Healing Sensitive Patients: Emotional, Energetic & Spiritual Health with Dr. Neil Nathan (Episode 2)

I want to transition a little bit to some of the details in the book. Obviously we're not going to talk about your whole entire book. It's a great book. It's actually one of the things I really liked about was you basically found experts in different fields. Instead of you doing it all, you actually brought people in to like dive into that, which I thought was really a great, great way to do it. So I want to just kind of go through some of those, those sections and hit some things I think people aren't quite as familiar with. And we actually already mentioned EMF a little bit. So I actually want to start, start there because I feel like that's something where people, it's like even like I was not. When I did my training, no one even hardly mentioned EMF. You know, whether it was a 4M, i4M, whether those other things, it was just like, well, there's, you know, fields or whatever, you know, so what, you know, what is, or what are electromagnetic fields? What are they, what are, where they come from and how, how do they negatively impact our, our body?

Okay, that's a whole long subject.

I know. Yeah, yeah, that's a book, right.

There are several kinds of emf so that although we talk about emf, we should specify what kind we're talking about. So there's the emf, the electromagnetic waves that we get from cell towers in our environment. There's electromagnetic exposure we get from every electrical device in our house. Electrical devices put out an electrical and a magnetic field, and that's just what they do. And then there's the EMF exposure, which is a different frequency. It's not the same thing that we get from our computers, cell phones, all of our computer type devices that are so near and dear to all of us. And then there's one more type which is called dirty electricity, in which if on the outlets of your home, if it wasn't done properly, it can radiate a fairly strong electrical field there, if you don't look at that. So again, this is of epidemic proportion now. It's grown as our exposure has grown. And 100 years ago we weren't exposed. Now, so for example, many people think there's not much difference from 4G or 5G. It's just one. It's one, right? Four and five. You're talking about a thousand fold increase in EMF exposure from 4G to 5G. And now they're rolling out 10G. When that occurred, there was a huge upsurge of EMF sensitivity. And what people Call it electronic hypersensitivity. EHS is the technical name for that. So again, many of these patients were being accused of being psychological, but what they were experiencing was they're sitting at their computer like you and I are both doing right now. But if it went on for a period of time, they became brain fogged, fatigued, or developed neurological conditions like pseudo seizures or tics or a variety of things, things. Headaches, extremely common. And it was reproducible for them if they did the same thing regularly. Yep, I get this every time that happens to me. And then if they would tell their friends about it, they said, well, that's crazy. I spend eight hours a day on computer and I'm fine. Well, some people are more electrically sensitive than others, just like some people have a better sense of taste and than others. And they become chefs or different perception of wine and they become wine connoisseurs or whatever. But we all have our own sensitivity. So this is very real. And it adds a whole level of inflammation to what is already an inflamed system for most of our chronic patients. So I urge anyone who has any chronic illness or has even a hint of this to get what we call an electro smog meter, which is simply a little meter. You can hold it in your hand and it tells you what you're being exposed to. So I can hold it in my hand and see how close can I get to my computer without it going off scale, or how close can I get to the electric clock in my bedroom or my refrigerator or my microwave, or what am I getting from the cell towers in my area? So you get an idea of what you're actually getting exposed to. And no matter what kind of exposure you have, you can block it to a certain extent by getting your devices shielded. So my, my Kindle is shielded, my phone is shielded, so my router is way across the room so that I'm not exposing myself at this moment to any significant emf. But a lot of folks need to know that.

Yeah, well, I think it's kind of interesting because I think. I'm not sure if you mentioned it in your book, but Prescription for a Healthy Home by Banta. And it was interesting going through that. And they talked specifically about dirty electricity. But one thing I just was re reminded of is that the Russians actually knew about this concept back in the 50s and 60s. And so this idea of illness from electromagnetic fields might be novel here in America or novel in our consciousness, but over in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe and Russia, they've known about this for over half a century. So that's something else. I think it's important for people to realize some of these things we're talking about are not. They're novel to us, but not necessarily new.

