EP 09: WTH ?!? Talking Lyme with Dr. Tom Moorcroft

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Alright, welcome back, everybody. So excited today. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel. This is what the Health and we've got it live streaming@naturecuresclinic.com I've got my esteemed colleague and great guest today, Dr. Tom Moorcroft. He's an osteopathic physician coming at us from Berlin, Connecticut. Thank you, Tom, for coming on to the show today.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me. Yeah.

And I wanted to really give you kind of a lead up here, you know, global leader in solving medical mysteries. And, you know, you are such a complex thinker. I've so enjoyed getting to know you over the last few years and your mind and your heart, your family and your clinic and your mission. I am excited. You know, this is one of these complex conditions of Lyme and all of the comorbidities and the complexity of it. So I'm really excited to talk to you about that. I'm excited to talk about, you know, how you got into medicine because I don't think I know that story. And then how you specifically got into Lyme.

That's a lot of stuff. Yeah, this is great. And I can't thank you enough, Greg. I mean, the opportunity to chat with you is always one that I love. And every time we see each other anywhere, I'm just like, yes, Dr. Eckel knows what he's talking about and it's fun. And I mean, I really appreciate you sort of pointing out the personal journey and the importance of family to me because I really think that that's such a critical thing, whether it's, you know, our personal immediate family or our sort of larger family, the family in our offices, you know, the family that gives us support, you know, and certainly you've been part of my family and my growth and being able to get my word out, you know, the mission out to other people and really, you know, so Many people are concerned they're not going to get better. So. But I guess, wow, where did I get it started? You know, it was funny. I was talking to somebody the other day about this and I. I didn't know anything about naturopathy or osteopathy. I just knew that. I remember two things growing up. One was, I remember seeing some TV show where this doctor walked into an ER and it was like a big disaster. And he just walked in super calm and he was like, you could do this, do this, do that. And then everything was great. I was like, wow, I want to be like that guy. Then really what happened was I loved being outside. And in college, I studied wildlife biology. And I was on this camping trip over a weekend and there were so many of us who went. We actually split up and we hiked different trails and we were in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. And I went with the. I wanted to keep the couples together. So I branched off with this other group of people. They said they're outdoor leaders. And at the end of the weekend, we were supposed to be going on a quick little jaunt before we went home. We left our water in our backpacks. It turned out a quarter mile hike was more like a four hour hike. I got dehydrated and hypoglycemic. Then they thought I was playing a joke on them, so they played a joke on me. By the time I got down from hiking, I found out they had put 30 pounds of rocks in my backpack. I was like, man, that shouldn't happen. I said, something went wrong here. Leadership failed. And so I sought out leadership training. The first thing I found was wilderness first aid. Then I was like, this is good. I loved it because it was not only about dealing with the situation in front of you, but it was about preventing other issues. The more and more I studied wilderness medicine, I just got more and more into medicine and this prevention thing. I said, wow, man, I want to be there because I love helping when there's an issue, but I would much rather prevent an issue from ever happening so that we could just all enjoy it. I just went into medicine. I was like, I didn't know where to go. I just knew medicine was hard. And all I knew about was the chiropractor would crack my neck when I grew up. And then you should be like a doctor. I just need MDs, right?

Yeah.

Anyway, the guy that I taught wilderness medicine for was a guy by the name of Frank Hubbell. And he was an EMT and then a paramedic and then a PA and then a doctor. Wow. He was one of the first people to create wilderness medicine. He's one. And what's up with this guy? He's different. So I interviewed at the school he went to, and I was like, oh, I should learn something about this osteopathy thing. But really all I knew was he was cool. So I wanted to check that out, and I thought I'd have to recreate medicine. And then I got into medical school and I realized, oh, I'm not alone, everybody. There's a whole bunch of people thinking we need to do it different.

Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah. I stumbled upon osteopathy by mistake, basically.

Wow, that's great. I'm really glad you found it. Yeah. Well, how about specifically. So how did you get into Lyme then?

Well, Lyme is an interesting thing. When I was teaching outdoor education and getting into this wilderness medicine, I had actually ended up having acute Lyme disease, and I was pretty sick from it. And then the doctor was like, hey, here's 10 days of your antibiotic. You're going to be perfectly fine. And over the next eight years, I had depression. I had fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and no one knew what was going on. I dove into yoga because another one of these things where the universe is guiding you, or whatever you want to call it, a coincidence, which I'm not sure I believe in. It was how I got to osteopathy. And it's just the friend said, here's some yoga dvd. Try this out. Then my body said, hey, all this yoga is feeling good. Stop eating all this stuff and drinking these sugary sodas. The more I started to listen to my body, the more I started moving towards this. And then I learned about naturopathy, and I learned about all this other stuff. I got better from Lyme, basically. I was 70% better just from my diet and exercise changes and my mindset shift, but I was still stuck in that 30% left, especially brain fog and stuff. I happened to be again, in somebody's office randomly studying osteopathic manipulation. They also did Lyme at the end of the first day. I'm like, whatever those people got, I got, please draw my blood and tell me how you're going to fix me. It turns out eight years later, I had Lyme and Babesia and they started to treat me and I got a lot better. Subsequently found out that I had a lot of heavy metal toxicity from mercury fillings, probably made worse by Lyme. In the end, it was just Kind of one of these things where I got better, and then I wanted to go do osteopathic manipulation, where I just get paid to meditate all day and help people feel good. Somebody came in my office one day, and I put my hands on her, and I said, you're sick, man. This is not like I fix it with my hands thing. And I didn't know where to look. I didn't know anybody around me who could treat this. I did a workup, and I found she had Lyme disease. I treated her pretty well, and then she ran into somebody and told her, and then, like, three people. All of a sudden. I have, like, a year and a half waiting list because we're being successful in reversing this. And so just kind of. I was never really planning it. It was just. I saw people suffering, and I sort of wanted to dive deeper.

