104: Why Chronic Illness Is Exploding - The Shocking Perfect Storm Doctors Rarely Explain with Veronica Porterfield

Everybody agrees there's a chronic healthcare crisis in our country. People are focusing on diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, but underneath that observable crisis is this chronic healthcare crisis of mold, Lyme, mast cell, you know, a bunch of different things. Why do some people get bitten by a tick? And this is the question. Why do some people get bitten by a tick recover quickly while others develop devastating chronic illness? Welcome back once again to Made for Health. We dive into more issues with Lyme and tick borne illnesses today with my friend, colleague Veronica Porterfield. So I want to start the conversation just with the perfect storm of Lyme disease, mold in our modern life. Everybody agrees there's a chronic healthcare crisis in our country. People are focusing on diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, but underneath that observable crisis is this chronic healthcare crisis of mold, Lyme mast cell, you know, a bunch of different things. Why do some people get bitten by a tick? And this is the question for you, Veronica. Why do some people get bitten by a tick recover quickly while others develop devastating chronic illness? The answer just isn't about the tick bite. It's about this perfect storm. Infections, toxins, immune dysfunction that creates this environment. So give us the 10,000 foot view on this perfect storm that we were living in. Now, that's a part of our occult chronic healthcare crisis.

So I think even before the environmental piece, we have to acknowledge that there's a genetic piece to that. So some people have a genetic predisposition towards mast cell activation or towards immune dysregulation, towards, let's say, issues with detoxing. And we're looking at that all the time here, not through genetic testing in any sort of significant way, but we see it all the time with people who are having trouble just handling the environment. So you take somebody who has an underlying issue processing toxins with maybe a predisposition towards an immune dysregulation or an immune imbalance and put them in an environment that is toxic, put them, kind of surround them with exposures to metals, chemicals, everything, and now their immune system is activated. So if they have another issue, like the last straw that would break the camel's back could be moving into a home that has mold or getting that tick bite when they go for a hike. And now everything kind of breaks down. I hear that all the time. Somebody will say, well, I was doing fine. I mean, I had a lot of stress in college, but I lived in this old dorm and then this and then that and whatever. And then, you know, I got a really severe COVID infection or then I Got a tick bite and then everything comes kind of crashing down.

Yeah, I think to your point, it's mult. It's a lot of things. You know, the EPA, we had the energy crisis in the 70s with the Iran embargo. And all of a sudden we have to, like, wrap our houses a certain way so that they're more energy efficient. And one of the results was the air. The houses don't breathe. And then the 80s, we had this thing called sick building syndrome.

Right.

You know, um, our food back, I think it was 98, was when genetically modified foods entered our food system, which also means lots of glyphosate and Roundup entered our food system, of which, you know, in most of Europe, neither one of those is allowed. But it's infiltrated our entire food system. And then whatever you feed corn and soy and. And wheat too, which is pigs and cows and chickens. So all of a sudden, now it's rife. It's everywhere. And then just chemicals in General. There's over 80,000 chemicals that are currently manufactured in the United States. I think something like 2000 have actually been studied for health issues. So it's like, you know, you put those. And some people ask, why are so many kids. You know, why do people have vaccine issues these days? Because literally the vaccines now are cleaner than they were. You know, we're not giving people live polio, we're not giving people live varicella anymore. Yes, kids are getting more of those, but I think it's more this milieu of, you know, I was in the military, we would just like line people up and they would get 15, 20 shots before they went overseas to the Iraq war. And they go there and get Gulf War Syndrome, some of them. But this is where the milieu comes into play, because they were going to a place where there was literally burning oil and they're breathing, burning petroleum products for a year and living in a place where the trash was being burned out. They're literally breathing, burning trash and rubber. And now what you know about Sears, it's like it's all these little things. And so it's not one thing, it's multiple. And also depends on the person's micro environment. Like if you live in la, for example, I learned this from patients every year. It's like filled full of smoke from the fires in Arizona. I go to Arizona a lot these years for our meetings out there. And there's sometimes I've gone out there that you can't see, hardly see the mountains from the fires. And so It's a lot of this stuff.

