When Recovery Stalls After Mold or Chronic Illness - The Mast Cell and Nervous System Pattern Many Patients Miss with Dr. Christian Jenski | Stress | E126

And like zombies, they will affect or infect adjacent healthy cells and make more senescent cells. And then you have deterioration of target end organs and you have aging. You age faster.

Welcome back. Once again, we are finishing up our conversation about mystery illnesses, diseases, illnesses, things that look like a lot of things. They're amoeba. They're dysmorphic. They can be almost anything, hide behind the scenes, you know, chronic fatigue, fibro. And today we want to talk about mast cell activation syndrome and finish up with central nervous system dysregulation, sometimes referred to as trauma brain, limbic kindling, limbic dysfunction, whatever you want. But these are two things that we see often that complicate people's health stories. So we'll start with mast cell activation syndrome. Yeah. So, um, Dr. Jansky, what's a mast cell? Yeah.

So a mast cell is, it's a type of cell in the immune system that is kind of like a little bag of inflammatory mediators. I mean, it just houses histamine and other inflammatory cytokines and platelet activating factor and all these little things that have specific jobs that typically create horrible symptoms in patients when they're unleashed. And they're kind of the bridge between the neuroendocrine immune systems. Like they just kind of all interweave. They line the GI tract, they line our blood vessels, they're at the skin surface. So they're just kind of everywhere waiting to be triggered. Kind of you picture in your head the COVID molecule with all the little spike proteins on it. They kind of look like that. They're waiting for a trigger and then they just, they just vomit out all of those inflammatory cytokines and it's, it's protective, or at least it's supposed to be. And in the setting of an acute injury or issue, it will be, but If they're being triggered all the time, then it's creating havoc in that individual and they get symptoms, anything from typical allergy type 4 hypersensitivity symptoms. So, you know, flushing, dermatographism, oral allergy syndrome, difficulty swallowing, difficulty breathing, all the way through anaphylactic shock. But you could have mood disorders, anxiety, panic. You can have headaches, you can have insomnia from this. Obviously GI issues because they're lining the GI tract. What is that? Pain, bloating, diarrhea. Constipation and the like. So there's a whole constellation of symptoms that go along with it that you can kind of pinpoint back to mast cells. They are a necessary evil, but they're very problematic in a lot of patients.

Yep. And to your point, you said previously they line hollow organs, so your gut, your bladder, uterus, lungs, sinus. Correct. And so there are types of mast cell activation that look like endometriosis. Yeah. Look like PCOS, interstitial cystitis. Yeah. So yeah, chronic interstitial cystitis is a type. IBS. They also are around nerve bundles. And so, the bridge, they're literally a bridge between your nervous system and your immune and vascular system. So, you can have vascular symptoms, racing heart rate, blood pressure fluctuation. You can have a mood dysregulation. I remember when I did my training at VCU, I was in the psych ward for the month I was there. They were giving schizophrenic patients who didn't respond to medications shots of IM and IV Benadryl and hydroxyzine. At that point in time, I didn't quite— I'm like, "That's kind of weird.". But now in hindsight and learning what we learned about SIRS, like you can have a psychotic break. That's a mast cell phenomenon. And mast cell activation syndrome usually is triggered by something. And one of the biggest triggers is water damaged buildings. So all of a sudden we have a link, but part of the amorphous confusion about it, because it does connect your nervous system with your endocrine hormonal system and your vascular system. All of a sudden it can look like a whole bunch of things. And it gets confusing because typically it's triggered by something. And once it goes awry, all of a sudden now you can have a thing called TILT syndrome, toxic-induced loss of tolerance, which I'm in a group with Dr. Afrin and some of the people in there were saying we should use TILT syndrome potentially more than mast cell because mast cell is being belittled by specialists in our country. But TILT syndrome actually is recognized, which is just a mast cell phenomena where you have chemical sensitivity, food sensitivity, and drug sensitivity. So you react with medications, supplements, foods. Yeah. And if you have all 3 of those, you have a 94 or 96% chance of having TILT.

