Healing Sensitive Patients: Emotional, Energetic & Spiritual Health with Dr. Neil Nathan (Episode 1)

Welcome back once again, everybody. I'm super excited to be here today with Dr. Neal Nathan. He is a pioneer in the integrative functional medicine world. He's been practicing for 50 plus years. He's got a new book out, Sensitive Patients Healing Guide, which we'll be kind of diving into a little bit here. Many of you may, may or may not know he is, and we'll do a brief overview of kind of, you know, who he is, where he's from, and we're going to just dive into it. So Dr. Nathan's a seasoned physician with over 50 years of experience. He's board certified in family medicine and pain management and he's a founding diplomat for the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine and the International Society for Environmentally acquired Illnesses. He's authored several influential books on chronic illnesses and mold toxicity, including Healing is possible, Healing your body from mold toxicity, Lyme disease and multiple chemical sensitivities. He also wrote the book Toxic and his most recent book is the Sensitive patients healing Guide. He's also, he's done lectures, he's been on walls. Today. He actually the Cutting edge of Health and Wellness Today is a radio international program that he, he is on host as well. And this actually your book came out this past January, so it's been, it was a great read. So I just want to hop into it. A lot of our, a lot of my people that watch me, follow me, patience. Some know who you are, some of you don't. So I want to just kind of start with your story, you know, because you've been in this field for, you know, in medicine, 50 years and you've seen the progression of functional medicine, integrative medicine, from, you know, little, little autoimmune stuff to these more complex multi system, multi symptom illnesses. Could you kind of walk us through your, your journey from family medicine, pain medicine to what you're doing today?

Okay. How much time do you have? I'll give you the Cliff Note version of it. When I went to medical school, I wanted to be a healer and was more than a bit disappointed when I got to medical school and I realized they were going to teach me to be a medical technician, a good one. But their vision of healing wasn't mine. And to be honest, this was over 50 years ago. I didn't have language to explain what did, I think was missing in my education here. But over the years I realized it was really pretty simple. There was no integration of the emotional and spiritual and energetic components to health into the model that we were being shown. And So I spent 50 plus years trying to figure out a model that works for me and works for my patients. So I've spent, especially in the early years, I spent every cent I made going to study with anybody who even offered an idea that might have a healing quality to it. And I had some fabulous experiences with some really wonderful people. And I wasted some money some of those weekends where it's like I'm in the wrong place. This person is, doesn't, isn't teaching what he thinks he's teaching. So to be specific to your question, so throughout my career, I have been interested in the outliers that my colleagues didn't know what to do with. I found that a terrific place to grow from is they challenged me, they made me dig deeper, they made me do research, they made me study harder. And so over the years, I've attracted the more complicated patients. And my colleagues were all too happy to send me their really complicated cases. And I didn't view it the way they did. For them, they were a problem, and for me, they were an opportunity to dig deeper. So as those came into me, I began to see back in my pain clinic days, I began to see this thing called fibromyalgia that nobody knew what it was or how to understand it. And as you know, what medicine does with something that's new is it's in your head until we prove it otherwise. So those folks were referred to psychiatrists for treatment and it didn't work. It didn't do anything for them. So it was obvious to me that something else was causing that. We needed to study it. So that was in the mid-80s. By the early 90s, we had begun to learn about things like intestinal dysbiosis and magnesium deficiencies and more complex ways of understanding hormones than most endocrinologists get into. We began to understand Lyme disease was emerging as something that was important. And as such, we were able to identify very specific causes of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and help a lot of those folks. I worked pretty closely with Jacob Teitelbaum back in those days, and we identified literally hundreds of specific biochemical imbalances that could trigger fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Over time, it became clear that Lyme disease and its co infections was a bigger piece than people realized. And mold toxicity then emerged. Back around 2005 when Richie Shoemaker published his, his first book, Mold Warriors. Richie was onto something. And so I, as I do, I flew down to Pocomoke Maryland and hung out with him for a week to study with him and figure out what he was doing. And it was obvious to me that he was identifying a big piece of the puzzle for us all. So historically, that's kind of how I got to where I am. And over the years, the patients that I was seeing began to be more and more sensitive. So more and more patients couldn't take the antibiotics they needed for Lyme, they couldn't take the supplements they needed to treat mold toxicity. And they'd become so sensitive that even some homeopathics couldn't be taken. They, their diet became extremely limited. They went to being able to eat a dozen foods and couldn't do anything else. So again, I was fascinated by that and again, just wrote this book that we're going to be talking about today, which is simply called the Sensitive Patients Healing Guidelines. Because in the last 20 years we've learned a great deal about what makes people sensitive and equally important, how to treat it effectively. So that's the Cliff Note version of how I got where I am.

