87: Mold & Lyme Disease - The ultimate guide to diagnosis and treatment w/Dr. Darin Ingels

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're One of the 130 million people that are dealing with SIRS Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Hey everyone, what's going on today? I've got a really cool guy, awesome guest for you guys to listen to. His name is Dr. Darren Ingalls. We're gonna be talking all about Lyme disease and mold and Dr. Ingalls, he's a naturopathic doctor. He's based in Irvine. He's been treating lyme for like 20 years and he even wrote the book on treating Lyme. It's called the Lyme solution. And so I figured since we all know that mold and lime are connected, it'd be really cool to talk to somebody who can actually explain how all that is really happening, so. Hey, Darren, what's going on?

Hey, Brian, thanks for having me on the show.

Yeah, yeah, thanks for being here. I. I'm excited to kind of talk into this stuff. I, I started noticing early on that there was when I would ask people, you know, kind of like, hey, what's going on? Why did you reach out to us? What's happening? You know, and obviously there's typically health reasons why people are reaching out to us, but lime was just such a consistent thing. And then I started through the years hearing like little tidbits about like, how, how it interacts and like even like the order in which you treat things, like all this stuff. But I've never had like a full on conversation about lime and mold. And so I, I figured a lot of other people are probably in similar boats and I feel like this could be a really cool one. So why don't we just kind of get like from top kind of top view perspective, like why. Let's even start for like, what is Lyme disease? I know it's super hard to diagnose in the first place, right? So like, kind of what is it? And why is it even hard to figure out if you have it?

Disease itself is a bacterial infection and it's primarily transmitted through a tick bite. And depending on where you live in the world, you know, some of these ticks, I mean, there's lots of different types of ticks out there, but there's specifically one called a deer tick. Its scientific name is the Ixidase tick. And these are the ticks that primarily transmit Lyme disease. So if you live in New England or the central part of the Midwest in the United States, these are endemic areas for deer ticks. However, we have seen these ticks really, you know, up and down the east and west coast. It's starting to spread inwards towards the central part of the US it's found in Europe. It's found in Asia. I mean, they're found all over the place. So when you get bit by this tick, there's this bacteria that can get in the saliva.

To your bloodstream, and then from there, if you get that, you can get any number of different symptoms. So part of what makes Lyme so challenging to diagnose is that there's over 100 different symptoms associated with Lyme disease, and often it looks like something else. So it's not an uncommon scenario that someone gets bit by a tick. They start experiencing symptoms, they go to the doctor. But, you know, if they complain of, you know, fatigue and headaches and joint pain, you know, your doctor might think it's the flu. Of course, the era of COVID 19, everything's COVID 19. So, you know, it's just very easy to get missed. You know, there's a couple of signs that are really telltale for Lyme. One is this classic rash. It's called an erythema migrans rash or a bullseye rash. So it literally looks like someone painted a target or a bullseye on your skin. And it's a very unique rash. I mean, there's nothing else in the world that we know of that creates that rash other than Lyme disease. Unfortunately, the percentage of people who get Lyme disease who actually develop that rash is relatively small. The CDC says up to 80% of people get the rash, but in research studies, we find it's maybe about 50%. And in clinical practice, most. Most of us would agree it's probably less than 20%. For those who get it, great. We know you've been exposed, but the absence of the rash doesn't mean you haven't been exposed to Lyme disease. And there are other rashes that Lyme typical target, or bullseye. But that bullseye rash is a classic sign for Lyme. And the other thing that's very classic is what we call migratory joint pain. So this is where, you know, one day my right shoulder hurts, the next day it's my left knee, then my right ankle. And this joint pain kind of seems to move from one part of your body to Another, again, as. As we know, there's nothing else in the world that causes that other than Lyme disease. So those two symptoms, you know, are signs. If we see those, we're pretty confident you've had exposure to Lyme. But beyond that, the symptoms tend to be quite vague. So again, fatigue, headaches, joint pain, neuropathy, which is a numbness or tingling in your skin or your extremities, Bell's palsy, where one side your face starts to droop, fever, chills, swollen glands, all these can be signs of Lyme disease. And again, a lot of these symptoms, they look like mono and flu and a lot of other things. And, you know, that's sort of in the acute phases. But we see a lot of people that get exposed, they don't get really acutely ill. It kind of slowly progresses over time, be it weeks, months, years, where they just start to slowly deteriorate and they start getting logical problems, brain fog, they have memory issues, mood problems, a lot of psychiatric issues we come to find out are related to Lyme disease. Sleep, gastrointestinal problems. You know, this bacteria is kind of interesting because it is a true shape shifter. It's a bacteria that's called the spirochete. And spirochetes are these long kind of coiled organisms, so they kind of look like a corkscrew, but that shape allows it. I don't know, for people my age or you may be older. Remember the slinky, right? That little metal thing that you used to open and close, and Lyme's kind of like a slinky. Is that it can, you can pull it open in that uncoiled form and you can ball it back up. And when Lyme goes into that balled up form, it's very hard for our immune system to identify it. And therefore our natural immune system really isn't effective at eradicating it. And even some of the antibiotics used to treat Lyme disease don't really go after that, that cyst or round body form. So, you know, when it goes in that state, it can kind of hide from the immune system. Lyme can actually get inside your cells. And our immune system is trained not to go inside the cell to kill things because it'll kill the cell in the process. So this organ is a really complicated, diverse bug that allows it to stay in your body potentially dormant for years. And then given the right circumstances, and if your immune system's taxed or something else happens, that may allow it to sort of become active again, and then the symptoms start to, you know, perpetuate again. So, you know, we patients, we track back that maybe their exposure, you know, happened months or years ago, but then something drastic happened in life. Their immune system tanked and now they start having symptoms. So yeah, it's just one of these really kind of confusing bugs that confuses doctors, confuses patients, and unfortunately is really missed a lot in medicine.