I love that. Yeah, I love that. And, you know, your personal journey, too, that took you there. You know, your clinic, Origins of Health, you're also in Connecticut, which is kind of the epicenter, but, you know, we're seeing Lyme everywhere at this point. And, you know, I love. You know, you really wanted to bring up. I asked you, okay, what do you want to talk about? Like, this is a huge topic. And, you know, you started with personal empowerment and mindset for patients. And, you know, one of the things that I have seen over the last two decades of practice with Lyme in particular, is there is a mindset aspect that needs to get addressed, because this can get like, you had it for a decade, really, before, really, you were suffering. Nobody had any answers. I was just talking with my staff over lunch, and they said they were watching some medical diagnosis show, and they're like, every time there's some mystery illness, Lyme gets put on the differential.

Right, right.

So what? You know, there is a mindset, and I'm wondering, you know, you're dealing with, you know, really some really ill people. And so one, I'm curious how you keep your energy so good and not get dragged into it, because it can be really depressing. Right. You're seeing really sick people all day with brain fog and not clear thinking, and maybe their emotions are all over the place. So there's that aspect. But then how do you guide or how do you start planting those seeds for them to get into that personal empowerment and that mindset of trusting their intuition.

Right. Well, I mean, it's hard, and I will admit, like, I work really hard to have this energy and to keep refueling my passion, because it's draining. And, I mean, I'm certainly human. There are days where I'm just like, not again. You know? Yeah, tough. I mean, I'm not going to lie and say, there's not a day where I don't come home and go, man, I should have been a yoga instructor. But, you know, I'm a scientist. I love the science. I love investigating it. But it's like my passion is to help people get better, and it's always been that way. And it's like. And I always tie it back to my passion for the outdoors. You know, it's like. One of the things that we've been talking about recently is I always want to train other practitioners in this so that they can. So it's not just me and a few other people. I mean, there's a lot of us learning, but I want to get right on the front lines. We have early diagnosis so that they don't have to get into this chronic state. But we need to have fun. And one of the things I realized talking to other practitioners is we're all not doing good enough time taking care of ourselves because we're giving so much to our patients. So then we just decided to do a ski retreat because I love skiing, my family loves skiing, and we just bring people together. And we did education in the evenings, and we skied together during the day. We shared great meals together. But one of the things we did is just we had conversations about what drove us and what empowered us. I remember, really, it was so powerful to me that there's a doctor who become a really good friend of mine that I met at our event last year, and she was, oh, my God. In the middle of me lecturing, she just broke down crying and was like, you just validated everything I do. The fact that I fought so hard for children with autism my whole career, and I'm just like. And it's amazing that so many physicians and other healthcare practitioners who are on the front lines and they're just making all this amazing change. We forget the real people. And it was like, so we all need that support. And so really what this whole retreat was about was kind of what I use in my personal life. You know, I spend time with my wife and my daughter. I come home and it's like, you know, there's late days, but a lot of times it's like, I'll cut out of work, I'll spend time with my daughter, or if she has like a dance recital or a ski thing, I go to it and Then I stay up a little bit later to get my work done, and I've really sort of carved out that time for family. Awesome. And Jill and I, my wife, we go out of our way to make sure that we have a little bit of time here and there. Plus, we have our kind of daily ritual. It's amazing if you spend the time to tell each other how much you love each other. And we, as a family, spend time in the morning and evening going over what we're grateful for. And I remember our daughter was like, the first. When we first started this, she's like my cat. Then the next day, it's like, my cat, like Deedee, who's her cat. And then she started to branch out. But it's these simple little things. So, I mean, I exercise regularly. I try to not work some days, but I usually end up working. But one of the things I found is a nice routine is as I go to bed, I think about the things that happened well throughout the day, and I go, wow. And I give myself an opportunity to actually say, wow, that was good. I did a good job, and that went well. And I'm actually making progress because it's like, we all talk about big wins, and the problem is people with Lyme disease or Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, most of them aren't having big wins. They're happy. They can get out of the bed. Some days I have patients who. Some of them are able to go to work, and they're just. Their life is a little bit, you know, kind of messed up. But some people are like, they can't go pee by themselves. So you're like, when they can do that once, that's a huge thing.

Huge win. Yeah.