And there's another component to that, too, which is how people's nervous systems are wired in a sense. Right. Like, so if somebody comes from a really stressful home of origin, then their immune system, or, sorry, their nervous system is wired in kind of fight or flight. So they're more. They have a little bit more autonomic issue, potentially from the beginning.

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, Dr. Robert Navio's work with the cell danger response has really helped us to understand that literally your mitochondrial, like the cause of all chronic illnesses and cancer and death is some degree of. I can say with 95% confidence, because I'm always learning new things and maybe I'll change my mind. But right now, the cause of all this is actually mitochondrial dysfunction. Yeah. And so all of a sudden, with the cell danger response, there are outside controls that wire that. And if your nervous system is dysregulated, the mitochondria and the cells won't repair appropriately. So now we talk about screens. Kids are being brought up on screens. There are political unrest like it's like a big toxic soup. And that's part of what we do, is talk to people and figure out which One of these 20,000 things are contributing to your personal health story. Which goes to the point of. We'll talk about this later about why everybody needs to be treated individually, not as a group thing.

Right.

I do want to give you a little bit of pushback.

Yeah.

I don't think I believe in genes anymore.

I know we've talked about that, haven't we have.

I don't think I believe in genes. No. What do I mean by that? Obviously, we need genes. Genes are the blueprint to build your house. You know, you look at a blueprint, you have a builder build a house. But if you have five builders with the same blueprint, they get five different houses. And our genes have not significantly changed in the United States as far as the makeup in the last 50 years. We have different populations and stuff. And worldwide human population of the planet has not changed significantly in the last however many thousands of years. But we do know cancer has skyrocketed. We do know autoimmune diseases skyrocketed. I think that's, you know, even something that is genetic. Genetic. Genetic. Like down syndrome, trisomy 21, you have three 21 genes. About 60% of babies that have down syndrome are spontaneously aborted. They're not born. The body just kind of kicks them out of the ones that are born. Some Will turn to be a 50 year old person that has mild mental retardation, but have a job, work at a grocery store somewhere, do something, have a super meaningful life. And some of them will get Alzheimer's in their late 20s, early 30s, and heart disease. And so how can a genetic disease be so different? I think that's where the environment and this epigenetics comes into play. And then the transgenerational epigenetics comes into play. Yes, genes are important, but the environment is, I think, way more important. Is more important.

Agreed. So I guess what I'm kind of referring to is a phenomenon that I see, and I'm sure you see it too, where somebody will come and let's say they're really sick with sirs, let's say they've lived in a water damage building, let's say they have mold exposure, but they live in that house with three other people. And the three other people are fine. What is it you could say, like you could go all the way back and say, well, from the time they were born, this person was exposed to this, this, this and this, this. But another piece of it is genetic. I think some people are more prone to illness. They're like the canaries in the coal mine. And even though that's not at this point the most significant factor by any means. Right? Because I think, you know, the environment far outweighs our genetic predisposition. Because I've seen enough people feel a little bit gaslit or feel like, you know, nobody believes me, that I'm sick. You know, my roommates are not sick. They think that I'm making this up or that it's totally somatic or whatever. Like I just want to acknowledge that we do have those canaries.

I think one of the things with that though, that my, what I see is people use that as an excuse. It's my genes. I can't do anything about it. Oh yeah, my dad had heart disease, my grandfather had heart disease. So therefore I'm more habit. And they almost bet your dad and grandpa smoked. Your grandpa was a coal miner, your dad worked in the factory down the street. Like they don't talk about the environment. They say, well, this runs in my family. Which is true. I tend to look more at the environment. Yes, there's genetic presupposition. Yes, you can. You know, a great example is the BRCA gene. In 1950, if you had the BRCA gene, your risk for breast cancer was roughly 20%. This is the breast cancer gene. Now it's 80% sustainer of care now for young ladies after they've had children is bilateral mastectomy, removing their fallopian tubes. Yeah. And some discussion of removing the ovaries, because that part's currently controversial. And we now know that ovarian cancer is actually fallopian tubing. But because we're in this transition phase, we're not sure is not removing the ovaries. Okay. And so a little complicated, but the point is like 80% to 20%. 20% to 80%.