So yeah.

If you have 2 of those, it's about 60% chance of having TILT. And how many people do we see? Yeah. Who haven't— A lot. A lot. Medication sensitivity, supplement, food. Yeah.

I mean, most of our patients other than the ones that just want like optimization, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. I think that makes sense. It's the semantic issue bothers me a little bit, but I understand it because it went from, you know, we've known about mast cells and we learned about mastocytosis in medical school as this like extreme form of it that I believe is like cancer. And so I think that everyone just started blaming everything on mast cells and like Cayman kind of talks about, it's not like we all of a sudden just woke up and everybody just started having a mast cell issue. They've been around forever. Mast cells are problematic. They've been triggered. We're just saying it too much. And I think it's starting to kind of irritate some people. I don't think that people should get offended by overuse of mast cell. The whole point is that you're trying to figure out what's wrong with that patient and do something about it. Whether you call it mast cell activation syndrome or TOAS, I don't care. Call it something, call it whatever you want, name it after yourself, but make the right diagnosis and treat the patient, right? Like it's just dumb that they're playing these semantic games. But this is a real thing that we see all the time, and it's just kind of hard to pin down because it looks like everything and lab testing's not great.

Yeah. And to one of your points you said previously, Dr. Mulderings, who's a German researcher on this field, has estimated in Germany maybe 22 to 24% of the population has mast cell activation syndrome. I'm sorry, 19%, 19% population, 19, 20% of the population has mast cell activation syndrome. Well, that number is pretty close to our, number for the people have a gene for SIRS. And so when you get mold as a trigger, it's like, it's one of those things. There's rare things that's everywhere. Yeah. Part of the confusion is there's a consensus one, a consensus two statement, white papers on both that define this. And the one defined it more as a pathology to your point, the mast cell activation disease. And then consensus two, consensus two looks at more the mast cell activation syndrome. And the problem is there's two different roads. You know, it's almost like smoking causes problems. No, it doesn't. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you remember that, but I was when I remember in Virginia and there was a time when we debated, it was controversial that smoking was bad for us.

Yeah. It's crazy.

Yeah. And so we're kind of at that road with this.

And because the lab's not great, they're basing some of the diagnosis on rate of change of a normal value.

Yeah.

Did your tryptase go up by more than this percentage even though both are still normal? Like, it's just kind of crazy. But the other thing, the confounding variable with CIRS, and I'll just touch on this briefly without making it too complicated, is that yes, mold and biotoxins can trigger mast cells, but if you're a CIRS patient, the other issue that happens is that your histamine pathways get upregulated, which are regulated by mitochondria. If they get upregulated, that means turned on. If they're turned on, then any nucleated cell in the body, which has the potential to make histamine, starts making histamine. So it goes beyond mast cells at that point. And so you may do a lot of mast cell-specific intervention and not gain any ground with that patient because you're not also doing antihistamine support in other ways. So if it is a SIRS patient, yes, mast cells on my radar, but I'm also understanding because of my understanding of SIRS that I got to do up and downstream. I can't just go after mast cells. I got to tackle all of this and literally throw all the things at this patient to see if this is an issue, if it sticks, if they get better. Or, you know, if you're able to kind of figure that out lab-wise, if you can get an experimental genie or something like that. But that's the complicating variable versus just mast cell mediated where you can then give them a mast cell stabilizer and all of a sudden things are better. Like if it's just GI-centric, give 'em some cromalin, maybe you try a little ketotifen, maybe you use something natural like quercetin. But if they're not getting better, you might want to add some antihistamines, H1 and H2 blockers, maybe some diamine oxidase, maybe. Aldohyde dehydrogenase support, all the other things that go along with it. It's complicated. It's really complicated.