Dude, that was like, that was like a solid 5 minutes explanation on it. Like, like I don't know if I, I don't know if I've heard like that succinct like good explanation in such a short period of time. So that was, that was great. I actually had like a bunch of bullet points to ask you and you like hit a bunch of them. So I was going.

Okay, so you mentioned in there. And then kind of towards the end, so there's, and maybe I'm okay, so there's two pieces. So one, you could get bit but not get infected. Right? Is that so is that true? Like, so you can have a tick bite, get infected? Okay, sure.

And think about that infection. I mean, you know, if there's a hundred people in a room and they all get exposed to flu, not all hundred people are going to get flu, you know, depending on the integrity of your immune system. And really about the terrain. And again, we could probably have a much longer conversation about germ theory versus terrain theory. I mean, is the germ really the problem or is it the terrain that allows that germ take over? And certainly, I mean, gosh, I lived in Connecticut for almost 20 years. I'm sure if I tested everybody in the state, we'd find a lot of people had antibodies against Lyme and never got Lyme disease. You know, they got exposed, their immune system took care of it. That was that they just have evidence in their immune system that they had that exposure. So certainly not everybody gets bit necessarily gets Lyme disease. But again there are those population of people that do get infected again, maybe their immune system was very healthy at the time and it's just been. And then again fast forward however many months or years later that their immune system is not so healthy. And now what was quiet, you know, can kind of manifest. And maybe the best example of that, Brian, is think about like chickenpox and shingles. You know, if you got chickenpox when you were as a kid, that virus can stay dormant in your body for 50 years. And then when your immune system tanks, then you can break out in shingles. It is literally the same virus that's been in Your body that long. So we've got plenty of examples of, you know, Epstein Barr virus that causes mono. That can get reactivated. So we got certainly evidence of other infectious agents that can get reactivated in time as the immune system is compromised. So, yeah, that's. Unfortunately, happens a lot.

Wow, I never heard that. That comparison for that makes so much more sense. It's so hard to wrap your head around Lyme. Like, I feel like just because the symptom profile that you talked about, it's like, oh, I've been bit, like. And then you talk about the bullseye thing. That's not always there. And like, if I really. But, like, the chickenpox shingles thing just. It makes sense. Like, you just know that, like, and then. Because the next question was to be like, okay, so it lays dormant. What are the things that trigger. So basically, is it like, you have this. You have this in your body, and basically, as long as your immune system is at, like, level, you know, level 10, let's say, doing its job, like, it's continuously fighting it off, but if anything lowers that immune system response, let's say to, like, level five or something, then all of a sudden, it's like, opening the door for it to, like, to, like, take over. Basically.

It's kind of like, yeah, abs, absolutely. You know, I think we have so many things in our world that can compromise our terrain, compromise our immune system, I. E. Mold.

I think, you know, that's one of the. The biggest clinical overlaps we see with Lyme is mycotoxicity. And if you wrote down all the symptoms of Lyme disease, you wrote down all the symptoms of mold and mycotoxicity, you know, there's probably an 80, 85% overlap. So clinically, it can be almost impossible to distinguish for someone that has Lyme disease and has, you know, mold or mycotoxin exposure, you know, which symptoms are related to each. And truth be told, I don't think you know, me, the doctor, you. The patient can necessarily know for sure until. And see, you know, what starts to improve. And I've had plenty of patients in my practice that had known Lyme disease. And then somewhere down the line, we discovered that they mold and mycotoxin exposure in their home, and we started dealing with that, and now their improvement got a lot better. So if you start treating Lyme disease and you get 50% improvement, kind of tells you it's 50% of the problem. But there may be something else that you haven't addressed yet that's still contributing to the symptoms. So mold piece is really.

Factors that lead to not only the clinical symptoms, but I also think it becomes an obstacle in having successful lyme treatment. And we know that when you get lyme disease from the research, that part of what it does is that it can damage your immune system. It can damage your mitochondria, which are the part of the cell that literally create energy. So if you're susceptible that way, if you get mold exposure, mycotoxins particularly, does that make you more susceptible? And I think it can go the other way around. You know, what if mold sets the stage that when you do get exposed to Lyme, you're also more susceptible? So I believe it goes both directions.

And I feel like you're literally reading my notes right now.

Because I was going to say, like, I've heard, you know, so many places, like, is the mold causing the lyme issue to be worse? Is Lyme causing the mold issue to be worse? The way that I'm kind of understanding it from you is, like, listen, you have your immune system, and it functions at, let's say, 100%, right? And then different things diminish the function, and then things can. Then critters and problems and exposures start to manifest and start to have issues. So, like, it kind of sounds like, like, if you didn't have a tick, you know, you didn't get bit, but you have a mold issue, then you go somewhere and you get bit, your immune system is depleted, you're more likely to get the inf if the bug had it. Right? And, like, kind of vice versa.