So if we focus on those little things in our day that were good, and we make time, like, you know, two minutes a day to just reflect on that. And then also, I take some of the things where I'm like, man, I wish I hadn't done that, you know, Or I wish I had had a little more patience when I dealt with this patient or this person on my team, I go, all right, you know what? Tomorrow I'm going to have more patients. And that program that I just wrote today of Tom being impatient or Tom being a jerk when he gets stressed out, I'm just going to delete that when I go to sleep tonight, and I'm going to wake up tomorrow and just be a little more thankful. Yes, that helps. I guess the other part that helps, too, is what I've learned in A lot of the things that we've run into each other through is a lot of these groups are if we have to have a dream. Right. And we have to have a plan. And it's. And it's. I'm always like, get stuck on how do I get there? Really? It's more about how do you. It's like, where are you going to be and what is the feeling going to be like? Because a lot of people are like, well, in a year, I want to be better from Lyme. I'm like, well, okay, how are you going to get. You know, then there's all these hows that get in the way. But I'm like, my question is, why do you want to be better from Lyme? What are you going to do when you get better from Lyme and how is that going to feel? Yeah, right. So it's like, well, I want to get better from Lyme so that I can go to my kids school functions. Okay, great. Why do you want to go there? What's it going to feel like? What are you going to love about the moment that you can leave your house on a regular, consistent basis and be at every baseball game.

Yeah.

Feel that emotion now and allow that to help bring you forward.

That's awesome. Do you do that at the beginning of meeting folks or when do you bring that into the discussion?

It kind of depends. And I'll admit, this is an evolving thing for us. And so it's usually been a little later, but I'm actually rolling out in the next couple of months a whole new program, like, way to come. People are going to go through our practice, which is, we're going to roll this out from the very beginning because to me, it's the number one thing. And when people go back and they say, how did you know you were going to get better? I said, I, I had better things to do with my life than have Lyme. Babesia. I happen to have some sort of thorn in my side, and I know I need to focus on that, but the best way to focus on that is to also know that I have a place that I'm going to in Lyme disease. So many people are like, I can't get better. That's the prevailing thing. Or, oh, I've healed from Lyme, but it's always there. I don't know. I've been better for six and a half years. And you know me, I go, go, go, I' early, up late, doing everything I can. Over the last year, I've definitely done More self care. But it's just like I'm always wanting to help and I always love doing stuff. My mom said, don't burn the candle at both ends. I'm like, mom, there's a fire on both sides in the middle, three different places, and it doesn't come back. I think a huge part of it is maybe there's something in a little nook and cranny somewhere, but I have this drive and this desire to do more in life and to contribute to the wellness of the planet, and that just keeps me going. And so the part that I think people need to focus on though, is it does start with you. And I think with Lyme, we do a lot of like, oh, now I don't have to take that personal responsibility. And so admittedly, that's been a hard conversation for me to start with people in the past, and now I feel really good about it because that's how you get better.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. You know, it makes sense. You know, maybe at the beginning of figuring out, well, what is it? And then you. Then you start, once you get the diagnosis or the kind of the roadmap, then putting in this, like, okay, what is, what's it? As if, like, what's it look like when you're better? I love that to bring that into the beginning of the discussion because it is so important. You know, it's a little bit harder in a kind of chronic neurodegenerative state where we don't have these cures and, or corrective agents as of yet, but it is such that mindset.

One of the things I've noticed in Lyme is that, and you can apply this to anything is if you know you're not getting better, that's a self fulfilling prophecy. And if you have a plan of what you're going to do and where you're going to go. Yeah. And you are gonna get better. You have a half a chance. Yeah. I can't guarantee you're gonna get better, but I can guarantee that you at least have a shot at getting better. As opposed to the opposite end of that discussion, you know?

Exactly. Yeah. Of just forever. I have this the rest of my life and I'm debilitated.

Right. Well. And I know a lot of your story and your family story and the things that are so amazing to me is you were always real.

Yeah.

But you also always were going, but I have. This is what I want to see happen. Yeah. I'm not going to fool myself and say there's not a reality. But I'm also not just going to, like, close the door, right? Yeah, close the door. Right.

Yeah. And that is so important. You know, the way that I talk about it with patients is I'm not the doctor to close the door. I have seen spontaneous remissions. We see stuff that shouldn't, you know, go away, go away. So why not just have it as a possibility and on the table there's that. But we also need to plan for what is right now. And, you know, I think it's really informed my practice and, you know, who I am as a being. You, you know, you definitely were mega support through some really trying times, that's for sure. So awesome. So what about. So you've got that healing the mindset stuff. Anything else on the mindset front that you put in with your patients in your practice?

I think that's a lot of it. I mean, that was huge.

Yeah.

