integrative Wellness Group as well as Dr. Nick or Dr. Nicole, you can check out integrativewellnessgroup.com. All night, no sleep.
**Unknown:** 'Cause I feel like I'm always dreaming. Wide awake, that's okay
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Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
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