Yeah, that's kind of interesting because I have had a similar journey. I've spent, actually calculate I've spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on my education through different organizations and a 4M and ifm and a bunch of stuff and traveling places. And you really have to be dedicated. I mean, you've been doing this for decades to really dedicated, to do that over years and years and years. One thing that when I've talked with people, and I want your insight on this, like when I talk with certain people, they're like, you know, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, when I was seeing these, these autoimmune complicated patients, it would be something simple like change a diet, antimicrobial herbs, something, and people would get better. And now it just seems like the complicated patients are getting more complicated. Have you seen that phenomena where the patient who you, the fibromyalgia patient who you'd see 20 years ago would get better with some diflucan or get better if you got out of the multi building and now you're seeing these people getting, being more complicated?

Absolutely. I don't think there's any question about it is that we call them the canaries in the coal mine, these very sensitive folks. But I think it's becoming global. It's an epidemic right now. It's not just an occasional one. I almost never saw anybody this sensitive 20 years ago, 30 years ago, definitely not 40 years ago. Your observation, I think is spot on, that this is increasing, actually fairly dramatically. And I think most of our colleagues are baffled by this. But honestly, I don't know that it's baffling. I think that we know what's causing it. It's just that nobody wants to address it. I mean, what's causing it is the extreme toxicity of the world we live in. We've added. Over the 50 years that I've been doing this, we've added, it's now estimated, 350,000 new chemicals into our environment that weren't there before. And the vast majority have never been tested for safety in human beings. The numbers that have been tested, about 500. So it's just a teeny, teeny drop in the bucket. And then we've added electromagnetic exposures never before seen in the history of the planet, what we call EMFs, where we're bombarded. I don't care if you live in the remote areas of Alaska, you're bombarded by electromagnetic exposures that our bodies are not designed to handle. So I think we know why it's happening. But I'm afraid that, you know, the powers that be go, oh, no, we need 10G now. We don't need 5G. We need more, faster, better, without really looking at the toxicity of what we're exposing every human being on this planet to.

Yeah. I want to just reiterate what you said that we are and truly seeing. And you've been doing this for a long, long time. You were a referral center decades ago for these complicated patients. You've been seeing patients becoming more and more complicated, more and more sensitive. Even as a person who's getting people sent to you from around, around the country. And that's, I think, an important point because a lot of times, you know, people say, oh, no, we're just better at diagnosing things these days. There's more cancer because we're better at diagnosing it, or there's more fiber. We're better at diagnosing autism. I mean, I remember I read the statistic recently that if you're an individual in your 60s, the incidence of autism in your population is like 1 in 40,000, which is a astronomical number. When I was doing my training, I was 1 in 6 to 700. Now it's 1 in, like, 54.

So in some areas, 1 in 35.

Which area is that?

Oh, several. I mean, it's continuing. The autism is increasing exponentially. And everyone goes, oh, this is terrible. Why could that possibly be from. Without really looking at what's kind of obvious? Sorry, but it is kind of obvious.

So.

So that means, I mean, that autism was extremely rare. I went to medical school at the University of Chicago, which had, at the time, Bruno Bettelheim's orthogenic treatment program. He was the only one doing it. And it was considered a genetic problem. And these were rare. These were genetically rare. And now by these statistics, which you're talking about, two or three of every kids that are born in this country is autistic. So this is. This is serious. It's.

It's crazy. So. So chemicals, emf. I don't think you mentioned mold in that. What would you say, like, the big five or six things you'd say are contributed to this. This epidemic of chronic health issues, sensitivities, things like that?

