EP 18: Solutions for treating Lyme Disease, w/ Darin Ingels,ND.

And you are taking action into your consciousness by tuning into Contact Talk radio and on tunein.com Hang FM and up snap mobile contact talk Radio. Welcome to what the Health an independent approach to your health span. Have you noticed how our health care system may not have your best interest in mind? Join Dr. Eckel in this fun and sometimes disturbing exploration of the state of healthcare and what it means for you. Now here's your host, Dr. Eckel.

Alright, welcome back everybody. What the health. I am Dr. Greg Eckel here at Nature Cures Clinic in Portland, Oregon and I have a special treat today. I know you hear that every week from me, but really I'm interviewing some awesome people and providers on the planet. I have Dr. Darren Engels, he's a respected leader in natural medicine, has been at it in the healthcare field for over 30 years. He's a Bastyr University graduate 1999 and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. He's also Medical Academy of Pediatric special needs. He has a great book out that I want to talk about today. It's the Lyme solution. It's his five part plan to fight inflammatory autoimmune response and beat Lyme disease. He started in Connecticut, I believe, but now is out in California. But he's helping people around the globe with this. It's a natural approach to treating Lyme disease and this is topic, you know, it's blowing up across the board. Dr. Engels and I guess let's start on, you know, maybe your personal journey on why did you write this book?

Sure. Well, you know, like a lot of practitioners, we get afflicted with some illnesses and that becomes our personal venture in life. And I developed Lyme disease when I lived in Connecticut. Strangely, I mean, Lyme is named after Lyme. Connecticut for people who don't know. And two weeks before I opened my own practice, I got bit by a tick and I had all the symptoms of classic Lyme disease. I had a headache and fever and joint pain and so forth. And I was treated the way that pretty much every other Lyme patient's treated, with antibiotics. And four to five days into treatment, I actually felt pretty well. So I opened my practice and for anyone who's opened their own business, they know what it's like where you're pretty much doing everything. So I was working 12, 14 hour days, six, seven days a week. And eight months into that schedule, I started to relapse and had symptoms again. So I figured, okay, I know what this is, I'll do the same Thing I did before and went back on antibiotics. And after a month, nothing changed. Changed antibiotics for another month, nothing changed. Then I started working with a local Lyme doctor that was pretty well known, and she had me changing antibiotics every month for about nine months. I found I was getting worse. I'd lost about £30 and my gut was a mess. I was fortunate to have known of a doctor in New York City named Dr. Zhang, who's a medical doctor from China and acupuncturist in New York. I went to see him. He started me on a regimen of Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture. It was also my realization that I really wasn't taking care of myself the way I should. It was my wake up call, that I needed to sleep more, I needed to eat better and do all the things that we as naturopathic physicians teach our patients to do, right? So I started taking stock of my own health, started his protocol, and really, within about a month, I was about 80, 85% improved. So it still took about another two years after that to really feel like I got my strength, my stamina back. But eventually did get to the point where I was living symptom free again. So it was really that whole process that prompted me to write the book because I realized what I had done for myself to recover. I. I started applying to my own patients and found that they were doing really well on that regimen. So, you know, it's one of those things where I think in the medical world, often people who get Lyme disease, particularly when it becomes persistent, have this feeling that's like, well, if I've got it forever, no, that's just the way it's going to be. And there's really nothing we can do about it. And, you know, my message is, no, there is something you can do about it. And when people really start taking stock of their health, being very proactive and, you know, following some of the protocols I discuss in the book, we get a lot of people over that hump and they feel well again.

Doctor. Oh, that's awesome. So did you have the bullet rash as well?