There's a lot of different pieces that we can bring in. Because the one thing is where I don't close the doors are. I'm just sharing one of the things that's so powerful for me. But I've been studying this my whole life just because it's interesting. Whether it's meditation, whether it's prayer, whether it's reading the newspaper, whether it's mindfulness, we can. We meet people where they're at and we help them find what allows them to have their goals and then also meet them. Because I think the other part is not only looking in a year, where are you going to be and how is it going to feel? What are you going to love about that? And so that you get that emotion? Because we know that that emotion stimulates your immune system. But the other part is, what are you going to do on a daily basis to get there? Right. And it's not just about the supplements or the medicines or even the diet, for that matter. All that's critical. But it's like, what do you do when you wake up in the morning and what do you do before you go to bed? Because one of the things, like I mentioned earlier is my nighttime ritual has totally changed the way I wake up. It's also, I've never really had a hard time sleeping. But, man, I'll tell you, I am in the middle of going through my day being grateful, and then I'm going, oh, wow, that one. I'm going to remove that program from my thinking. Then all of a sudden, like, I'll find. When I get to the right point, I'm just so. I'm like zen. I'm not even like trying to meditate. And I'm just like, it's bedtime and I just roll over on my side and go to sleep or something. You know, it's amazing. And then when I. And then the one thing I do before I go to bed too is I'm like, I set my intention for what my body's gonna do while I'm sleeping, like healing and resting and how I'm gonna feel when I wake up. I just started doing this last three or four months. It's incredible, man. It's like you determine how you're going to wake up. You set that goal. And then when I wake up, it's like so many people are saying, get outside, get some sunlight, but breathe some fresh air, wake up and do some hydrating and all this good. Just simple things. But do it with a purpose. And like I was saying, it only needs to be three or four minutes on either end of your day. And realistically, if you can't find eight minutes.

Yeah. You don't have a life, you don't.

Want to get better, and you really shouldn't come see me. Right. Because I'm going to hold you accountable for it.

Yeah, got it.

But it is, it's just these simple rituals that will help you.

That's awesome. Now you've also grouped in here, pans and pandas and autoimmune encephalitis. And there's a whole constellation of kind of the differential diagnosis and some of these things lead into the other. So how does that come into play here for you?

Yeah, I mean, I started, it was kind of the same way I got into treating Lyme and other tick borne illnesses. We had people, their children were coming in and they're like, hey, I was diagnosed with pandas this acute onset of a neuropsychiatric disorder after exposure to strep. And they're like, but my kids never had strep, but they were bitten by this tick and they had the Lyme rash and they were treated for like two weeks. And I was reading and so people just kind of came in and as I started to research it, well, you know, pandas was originally described in strep because it looked a lot like Sittingham, Korea. But Susan Swedo from the National Institute of Mental Health, who kind of coined the phrase, said, I wish I hadn't. Because the more we researched it, a lot of things do it. So pans is this pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome. And what we see is we see acute changes in behavior. We might have kids who have been potty trained, are now bedwetters. We see acute food restriction, but a lot of this sort of OCD and rage and regression at school, or if they're not of school age yet, they regress handwriting changes. And it's kind of like this overnight thing. But as you look at pans, some of the triggers outside of strep are Lyme, Bartonella infections, maybe even a mold exposure, Candida, a variety of viruses. And we're finding more and more environmental infections and toxins can trigger this autoimmune encephalitis. And so basically, pans boils down to there's some sort of infectious trigger that causes autoimmunity. And then we end up with an inflammatory process, typically of the brain, that's causing an encephalitis, which is like this acute behavioral change. We also see this in adults, too. We'll see people who all of a sudden, they're not doing well at work and they're forgetting things, or maybe they have really bad anxiety that they never had. Maybe they're not super ocd or anything like some of the kids get, but they might have rage outbursts as well. And it's really. So it's interesting in my brain to think about it that way, because we have root cause, we have autoimmunity, and then we have brain inflammation, and we need to address all three of those. So it was just kind of this natural progression of seeing these children where a lot of the infections we were treating triggered pandas or pans, I should say. And so you got to treat it because, again, like you were saying, it's like we just treat the person in front of us, right? And it's like I solved complex medical mysteries because other people around me weren't willing to do it, or maybe I didn't even know they were there who could. And that was what we really. I just said, hey, we're seeing this. And one of the other things that I saw, too, was kind of going through the mystery of the whole thing, is some of the kids that I was having a hard time treating, say, Lyme or Bartonella in. Once I started to see more of the pandas thing and started to research, and we all, as a group, learn more about, well, it's not just strep, it's all these other things, then I understood why I wasn't being as effective or why these children were relapsing so quickly. And then I was able to create better protocols for Treatment.

Awesome. Now, with your treatment of Lyme, don't do a lot of antibiotic treatment, is that correct?

I do a mix. I definitely would say I use more antibiotics than I ever thought I would.

Okay, but more acutely, though, right? That was at the beginning. Beginning stages or also at the chronic stage?