Well, I didn't mention mold or Lyme, which are also epidemic. And again, some people don't know that. The CDC keeps increasing its admission of how many cases we have. A year back in 2013, for the first time, they admitted there were 300 new cases of Lyme a year. Last year, it was jacked up to 625,000 new cases of mold a year. And that's underreported. So we have an epidemic. Nobody's reporting mold, but some conservative estimates are that 10 million Americans right now have mold toxicity to some extent. But that's linked to this toxicity, which is our immune system, so being so bombarded that they've gotten weaker. So we are far more vulnerable to infections of every type. So although mold is a toxicity, it starts growing, we get reacting to it. And again, it's our immune system that if it. If our immune system is not robust and being exposed will make us sick. If our immune system is robust, we may be in it, but not react to it until we take a hit, whether it be Covid or a surgical procedure or an emotional experience, death of a loved one, feelings of abandonment, a severe infection of any type, once that immune system takes a hit, it loses containment. And what we have been exposed to in the past now jumps in and goes, yippee, the coast is clear. Now I can take over this body.

So really, you have to become an expert at not just one thing, like a cardiologist or rheumatologist or endocrinologist. You have become an expert environmental health expert, a toxicity expert, a developmental pediatric expert, a immune expert. You really have to have. This I call is an uber generalist. You have to know literally a little bit about everything, but not just a little. A pretty deep knowledge of all these things and how they Contribute to people's health.

It is, but that sounds kind of overwhelming. I don't know too many who can do that. I think on a doable level, it's. You just need to understand that these are very real illnesses. They're not rare. Start looking for it in your chronically ill patients because you're going to see it and you don't have to be an expert at it to at least be able to do treatment for mold and lime. We don't have the tools yet to be able to measure these environmental chemicals. They're coming, but we don't have it yet. So if we think about a need for detoxification is something probably every human being on this planet needs to. To do, I think we could make a dent in that. Yeah.

Now, one thing we're going to talk about here is the sensitive patient. I mean, you wrote your book the Sense of Patients Healing Guide. Could you just define for us, like, when you say a sensitive patient, like, what does that mean? Is it someone who just reacts with chemicals? Is it someone with mold? Like, what does it mean?

Well, I first want to make it clear that I don't mean sensitive to being told, oh, look, I look, I look. Do my thighs look fat in this outfit? That's not understood.

Yes.

Yeah, we're talking about the, the nervous system. The word sensitive comes from the word sense. So let's look at our sense organs. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, those are our senses. So sensitive patients are sensitive neurologically in those areas. So they become sensitive to light. They need to. They can't be outside without wearing sunglasses. If extreme, they have to wear sunglasses indoors. And you might think, well, that's rare. It's not as rare as you think it is. Sound sensitive. Our sound sensitive patients jump when they're exposed to a sound that other people in their environment don't even barely notice. They can't be around loud noises or in certain environments, touch. These folks get very sensitive to the clothes that they wear, their skin, to people touching them. Smell chemicals. These folks become exquisitely sensitive to chemicals so that they can't go down the fragrance aisle in the grocery store without having a severe reaction to it. We have EMF sensitivity, where people can no longer spend endless hours on their computer or phone without having cognitive impairment or headaches or extreme fatigue or even some neurological events. So that's what we mean about sensitivity where food sensitivity, where you can't eat the foods you used to use because they make you sick in a variety of ways.

Now, you know, this is a Silly question. Is this common or rare? I think, you know, when you first hear about it, you sound, you know, when you describe it, it's, you know, it's not that common. But then you start asking people, do they have food allergies, do they react with food supplements? You know, do they have problems with capsules or things? You know, as you start diving into it, you realize there's a lot of people that are sensitive to a lot of different things. Do you have any numbers? Like what, what's the estimate that how many people are dealing with, with this?

It's gonna stun you, but it's in the ballpark of 35 million Americans. I'll give you a study not done here in this country, but in England, where they did a elaborate study and found that almost 1% of people in England were on disability because they were so handicapped by their sensitivity. And then to some extent, 35% of the English population had become sensitive and were able to quantitate that. There's a researcher named Claudia Miller who's been researching chemical sensitivity in great detail in this country, and she has found the numbers to be pretty much astronomical. Again, we're not talking occasional.