I did, and ironically, I didn't know I had it. I was actually getting ready to go to the hospital, having 105 fever and just feeling horrible. The person who was taking me to the hospital says, oh, hey, what's that on the back of your leg? What do you mean? And I did the double mirror thing and saw a big bullseye rash. And of course it was behind me so I couldn't see it on my own. And I think, though this is pretty typical for a lot of people who've been exposed to Lyme disease. These ticks like to go to the moist, warm areas of the body. So it likes the back of your knees, your groin, your armpit, in your hairline, places that we don't really look very often. And so you could have gotten exposed to it. Never seen the rash. But the rash, unfortunately, is not a reliable enough marker for most people to say you do or do not have exposure. I mean, I was one of the lucky ones where I actually did have the rash. So the minute I saw it, I knew exactly what I had. But so many people we see have no history of a rash, never saw anything. The CDC says upwards of 80% of people who get Lyme disease get the rash. We know looking at the literature that it's somewhere less than 40%. And, and I think most of us in clinical practice would argue it's probably less than 30%. So again, if you have it, it's kind of a hands down slam dunk. You know, you've been exposed. But absence of the rash certainly doesn't exclude the possibility of having Lyme disease.

Yeah, it's. It is definitely. It's sometimes it's a very elusive diagnosis to arrive at. Right. With some folks have had chronic symptoms for 10, 20 years, I'm sure. I want to ask you some questions about those folks as we get going here. So, I mean, wow, what a start. So right as you're getting ready to launch your career.

Yeah, yeah. The timing couldn't have been worse. And, you know, I think in retrospect, you know, it was the perfect storm. I think had I gotten bit, gotten treated and if I'd really been taking care of myself and we're not kind of working normal hours and eating well and sleeping well, you know, that may have been the end of that. But I think with all the stress and everything else that was going on at the time, it really just created that perfect storm. And we'll talk a little bit more. I think, in our conversation today about the terrain is so important with any type of chronic illness. And if we're not taking care of that, it's really hard to get over the hump. So it's so easy to just throw a bunch of pills at Lyme disease and say if we just kill the bug, everything's going to be great. But I think it goes much deeper than that. We find with people that have had chronic Lyme disease or persistent Lyme disease, again, we really have to take care of the terrain and make sure everything else is in good working order.

What are you seeing so on on that front. Right. So I love that discussion about the terrain versus the bug. Right. Are you a naturopathic physician or what the. That. So you. I mean, you were in, like, the hotbed in Connecticut. So, number one, we're seeing Lyme all over the globe at this point.

Well, if you look worldwide, you know, Lyme disease has been reported pretty much in every continent except Antarctica. And Australia refuses to admit that they have Lyme disease there. But we see it in Europe, we see it in Asia, we see it in Africa. You know, this is not just a United States problem. However, we are one of the highest instances of Lyme in the world. Obviously, this is where we sort of discovered it. You know, in the United States alone, we estimate there's, you know, 300 to 400,000 new cases a year. So you can do the math pretty quickly and realize if we've got, you know, upwards of, we'll even say half a million new cases a year, that's new cases adding to the existing cases. Now, we now have millions and millions of people in the United States living with Lyme disease. And if you look at Europe, you know, they estimate it's about 85,000 new cases a year, and then less as you get to other parts of the world. But in the United States alone, it's now been reported in every single state. So this whole thought of, well, it's really just New England, the central Midwest. We know that the east coast and west coast are becoming endemic. And with the migration of birds, the warmer climate, these ticks are moving out of their natural habitat into areas that we didn't really previously see, these deer ticks. So I don't think anyone's really immune, certainly United States. It was funny. I gave a talk in Canada last year, and so I was looking up some of the Canadian stats, and it was funny to me that here we report 400,000 cases of Lyme, and in Canada, they reported just over a thousand. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure we share a border. The ticks don't have passports or anything. But I'm pretty sure if you live in Quebec, you live in Ontario, all those bordering provinces to, you know, the central part of the US Where Lyme's endemic. It makes a lot of sense that, you know, we would see quite a bit of Lyme disease there. But having worked with, you know, people coming from Canada and different provinces who have Lyme disease. Again, I think it's the same kind of issue that it's there and it's just really not recognized.

Wow. Still to this day, that's pretty incredible that there is such denial in medical communities. Why do you think that is?