That's not mediated by genes. Yeah, understood. Yeah.

And so I think that I want to empower people that even if you have this gene for whatever and your family, that your environment is still as important, if not more, to determine your. Your course, your outcome. And you can change your trajectory 100 based on a bunch of stuff. So let's talk about the disease model. We'll use Dr. Horowitz, who I interviewed in the podcast. Brilliant. He's like the pioneer in this world. And I think it's really funny to find individuals like him, super smart people who kind of been in this for decades, and they create their own functional medicine model. You know, I was mentioning before about Yehuda Schoenfeld and his. He has a thing called Asia syndrome, which is anti inflammatory syndrome induced by juvens. And he has four major things in that. And it's really interesting how over the SIRS or Mast Cell with Dr. Afrin's group or Dr. Shoemake with Dr. Heyman with SERS. Super smart people, like in their different groups and they describe this phenomena. It's like 80% the same.

Yeah, there's a lot of overlap.

A lot of overlap. Talk about that briefly, because I feel like people get stuck in this specialty loop of I'm working with a mold person now I'm working with a Lyme person I'm working with. And like, literally I feel like you have to be like, to do them all to really help many of these people.

Have you ever lost trust in your own body or in the doctors who were supposed to help you heal? It happens to millions of people who are stuck in the cycle of prescriptions, tests, and more questions than answers. That's why Dr. Aaron Hartman wrote his new book Uncurable. As a physician and a parent, he's lived through the pain of being told there's nothing more we can do. But instead of accepting that, he built a new path, one that combines traditional and functional medicine to uncover what's really driving illness. Uncurable is more than a book. It's a roadmap to help you find the root causes your doctor might have missed. Reactivate your body's natural healing systems and finally believe in what's possible again. If you've lost hope or trust in the system, this book will help you take back control. Go to UncurableBook.com and grab your copy along with Dr. Hartman's free resources to help you start your healing journey today.

I think we see it often, so I think we see it in our patients who come in and they're not well. And as we start to kind of peel back the layers of the onion, there are multiple layers and there is an immune layer and there is, you know, for some people an infection layer. There is potentially a GI layer. There are a lot of layers. And so being able to work with somebody who has expertise kind of in all of those realms rather than just one focus or one protocol that everybody goes through. Because this is the protocol. Yeah, it's really important.

And with Horowitz is his, with his 16 point Imsids thing he calls it. It's really interesting because he has different, he has different categories, infections, mold, toxins, genetic predispositions, gut health, microbiome. But he has like 6 primary and 10 downstream effects. But inflammation is one of the downstream effects. And I kind of like that model when I'm seeing my, some of my more complicated patients because I'll do like the regular functional medicine stuff, you know, gut health, I'll do my triangle of health, guster at sleep. But if they're not getting better, I'll add in some hypermobility. But like just having options. It's my toolkit, you know. I feel like his model is really super nice because he kind of. It's like the one model that probably hits most of the other models. Yeah. Versus some of the models hit three or four things. His is nice because it's like pretty comprehensive.

Yeah.

The thing that just blows my mind is he developed it by himself.

I know, but like you, I mean he, I think over years of working with people like added another thing and realized this was another thing and this is another factor. So.

So let's somewhat talk about mold briefly because I feel like that's something like some of my most difficult patients have gone these super Lyme clinics, they had ports put in Antibiox for a year, didn't get better. And then they come back and I'm like, they have mold issues. Yeah, let's talk about that because that's something that I feel like is now just coming to Public consciousness, but it's a big player with reactivation as well as people who aren't responding to.

Well. I think it's the effect of mold on the immune system largely causing such dysregulation that kind of in some sense predisposes people or is kind of foundational in terms of, you know, who's going to be more susceptible to being more sick because the immune system kind of has like one arm time behind its back.