Yeah, I think it was actually in your book. I was reading the number and I was talking about that. But what fascinated me was that there are countries and governments where they actually recognize and will give people disability for these sensitivities. I've not heard anywhere in our country where people have actually gotten disability for environmental sensitivities, chemical sensitivities. Have you heard, heard of that happening here? Have your patients been able to get that here? Is that something that's only being discussed overseas in different countries?

I think that people can get disability, but it wouldn't be because of their sensitivity. It would be because of their fatigue or joint pain or cognitive impairment that are symptoms that accompany the same things. The inflammation that is the underlying principle of sensitivity will cause those other symptoms. And you can get disability for that. At least some states will recognize that. Some states you have to hire a high powered attorney to get what you're really entitled to because you really are disabled.

Now, we were actually talking about this briefly before we started recording about both of our experiences. And know, I've probably, you know, I deal with patients, you know, I can get some, some individuals, I'll get them, you know, work with them, they'll get 50, 60% better. But this gets stuck. Like, you get them a point and you've, you know, dealt with their Lyme, you dealt with their Mole, you dealt with their gut issues, autoimmune, gluten, whatever it is, you know, and they just. Their body's not healing. Could you talk about that? What. What keeps people stuck? What have you found, like, as far as where in a person's healing process that the stuckness kind of sits?

Well, I think the word stuck is really accurate, and it's one that I've used for a long time myself. I think stuck implies there's some kind of a blockage somewhere, and so you can be stuck physically. But you're saying we've already addressed that for some of these people. So the stuck place could be emotional, energetic, or spiritual or combinations of all of those. And at a certain point, I found with my stuck patients, we've had to come to a place where we have a serious conversation, and I'll actually use these words. I'll say, we're stuck. We're not moving any. If there was a place in you that was stuck, could it be spiritual or emotional or energetic? And almost all of faith will say, yeah, I feel like that's the case for me. I feel stuck. And then. Then we can begin to really get into. Where is that coming from? Is that some experiences in your life that never got worked through somewhere along the line, some trauma that never really got dealt with. And again, one thing that doesn't get looked at much is the energetic, which is. I mean, some. Some of these folks will respond to acupuncture because it moves energy around the body in stuck places. So that. Then we need to talk about ways of moving energy through the body in ways we didn't. And just as a. By the way, I don't mean to be a shameless promotion of this. I did write a book before this one called Energetic Diagnosis, which talks about the energy pieces of that. Meaning there are devices that are now on the market that can measure energy, that can help move energy through the body in different ways. And for some people, that's their stuck place. I think the biggest place is some type of emotional blockage from some type of trauma. Now, that can start when you're tiny and young, or it can any time along. Along life, where basically the message that you take from your life is, this is a dangerous world that I'm living in, and I have to become hypervigilant in order to deal with it, because. And then basically, you shut down different systems so that you can go, okay, am I safe? How can I deal with that safety? I think it might be helpful for us to talk about how that evolves in people because I think that's really important.

Well, it's actually, I'm going to transition to that there because one of the things, the limbic system versus the vagal system and how the vagal system has two systems as a dorsal and ventral vagal, and how from either Stephen Porges work, some of Annie Hopper's work, and even talking about, you know, my experience has been, you know, you got the big T trauma and little T trauma. You know, we acknowledge the physical, sexual, emotional abuse, big T trauma, but the little T, whether it's a chronic illness, whether it's being married to a narcissistic individual, you know, there's a lot of different micro traumas that over time can build up. And then you basically get this dysfunction in your body's neurological integrative part, which is in your brain stem, your midbrain. So could you kind of delve into, like, how you kind of differentiate, you know, looking at someone's vagal stuff, limbic system, like, help us kind of walk through what, what these scientific words mean, as far as, you know, it's kind of marrying the, like, what you mentioned, like the science with the expression of the people's stuckness.