It sounds like, yeah, you know, full load. I mean, I came up out of, you know, training in environmental medicine, and we always use the concept of a barrel. You know, you're born with a barrel, and some people have a big barrel, and some people have a shot glass. When the barrel overflows as you become symptomatic and it's a problem. So it's really the totality of everything that's, again, adding to your load. Lyme chronic infection adds to the immune load. You know, mold, mycotoxins, chemical exposure, pesticides, herbicides, all this adds to the load. So I've heard some ridiculous things out there, and, like me, I can't understand it. Like, well, you have to treat mold before you treat Lyme. You have to treat Lyme to treat mold. If you don't do one, you're never going to get better. It makes zero biological sense. The reality is you got to treat all of it because it's all adding to your load. And they're separate things. And even the way they're treated is completely different. So I've never subscribed to the concept that, you know, you have to deal with mold before you do with Lyme. Is chronic mold and mycotoxin exposure going to inhibit your Lyme treatment? Probably, but that doesn't mean you don't treat Lyme. So, you know, I think, you know, any of us in naturopathic medicine, functional medicine, you know, we're always trying to look at things that are adding to your, your body burden, adding to your load, so that we know what we need to target in our treatment to lower the load of all of that. And how many of these things, again, do undermine your immune system, do alter gut function, which of course is a huge part of your immune system, you know, alters your biochemistry in a way that it's not conducive for healing and repair? You know, it just adds and adds and adds and adds. So we have to target those things that we know are contributing to your problem and start to address it appropriately.

Yeah, you know, I've heard the same thing. I was actually going to ask you, and then of course you answered it already the, the order of treatment. Right. Because I've so I've hear places. It was if you have Lyme, you have to do mold first and then you do parasites and then you do co infections. And I've heard this from like multiple places. And I was just, I would ask you, like, is that really, like, how it goes?

Yeah, I mean, it gets to the point of almost bordering, I said on ridiculous. It's like, okay, you can only do this on a Tuesday with a full moon and the, you know, the date has to end in seven and Jupiter has to be in the fifth house. And you know, it just, it just borders on, you know, insanity. And as a patient, it's completely overwhelming because it just adds to the stress and confusion of, oh my gosh, if I don't do this piece immediately, I'm never going to get well. And I think that creates a bad.

Patient that you almost feel like you're just never going to get to that point where you can get over this hurdle because there's just so many hurdles to clear. And I think everyone just needs to, to take a step back, take a deep breath and realize, look, you might have a lot of different health issues that you're trying to address, but fortunately, all these are actionable and you just have to take one piece at a time. I Think where it gets to be hard is if you identify that someone's got mold and someone's got Lyme and someone's got other infections and food allergies, you feel like, oh my gosh, I just got to do all of it once. Well, you don't necessarily have to do all at once. Do it in an order that makes sense. And I think that's between each person and their practitioner on what you feel contributing factor. But in my practice, I mean it's not uncommon that we're doing a lot of things in and around the same time. I think it's good for all of us to do things slowly layer in as needed just so you have some sense of what's helping you. I think it's very hard sometimes when you start doing 20 therapies once, particularly if people don't do well, you don't know what's contributing to. So you want to have some sense about how each of your treatments is impacting the person so that, you know, this is something worth keeping or this is something we need to change. Because if you throw the kitchen sink at everybody, it's just, you know, it's hard to know what's helping, what's not helping. So I will usually start, you know, with one or two things. Let's target this first. You know, I think there's so many foundational things that anybody can do with any chronic illness. You know, gut and diet are I think, the cornerstone of any chronic illness. Care what it is. You know, if you're eating crap and you know your gut's a mess, you're going to have a hard time overcoming anything. So you've got to really work with your doctor, your practitioner on getting your gut in good working order because that's a big part again of your immune system and make sure that you're eating a good, clean, healthy diet. And you know, there's a million opinions on which diet might be best. But again, you know, talk with your doctor about what you think is best for you. But certainly I think all of us would agree that getting rid of junk and processed foods, eating a mostly plant based diet, lean animal proteins, low mercury, fish. I think most of us are kind of in that camp that realize that that contributes to a healthy gut, healthy microbiome and that starts to shift the tide to allow you to start to heal better.

Yeah.

Every time you talk, I'm checking things off my list that I didn't even ask yet. So I did want to, I wanted to ask you about co impact infections I've heard CO infections a lot. To me, it seemed like a Lyme sort of thing. Like, I've never really heard it with other things. Is that a Lyme specific thing or is it just other. Is it just that your immune system is beat down and so you start to get other infections, but that could happen with any chronic illness that you're dealing with.