I think one thing I want to keep, I say this a lot. I feel like, you know, repetition is the mother of all learning. But with SERS, chronic inflammatory response syndrome, 80% of it is a water damage building. And there's like over 200 different chemicals and particulates and glucomannans and a bunch of stuff in a water damaged building. But within the water damage building, there's also 80% of that is actinomyces and endotoxins, which are one our bodies make endotoxins and actinomyces is a soil based organism. And so all of a sudden like the water, the mold thing is like it's bigger than mold. It's all this other stuff. And then you realize with SERS, like the 20% also includes breast implant illness, includes concussion. Some people can actually over train and cause their muscles to break down and release these things called damps or damaged associated molecular patterns that activate your innate immune system. And then a bunch of stuff, you know, then there's the random rare stuff like fiesteria, ciguatera, recluse spider bites that I don't think I see a whole lot of that stuff. But just to realize that the SIRS world is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it can be a part of people with their tick borne illness not getting better.

I think that's something that especially when somebody's been treated for a period of time with antibiotics for a tick borne illness, you have to ask yourself what else is going on. So it would be, you'd be remiss as a provider to just give somebody antibiotics indefinitely and say, well, you know, this is just what's required to manage this. If the person's really not getting better, if they can't get off of those antibiotics, then there's definitely something else going on. To your point.

Yeah, and having more tools in the toolkit or picking them up is super important hormonal chaos. So one thing is, you know, people will come adrenal fatigue, their hormones are off. How does all this affect people's hormones?

It's not Uncommon to see significant hormonal, I would say overall, like a drop in hormone levels, especially sex hormone levels, but adrenal hormones too kind of get thrown out of whack. And I mean, largely, I suspect that because the whole system is under stress, rather than thinking like the body just naturally responds or adapts to the situation and says, well, we don't need to really be reproducing here. We really need to just be surviving with kind of a constant chronic assault, if you will. So we commonly see people with low testosterone women who lose their cycles or have totally dysregulated cycles. Maybe they start to develop heavy periods. They wonder if they're going through perimenopause. They're 32 years old and they're like, can this be for real? Like, I'm getting a cycle every 35 to 40 days. It's super heavy. This is what my mom described in perimenopause. Like what is happening? So really low progesterone in women, really low testosterone in men. That's not uncommon at all with these chronic infections.

And it's getting more common. You know, if you look at, for men, every 10 years, men's testosterone levels are dropping lower and lower. And so now it's almost like today, if you look at a man in their 60s versus a man now, you know, someone today might have a, you know, have a testosterone of 5 or 600 and be, you know, in their 30s and 40s. Right, but that would have been the level of a 60 or 70 year old half a century ago. Correct. So we're also seeing this, this degradation and infertility is on the rise. It's just why a lot of these chemicals, toxins, mold, Lyme, I mean, it's, it's a big, it's a big slurry. Mitochondrial dysfunction is something else. Another downstream effect of this whole thing. Not just hormones being messed up at our mitochondria. How are these infections, how are they toxic to our mitochondria, like the powerhouse of our cells?

That's a great question. I don't know the mechanism of that.

Okay, well, I guess maybe the question is, you know where I'm kind of shooting at with that is like these things are actually making their own toxins that affect our bodies. They're with, you mentioned with Bartonella, it releases enzymes that actually break down our tissues. These infections are their own toxins that then can affect our mitochondria and ultimately with the whole cell danger response, any insult can result in your, your mitochondria Saying we can't, we can't. And so all of a sudden anything, whether it's physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, trauma, whether it's environmental toxins, it's like the big tea toxin, the little tea toxins, and then just the emotional toxins, all of them can actually affect our mitochondria. And this is just one of the many things in that category of stuff. POTS and dysautonomia, that's something we both see a lot of. How do these things, what's the way in which these things can lead to or show up, like with POTS and dysautonomia.