In the chronic stage. And it sort of depends on their symptoms and the duration of illness and kind of what they have. Certainly, the more I've practiced acutely, I will definitely. I'm still of the. I saw a guy last summer who had one tick bite. He had Lyme disease, babesiosis, Borrelia miyamotoi, anaplasmosis, all from the same tick. He had anemia. Well, this is an interesting one, too, about the way I know you think, and definitely the way I think, too, is he came in and his initial stuff was his blood count with the white cells, platelets, and the red cells. Everything was low. I had one test that said he was Babesia positive. And I'm like, no, there's something else going on because Babesia doesn't hit white cells. Sure enough, I, with the other testing, comes back in later. He's got the anaplasma and then all this other stuff we look at. A lot of times, I think our patients call and they're trying to do the Google thing or the Facebook group and say, oh, I figured out what's going on. They have a lot of good information, but sometimes they don't have that whole picture as to why we're making certain clinical decisions. But in this guy's case, I had him on a prescription antiparasitic, two antibiotics. Then I put them on a couple of different herbs and some probiotics. We treated them for a couple of months, and then we removed the antibiotics and we continued the herbs for a while on the tail to make sure that was an acute treatment. I think the longer I treat people and the sicker they are, the more I like to start with herbals. Even before that, a lot of the mindset. The thing that really got me back into the mindset piece was the connection between the gut and the brain. A couple years ago, I said. I looked at all my charts and I said, what am I missing? I said, I think I'm not focusing on the gut enough. We start looking at the gut. It's so important for memory creation as well as memory recall. So many of our patients have cognitive dysfunction, brain fog, or they're not doing well in school. School. That's really what happened, was I just started Looking at that and I'm like, let's start focusing on the gut from the beginning. It's hard to focus on gut rebuilding before you start antibiotics if you've already started antibiotics that are destroying the gut. Then I started working on the gut more early because what I used to do based on my initial training was start with the antibiotics, then go to the herbs and then fix the gut.

Yeah.

And now I just flip the whole thing the other way because it works better.

Got it.

Better. Faster.

Yeah.

So I do still use a fair amount of antibiotics. I mean, I see, you know, I routinely see people who are in stretchers and wheelchairs. So it's like. But the longer I do this, the more and more I move away from starting there. And like. And definitely it's like it's been a. It's mostly been a thing where when I come in and say, this is how we're going to do it, and I share the whole sort of roadmap with people, then they start to get more buy in because a lot of people are afraid of missing out on antibiotics because they've read that they need them. Then there's another group that hear that antibiotics are terrible. I just try to bridge the gap. And I say a lot of the people where we start with their gut and their mindset and we get them doing a daily ritual and we get them back doing the herbal antimicrobials and such and all the detox support, then we find out we don't need antibiotics.

Yeah, perfect. Sometimes you do, but sometimes you do, right?

Yeah.

That's awesome. You also put the gut brain heart access there. So bring the heart component in there for us.

That's awesome, man. This is like what I talk about. And it's great because everywhere I look, there's a gut brain axis and there's so much information about how the gut regulates memory, it regulates mood, it creates like 95% of our serotonin or whatever that number is. I mean, it's gaba, but the heart is critical. And I talk a lot about both in my practice and both when I lecture is polyvagal theory.

Yeah.

Which is for everybody that might not, you know, be up on that thing. Yeah.

Talk about that. Because that's a. That's a kind of a newer. It's kind of old hat test, but it's new coming out into the population, so.

Yeah. And so basically most. A lot of people are familiar with the fight or flight thing. Right. So we have the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic. Nervous system. And this is just our fancy way of saying we call it the autonomic nervous system, which really just means what are the automatic things going on in our body that we don't necessarily have control over? I don't have a direct control over my heart rate or whether my blood vessels dilate or constrict, or if I digest food or if I think I have some through respiration, I have some ability and maybe meditation, some ability to modify that. But those are automatic controlled things. If I'm driving down the road and a little kid runs out in front of me, I'm going to, you know, slam on the brakes and swerve and I'm going to do it. Really, I didn't think about it.

That was automatic, right?

And you're going to be really sweaty and your heart rate's going to be going. So that's a sympathetic thing. And then sleeping and resting and rejuvenating is the parasympathetic side. But one of the things that people especially, there's a guy by the name of Steve Porges who's really done a lion's share of work on this. He said, well, the problem is we typically talk about parasympathetic rest, rejuvenate, joy, compassion, social interaction. Then we talk about sympathetic, which is fight or flight. Meaning if a saber toothed tiger is attacking me, I stand up and say, I can beat him or I can run away, but the point is I can do it. But the problem with a lot of what we see in people with chronic illness and chronic mental illness as well as infectious illness, is people feel like they can't, they can't run away anymore and they can't fight anymore. He's like, so when we look at this, there's another part of the parasympathetic nervous system that really is more of a freeze mechanism. And it's when you're hopeless, how do I get away? Well, if I'm a mouse or a chipmunk and I've been running away from the cat and he grabs me in his mouth, I can't get away anymore. Well, the best thing to do is play dead. And hopefully that's the best opportunity I have. We see people who feel numb, frozen, withdrawn, helpless. These are a lot of our chronic Lyme patients and people with chronic neurodegenerative disorders. And so he talks about a dorsal and a ventral vagus. And the vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve that comes out in the back of our neck here. And basically it Controls a lot of our voice. It controls, like, if you've ever done put a Q tip in your ear and cough, that's actually part of the vagus nerve. This public service announcement, you're not supposed to do that, but you might perforate your eardrums. So don't do that.

Just don't do that.