That's also where it becomes tricky as well as we, there's this thing called the Pentad Super Syndrome. Yeah. Which is, it's a syndrome of syndromes. And if you see one of these, you always look for the other ones. So hypermobility is one of these autoimmune issues, gastrointestinal issues, mast cell activation syndrome, and dysautonomia. And so, and these have the incidence of these are very, very similar, but if you have one of these mast cell activation syndrome, and you've got dysautonomia and GI issues and you're hypermobile, then all of a sudden you get your nervous system gets dysregulated. And so the mast cell component, it's more, it's a part, a piece of the, a piece of the puzzle that needs to be addressed. But that's also, I think, to what we talked about earlier in this series is that finding out what someone's trigger, what's your trigger. If your trigger was a hike with a tick bite or was moving to a brand new house with lots of new carpet or moving to an old home that you renovated. Then, all of a sudden, you need to figure that as well because treating the mast cells can help calm symptoms, but if it's your SIRS patient or a Lyme patient or post-concussive syndrome and being a head injury which induced leaky gut, which messed up your nervous system and now you're leaking these protein particles and activating your nervous system and developing food sensitivities, da, da, da, da, da. Yes, treating chromolyne can be helpful with that, quercetin, a bunch of those things, but you really need to firework on your brain that started all this stuff. Yeah. And so that's where it's—

nobody really thinks about it. Again, going back to like real world experiences, which I think is very helpful. My new intake today is, is a young man who's had 4 concussions in the course of a year. He's got no GI symptoms, but I can guarantee you that his gut's going to be a mess because he's getting a gut test because everybody does. I will not see somebody if they don't do a poop test. It's just, it's that important. And the reality is, is that he went to a concussion clinic. He went to the, the local concussion clinic and they cleared him. At no point in time did they address his gut. He went to a neurologist who did an MRI and put him on verapamil. At no point in time have they addressed his gut. So they're giving him a calcium channel blocker. They're calling him atypical migraine or post-concussive migraine or ocular migraine. And really the reality is that this kid needs his gut cleaned up, but he's also a potential SIRS patient. His mom's a SIRS patient. His brother's a SIRS patient. So there's the tie that binds. Maybe he was cooking SIRS all along, couple of head injuries and bing, bang, boom. Now all of a sudden he's symptomatic. Like it is the thing that brings things together. It is the things that makes things worse. You gotta find the root cause. You gotta work through it.

Yeah. And I think that's a good point. What we talked about, like people will hyperfocus on one of these, they'll hyperfocus on EDS, hypermobile, they'll focus on my gut, on mast cell, you know, on mold, but they won't realize, you know, most of our patients are like, oh, you're a, you're a SIRS mold. Lyme, concussion, well, I'm a gut concussion muscle. It's like, figure out what someone's cocktail is and layering that. It's ultimately, it's individual for every person. It's not going to be a one-size-fits-all. You know, one thing I love for concussions that I've had such good results with, or two things actually, hyperbaric. You can bypass a lot of the issues with blood flow dysregulation. You can actually, there's great literature treating inflammatory bowel disease. I've actually had several Crohn's patients go into remission solely from hyperbaric. So it does a lot of cool things. And then sensory deprivation, float tanks, the military has used those for actually post-concussive syndrome patients, whether it's the meditative aspect, the magnesium, whether it's the removing the Earth's gravitational forces, which somehow helps reset the nervous system. But all of a sudden now, that patient who, this is your protocol, actually it's nuanced. It's nuanced. Chromelin, I absolutely love. I've had patients with bad dysautonomia and pain syndromes. And cromolyn supposedly is not really well absorbed orally. It's only affecting the mast cells in your GI tract. One of my patients, her POTS went into remission with 4 times a day and her pain, she had this weird fiber pain, went away with 4 times a day of oral cromolyn. Yeah.

I love it when it works. For me, it's like a coin flip. Like it does nothing or it solves the problem, or at least some of it.

That's, I'm going to say that's in my clinical experience, that's a true statement.

Yeah. For me, it did nothing. For one of my patients, it was like, I godsend and she's like, I'm going to take this forever.