Right. The Europeans have been much more on some of this than we have. There's a type of electric field that comes out of the earth called a geopathic zone. It's literally a pillar of energy that comes out of the earth. And I know it's going to sound weird, but you can perceive it by dowsing it like you would douse water. Again, many people would view that as a woo woo type of thing, but in many communities in this country. I lived in Missouri for many years. If you're going to drill a well, you got a dowser to come out to your property and show you where to drill. Because otherwise you could waste a whole lot of money just digging in the wrong place. But these geopathic zones can affect health adversely. So there are many clinics in Germany that will insist that they go out to your home to check it for a geopathic zone because your cancer may be caused by the fact that you're sleeping in the middle of one. And health may involve just moving the bed to the other side of the room so you're no longer in the geopathic zone. So, yes, there's way more that old Shakespeare incumbent may more is going on in this life than is apparent in your philosophies, Horatio. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because some ancient cultures where ancient cities and ancient places where people live, they actually had a. Somehow they had a knowledge of this in some of these zones. My wife and I were at a clinic in Switzerland and they actually had known like one of these areas over there. So it's really again, interesting. This is not new in the historical perspective. It's novel to us here in the United States. To talk about it, I want to transition to something that I actually had never ever heard of before until it was actually mentioned in the book. It was actually this thing called spiky leaky syndrome. I actually not heard of that until I was reading and I was like, this is 100% novel to me. So could you talk about that briefly? Because that was something that was just 100% novel to me. As I was going through the book.

I first learned about it, in fact, while the book was being written and I held up production of the book to include it because I thought it was important. I heard Andy Maxwell give a lecture on it. Andy's a pediatrician who has been working with a lot of sensitive kids for a long time, and he and his medical partner for over several years began to put together a bunch of medical events that made sense for them. So the. Basically, the spiky leaky theory. Sorry about the complex name, I didn't make it up. Is. Is that if there is a loosening or weakening of ligaments at the base of your skull, right where the. The skull attaches to the first cervical vertebrae, that's a very sensitive area. And this is in the category that we talked about a little bit before about weakened ligaments or people with Ehler Danlos syndrome, in which if the ligaments at the base of the skull become looser, the skull collapses on itself. And in doing so, the blood vessels, nerves, lymphatics, and all the things in here get compressed. There's literally a. A blockage to a certain extent of outflow of all those tissues. So these people can get a facial edema in a way that you would not expect it to. They can get headaches. And it's very tied into another condition called cci, which is cervical cranial instability. But it's the same concept. Cervical cranial stability basically means at the craniocervical junction, the skull and the. And the cervical vertebrae, instability means loosening of those ligaments. So we get a structural imbalance here that causes a. A blockage which profoundly affects the autonomic nervous system. It sets off a domino series of events in the body that is very similar to what these other inflammatory conditions affect. And Andy Maxwell has found that one of the major things that triggers this cci, or instability, is the mast cell activation triggered by mold toxicity. So we're beginning to tie some of these things together. So the actual paper that andy wrote is 50 pages long with multiple diagrams. It's super complicated, but we tried in my book to make it as accessible as possible to understanding what's going on. So it's very difficult to diagnose this because these structures at the base of the skull where it's all happening, are very tiny. The resolution of an MRI is. Is less than 2 millimeters, meaning if what you're looking for, an MRI is 2 millimeters or less, it's not going to see it, because it can't. It's beyond its resolution. So you need to do special MRIs. You have to put people standing in different ways in order to be able to make that diagnosis, which is tricky.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because, you know, with the whales, describe spiky, leaky, but Then the cranial cervical instability. I have a lot of patients with hypermobility that have a lot of different types of dysautonomia. They might feel better. You know, first thing they wake up in the morning, they have these headaches. They feel better after laying down for a period of 24 hours. They get up all of a sudden, they get these weird sounds, hearing things, perceptual abnormalities that seem kind of like they're crazy. But it's literally that part of the brain that it's the regulatory system in your midbrain. I feel like it's one of those things. It's common. It's just we don't know how to diagnose it. And as we learn more about. We're going to see it more and more.

Yeah. So part of this congestion or lack of flow going on inside the head, part of that is cerebrospinal fluid, which can't flow down through the body the way it is supposed to, and then it leaks. That's where the leaky component of this thing comes from. A couple of very simple things that people can do to kind of hint that maybe it's going on would be to get a soft cervical collar which would lift the skull up a little bit and take some pressure off of that. Another trick that Andy has found is that if the cerebrospinal fluid is being built up, taking Diamox, the medication that we use for people who are in to prevent mountain sickness, can be very helpful.

Yeah. Something else that was in your. And I had come across this before. I forget where you're. I think it was one of your lectures somewhere else about thiamine deficiency, which for me has been a game changer for a lot of my patients from Dr. Laundry's work at the Cleveland Clinic. How thiamine affects your autonomic nervous system and how a lot of complex patients have these mitochondrial issues that can be exacerbated by functionality thiamine deficiencies. Could you kind of briefly talk about that? Because I feel like this is something that we've known about historically, going back into the early 1900s with what was going on in Japan. And workers would be outside and get sun exposures and develop, you know, weird neurological issues. But here in our overfed society, we're actually getting nutritionally driven over feeding syndromes that induce these functional deficiencies that again, can look like a lot of bizarre kind of things.