Yeah, but then a lot of it goes. The vagus goes down to your heart, and then it goes below your breathing muscle, the diaphragm. And it provides some nervous system control for the vast majority of the organs in your abdomen digestion, like stomach and spleen and most of your intestines and so on. He said that below the diaphragm is more dorsal. And this is an older mechanism. And this mechanism is what's doing that freeze state. And then the ventral vagus, if you look at the anatomy of it, it's got more insulation around the nerve and it's coming down to control the heart. What he's saying is we need to get these two parts back in balance because a lot of our chronically ill people have gotten into this frozen, helpless state. And it's funny, they all seem to have gut issues in one form or another. We talk about the gut reaction, and one of the greatest ways to lock up your breathing and to lock up this thing and get yourself into the hopeless state is to not pay attention to the gut reaction. Also is to not breathe deeply. A lot of times I've always heard people breathe all the way down, so your pelvic floor muscles push into the chair, breathe into your belly. Well, part of that is so we can mechanically massage our organs and help detox. But the other part is to release a lot of the stress on the solar plexus, which is the control center for this dorsal vagal area. Then partly where the vagus comes out is at the base of the skull. A lot of the stuff I have people do are really simple exercises to release their upper neck. Then if you do breathing where you focus on your heart, so heart centered breathing, and just kind of relax and then you have that practice of gratitude where you. And after you get used to breathing and feeling energy in your heart, then you just start thinking about super cool things like your daughter or your family or even going out.

You're super creative. Yeah, yeah. You can get really in a creative flow state with that. That's awesome.

Yeah.

The gut, brain, heart access, I love it.

Right. And you know that a lot of people, you find that a lot of chronically ill people, when their gut is more off. They're not thinking as well, but also they're not as in touch with their emotions or they're the extreme opposite of that. It's like they're super emotional. So as practitioners and even friends of these people, we can let them know simple things like having that gratitude practice or doing a little bit of breathing where you're just noticing that you're breathing in the area around your heart. And then once you feel comfortable, think about something really cool that you love. And this will help do a lot of unlocking of and rebalancing of that heart, gut, brain axis. Love it.

All right, I'm going to take a station break here. This is what the Health. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel. If you're just tuning in, you can catch the beginning of this show@naturecaresclinic.com check out the podcast tab at the top of the sheet there. My guest today is Dr. Tom Moorcroft, and we're talking all things Lyme. We just went over Polyvagal theory, which was awesome, and tying that into mindset and really in chronic illness in general. And just in basically on how to feel love in the world, I think is what that one boils down to coming out of the heart. So I so appreciate you sharing that with our listeners today. Dr. Tom, you know, I want to move on to the next piece of this is around brain detox. So, you know, maybe that doesn't follow directly. I mean, one component on gratitude, what I do, and we have a gratitude board in our lobby for our patients. My staff come in every morning in our staff room, and we all write up our gratitude. And what I've discovered is, you know, the more you get into that gratitude state, the easier it is to flow. You know, where, you know, at the beginning, like you were saying with your daughter, like, she was really grateful for your cat for the first couple days. But then what unlocks is then the creativity starts coming. And now it's like I can rattle off four or five things like, easy, like, wow, all of this gratitude just coming out. You got to open that up for yourself, though, for sure.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting and I'm so. I feel so fortunate and grateful that I can actually share this. Right now. My mom's visiting for a couple of weeks, weeks from Florida and hanging out with our family, which is really cool. Two or three days ago, I was going to sleep and I was doing my evening ritual, like I told you, and I said, getting on my nerves a little bit. It's Been almost a week now. Yeah, right? I love my mom. I love my mom. But I said, she's always trying to tell me how to do things. And I'm like, shit, man. I'm like, in my 40s. I've got a child. I'm successful. I'm trying to make huge changes in the world. I feel like I'm doing everything they had hoped I would do, you know? So then I sat down, I said, you know what? I'm really grateful for my mom. And I just sat there and I'm like, I'm really grateful for laying back, and I'm grateful for Mom. And I just waited a second, and then all of a sudden, my mind just had this different thought. And it was like, you know what? All those little things that might bother you about the way your parents nag you a little bit or your friends bother you. My parents, I'm not like them. Right. Like, I'm kind of like them because they raised me, but I'm actually going on a totally different trajectory than I feel like they're trying to make me go on. And instead of being upset about it, I said, wait a second. If they didn't create a loving space for me to grow and become the crazy, you know, health person I am, I would have never gotten there. Yeah. So they were. Maybe I'm just going. At one moment, I was like, they're so constricting. You know, mom is constricting me, and when my dad was alive, they were constricting me. But it was like, no, they actually. I mean, yes, they were a little bit, but, man, I would have never gotten over here if they had created a box that I wasn't allowed out of.

Right.

And then. So then all of a sudden, like, you know, I can just feel the joy when I see my mom and she says a few things, and I'm like, it doesn't matter to me. I get it, but it doesn't bother me anywhere near as much. And it was just like a little twist. It wasn't a big thing.

Yeah.

And I don't even feel like it just happened, so I don't feel like I'm really even sharing the power of it, so well. But it was just like, man, I would not be where I am, and I wouldn't be been allowed to become the person I am if they hadn't given me a little bit more space than I thought they did.

Yeah. Awesome. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Just a small little calibration changes the whole trajectory. Yeah.