Well, the CO infection piece really ties into the tick itself. We know that ticks that carry Lyme have the capacity to carry other infections. So when they bite you, sometimes they transmit more than just Lyme. And we know from some of the research, you know, some of the ticks up in the New England area, up to 33% carry Lyme plus some other microorganism. It's another bacteria. So it's really when you get that tick bite, you know, are you getting exposed to more than one microbe? And in some cases it can be two or three, and rarely even something like four or five. So if you've got a tick that just has, you know, in its body, has a lot of, you know, Lyme and Bartonella and Babesia and Ehrlichia and anaplasma, you know, when it bites you, again, it just has this capacity to accidentally kind of infect you with, you know, some of these other things. So when we're testing people, we're usually not just testing for Lyme disease. We're usually testing for other CO infections. And again, really, depending on where you live in the world, we know that certain organisms are more common in an area than others. So if you live, you know, out in New England, you know, we're always testing for lime and Barnella and Babesia and Anaplasma. If you live out here on the west coast, we're testing for other species, species of Babesia ehrlichia. So, you know, depending on where you are in the world, that sort of tells us what we need to be searching for. But as part of our testing anyway, it's pretty common that we're testing for the multitude of these CO infections because, again, clinically, it can be difficult to distinguish one from the other. There are some symptoms that are more common with some CO infections than what you would see with Lyme. That might be, again, a telltale sign that there's something else going on. But, you know, we typically like to do the blood test anyway just to make sure we're on the right track.

Yeah, can we talk about testing a little bit, too? Because I understand it's kind of hard to figure out I know the symptom profile is difficult. Right. But from a testing perspective, I've heard that it's kind of hard on the testing front. Is it just that? But you don't really know what you're testing for because you're trying to go after all these symptoms. If you're not a doctor that really gets Lyme. Like. Like are there. So you just mentioned the different blood tests. Some align specific. Some of the other co infections. Like is it pretty easy if you know what you're looking for? And the problem is just that people don't really know what they're looking for.

It can be a function of that. Doctors may not necessarily be testing for the rice thing. If you don't look for it, you won't find it. That's definitely a problem. I mean, I problem here in California with a lot of doctors that legit believe that there is no Lyme disease in California, even though the CDC says California is the fifth fastest growing state for Lyme disease. A doctor told one of my patients, we don't even have deer. Like the animal. I'm like, well, that's funny because where I live there are deer crossing signs all over and I see deer all the time. But anyway, yeah, so the problem with testing is a function of really with Lyme specifically, it's the sensitivity of the test. I mean, understand we don't have a good way to measure Lyme directly in your body. You know, if you get strep throat, I can swab your throat, culture it and prove that there's strep in your throat. We can't measure Lyme easily at all. And so we depend on antibody tests, which is just a sign of immune exposure to the organism that gives us occasion that maybe you've had. But we know from the research that the sensitivity of the Lyme testing that's commercially available is pretty poor. And I was a microbiologist before I was a doctor. I used to do all for a living. And a good test is typically 95% specific and sensitive, which means that if you have the disease that you're doing, will pick it up. And also that if you have a positive, it's specific to the disease that you're looking for. So you want to make sure you've got a.

But we know that the sensitivity test is somewhere between 43 and 46%. So it literally misses half of the people that have Lyme disease. That's a terrible test. And interestingly, the test that's available was never designed to be diagnostic. This Test was developed AIDS ago as a way to monitor people that had known Lyme disease. So these are people that had the bullseye rash and all the. The classic symptoms. They wanted a way to monitor them. Well, this was a way to kind of monitor their antibody levels. So at. At face value, all this test really shows us again is, have you had exposure Lyme disease diagnosis? Even if you go to the CDC's website and read their page on Lyme disease, it'll tell you it's based on your signs and symptoms. And particularly if you live in an area that's endemic for deer ticks, the lab test is really efficient. So, again, I've never quite understood why doctors have relied so heavily on the test that you do or.

When at the. It's really a clinical diagnosis now, because Lyme does look like a lot of other things. Certainly, as a doctor, it's our due diligence to rule out other possibilities. You know, it looks like a lot of other autoimmune diseases looks like other infections. So typically, you know, we're doing other testing to try and make sure it's not something else. But, you know, if all the other tests come back negative, your Lyme test comes back positive and you have symptoms. You know, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's.

Probably, can you give false positives on Lyme tests?

False positives with Lyme tests are extremely rare. False negatives are extremely common. You know, and we know that some of the antibodies that we measure. So there's a test called a western blot. So the conventional testing is you do a Lyme screen. That's the terrible test that picks up 43 to 46% of people. If that test is positive, then it flexes over to this Lyme western blot. I mean, I had classic lyme disease in 2002, and I went to the lab, My Lyme screen was negative. I had 105 fever, joint pain, neuropathy, big bullseye, rash on my leg, and my Lyme screen was negative. But I did my lime western. It lit up like a Christmas tree. So we know from years of research that some of these antibodies are very specific to Lyme and some antibodies are not specific. So again, why we've never changed that criteria to reflect that I don't understand. But, you know, from a conventional standpoint, you need to have 2 out of 3 IgM antibodies on this Western or 5 out of 10 IgG antibodies. And again, some of these antibodies are specific to Lyme and some aren't but if you've got one Lyme specific antibody on the IGM and not two, I mean, isn't it like being a little pregnant? I mean, you know, I mean, you are, you aren't. If you have Lyme specific antibodies, which means as far as we know, there's no other microbe that triggers that immune reaction. Does it matter if it's 1, 2 or 3, 4 antibodies? You know, now we're talking about differences in immune activity and think about all the things that potentially affect that. I mean, that can be. Are you immune compromised? Are you taking medication that suppresses your immune system like steroids? Are you, you know, do you have some other underlying condition that's altering your immune response? Or has your exposure been so long ago that immunity naturally wanes with time? And your antibody levels are less because they are little during the quantity of your antibody. And what's kind of interesting with the western blot test is they compare you to a control and your antibody levels have to be at least 60% of the control to call it positive. And the lab that I use is called Medical Diagnostic Labs in New Jersey. They actually send me a copy of that test with those percentages. And I've seen people at 59%, 58%, really 1% is the difference between you do or do not have Lyme disease. I mean, that's you drinking an extra glass of water during the course of the day because all these blood values are a function of how hydrated you are. So again, you know, the way we kind of come about it from a lab standpoint, unfortunately, it's just, it's not great. It hasn't changed in almost four decades. I think with the other CO infections, they are not as problematic. Again, I think there are some labs that do a better test kit than others. But, you know, typically if people have Bartonella, babesia, you know, we'll see antibodies. So even when we're running that through regular reference labs, often we will pick those up if they are there. There are some more specialized for some of these CO infections, again, for someone who might have Babesia, there's a lab that does a test called a fish test, where you actually can stain your blood and you'll put it with a fluorescent dye. And if there's even little tiny bits of Babesia there, it'll light up so you can visually see it. And that's pretty cool. So again, we got a few other tests out there for very specific co infections that. But we'll pick and choose labs that we think Do a better job. But again, it gets to be a bit complicated and kind of expensive because, you know, we're using these different labs to try and, you know, detect whether you've had that exposure. And unfortunately a lot of these labs, you know, don't bill your insurance company. So it becomes an out of pocket expense. If we're really trying to get to the crux of what your exposure was, you know, it's sort of a necessary evil to understand, you know, what your exposure's been.