Sure. So we're going to talk about three main systems here. The limbic system, the vagal system, and mast cell activation. Those are the three biggest systems. They're not the only ones that are the underpinning of almost everyone who's become sensitive. Let's start with the limbic system. The limbic system is the part of our brain that is trying to keep us safe by again, scrutinizing the stimuli that we're being exposed to from the perspective of safety. Now, our limbic system has been doing that since we were in our mother's uterus. So even in utero, if your mother is going through some sort of extreme difficulty, be it emotional or physical, in you in that uterus, are being exposed to those neurochemicals of stress constantly. So you can even get stressed out before you're born. I know we all think, oh, being in the uterus, floating in this amniotic fluid and life is wonderful. But not if your mom is going through great upheaval. So it could start then or any time. None of us have had perfect childhoods. I don't know, I haven't seen. It doesn't exist. So depending on what you had, or as a child, say, recurrent ear infections or throat infections or tons of antibiotics or more problem problematic parents who weren't there for you, they were so busy working that you were just kind of, you know, fend for yourself. Or even worse, abuse of any type, emotional, sexual, physical abuse, surgeries that you may have had any or all of these particular stressors get the attention of our limbic system, which some from an early age, our limbic system is literally getting wired neurologically to be protective, which is, I've got to really pay attention to what's happening in my world so that I can protect myself from something happening to me. You know, a simple example would be if you had an alcoholic parent and you knew that they were coming home and walking in the door. It's like, okay, I don't know what shape they're going to be in, so I got to protect myself. And then that goes through the rest of your life. Surgeries, childbirth, infections, Covid huge stress to the body. So at any given point in time, no matter how old you are, your limbic system is the sum result of the various stresses you've had. Now, if you're lucky, and some people are, they were minor. And so your limbic system can go, okay, this is a cool world, I like it out here. But for the most of us, at some point it was, I've got to pay attention. So the limbic system becomes hypervigilant, and when it becomes hyper vigilant, it's. The neurological functions of the limbic system are basically two emotion and sensitivity. So let's take it from a practical point of view. How do you know if your limbic system is messed up? Well, if you have any increase in sensitivity, light, sound, touch, food, emf, smells, chemicals, that's limbic. If you have any emotional upheaval, it could be chronic or it could be an exacerbated one. Anxiety, depression, ocd, depersonalization, derealization, mood swings, that's limbic. So one or all of those symptoms tells us that, okay, there's a limbic piece here that we need to pay attention to. Now, the limbic system is completely physiologically interwoven with another system, different part of the brain, which we call the vagal system. Although the word vagus is in it, and it refers to the vagus nerve, which is the 10th cranial nerve. It's not just that. It's a whole system of cranial nerves that are interwoven. And the two systems, basically, they're trying to keep you safe, not trying to hurt you. But the vagus system gives us different symptoms. So, for example, the vagus nerve controls intestinal motility and controls most of Intestinal functioning. So any. Any GI symptoms that you have, Constipation, reflux, diarrhea, abdominal pain and cramping, likely to have a vagal component to it. The vagus nerve controls the autonomic nervous system. So if you developed POTS or blood pressure fluctuations or palpitations, again, that's vagus. So those are the symptoms that tell us, okay, we have some vagal dysfunction, we have some limbic dysfunction. And if you have that and all my sensitive patients do, we know we need to work on both concurrently. Because if you have a vagal system and limbic system that is hypervigilant and you only work on the limbic system, you're going to stay hypervigilant. So you kind of have to do both.

Okay, you mentioned the mast cell. How could you mention how it plays in the mast cell activation syndrome, which is pretty common as well?