Yep. Back to therapeutic trials. Yeah. The bigger toolkit in the practice of medicine. What's the best thing for this person? Yeah. And you create a protocol, but the reality is probably for you as well as me, it changes when the people come back. Yeah. Through messaging, through, throughout the visits, like depending on how they're responding to what we're recommending. Yeah.

Because physiology changes, like it's about continuously updating data, either through a story or through hard data in the way of labs or both, you're getting information either way. And then you utilize that new information to either stick with the plan or modify it. And then you just keep working towards the same goal.

So let's talk about some mast cell activation syndrome and post-viral illnesses. Yeah. The most recent one is COVID, long COVID. Yeah. And this might be debate between us because there's two camps want to claim post-COVID for them. The SIRS world want to claim it for them. And the mast cell people want to claim it for them.

I'm in the SIRS camp. Which one are you in?

It depends.

Are you straddling them? You got one foot in each?

Well, I've had a couple of long COVID patients who lived and worked in moldy environments. They were clearly SIRS patients. And I've had patients who we got them remission doing like ivermectin and H1H2 blockers. Yeah. So I think that depends which camp I'm in.

I, it depends on the individual and I, I don't think it needs to be fractioned. I will say that the SIRS camp, in my opinion, also covers mast cell because of all the histamine stuff that we see in SIRS patients. So I think that's kind of the same camp. But yeah, if you can get a patient better that has long COVID with just treating mast cells and doing a little other basic antiviral support, why wouldn't you? Like, why would you push them down the path of $50,000 remediation and Swiffer testing and IEPs and binders and stuff if they don't need that, right? Like, that's great when that presentation happens. So I, I think it's less about CAMPS and more about like what's going on in the patient sitting across from you on that given day. Like, my issue with CAMPS in the SIRS literature, or at least in the SIRS world, is that I think some are, are skewing the way that it's seen by the masses that will eventually pull the strings of this becoming kind of standard of care. If it was more unified, it might push towards standardization more quickly. And if they're looking down, seeing us in 3 or 4 different camps and who believes— are we believing Shoemaker? Are we believing Neil Nathan? Are we believing Joe Carnahan? And it's like at that point in time, they're just like, they're just bumbling around and no one really knows what's up. If we were unified, I think it would be something that we can kind of present a little bit differently. I am basing my treatment on how I was trained, which is sort of certification through Shoemaker and Dr. Hammett. So I just think like long COVID, when it was first described to me, when it was this, like this aha moment in the, you know, we're going to establish a multidisciplinary clinic with these types of practitioners because long COVID is mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammation and oxidative stress and autoimmunity and persistence of viral illness or reactivation. And it's like, and that sounds familiar. What is that?

Holy.

Oh, that's SIRS. Because literally that's how I was taught SIRS. And so it felt like it just overlapped.

So maybe the way to think about, because, you know, I first did the training, it was like, you know, Phesteria squattera, and it was recluse spider bites. Yeah. It was, you know, water damage building. These are the SIRS thing. And they've been adding on, you know, post-concussive. And so maybe MCAS is just, you know, the newest thing they'll get. Yeah, folded in there.

I think it's going to get folded in.

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Journey today. One thing that really with, you know, with the long COVID stuff is that whole concept of senescent cells. Yeah. You have these monocytes that are supposed to turn over and they decide not to. And they— Zombies. Zombie cells. Yeah. And they just hang out for 6 months. And all of a sudden, you're finding spike protein particles in someone, you know, 4 to 6 months out. Oh, you still have a virus in your body. It's still replicating. It's like, no. You have these senescent cells. And so, senescent cell therapies become— Senolytics. Senolytics, yes, become really helpful for these individuals. But then, you're kind of going back then, like that there's dysfunctional cells, you know, the monocytes, that's part of this weird kind of immune dysregulation you see with both SIRS as well as mast cells.