So I would say dysautonomia is a pretty common finding with tick borne illness. I don't know if it's actually mediated through mast cell activation, honestly. I mean, I'm not exactly sure what the kind of mediator is there for that. But people who historically have been, you know, kind of running their normal lives and functioning totally normally will say after they develop a tick bite, like suddenly when I stand up, I get dizzy, I feel dizzy. All. Some people will even have like cognitive changes, attention issues that are like kind of dysautonomia related because they're not getting profusion to the brain like they typically would or were.

There's the pentad super syndrome, which is, you know, the dysautonomia, the gastrointestinal issues, autoimmunity, hypermobility, mast cell and I don't. And then there's the septab, which is the two extra things which gets a little complicated. But the, ultimately these, these come together and I don't think, I don't think anybody knows like the why, why, why, like why they all. But it's like almost like, you know, it's where there's smoke, there's fire. Right. Kind of thing. And so I almost, if I see an, an all immune issue, I see an infection and people aren't getting better. I'm all sudden. Do you have any one of these? I'm looking for them because anyone. Because you see one, you'll probably see another. You see another, you'll probably see another. And it's really common. You see all five of them.

Yeah.

And so if you're not doing all those, someone's chronic infection, they came into you with chronic Lyme or Bart Babesia. Why are they not getting better? It's like, have you dealt with these?

Right, exactly. So somebody comes in with this things and then maybe they go, like you were saying earlier, maybe they go to a Pot specialist. Because they're like, I feel dizzy. I feel weird. I don't tolerate exercise, I don't tolerate heat. I just don't feel right. They go see a dysautonomia specialist or somebody who can deal with pots, and they feel a little better, but there's a whole other realm to deal with so that they can start to actually heal.

Yeah, I want to transition a little bit to Long Covid.

Okay.

Briefly. Long Covid is just one example of a phenomenon we see all the time. Know, you get an infection and you get neurally mediated immune dysregulation that affects your hormones and your entire body. You know, your post Lyme syndrome, people getting Epstein Barr and resulting in chronic fatigue and fibro. I actually had a thing about the Incline Lake, which was this thing in the 80s where a lot of people were getting gas lit. And ultimately it was this place in California. It actually made the news. The CDC investigated it. The people were told it's all in their heads. Female teachers getting sick. And they came to find out that was mold.

Okay.

But the idea is that Long Covid is like the newest example of a viral infection, a triggering event that some people, not everybody, not all people, but significant number of people, results in chronic fatigue, fiber mast cell pots, dysautonomia, and even the vaccine. I mean, this happens with other vaccines that happen with the hpv. It happens with flu. It's not common.

Right.

But anything that insults your immune system. Let's talk about Long Covid briefly, because I feel like people now understand this is a real thing.

Yeah, yeah.

There's so much stuff about it. And my point is, like, Long Covid is one of the many things Covid. It's like. Like it was because when covet happened, people, you know, what are you gonna do for it? There's no data on, like. Well, we know it. We. We have data on flu and Epstein Barr and herpes. We have data on, you know, HHV6. We have data on a bunch of other viral infections. This is another viral infection. So we're going to use that information. You need to get your D levels up. You need to get your zinc up, maybe take some knack, you know? And all of a sudden, the literature came out a year later. Those are the things. It was important. Yeah. And so it's like, people need to understand these patterns. Something's new, quote, unquote. But a practitioner that's been practicing for years seen it, has seen something similar.

Right.

And can actually use their clinical expertise. The three Parts of evidence based medicine, the most up to date literature, patient preference and clinician experience.

Yeah.

And Today we ignore 2 and 3 and only focus on literature, which means we miss a lot of stuff. But you don't want to negate the fact that if you've been practicing for years, even if something's novel, like long Covid, you actually have tools. So I want to talk about it briefly. Like the perfect storm, the trigger and how. Let's talk about COVID and how in how it's reactivated infections like Epstein, Barn. I want to talk about that briefly.