So thiamine is kind of unique, it's vitamin B1 in that the biochemical reactions by which we make energy, which we call the Krebs cycle. Almost every step of the Krebs cycle requires thiamine as a cofactor to make that work. So if we don't have enough thiamine, we're not going to be able to have the energy we need. Our mitochondria are not going to be able to function properly. And it's probably way more common than people realize. The. For example, mold toxicity. Sorry to focus on mold, but mold toxicity prevents the body from absorbing or using thiamine the way you normally would. So the vast majority of our patients with mold toxicity are going to have a thiamine component to that, which is pretty easy to treat if you recognize that's what's going on. There are 4 million people in this country right now taking metformin, medication we use to treat diabetes. Metformin blocks the body's ability to utilize thiamine properly. So, and again, there's a whole bunch of other nutritional issues. What we call the standard American diet, which is called the SAD diet, because of our use of high fructose corn syrup, our use of preservatives of every type. That diet would make us deficient in thiamine because it's not present there in adequate amounts. So more Americans have a thiamine deficiency than they would realize. And supplementing that is a simple thing to do. Once people recognize, it's a bigger player than you would think. And again, thiamine is critical for the functioning of the autonomic nervous system, which has been a theme in what we're talking about today.

You know, I'm not sure if you've done this before. I've got several patients with Parkinson's I'm working with right now and actually read a book about thymine therapy with Parkinson's patients. And the doses there are super high, you know, two, three, four grams a day. Have you used it or utilized thiamine with patients with significant neurological issues and had a really nice response and profound response, or in what situations have you seen patients have significant responses to some kind of thiamine therapy?

Again, I've started using it routinely with my mold toxic patients. A thiama deficiency will cause ataxia, which is an instability where you're walking and you can't really walk normally. So in patients with ataxia, I found that to be helpful. And Chandler Mars, who wrote the book, co authored the book, has shared with me that some people need massive amounts of thiamine to make it neurologically therapeutic for them. Meaning we're talking a thousand to twelve hundred milligrams of thiamine a day, whereas most of us need 100 milligrams a day. But if you like, I'll comment on the Parkinson's picture in Parkinson's. And that applies to Alzheimer's disease and ALS and to almost any neurodegenerative disease. The underlying pathophysiology of it is inflammation. And so figuring out what is triggering that inflammation is really helpful for treating it, as I'm sure you know, Aaron. So I just wanted for your listening audience to talk about the fact that any patient with Alzheimer's. We should look at mold toxicity. We should look at Lyme disease, We should look at heavy metal toxicity, particularly lead and mercury, as possible causes. And if you can catch a Parkinson's patient early, you can really make a huge difference in their clinical course.

Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely agree with that. So oxalates are an interesting topic. I think Kurt Wooler, I think, did a chapter in your book and actually came across his work back in 2017 while I was doing some research on autism. As a person who's, like, sees a lot of kids with autism and works with autism, can you talk to us about oxalates? I feel like that's one of the things that's, you know, super common. When you do urine tests, you routinely see oxalate crystals in it, and people just kind of have. You have kidney stones? No, they just glance over it and ignore it. Yet these can be a trigger for myofascial pain, fibro pain, neurological issues, because you kind of give us a little primer on that.

Sure. If you. If you were able to look at an oxalate crystal, it's not a pretty little crystal. It's got shards all over it. It's a type of crystal that if it is found in your joint, it's really painful and irritating to it. It's just found in any tissue. It's painful and irritating to it and is a real source of inflammation. Don't want to be a dead horse here, but molds make oxalates so that it adds a whole level of oxalate toxicity to people who might be predisposed. Oxalate stones are one of the most common form of kidney stone. So anyone who has developed a kidney stone has some degree of an oxalate issue. And you may need to look at measuring oxalates in the body. The OAT test has traditionally had several different measures of oxalates, which we found to be quite helpful. And if we're measuring oxalates, in the body, we can treat it, but then you have to think about looking at the foods and supplements you're taking that might be making oxalates accumulate in your body based on your own genetics and biochemistry. So not everybody is sensitive to oxalates, but quite a few people are. And common sources of oxalates are things like spinach, kale, rhubarb. I mean, those are very, very high in oxalates.