It's failure of an innate mechanism called autophagy, right? Like, it's cellular housekeeping. Your immune system is designed to thin the herd, clear out the bad stuff, including your own cells when they are dying or dysfunctional or hurting the host. When your autophagy fails, when your apoptosis program cell death fails, is when you start to get more senescent cells. And like zombies, they will affect or infect adjacent healthy cells and make more senescent cells. And then you have deterioration of target end organs and you have aging. You age faster. So the whole push towards senolytics is really spearheaded by the anti-aging community. Cause it's like, how do we turn off the zombie cells? How do we turn apoptosis and autophagy back on? When you look at the transcription dysregulation in CIRS patients, what are some of the things they're measuring? Defective apoptosis of neurons, neurons that are supposed to be offing themselves, not doing it. Defective autophagy. You're seeing poor antigen presentation. You're seeing You know, B and T cell receptor dysfunction. You're seeing TGF beta receptor signaling dysfunction. So like all these things that should be running smoothly aren't, and you just get these zombie cells. Like quercetin is a really well-known senolytic. It's also a mast cell stabilizer. It's also a zinc ionophore, which makes it antiviral. So like that's why quercetin was such a game changer. It's doing like 6 different things. You could use it in any one of these individual cases, whether it's a SIRS case, a mast cell case. You can use it for cardiovascular, you can use it as an anti-inflammatory, you can use it as post-viral. And yet there it is doing all of them at once.

Well, quercetin is also in the Lyme world is used to treat some of the Herx reactions. When you start treating people's illnesses, they have these, all these horrible reactions. Yes, resveratrol, Japanese knotweed has to be sourced from there, you know, but one of the things is quercetin, which it's blocking this Herx reaction, which can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but it's you take something and you kill things off and your immune system goes bonkers.

So, and it keeps that calm.

Yeah. And quercetin.

I love resveratrol. That's another senolytic.

Have you used rapamycin that much? I haven't. You haven't? No. Okay. I'm just curious. Have you? I've used it with a few people. Yeah. And it's worked well for the few people I've used it, but it's been very—

You cycle it?

Yes.

Yeah. You can't do it consistently.

Yeah. Low dose.

Yeah.

But once a week. Yeah. Once a week. Yeah. 2 to 5 milligrams. One of my patients actually, Ended up getting diagnosed with Mycobacterium avium complex lung infection and had pain, systemic low immunoglobulins, IgM, IgE, as well as IgG. And he did really well in this for a couple months until we got that diagnosis. And then we got the diagnosis, his pulmonary doctor was like, you're going on triple antibiotic therapy, stop the rapamycin. Yeah. And then he was, you know, but he did really well as far as his symptoms for half a year before we finally got the diagnosis of MAC, which was interesting.

Yeah, I'm interested in it from a pro-longevity standpoint. I don't know that I have enough hard evidence to trust it and no one's really, there's no unison on like the dosing and clearly you can't do it long-term and you have to cycle it. And, but it's intriguing to me. It's an inhibitor of the mTOR pathway, right? Mammalian target of rapamycin. I'll tell you what I love for all these patients. And I think you do too. LDN, lotus naltrexone. I mean, it's like a game changer.

It's doing a little bit of everything for every one of the things that we've talked about in these podcasts. And something I've figured out intuitively in myself, and we might, maybe we'll debate this or discuss it, but when Contrave got approved by the FDA to treat obesity, which is Wellbutrin and naltrexone, I decided with a lot of my patients, hey, you know, a lot of them have weight issues. Let's try going from 4.5 milligrams, low-dose naltrexone, to 8 to 16 milligrams once or twice a day because that's the weight loss dose. And I've had a subset of those patients, maybe 25 to 30% of people who got improved pain, improved inflammatory response, like 8 or 9 milligrams once or twice a day dosing. I haven't seen anything amazing for the weight loss aspect, but I've actually seen a better response. And this is something I kind of intuitively decided to try because this drug is, it's so safe. We're taking Narcan now and putting it in bathrooms and stuff around the country.