Okay, so now we're dealing with the trifecta of hypervigilance, which is limbic, vagal and mast cell. So all three systems are completely interwoven, and we're seeing a profound increase in mast cell activation. Now, until 2016, when Larry Afron's book came out, never bet against Occam, we thought that mast cell activation was a rare genetic disorder. Didn't see it. And his book was a light for us all in going, oh, wait, this is not rare at all. So mass. Now, the limbic and vagal piece is a neurological piece. And so we have to think about it neurologically. It's not psychological, it's neurological. But unfortunately, our very sensitive patients often get used of it being psychological, which is, buck up, I can take the stimulus, then you should be able to take it also. And it's completely ignoring the fact that that that other person's nervous system is going, no, I can't take it. I'm trying to tell you, you're not wired to be able to do that. Back to mast cell activation. Mast cells are a cellular way of protecting ourselves. And mast cells connect to the nervous system. They're a bridge between the nervous system and the immune system, and they're present in every tissue of the body, especially in the tissues of the body, the that interface with the outside world because they're an immune cell that try to protect us. So lining of the sinuses, the throat, the gut, the vaginal tissues, that's where they are most present. And once activated, they release hundreds of biochemical materials that have loads of symptoms and make us inflamed. So all three systems work together, and we've learned that we need to treat all three systems if someone becomes sensitive. And just as a comment, patients who have mold toxicity almost always over time will develop limbic, vagal and mast cell issues. Patients with Lyme disease co infections will develop that in fact many, many chronic conditions will ultimately reflect itself in that way. So this is not rare. And I'm hoping that people will understand that this is a treatable, fixable thing once you realize what it is that's setting you off.

Yeah, it's really interesting. One of the things that kind of intrigued me when I first started Studying this was Dr. Molderingsworth over in Germany that said maybe 19% of the population had mast cell activation syndrome. Then from Dr. Shoemaker's work, 23% of the population has the gene for cross, you know, mold related toxicity. And you start hearing over and over these, these statistics and they're all about the same ballpark, you know, hypermobility, which is a part of the Pentad super syndrome. Probably 20% of the population has some degree of hypermobility. And then you look at some of the data with Dysautonomia, again you look in the 15 to 20% ballpark. I just wonder if we're all looking at something similar, but from a different vantage point as a rheumatologist, neurologist, immunologist. But we're all actually seeing different expressions of this similar complexity.

I think we are. So, for example, Andy Maxwell, who's written extensively about this, believes that the hypermobility is directly related to these biochemical mediators that being produced by mast cells. Those mediators weaken the ligaments, making us more hypermobile, and that they're directly connected. Because we do find when we treat mast cell activation, that hypermobility can get much better, if not completely go away. So for a long time, this hypermobility, which people call Ehlers Danlos syndrome, has been looked at as again, genetic rare. And now we're looking at, no, it's not rare, it's more common. But I think that those numbers that you're quoting are all connected. So mold toxicity produces mast cell activation, Mast cell activation produces hypermobility syndrome. So I think we can start to look at this as being an interconnected whole. Yeah.

Now trauma, you know, you kind of alluded to that before. Can we get into trauma a little bit? Because one of the things, you know, you get into people's story and you might have a story of a bad relationship, family abuse, alcoholism, you know, because we adopted all of our kids. And one of the things we had to go through was training, and we had to read the book the Body Keeps a Score. And just the act of adopting a child, moving from one house to another, instability when you're developing, all of a sudden, you know, My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. And so early on I learned, wait a second. You can have trauma from being in the ICU the first four weeks of your life, just from, you know, bad birthing situations. So all of a sudden, this trauma. I think we overlook a lot of trauma because we're so focused on the big T. We forget there's all these little smaller, not less significant ones. How do you help people kind of realize that maybe part of their underlying health issue is trauma? Because that's one of the hardest things I have. I run into trying to walk people through because they're like, well, no, no, no, it wasn't that big of a deal, or it wasn't that bad, or it was such a long time ago.

I usually don't bring it up at my first visit.

Well, yeah, of course.

I'm just saying that I first have to develop enough rapport with my patient that they perceive my office and me to be a safe space for them to talk about whatever it is they need to talk about, because this is often things they haven't talked to anybody about or very few people about. And we bring it up in this same context, which is, again, we started with, you're stuck. So let's take a deeper look at your life in terms of, are there events that you have gone through that may have contributed to where you are right now? And I found that the vast majority of patients, once we've developed that rapport, are much more open to talking about it. And honestly, given my own way of practicing medicine, one of the first tools that I embraced was hypnosis. So I would actually, with a patient's permission, regress them to a point to the various points of trauma that they had experienced in their life so that they could get a quick feel for what were the key events in their life that are contributing to their stuck place? And I found that to be a fabulous tool for helping people get there, because they. They would go there on my own. I would never say, well, that happened to you, so that must have done. Blah, blah, blah. No, patients have to come to that realization on their own when they're ready for that perception. One of the things I'm doing more and more now is Stephen Porges, who put our understanding of the vagus nerve on the map, has a new Book out. It's called Our Polyvagal World. Have you seen that, Aaron?

