78: Is It Anxiety—or Dysautonomia? – The Hidden Nervous System Disorder Behind Fatigue and Brain Fog with Dr. Aaron Hartman

We talk about these major, five major mystery illnesses. You have to realize they come together, they tend to come together in groups, they tend to play together, and they can actually make each other worse. And so if you have one chronic Lyme mold autoimmune issue, autonomic nervous system issue, you should always look for the other ones as well. We are week four, number four of our mystery illnesses, taking a deep dive into some of the enigmas that are currently plaguing our country and our healthcare system. We already talked briefly about Lyme mold autoimmune diseases. Today we're going to talk about dysautonomia, one of which people have heard of is pots. So what is dysautonomia and how is this a mystery illness? Well, dysautonomia is basically a dysfunctioning of your nervous system. Now there's five parts, not just two parts of your nervous system. There's your sympathetic nervous system, your parasympathetic nervous system, your sympatho cholinergic nervous system, your sympatho noradrenergic nervous system, and your gastroenteric nervous system. So basically, fight or flight, rest and digest part, which is your sympathetic parasympathetic. There's acetylcholine, which has to do with a lot of vagal nerve activity. There's the part that of your brain, central nervous system that talks to your adrenal gland, sympathoadrenergic as well, the norepinephrine which is a brain neurotransmitter. Then your gut itself has its own built in nervous system. So all of a sudden, if you just understand the different parts of your nervous system, you can see why. Okay, vagus nerve calming, rest, digest. If that gets messed up, you can have anxiety, neurological mood disorders, sleep disturbances, hormone issues, hot cold flashes, temperature regulation issues. Oh wow, that. So it could be more than just hormones. Yes, it could be an issue with your autonomic nervous system. If you're having type of dysautonomia where you're having panic attacks, your blood pressure spikes, pulse spiking, you wake up in the middle of night, short of breath, anxious, feeling jittery, that could be actually neuric spikes that occur from laying down. Or it could be related to pots, which is a neurological dysfunction in the way your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system relate with your peripheral nerves. So now it's easy to understand. Like I'll see patients, they come to me and they have an autoimmune issue or a gut issue. Or they have Lyme disease. And this is one of the interesting things. The connection is maybe many times you can develop a type of borderline dysautonomia related to other things like Lyme or Bartonella, Babesia Epstein, bar reactivation, an autoimmune disease, water damage, building Lyme, et cetera. So not just addressing those. If you're having some of these neurological symptoms, addressing that. Well, how do you know if you have an issue? Well, first, during a physical exam, when I see patients, I'll see a thing called an adrenal pupil, which is when they're examined them. The pupil gets really big. I shine a light into it. It gets really small, but it undulates. It gets bigger and smaller because it's a fight between your fight or flight and your rest and digest part of your nervous system. The people's skin might feel cold and clammy. They might have discoloration of the extremities of their hands. There's a thing called a nasaline test where when they sit up, you see a fluctuation in blood pressure and pulse. But typically, the history is what leads me down, thinking there's a dysregulation in your nervous system. And again, if you see multiple body systems being involved, different kinds of symptoms, you need to think, is this a nervous system thing? Is it primary or is it secondary? And we talk about these major five major mystery illnesses. You have to realize they. They can. They come together. They tend to come together in groups, they tend to play together, and they can actually make each other worse. And so if you have one, chronic Lyme mold, autoimmune issue, autonomic nervous system issue, you should always look for the other ones as well.

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One of the nice things about some of the dysautonomias, particularly pots, is that through basic nutritional interventions, gut interventions, fluids, electrolytes, you can treat a lot of the symptoms. If people are dealing with an autoimmune form of dysautonomia, then that gets a little more complicated. But the most common ones I see are not the autoimmune ones. They're more the POTS type of dysautonomia that we see related to dysfunction nervous system. And those go into more brain regulation of cortisol, brain regulation of epinephrine, and then ultimately your peripheral nerves. If they don't constrict in your arteries when you change position, your blood pressure will fluctuate. So how can this be treated? Well, these are more complicated and more. This is like, I call this Functional Medicine 3.0. We really need to have a full body, multi system, multi symptom viewpoint. But there's some interesting literature showing that individuals with certain types of dysautonomia can actually have nice responses to lower naltrexone on forms of IgG, IV IgG particularly. But we use more oral in our office and then working on the gut, actually treating gut problems, particularly sebone dysbiosis. So if someone has some of this dysautonomia, simply addressing nervous system regulation, gut issues, and then realizing there's going to be some kind of environmental trigger, looking for a mold, looking for an infection, looking for even. One of the things that's really interesting is many people will develop nervous system dysregulation just from being sick over time. So, so it's kind of like water torture where the drip, drip, drip of water over time can actually cause a trauma like response to your nervous system. And so some people will develop this over time. It's not an acute thing, it's more of a low grade escalation. And those individuals need to do some kind of brain rewiring. But hopefully you're starting to appreciate how complicated some of these interactions can be. And having a full spectrum perspective on if you have a mystery illness, if you have multiple systems, multiple symptoms going on, you really need to have a full, a full gauge approach to all these things in order to understand and get to the root cause of what's going on. So my questions for you today, is anybody out there diagnosed with a type of dysautonomia or pots. You know, how long did it take to get diagnosed and what was your journey? Because I'd be kind of curious about that. Hearing these stories helps me kind of, you know, think about patients. I see. But also helps. You can help other people who are in the similar situations you may have been to help realize they might have one of these underlying mystery illnesses and how they help. They need to help the body get on the track to healing repair. Next week, we'll be talking about the last of these mystery illnesses, which is mast cell activation syndrome, which actually, according to Dr. Moulding's work from Germany, maybe 19% of the population has this. So we'll talk about that one next. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.