It's so safe and it's, and it's so effective and there's very little side effects. And the one thing that I had questions about, and this was myself included, because it, you know, it's something I've taken for a long time and it was instrumental in helping with my autoimmunity, pain, mast cell stuff, SIRS stuff, was, you know, what's the long-term safety? I think long-term safety is sort of fine. It's, does it lose its efficacy over time? Should you cycle it? And yes. And the answer is yes. And this is what I've recently learned. And it's as simple as maybe just holding it for the first 3 days of the month, you know, days 1, 2, 3 of each month, don't take it and then get right back on it. I think that that's, really what we should do. And it, and it makes sense if you understand the concept of tachyphylaxis. Receptors downregulate over time, things lose their efficacy. It's kind of why we do a hormone holiday when we do BHRT. The whole point is keep things sharp, keep them ready to work and rock and roll.

And that's a new piece of information. This literally this past year, Pam Smith is who I learned that from. 100%. Yeah. She's one of the advisors for the LDN Trust. Yeah. Which is a resource. Yeah.

I, I learned that from her as well, actually.

Yeah.

She's cool like that. Yeah.

XER doc. Yeah.

We gotta stick together.

I know she's XER. Yeah.

She was Detroit, man. She was in the ER in Detroit, Michigan.

That's life. That's hardcore. Yeah. Well, you were in Chicago for a couple years.

I lived in Chicago, inner city Chicago for 10 years.

Which one's more?

I don't know, man. I was on the South Side of Chicago, so I would, I would love to swap war stories with her.

That's funny.

Yeah. Yeah.

So let's transition a little bit. Mast cell, again, we've talked about in another podcast. I want to end this whole mystery illness thing with the last topic that it's like many things I've done. When I first started this journey, I told myself I am not going to do mold. It's too complicated. Don't want to mess with it. And all of a sudden, you know, you're laughing. And then it's like, I can't help my patients unless I figure it out. And is this everywhere? And then, cause I was going to ignore Lyme cause you know, and then all of a sudden you hit the point and like tick-borne illnesses, you're like, I guess I have to learn how to do that as well. And then all of a sudden, is this like everywhere? What I've realized with my patients is the sticking points. You work through things, you got a gut issue, sleep issue, stress issue. Let's work on SIRS, mast cell, connective tissue's a big thing. It connects all this stuff together. But I realized as I work with patients over years, as you do as well, and you get to a point where they're, you've done all the things and they're still stuck. They're 60%, 80% better. You wash and repeat. Did the Lyme pop up again? No. Did we really clean your house? No. And you do that 2, 3 times. And what I've come to over this last couple of years is that sticking point with people after they work through these things is their nervous system. Yeah. You know, actually the person who introduced this to me was Andy Heyman. With the whole idea that all of our SIRS patients develop a TBI-type phenomena, traumatic brain injury-type phenomena, a chemically infection, whatever you want to call it. Like, the brain genes get activated similar to a traumatic brain injury. And then through Neil Nathan and doing some training with him, that's a big part of what he does is these people get in these— well, even the cell-to-injury response, Dr. Naviaux's work, part of that stuff is like chemicals and toxins, but it's also the nervous system. So, all of a sudden now, I'm kind of transitioning my career for a lot of my patients where it's like, Is your nervous system healthy? Do you have some big T trauma, physical, sexual, emotional abuse, a little T trauma, and that could just be your caregiver for a kid with special needs. Yeah. It could be in a stressful relationship, having a narcissist in your family.

Yeah. Death by a thousand cuts.

Death by a thousand cuts. Yeah. Or it could be your own personal chronic health issue. So my thesis is my new thing while I'm working through now with patients is limbic kindling, brain rewiring. On dynamic neural retraining, like whatever you want to term for it, or polyvagal theory, which, you know, Dr. Polythrust, I think, was the guy who talked about that, like, in the early '80s is when that book was written. So what are your thoughts about that?