I've not seen that book.

Now, okay, now I love Stephen and in fact I, I wrote the chapter in my book on the Vegas with him. I mean we've been friends for a while now and. But he's an academic and so if you read Stephen's writing, it's really designed for medical professionals who can understand some of the depth of brain chemistry that's required to get it. Now Stephen knows that he's a bright guy so we got his son Seth to write the book with him. Seth being a world class journalist. And so with Seth's help, this is a fabulous book for patients to understand what the vagal system is and how it impacts all of us. And it becomes really clear that example Covid profoundly affected the vagal system of every human being on this planet. It added another layer of fear and threat to all of us. And we've all dealt with that differently. There are some people who are still wearing masks thinking that it helps them. And it's like they, they've been taught or told that they need to do that in order to protect themselves and they're going to protect themselves. In point of fact, I mean the CDC just announced that we should be looking at Covid is no different than any viral infection. There's no reason to view it, but we have four years of trauma there. So to take this to another place, I think that our education should start in primary school with learning relaxation techniques and how to deal with this from that would be way more useful than, I don't know, learning the capital of Czechoslovakia and memorizing that. Because our children are being exposed to incredible amounts of stress. I think more than they have in the past. But not just children. All of us are being exposed to tremendous amount of stress. So am I answering your question, Aaron?

Yeah, it's I guess to round it off like you developed rapport which, you know, I've had patients who it's taken a year and a half, two, three years sometimes before we kind of get to a point where it's like this event was a traumatic event or they have an aha moment and sometimes it's even longer. I've been my wife and I've been married for 20 years and we're 15 years into it. When I had the realization that when she started with a lot of her anxiety and other issues was actually during grad school in anatomy lab when she had a massive formaldehyde exposure. And that was on top of her having some other trauma related to some family health issues and stuff. And sometimes it takes time. In order to have time, you have to have a relationship. And people can't, like, jump in and have a one off with you and see you three years later. You have to actually develop a relationship with the patient and have that time. Because sometimes some of these things just take lots of time.

Absolutely. I'll give you an example, one that jumps to mind. One of my favorite patients, delightful young woman, had chronic fatigue syndrome. And I was treating that. She was improving from that, but not completely getting better until we realized she had mold toxicity. We started looking at mold, and then when we treated mold, she got a bit better, but she was just stuck. She would get to a level of functioning and just not. And this was seven years later. She casually mentioned a visit. Got to worry about things that are casually mentioned at visits. They're not always casual. She casually mentioned that she'd been recently thinking about the time that she was jilted and left at the altar by a fellow that she was going to marry. And all our time together, this is not something she had ever mentioned. It's one of those, oh, that's interesting. Do we think that this might be important? And then she was then, for the first time, able to be comfortable enough to talk about something that had been absolutely catastrophic for her. And then she got well. But interesting. People aren't ready till they're ready. And it sometimes, as you're saying, takes us way more time than we would like or our patients would like. But patients come to a state of readiness where, okay, I'm willing to deal with that now.

Yeah, maybe the summary of that. This kind of medicine is not just required technical expertise of the doctor or the desire to get better from the patient. It's a discovery. And discovery just takes time many times. And that time, who knows how long it can take Sometimes.

I've taken some of my patients 10 years, but if I see a spark in them, I just know that deep down I think that being can heal. And I have always been willing to stay with people until. Until they get to the point that they're really ready to deal with. It's usually an experience that they defined as catastrophic. You might look from the outside and go, well, that's not such a bad experience. But I don't make that decision. That's their choice. From their perspective, this was catastrophic. This changed how I viewed the world. At this point in time, I. I decided this is not a safe world. And I've got to really armor myself in order to deal with it. And then we have to help people take that armor off.

So I want to. That's. That's. Those are all great, great points.