Yeah. And so as you talk about brain detox and stuff, it's like, to me, the important part of we're talking about all the gratitude in the heart. A lot of people who have Lyme or have other chronic illness, doesn't have to be Lyme, have dysautonomia, the imbalance of the regulation of the autonomic nervous system. So their heart rate might be really too fast, or they might stand up and get sort of dizzy because their blood pressure goes down or their heart rate goes the wrong way and all that kind of stuff. A lot of our folks with Lyme and mold and bartonella, they suffer from pots, the postural orthostatic tachycardia. A lot of this, though, that has to do with that polyvagal piece. The direct communication between the heart and the gut is through the brain and the vagus nerve. Now, there are other connections that I can even feel, the energetic connections. They don't go back to from my gut to my brain and back down to my heart. There is other stuff going on, but the nerve pathways are really directly through the brain. A lot of what we talk about for fixing the heart and fixing the gut are fixing the brain. Specifically, the thing that got me into the whole even gut brain axis conversation was I was looking at brain detoxification because so many people had brain fog and the kids were having all these school problems. I started looking at the glymphatic system. It's the detox system of the brain. This is basically there's a wave of fluid, cerebral spinal fluid and interstitial fluid that moves through the brain to clean it out. What's really interesting is a large portion of it, I've read as much as 90% of it, of its function is occurring in deep sleep. As they research more, they tweak that out. And I'm sure it's not going to be just 90% of it's while you're sleeping. But it's amazing to think that sleep impacts brain detoxification so much. Then I started looking at where the dirty water, if you will, drains from the brain so that we could optimize not only just taking these supplements to optimize brain detox, but to actually figure out are the pathways that allow the body to detoxify open. I found that one of the primary modes, and again depending upon the researcher, it's 15 to 30% of all the detox out of the brain comes through the nasal lymphatics, basically drains through the upper nose and down through the neck. What's really interesting is if we look at. And then the other part is most of the cranial nerves, including the vagus, have drainage around it. Lymphatics, the pathways that help drain the toxins are low pressure. If I have a lot of muscle tension where my head's forward, I can literally clamp those things off and decrease their ability to detoxify. A lot of times when we're doing that head forward posture, I'm like, no, that's why we need posture and unlock our upper cervical and let it float back and up like they teach in yoga class, so that you can actually get drainage from your head. Then I see so many people with chronic sinusitis. And then we look at mold issues. We find that we talk about Marcons and there's multiple antibiotic resistant staph in the nose. And is that a problem? Is it not? That's kind of been debated a lot. But we find also nasal sinus biofilms that are protecting these molds. Mycotoxins in the molds in your nose and your sinuses. I said, well, that's kind of interesting because there's a paper out on Pandas that said one of the ways that we might get Pandas to start is recurrent strep infection in the nose and then our own immune system cells hanging out in the nose. And once there's so many of them, they start to migrate up into the brain, triggering the autoimmunity and then inflammation of the brain, breakdown of the blood, brain barrier and all those things. I started to see it. Whether it was a little kid coming in with Pandas or somebody who had a mold exposure at work or somebody who just had chronic sinusitis, the nasal drainage pathway is critical. That's really one of the big places where you can work on brain detox. You can do simple things too. Like there's a Buteyko breathing method. You can look it up on YouTube and look up Buteyko B U T E Y K O or something like that. Unblock your nose and they'll teach you how to unblock your nose in less than five minutes. It's temporary, but then if you like that, you can work on it more because your body can let out nitric oxide and dilate your sinuses. And people with chronic sinusitis, they'll just pour out and they really get a good cleansing. And you can do really simple things in the nose and with the posture and then working on sleep and these really simple things. Free at home. Go to sleep, breathe through your nose. Learn how to open it if it's clogged and kind of sit with a slightly better posture. And you can detox your brain better.

That's awesome. And folks, you can go to Dr. Tom's website, originsofhealth.com and he's got a brain detox guide on there, so you can download that from him. That's really nice of you to offer that as an option for folks. All right, so we are coming down the home stretch. We got 15 minutes left in the what the health. This is Dr. Greg Eckel, and my guest today is Dr. Tom Moorcroft. We're talking all things Lyme. You can download stream this show@naturecuresclinic.com There's a podcast button up there. If you're just tuning in. Make sure you go back to the beginning. You can check out the other shows as well. You know, we're talking about these co infections. So kind of getting a little bit deeper into the, you know, the scientific gobbledygook here. And, you know, with, you know, you got Lyme and Bartonella leading into pans, and I think we've talked about that activation of immune system getting into that autoimmune aspect. Are you seeing most people? Well, I guess my question in this is, you know, I've seen folks with on the Lyme trail, and they collect doctors and treatments and, you know, it's that mindset thing of like, God, I'm just in it. And now I have all of these providers and they're in this paralysis. If you tie this in. And it makes sense because it's an ever evolving science and we're getting clearer on, oh, this is the path of what's happening here.

Right.

How. How do you tease that apart for people?