Yeah, I mean it's so. There's so many parallels from what you're saying versus like just how we go in and test a house and the strengths and weaknesses of different tests and like the false negatives and all that stuff. So interesting to hear it on, on the body side too.

What's.

Why does Lyme show so many symptoms? Like what? How does it move through the body? How is it affecting so many different systems in your body? Like, it's probably a very long question to answer, so I'm sure summary is just fine. But I'm just trying to like, to figure out or to, to kind of talk through a little bit. Like I've learned, you know, we've learned how, how mold kind of works through how it can get into the bloodstream, gets through the gut barrier. You know, different things like that. Like what is Lyme doing as a, as a bacterial infection versus, you know, an airborne thing that you're breathing. Right. Like how, how is that doing whatever it's doing in your body that allows it to basically travel to all these different places potentially and cause different.

Yeah, I think there's two answers to that or two parts to that part is that again, Lyme has this capacity because of its unique nature, it can invade really any tissue in your body. So the fact that we see such a diverse number of symptoms probably correlates to where in the body it happens to go. If it gets more into the joints, you're going to get joint pain. If it gets more into the GI tract, you're going to have gastrointestinal problems. So if it gets more into the brain, you're going to have neurological issues. So part of it is its ability to invade different tissues. I think the bigger part of it though is that we know that Lyme can actually induce an autoimmune problem. We know from the research. It, you know, the antibody response, your immune response to Lyme can cross react with the, with your brain, with your peripheral nerves, with your joints. So a lot of symptoms that people with Chronic Lyme in particular experience maybe do more to the autoimmune problem than the infection, which is why if you just target treating the bug, you may not get complete resolution of symptoms. Because if this autoimmune piece has been kind of induced, you really have to treat it more like an autoimmune disease than just an infection. And again, these autoantibodies can go anywhere, and they affect any number of different tissues depending targeted. You know, it's just one of these things where I think because Lyme is so poorly researched, you know, we just don't know enough about what else is going on. I think there's a lot more to the puzzle than we've been able to explain for as long as Lyme's been around, since really the early 1980s. There's very little, you know, federal research funding looking into, you know, how it's transmitted, how it's best diagnosed, how it's treated. So a lot of this is still based on practitioners clinical experience. But yeah, it's just.

I think there's a lot more than we understand of how the interaction between Lyme, our immune system, and the environment is all contributing to this totality of symptoms. And again, we know that Lyme can damage your immune system, it can damage your mitochondria. That certainly contributes to fatigue, contributes a lot to think, to the neurological symptoms. But it's this combination of invasion and autoimmunity that probably is the bigger parts of why so many different symptoms come up with Lyme.

Yeah. So then what is a. What is like a treatment plan? Look, like if there's so many different things that are going on, so you have an infection, but then, and I guess everybody's different from how you're saying, like, if the autoimmune piece gets triggered, then you're having to somehow handle that. But, like, at the core, an infection, like a bacterial infection, is an antibiotic kind of the thing that happens in order to get rid of the infection or like, how does that piece get handled?

So certainly for someone with acute, antibiotics can be very effective, and that's the best indication for it. What's really less understood is, you know, what happens for someone who got exposed again months or years ago. How effective are antibiotics in that population? When you look at the research out there, it kind of shows that antibiotics, if you've been exposed a while ago, don't tend to be very effective. Either you get no or you get some benefit while you're on them. And as soon as you come off the antibiotics, you're kind of back to school. One of the things we've learned in research with Lyme is that you can get these things called persister cells and these are parts of the organism that are just resistant to antibiotics. And we've got more and more research coming out, particularly from Johns Hopkins University on these persister cells that when they study it in a lab, even with high doses of antibiotics, they just don't die off. And it can be up to 20% of the total amount of organisms in your body. So if you've got these persister cells and antibiotics aren't really addressing them, clearly it's not going to do very much for the infection part.

So is the infection creating those cells or that's something that somebody has already.