It's absolutely where patients get stuck. It's the most common reason for a patient in my practice to hit a wall. If we're making progress, and it's rarely linear. So, A, you have to kind of keep that in mind when you're practicing medicine like this, especially in complicated patients, especially when treating mysterious illnesses. It's rarely linear. It's a lot of ups and downs. You just got to keep your feet on the ground and keep moving forward to the best of your ability. Sometimes you take a step back and that's okay. You hold that space, you regroup, you move forward again. But when they get stuck in the mud or they start stuck in the mud, there's an impasse to almost everything we're trying. It's not them. They wouldn't be here if they didn't want to get better. It's the limbic system. It's their neurovascular system. It's the central nervous system. It's that stuckness that you have to then work through. The problem is that that's a lot of work that they have to do because it's personal work, but we clearly can help and point them in the right direction, give them modalities of intervention, point them towards a practitioner who's better skilled than me to handle it. If it's neurofeedback or EMDR or something like that, But this is a very common phenomenon and probably the tie that binds to many, if not all of my multiple chemical sensitive patients, my TILT patients, my MCAS patients. I personally think, and this includes me as a former SIRS patient, that every SIRS patient has some degree of limbic dysfunction just from having that disease and the fear of, am I ever going to get better? Is every house going to poison me? Is my home ever going to be where it needs to be? Can I go anywhere? Can I get my life back? How is that not traumatic? You know, like, of course it is. So that is a problem that I think is ubiquitous. And I know that you recognize this. You've talked about this early on, because I remember you used to bring it up when we were talking about things and it just kind of washed over me because I was still trying to learn some of this complicated nuances of how to treat these illnesses. And you were talking about limbic stuff and you put together this amazing template that I share with patients all the time. And it's just like, overwhelming to someone who's already overwhelmed. And so I always have to disclaimer it, like, I don't expect you to do all of these. This is just a list of things I want you to look over, see what resonates with you, start low and go slow and work towards a goal. They find little things that work, whether it's breathwork or vagal retraining, or they go see a practitioner or they read The Body Keeps the Score or whatever, but it has to be done. Otherwise they're not going to get unstuck. And as it gets done, you kind of see this light. And then they start to tolerate things like couldn't tolerate anything. Now can tolerate a little bit. Now can tolerate a little bit more. Now they feel so good. They want to be, they're like, what can we get compounded? What can you inject me with? What can you infuse me? It's just like, who are you? And where they're better, they're getting better.

Yeah. There's a period in time where I was, you get the new patient coming in there. Like the patient who I can't, I literally can't drink water. 'Cause sometimes I react with that. Yeah. Yeah.

I've had this.

Can't take any supplements. Yeah. I'm eating 3 foods. I'm eating like lamb and pear. Right. Yeah. And it's like, well, of course you're not gonna take any medications or things. And so there's a bunch of those I started doing laser meridian therapy with, which is a, it's an interesting acupuncture-based therapy that I had amazingly good results with calming people's nervous system down over 3 to 6 months and then getting them to tolerate food. Unfortunately, the practitioner I was doing it locally, yeah, he passed away. Some patients have done better with acupuncture, but then some people can't tolerate. I've had some people do well with electrical stimulation. Then there's EMDR, tapping, SMAC work, parts work, a bunch of different things.

Grounding, the PEMF.

Yeah. I mean, you've— tell us about your— how's PEMF worked for you? Great.

It's phenomenal. I used it for two different reasons. One, acute pain. I had back issues and it was a game changer for that combined with some physical therapy. And then I used it for calming and it's improved my sleep exponentially.

I'm going to make a statement and you can tell me if you agree, disagree, your thoughts about this.

That seems to be your soup du jour.

You tell me if you agree or disagree.

Why did you care about my opinion?