Well, I. I'll tell you. Like, I was. I feel like I was kind of on the front line of that long Covid phenomenon back in. I guess I first started seeing it in January. Well, no, maybe the fall of 2021. And at the time there was a question, like, is what we're seeing just kind of a prolonged COVID infection? We were doing radiance diagnostics, Bruce Patterson Labs to see, like, is there a spike protein component to this? Like, is a spike protein kind of infiltrating a monocyte and driving this kind of ongoing. And we tested a lot, a lot of people who had long Covid symptoms. And I think probably one of dozens had spike protein in their monocytes. So they were showing up with fatigue and, you know, post exertional malaise and like kind of the whole group of findings. And in most instances, it wasn't actually Covid that was doing it. It was that Covid had triggered another cascade of events. And a person who had previously been exposed to mold or somebody who maybe had Lyme disease, maybe it was reactivating the Lyme. So kind of the insult to the immune system and the dysregulation that resulted from that. We were having to kind of pick up the pieces on the other side of that and figure out, okay, this isn't in the first instance, Covid continuing to drive, like the spike protein continuing to drive this scenario. We maybe have Epstein Barr, we maybe have Lyme, we maybe have, you know, HSV1. We maybe have. I mean, there are a number of different things that could be findings on the other side.

Yeah. And they've actually, Radiance diagnostics has changed some of their stuff now they're actually doing certain cytokine panels that actually will pick up like Lyme reactivation, which is interesting. My first long COVID patient was actually someone that was working at research at the local hospital, clinical research, and got long Covid and hers actually was surge, really was mold related. So her Surge phenomenon was she had a moldy home and her workplace was moldy. She was fine. She was healthy. She got Covid, and then she developed SIRS after it. And so it's one of those things where I think long Covid, depending on which same kind of thing. Expert. Are you a viral expert that's looking for the spike protein thing? And there's people with that, but there's also some people that it's. It's a mold issue. Some people it's the reactivation of their Epstein Barr. Some people it's reactivation of their cmv. Some people it's reactivation of their Lyme. And so long, Covid. This now, actually, it's interesting. Academic centers are collecting data, but not actually having massive treatments. I think the. Probably the biggest novel treatment in the academic thing is probably Bruce Patterson's using maraviroc and Amostatin to, like, help with the senescent cells. And it's probably the bigger things, but in our world, it's like, again, this is like mold. This is like lime. This is like pots. And so we're kind of. We've been treating these. The first patient I treated with this was actually May 2000. Yeah, it was early. Early on, before I was even recognized. But. And I think that's one of the things. If you're in the. If you're in the trenches, you're gonna see stuff before it makes it to public consciousness.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's been very illuminating. I think Covid's actually been really helpful in validating both for providers who are doing this, but also for the patients themselves. And seeing the immune dysregulation that results from COVID I think it's been. And I'm sure you've seen this too, people who've had Covid trigger an autoimmune condition 100%. So now having it in, like you said, the public consciousness is really helpful because people can advocate for themselves.

But I think it's a great. This. Like, to play off what you said, Covid has brought the public consciousness that what we've been doing, the functional medicine world, is legit. It's there. It's just. And this is one example of all the many, many things we deal with on a daily basis. And tick point analysis is one of the many things we have to deal with on a daily basis.

Yeah.

Cool. I feel like that helped fill out things a little bit. I think we want to end with beyond antibiotics with these patients. Like, what's. What else is there besides antibiotics?

Okay.

With Lyme patients. I'm sorry? Yeah, with Lyme patients. Tick borne illness patients. Because many of the people we see, like, need more than just antibiotics to get better. So maybe we'll end up our conversation about tick borne illnesses, which with diving into a little bit of that kind of stuff. What are other things that can help with biofilms and mast cell and cytokines and all kind of jazz, because it is kind of complicated.

Yeah, sounds good.

Great. Awesome. Take care. Talk to you soon.

If you've lost trust in your body or in the system that was supposed to heal you, don't give up. Dr. Aaron Hartman's book, Uncurable Will help you rediscover what's truly possible. Visit UncurableBook.com to get your copy and start your healing journey today.