We've got evidence now that you can get these persister cells right from your first tech bite. I mean, like in the matter of, you know, if they can, when they test you right after the bite, they've done this in animal studies where they found right after the bite they measure these organisms and those persister cells are already there. So in some cases people are being bit with these persister cells. So it's almost like you have chronic Lyme even though it's acute, which seems completely insane. But that also makes sense why even people sometimes when they get the early diagnosis, they still have these long term problems because the antibiotics just didn't address that percentage of organisms. They persisted and then they started creating other types of problems. So, you know, from a treatment standpoint, I always come back again really to the terrain. I think, you know, if we can get the body healthy, we give it every fighting chance, these infections naturally and we start to shift the tide so that, you know, your body, you know, biochemically is functioning the way it should. So the tissues are health, the body's healing and again that's, you know, gut diet, that's environmental control. So making sure you don't have, you know, tons of mold in your house, making sure inundated with herbicides and chemicals, it's making sure you get good sleep, it's making sure you move your body. You know, all these things we do to help promote health really are kind of the keys to getting over a chronic illness. And that includes Lyme disease. So, you know, when I sit down with my patients and we're having this conversation, it's really not just about killing the bug. It's about doing all these other things to get healthy that, you know, allow your body to do what's supposed to do. I mean, the Beauty of being human, right, is that, you know, it's built into our DNA to heal. And no matter what your chronic health issue is, this is, this is part of being human. It's the obstacles in the way that stop that natural process from happening. So we just want to get those obstacles out of the way so that.

I've seen people who've been in really, really bad shape with any number of different conditions, including Lyme disease, where, you know, we can make those changes, start to see that incremental improvement and get the body, you know, on that right track. I think what happens in the Lyme and really the mold world too, is sometimes there's this expectation that's going to happen quickly. And what we find for a lot of people is that it doesn't happen quickly. And, you know, I think about with, you know, the mold folks, I mean, how long you been in that moldy environment? In many cases, it's months to years. How long have you had that exposure? What is your body burden of mycotoxins and how disseminated is it throughout your body and your, your tissue? So how long do we think it's going to take once we clean up the environment to get that body burn down low enough that those cells and those tissues?

And you know, again, I think some people have this expectation that's going to happen in a matter of weeks or months, and I think in reality it's a year or longer. And if you've had other exposures beyond mold, again, how long is it going to take to get rid of that? So, you know, in essence, we're always trying to find strategies to lower the body burden. And one of the things I just thought I'd mentioned that I think is kind of interesting is I just. So many things out there, the five day detox, the seven day detox, you know, in reality, detox is not a week. Detox is lifelong. It's about getting ahead of the curve. Live on planet Earth, you're exposed. It's just the unfortunate nature of living in the world that we live in now. And it's only gotten worse as time has gone on. So I always think of it like, you know, filling up a tub and draining at the same time. Which process goes faster. If we can drain it faster than it fills up, you know, we're good. But if it fills up fast and we can drain it, we get in trouble because it overflows. So we're always trying to get ahead of the curves, get our detox pathways operating as optimal as possible. And I think one of the things I see in a lot of my patients with chronic Lyme and chronic mold is they are not good detoxifiers. You know, we'll hear it from their history that, you know, if they take a little bit of medication, it has a very profound effect. Little bits of anything go a long way. You know, they drink a little bit of coffee. It gives them, you know, heart palpitations, keeps them up all night. So if you are a poor detoxifier, whether that's your genetics or whether that's your environmental exposure, it is harder to get your body back to that state of health. Again, not impossible, but it's going to take longer than the people who are very rapid detoxifiers. But my experience is that the people who are very rapid detoxifiers don't tend to have these health issues because their body can clear that rapidly. So, yeah, you know, I know it seems so complicated because we're looking at so many different aspects of everyone's health, but at the end of the day, it really is. Again, you have to look at the whole person and address all these individual pieces that are stopping them from getting well again.

Is there a panel of testing or specific things that you look at to understand immune system function? Like if you were. If I want, if I came to you, it's like, hey, listen, nothing's really happening with me, but I want to know, like, all the elements of my immune system and where I could, like, bolster things and where I'm deficient and things like that. Is there, like a certain things that you would look at first for somebody who's like, hey, I just want to make sure my immune system is functioning, but I want to know where I'm starting at, and then I want to see how I'm progressing.

Yeah, unfortunately, tests that are out there, blood tests, really aren't great for measuring immune function. You know, we can measure antibody levels. I can count your T cells and B cells and NK cells. If you're really immune deficient, we can pick up on that. But I mean, I used to have HIV patients that would have these really low white counts because HIV invades your white blood cells, but functionally they never got sick.

So what we don't. We can't measure very easily is how well is your immune system. And that's ultimately, I think, what we want to know. So we just. Where we've got good technology that tells us about immune function. So again, for someone who might be immune deficient, there's certainly blood tests we can run to kind of rule that out as a possibility. But it's still not telling us again how well your immune system is reacting to different viruses and bacteria or other environmental exposures.

Too bad. I wanted to run that magic immune system panel on myself.

Me too.

Please let me know we'll win the nobel prize in medicine.

Yeah, I'm probably the wrong person to talk to you about that.

Okay. So does lyme ever go away, or is it just something to where your immune system gets bolstered and it starts kind of keeping it at bay, or do you actually get rid of it?