Yeah, it's complicated. I mean, part of it is I try to do as much of it as I can in my office, you know, so I don't have to go outside of that. Yeah, part of it is that roadmap I talked about is just saying, like, hey, like, we are gonna go through all of this stuff and we're doing it in a stepwise manner for a reason. I mean, but it's hard. I mean, one of the ways I try to work on it is I lecture at professional conferences and teach other doctors because I see somebody gets bitten by a deer tick. There are certain known pathogens that they transmit, and there are other pathogens that are bad bugs that give you diseases in them that might be transmitted. Then there's organisms that we know are not in Those ticks, if you got bitten by a deer tick, I don't have to test you for what's carried in all these other ticks unless you've been bitten by them or you have another unknown bite. The thing is, a lot of times we spray and pray. We're going to order every test at XYZ Lab. I'm like, we don't need to do that. A lot of times start with a basic really good foundational workup and make it very individual. There's certain tests you should get if somebody's been possibly exposed to a, a tick and have tick borne illness. But what I mean is certainly some people, methylation is more important. For some people, stool testing is more important. For some people it's their nutrition. Some people it's just getting them to remember they're alive and breathing and getting them to drink water in the morning or getting them to poop more than once a week. I just try to start with after all these years, you start to see patterns of things that people need and I try not to overwhelm them and because I find that less is often more. But at the same time I find we have to let people know that we're thinking of all of these things. And that's why like, you know, your podcast and other events like this that allow, educate people that we, that the provider they're seeing actually knows a lot of this stuff and they're specifically choosing to do or not do something at this visit because they have your best interest in mind. Because I find that if we don't allow people to understand that one, we've been there, we felt it with them and that we're there to treat them like they were one of our own family members. It's hard because they're just dying to. I mean, you know, sometimes the medical system accidentally invalidates their experience of being alive.

Yeah.

You know, and sometimes on purpose, but I'm not going to go there. But I think that a lot of.

Times another one, another show, we can talk about that for this is what the health.

That's right. But it is, it's like we say, oh, it's on your head. And we don't, you know, we're not. Oh no, you don't have that. Back in the day we were like, oh, people look like they had Lyme. They tested negative, but they had Lyme like symptoms and they're like, oh, it's on your head. Then 20 years later, we discover a bug called Borrelia miyamotoi actually gets Transmitted from the deer tick to the people. When we went back and looked at the lab test, they had Borrelia miyamotoi, not Lyme. But the problem was we knew both of them were in a tick. We just didn't know one got transmitted 10, 15 years down the road. Oh, I'm sorry, I made the wrong diagnosis. It's about being open and reasonable. I also think our patients have to remember that we're human, doing the best we can, but we are also experts in this, who do this all day, every day. It's been over a decade of. That's all I've done. When I look at that, it's hard because they don't have hope. And so my goal is to. And like I was saying, I'm kind of changing the way people started my practices so that they can start to see that hope and start focusing on that from the beginning and always checking what they're doing based on their. Their goal.

Yeah.

And so that's really kind of neat, in my opinion, to be able to do that, because now I can say, hey, well, are you. Is it. Is this. Is this going and trying five new supplements without asking me actually helping you reach your goal or potentially distracting you?

Right. Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

People said, well, I saw this great podcast and this doctor said, take X, Y and Z. It's like, let's keep our formula. Give me a chance here, folks.

I know, Right, Right.

Hey, so in kind of coming down the home stretch, we got about four minutes left here wondering on. We talked about associated issues and maybe didn't give this enough time, but we talked about mold a little bit Epstein Barr, strep. How about emfs? What are you seeing with that stress diet stuff? I know within this three minute.

Yes to all of those. I mean, one of the things I tell people to do in the detox handout that you talked about is put your WI fi on a timer so that it goes off like at like 10:30 or 11:00 clock and goes back on at like 7 or whatever time you need to set it, forget it, because your wifi being on at night will mess up your sleep. So if any of your listeners are having insomnia and they leave their wifi on or they have their cell phone in their room, get rid of that. If you need to use it as an alarm clock, put it on the airplane mode and put it 12ft away from your body. But you turn off your wifi, in a week or two, you're going to be sleeping a bit better. If not dramatically better the first night. Nice.

Yeah.

All of these things impact it. I mean osteopathy is about the body being one. A human being is a unit of body, mind and spirit. We talk about those three words as if they're separate. Our body doesn't know the difference. We talk about them so that we can talk about them. We separate them so we can do that. Really, if I do anything to you mentally, emotionally or spiritually, it's going to affect you physically and vice versa. So stress is in my opinion and I think the opinion of a lot of people, the number one cause of inflammation in the developed world. So calming down and de stressing a little bit, even if it's just that five minutes of heart centered breathing is critical and wi fi and the new 5G, I'm a little afraid about where it's going.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, we'll see. There's definitely going to be a lot more work to do on grounding and cleaning the body and going into getting into nature. Go figure. To help the body withstand some of these insults and I think looking at genetic platform and how much stress, trauma, et cetera people are bringing into the table, everybody's going to get affected a little bit differently with that.

Yeah. Certainly ground get outside when you can where it's a safe tick free zone. And also I have a I talk about in some of my sleep articles on the website about angles when you're sleeping and grounding pads that actually work versus ones that sound cool. So I sleep grounded every night.

Awesome. So please Everybody, check out Dr. Tom's work@originsofhealth.com thank you so much Dr. Tom for coming on. It's been an awesome discussion. Again, this is what the health we're here on contact talk radio on Tuesdays from 2 to 3pm Pacific Standard Time. Please tune in everybody and we're going to be educating you about your health.

He runs and.