Yeah. And I've had multiple patients as well who've had overgrowth of yeast in their GI tract as a driver for oxalate production. And after you work on their gut, I've been able to normalizer the.

They're.

They're o testing. So I think it's one of those things that it's on some of the testing we do. But a lot of practitioners don't know how to either address it or it just kind of. It's against. Not commonly discussed, even though it's something that's really, really commonly seen.

Yeah, there's. I mean, we have a great chapter in the book. It was written by Emily Gibler, who herself has wrestled with oxalates, and she's a nutritionist, which is very helpful. And that's a good start if you really want to get a great book on oxalates. Sally Norton has a book called Toxic Superfoods, in which she not only goes into oxalates in detail, but tells you how to lower your oxalates. The biggest issue is suddenly deciding that, oh, okay, oxalates are a problem. I'm going to stop eating them. That's a very bad strategy because if you suddenly decrease the amount of oxalates you're taking, and you can get a phenomenon called oxalate dumping, in which the body goes, okay, this is great. I got a whole bunch of oxalate in me. I'm just going to dump it all at once. And you can get much, much worse that way. So if you're going to come off oxalates, you really need to understand how to slowly reduce your oxalate consumption. Very important.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point, because sometimes when you. Uric acid is another great example of that with people with high uric acids, and you bring it down too fast and they can literally have a flare of their gout and their joint pain. So it's another example of a crystal storage disease that if not, if you don't take people off the edge slowly, you can literally flare their pain, which flares their cortisol, which can then almost be a Triggering of their underlying trauma stuff.

Ropes. Speaking of coming off things slowly, I thought I'd segue this. Many people don't realize that antidepressants like SSRIs, you need to come off of them slowly. Also, I know people know you need to come off of benzodiazepines slowly because the body will resent it greatly. But I don't think even psychiatrists appreciate how suddenly stopping an SSRI like Lexapro, Zoloft, or what have you can really mess up the neurotransmitters in the body and set you back enormously. It has to be stopped very, very slowly and gradually. Just for your audience to know that that's not something you can come off of quickly.

Well, actually, that's on my list of things to talk about, actually. So you kind of transition us to that one. It's something. Seen it for years. I've been practicing for, you know, only about 24 years. But I saw this early on in my career where there's some people who you have to, like, you know, go from 20 milligrams to 17 milligrams to used to take them off so slow. It didn't quite make sense to me back. Back then. But, you know, as I've studied and learned, I've realized there's that certain population in your book. This is the first place I actually saw it, like, listed out that you can have, you know, benzo withdrawal. SSR withdrawal as a trigger for the sensitive patient. I think, again, something I've seen, I recognize, but didn't necessarily connect the dot with some of my. More particularly my mast cell patients and my patients have more in my mold patients that are sensitive to everything. It's almost like they need their benzo for the mast cell stabilization. They need the SSRI for the cortisol effects. And if you take them off of that too quickly and sometimes it's just like baby doses. Like, what are your thoughts about how. How you address that in someone you're seeing that's sensitive when they want to get off the medication, but you're managing all these other things.

Point is very well taken. I often ask that people not withdraw from those medications. I know how toxic they are. I want them off the medications until we've addressed the root cause of what's been making them sick in the first place. So. So if they had Lyme or mold or you name it, whatever the chronic illness is, that once that's been addressed, the inflammation level in their body is markedly decreased and they can handle that much Better. But I've had patients where, I don't know, they were on really high doses of things like Ativan.

And.

I would reduce that by teeny, teeny bits a month or more. I mean, the level of withdrawal has to be match the patient. So some patients can come off fast, but if you're taking somebody off and you're moving too fast, they're telling you, I can't do that. And so again, you can say, oh, you become an addict, this is terrible. But no, I'm not usually the one who put him on the drug in the first place. But that notwithstanding, they're telling us the path. And I've had people take two years to get off of benzodiazepine and a year to get off of an SSRI type medication, and it's just slow. And they were thrilled when they got off because they realized how fragile their system was. From that perspective.

Yeah, yeah. I've actually. I'm working with a young, young guy right now. He's maybe 12ish. He's young kid with horrible dysautonomia. At one point in time, he couldn't. He come in the office, couldn't hardly even get up. He'd just lay down the whole entire time he'd come with sunglasses on. He was sensitive to so many things and disrupted sleep. And one of the things we figured out early on, he has some mast cell issues as well. I'm kind of curious your thoughts about this because obviously sleep is critical.

Right.