That's a great question. The honest truth is we don't know because, again, we can't measure lyme directly in your body. I am of the opinion that I don't think we eradicated 100%. I think it becomes part of our normal microbiome. And again, kind of coming back to my chickenpox shingles thing, I think once you get exposed, it's probably part of you. Not to say that you. Where you live with it, it lives with you, and you don't bother each other, and all the symptoms you used to experience go away. I mean, my own experience with lyme, you know, treated myself for about three years. Got to a point where I was 100% symptom free. And I've got plenty of patients that have had a similar experience. So it's always possible to get better, to get over Lyme. But again, I think people with lyme tend to get hung up, that it's only lyme, and in many cases, it's lyme plus something else. So you may go through your lyme treatment and you get improvement, but you don't have complete resolution. And for me, that's just a marker that we need to start other things in your life that might be contributing to the way that you feel, because it's not always lyme disease. You know, I learned early on in this world that, you know, it's kind of like if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you're a lyme practitioner, you know, you kind of see the world through a lyme lens. And because lyme does look like so many other things, it's easy to, you know, kind of think that lyme is the major factor that's contributing it. And I had a colleague who was a lyme doctor, and she had a patient seeing after the fact that had this chronic sort of vaginal. Seemed like a yeast issue. And the doctor was just convinced it was a manifestation of lyme. Disease and treated her for Lyme. And of course, it didn't really get much better. And she came to see me, and she had just a different section. It wasn't Lyme disease at all. And it was treated, and she got better, and that was the end of that. So it's important that, you know, if you're working with Lyme practitioners, that they're really looking at the totality, not just the Lyme piece, because, again, inevitably, there probably are other things that are contributing to your health. It's not just Lyme disease, and particularly if you've been through Lyme treatment, you got. But certain things did not get better. It just tells me that there may be other things we need to investigate.

Yeah, that's such a good point. I mean, I catch myself. Every building I walk into, like, looking around, right? Like, not every building has a massive problem, but.

I walk in, and I'm immediately looking for it. You know, I'm just, like, trying to look. To look around like that. So, I mean, it totally makes sense that it happens on that side, too.

Well, I think a great. You know, I think about your world and my world because they are so similar in so many ways. And the way that we approach a problem and could I go into any home and find some mold? Probably. Is it contributing to the way that people feel? Cases, probably not. So to say, well, I found mold, therefore that's part of the problem. It's not really a fair assessment. And it's kind of same thing with Lyme. It's like, well, is it possible there? And it's not really the big thing that's contributing to the way you feel. Yeah, I mean, that's possible, too. So, again, we have to think a little bit further than just the. The piece of paper in front of us and see the whole picture to say, yeah, is this really the big thing that's contributing to the way that you feel?

Yeah, such a good point. Because there are times where I'll go in and, you know, we find a number of things that are happening or whatever, and then we're kind of reviewing all the results with the client afterwards, and they're, like, asking a specific question about one item, probably because it's expensive to handle. So let's say, like, windows. Like, let's say we found problems in their windows, have to replace it. Well, that's expensive to replace all your windows. And it's like, well, do you. And they'll ask me this, like, do you think that the windows are really contributing to that? To our Health.

I don't know. I don't know. I like, I mean, take a step back and you know, why, why did you reach out to us? Obviously your doctor was probably telling you that they're seeing mold. Right. Like there's some sort of issue there that's coming up. So that's why you reached out. Is this particular window, the, the one thing that's putting the straw on the camel's back is breaking it. I don't know in particular, but it's what you described earlier. It's overall load. Right, Right. If it's this window. But then there's 15 other things going on. I mean, yeah, the windows probably contributing in some, in some capacity. Is it contributing as much as this kitchen cabinet over here? Like, I don't know. Right. And so we kind of go through and try to prioritize in those cases. Like, well, what areas look the worst. Right. Maybe if you can't do everything, then you address the areas that seem to be most, you know, heaviest concentration and loads and try to get the biggest bang for your buck that way. But it's interesting. It's not. Yeah, it's not that easy, you know, to just kind of point to one thing and say, this is it. This is what's causing everything. But it is that whole totality that you're talking about.

Yeah. I want to share a really great story. I have a patient, I'm pretty sure that the family's a client of yours. And this little girl, she six years old and she was having head to toe hives sporadically and she would go through periods of clearing up and then would break out. And we tested her. You know, she had some food allergies, some other issues.

But we identified that she was actually very sensitive to oats.

Oatmeal every day. So we pull a lot better. But then after a while it started getting.

After a rainstorm here in California, which of course is kind of unusual. And the, the very long there.

Less than three years old.

The mom was telling me that she and her poor husband almost got divorced over this because the amount of work that had. Yeah, extensive and expensive. It was just a huge. So the family went, they did all the remediation and the girl scared.

Clear. She has not had an outbreak since. So this, this, this load on her, clearly oats, food. But the mold was a big part of what was triggering her immune system. So if we understand that something like Lyme disease can have a negative impact on your immune system, you know, mold is another one of those things. But Clinically again, you know, how do you differentiate? You kind of don't know until you, you deal with it and treat it. But I think she was a great example for me about how important this environmental factor is because it would have been very easy just to kind of keep going down that path. And she's eating, you know, it's a brand new house. New houses aren't supposed to have mold and fortunately they did the work, found out it was a problem. And it wasn't just a problem in one area. It was literally like half the house found major, major problems. So, you know, I, I know it's always a hard conversation with people because we know the expense of testing and remediation. But like at the end of the day, this is your health. The cost of treating you for years and years and not getting any better is still going to be more probably than whatever you're going to pay to get your house cleaned up.