I'm just kidding. Supposedly people dig us fighting about, you know, I had one of my patients said that. Fight more? Well, actually, it's funny. He was— Is there two in agreement with each other? He was funny because he was saying, I really appreciate your banter back and forth because it's like, Jensky pokes you a little bit and you poke him a little in the back. And that's, you know, people like it. I just got back from a conference in Phoenix, Arizona. And ran into a bunch of, you know, pretty high-level business entrepreneur type. And one of the guys there specializes in pain. He's a psychologist. And he wrote a book about this actually, that pretty much all chronic pain has a nervous system component to it. He takes it a little bit to like, it's all treatable by meditation. But the question is, you know, with somebody's like chronic pain, what part of your pain do you think is related to stress? And I don't want to I want to use stress in a bigger way. Not like, you know, I'm stressed cuz life is hard, but I'm stressed like nervous system stress, illness stress, whatever you wanna call that where your nervous system is dysregulated. Because that's where I feel like the PMF has been really helpful for a lot of my patients. Yeah. With their related, unrelated pain, dysautonomia, nervous system dysregulation. Yeah.

I think a large portion of it. I just think it, it's hard for the individual to recognize that it's hard to pinpoint it to that because we get really good at tolerating things or masking things. Everybody wears masks. Everybody changes their set point of tolerance or intolerance. And it's just like, to what degree is my psychological, emotional, physical stress affecting pain? I don't know how you quantify that, but, but the reality is, is that something that's energetically balancing, making you feel better, clearly speaks to that, in my opinion, something that's resetting the system. Something that's unblocking that which is blocked or opening up a pathway that needs to be open. That to me is where magical healing can happen. And it's a little woo-woo and it's not as palatable for some people, but it's effective. I see it happen all the time. It's just, you know, you have to start thinking about that kind of stuff when all the other things that you're doing aren't working. It's like, is this a me thing? Is this a them thing? Or is this a neither? And we're just stuck because of the approach that we're taking.

I think the whole Dr. Robert Naviaux cell danger response is a really interesting thing because it's mitochondrial dysfunction that affects cell cycling. So you get these senescent cells, but ultimately the nervous system, once in a safe place, will signal the mitochondria, okay, go back to business as usual because you're now in a safe place again.

Which is a cell cycle, right? So it's cell cycle, the danger response. Mitochondrial cell danger response that he's talking about is cell cycle arrest. So the cell goes through these cycles. This is a, a point at which it literally stops waiting for the body to get better, to then start up again. And so clearly there has to be a signal there. Right?

There has to be. So mystery illnesses, we've seen it all the time. Mm-hmm. They're everywhere, but they can't be treated. There's hope. You just have to get an individualized program. Work with a practitioner who will listen to you, who has the tools in their toolkit to help you along. But ultimately what I tell a lot of my patients, I talk about in my book, Uncurable from Homestead Nervous System.

Yeah.

Nice. Yes. Buy it. Buy it. Yeah. Is that you have to put your own, I use the phrase fellowship of the ring, right? It's like Frodo going, maybe I'm aging myself, but going to—

No way, man.

Like going to Mordor with the ring. It's like he doesn't do it by himself. He has, even Sauron, the, you know, the white wizard who becomes like the bad guy, even he had a purpose. Yeah. And getting Frodo Ligolas, you need, you need Samwise, which I think is the hero of the story because he's like the, the Samwise Gamgee. Yeah. He's the unassuming guy who's just always there, who basically at the end is literally carrying Mr. Frodo to the top. And even Gollum, you know, was needed at the very, very end to, to make it happen. You know, so it's one of those things where they, people need their Fellowship of the Ring, their support, because it's hard to do on your own, particularly when you're sick. And so I'll just encourage people to get the resources, get educated. We have a bunch of stuff on our website. We have our connected health program, which allows people anywhere in the country to kind of start their healing pathway. We have a brick and mortar people come to. So we try to make, no matter where someone's at on their healing journey, we try to give people resources to meet them wherever they're at. Yeah. Wherever they're on their journey.

So they can find their village.

Yeah. So, and that's kind of, that's what we do. Yeah. With that, thanks once again. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.

See you.

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.