And so a small. He was like at that point in time, maybe 10, the smallest sliver of like a eighth of a milligram of Klonopim actually helped him to sleep and actually gave him a good night's rest. And so over about six months, he actually started turning the corner and feeling better and having energy throughout the day. Like, what are your thoughts about in certain situations, these medications? Because I'll just say personally, you know, I think we overuse them. But then there are those patients with mast cell issues that sometimes this is the only thing that kind of helps them.

I have patients where I've used those medications. It's not a. No, no. Each patient has to be viewed separately from their own biochemistry and genetics. When I have patients, being mold toxicity and Lyme and Bartonella can make people incredibly anxious and depressed and hopeless. And many of those patients will benefit from an antidepressant or. I'm not opposed to using it. I'm merely commenting on when you come off, you just have to come off. I mean, it's not. We're not chastising anybody for taking those meds. They're life saving for some people.

Yeah, well, I think that's a great. I wanted to just clarify because I think we're on the same page with that. And ultimately you're personalizing your. This treatment for the individual. You're not blanket saying everybody needs this or blanket saying no one needs this. You're literally meeting the patient where they're at. And sometimes these medications can be transformative with done the right way, but also realizing they can be addictive as well. So it's, it's a give and take kind of thing.

I mean, that's. Many people have asked me to, to create an algorithm how to treat mold toxicity, and I have refused to do that because there is no algorithm. Each person has to be viewed separately. It's. If you were to try to plug sensitive people into an algorithm, you're going to make them all sick.

It's the ultimate kind of personalized medicine where you're literally making changes to the patient's treatment regimen based on how to respond. It's truly the practice of medicine in many ways. It means the practice of medicine you're practicing.

It takes time. It's not, honestly, it's not for everybody. But gosh, I've helped so many people who were. Whose lives have been profoundly impacted. They weren't able to work anymore, they weren't able to leave their homes. I think it's in the thousands now of people who've gotten their health back. So, yes, it's a lot of work for me to do that, and that's very rewarding work.

Yeah. So I feel like we could keep on talking for hours. I mean, I've only gone through like, you know, two pages of my eight pages of notes here, but. So what are you up to now? I know you're doing this practitioner's course. We have about over 200 physicians. Why don't you tell us like, what you're doing right now and how people can learn more about what you are doing, where they can go for that kind of information?

Sure. So unfortunately not. Unfortunately. I retired from clinical practice about three years ago. But as my wife will tell you, I'm not really retired. I kind of shifted gears to do more teaching and more education. So as you said, I have a mentorship program for physicians and other healthcare practitioners in which I work with a fabulous naturopathic physician, Jill Christa. And we combine both traditional medical approaches with naturopathic approaches to help practitioners understand A wide array of options they have for treating these various inflammatory conditions. Well over 200 people in the program right now. I do consult. If people are interested. You can go to my website for that. My website simply neilnathanmd.com we do consult, but my consultations are more in the teaching realm, Meaning I want to have your physician on the zoom with the patient so that I can not only help the patient understand what to do, I can help the physician get better at it also. So I do a lot of that. I have several more books that I'm in the middle of writing. My publisher has asked me to write a second edition of Toxic, so that we're updating it. And so for that, I wrote five or six new chapters and then updated the information in there. I'm writing right now a new chapter on. It's basically about inflammation as the underlying physiological process behind most chronic illness. And again, I'm writing that with another person that goes into a lot of the newer cytokine measures of inflammation, which I think would help patients understand. I mean, often when patients say they're inflamed and their doctors will do a CRP or a sed rate and they'll go, those are normal. So you're not inflamed. There are other measures of inflammation that we're learning about to help patients understand. Yup. It's not in your head. It's very real. Let's figure out what this is so we can move ahead. And then I. I do a lot of what I'm doing with you, Aaron. I do a ton of podcasts and a lot of webinars, so I'm trying to teach people what I know.

Well, that's. I mean, I think it's awesome because that's how ultimately this spreads. Not just, you know, even though you've done this for a long time, is if you. You can see your thousands of patients, but if you train 200 people now, your impact is just you're multiplying by 200 versus just. There's only so much you can do when you're a little, you know, scrolled away on the west coast doing what you do, you know?

Right. I mean, I decided that five or six years ago, it was, I need to find a way to teach more people what I know so that we can have way more people doing it. Not a lot of physicians do what we do, so we got to train more people to do.

Agreed.

Agreed.

Cool. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Nathan, for your time. I really super appreciate it. Again, your book, the Sense of Patients Healing Guide. There'll be links below. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. And you take care.

Great. Thanks for having me.