Yes, thank you. I say that all the time too. It's just, it's the big chunk of money up front versus it split out over the course of 10 years. Right. So it just seems like more money at the beginning. But I say that all the time too. It's, it's, it's hard. Listen, you're right, it's, it's a lot to. When you look at doing a mass scale, you know, remediation like that, and when you said that they almost got divorced. I have many clients that have gotten divorced over it and it sucks.

It's like, yeah, I, and yeah, well, you know, it's, it's. I tell my patients, I'm like, if, you know, you have home, if you can't leave, like if you're an apartment, you can just leave, great. But if you own it and you're there for the long haul and you want to stay, you know, you need to make that investment of, for whoever the sick person is because inevitably at some point it may affect the healthier people in the household. And I'm like, look, you need to beg, borrow and steal whatever you got to do to get that work done. And look, I know it sucks and I know it can be really expensive, but this is your life, this is your health. I mean, you, I'm sorry, you just can't put a price on that. And I've seen so many people stay in toxic environments and get sicker and sicker and sicker to the point where, you know, I'm doing the best over that hump. But I know that there's that, that Obstacle that until they get out of that environment or remediate, it's just gonna. It's gonna be a big block, and people get frustrated and, like, well, I'm not getting better. And I'm like, right, because you still got this heavy load of things that are every day undermining your immune system, undermining your health. And, I mean, I can only do that. Toxic environment is so bad that, you know, you just. You need to figure out either to leave or to fix it. And I know it's such a hard choice for people, but I just want to reiterate how important it is for your health to make sure that you take care of that stuff.

Yeah, it's funny that you say that, because something that I would see happen a lot. So by the time they. Sometimes by the time people get to me, they've already been kind of doing what you just described, like, right. They're. They're coming in, they're doing certain treatments. It got a little better. Maybe it's not anymore. And then they kind of find us. Right. But, like, the.

The.

The kind of, like, path that happens a lot with those people is. Is what you. It's kind of what you described with the girl, with the little girl is that we saw something. We did a treatment. She got better, right? You saw like a. She got a little better. And then. And then it, like plateaus maybe, and then it comes back down, and then it's like, okay, there's something else going on. And so, like, you know, kind of something we always say is that the exposure, it always wins at some point. Like, you could treat and treat as much as you want, but at some point, you can't keep up with it. You know, it's gonna win.

So, yeah, it's just really interesting because you're seeing it, like, on the front end, and then I'm seeing it on the back end.

Yeah. Well, I had another young lady I saw yesterday, and she has Lyme, and she's got terrible body pain, and a lot of the classic Lyme symptoms, you know, fatigue, body pain, neuropathy. And we just had her apartment tested, and her ochratoxin level, mycophenolic a citronin levels, were one of the highest I've ever seen. And so, like, you know, so we're having this conversation. It's like, well, clearly this is another big factor on why you feel the way you feel. And again, she's been in Lyme treatment for several months and hasn't improved drastically. And a lot of what she's experienced, could very well be, you know, the mold, the mycotoxin. So the good news is, you know, she's in an apartment on a month to month lease, so she's going to be able to get out of that no problem. But you know, that's not always the case for people. But again, she's just another example for me of, you know. Yeah, there's other pieces to the puzzle that just need to be figured out.

Yeah. And this is awesome. This is a really good Lyme talk.

So thank you for breaking everything down. I, I mean, I've been dealing with people that have had Lyme for years and I've talked to a bunch of doctors and, you know, here and there and different things, and I just feel like this conversation just broke everything down really, really well in a way to understand. So hopefully people will get a lot of value out of this because I, I think there's a lot of good info and the way that you describe everything. Super great. So thank you.

Oh, my pleasure. Of course.

Yeah. All right. Where do people find you? How do they talk to you? Like, do you want them to talk to you?

What's up?

Yeah, well, yeah, people want to, you know, learn more about myself. My practice best way is just to reach out through us. Our website, which is Darren Ingles nd n is in nancyd.com all of our information, social media links are on there. So we'd love for people to follow us. We got a lot of great information about Lyme and mold and environmental medicine and health. So we'd love for people to stay connected with us so we can give you all that great information.

And people should buy your book too. I feel like they should do that.

Certainly if anyone has Lyme disease or has a friend, family member, you know, look, I wrote this book for, you know, the general public. It's a step by step guide. You know, if you live in necessarily have a doctor or practitioner that can give you that hand holding. Everything in that book is pretty much something that you can do on your own, so you can really take stock of your own health, someone else to do it for you. You know, I've got one chapter in there that are some therapies that you probably need a healthcare provider to help guide you on. But pretty much everything else in there are things that you can do on your own. So again, it's something that I found a lot of people have gotten value out of because they live in areas where again, where they don't really have a good practitioner. And it's written, I think, in a way that's just easy for people to follow and not. Not terribly confusing.

Love it. Awesome. Well, thanks again, and I'm sure everybody will enjoy this, and I'm sure you and I will talk again pretty soon.

Great. Thanks, Brian.

All right. Bye. Bye.

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