Well, we have an inherent problem with testing. That testing isn't great. This has been the bane of Lyme disease since the beginning. And I don't think a lot of people understand what the Lyme testing is really about. The testing that's primarily used was never, ever designed to be diagnostic. Actually, it was designed to monitor people that had known Lyme disease because the test is not a sensitive test. What that means is that the likelihood of it picking it up if you have the disease is actually fairly low. And again, when you look at the literature on the testing that's used by most conventional labs, the sensitivity is less than 50%. So literally doesn't even pick up half the people that have the disease. Again, I was a microbiologist before I was a doctor. I used to do this test for a living. And it surprises me. Any lab test that's that poor, we would typically never even use because it's not reliable. If you go to the CDC's website and even read on their website, they tell you that Lyme disease is a clinical diagnosis. That means it's based on your symptoms. So the CDC says it's based on your signs and symptoms, and particularly for those people that live in an area that's endemic to deer ticks. So I think we need to broaden that a little bit. The CDC is obviously very conservative in that approach. But if you rely on the test alone, you do or do not have Lyme, you're going to miss a lot of people. And unfortunately, a lot of healthcare providers use that test exactly that way. If your test says negative on it, you don't have Lyme and they forgot common sense, and they really aren't reading the literature that shows that that test just isn't very accurate.

Yeah, so. And that's the CD57.

57 is a little bit different. So the recommended testing from the CDC is a Western blot. So it starts with a Lyme screen. If your screen is positive, then the next test is the Western blot. So again, the Lyme screen is just not a very sensitive test. The Western blot is slightly better, but it's still not great because these are antibody tests. It's also dependent on all the variables that influence your immune system. Do you make a good antibody response? Depending on when you were exposed if it was maybe five or 10 years ago. Immunity naturally wanes with time because they're measuring quantity of antibody. If your immunity wanes, also increases the likelihood that that test isn't going to be positive. When you start factoring these other variables, that test, at its absolute best is for someone who has true acute Lyme disease, where maybe their exposure has been within the last several months, but you get someone who may have been exposed years ago, the likelihood that test being positive just goes down. So I think that's what we're seeing a lot in our practice, is these people that have had these ongoing symptoms for months to years, they haven't had a diagnosis, they certainly never had treatment. And because the symptoms of Lyme disease are quite vague, it can be mistaken for any number of different illnesses. You go to the doctor, I'm tired, my joints hurt, I you got some swollen glands. They said, oh, yeah, you got a virus running through, you got mono, you got something else, go home, shake it off, fluids, standard stuff. Then you have these people who go on for months and months, years and years, feeling miserable and often getting worse, and they keep going back to the doctor, and then they get shuffled off to the different specialists, the rheumatologist, the neurologist, and they come back with really no diagnosis. So I think until we get to a point where healthcare providers are really becoming more educated about, you know, Lyme, how it's diagnosed, stop relying so much on the test alone. And truly, we do need better testing. You know, unlike other viruses and bacteria, where we can culture it and measure directly in the body, we are still really lacking a good test that's able to do that.

Got it. Yeah. And that's where. I guess that's where the controversy comes.

Yeah, yeah. You know, because, you know, if you go to an infectious disease doctor, unfortunately, the idsa, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, they have a very conservative approach on this. And if your test isn't CDC positive, you don't have Lyme. Again, ignoring all the literature around Lyme disease, which, again, I've never understood at all. So they say, again, unless that test is positive and you have symptoms, you don't really have Lyme. But I've also had patients that have symptoms, have a positive test, and their doctor still says they don't have Lyme. So at that point, what more do you need to start getting proper treatment? So there's the rest of us. You know, there's a group out there called ilads. In fact, they just had their big conference this last weekend in Boston. This is the International Lyme and Associated Disease Society. And the doctors that train through this group, you know, really have a deeper understanding of Lyme. They're more likely to treat you based on your signs and symptoms. And if you've gone through the process and you've really ruled out other possibilities, you know, that's part of Lyme diagnosis, too, is that you do want to rule out other autoimmune diseases, other types of infectious agents. But if you've gone through that process, everything's negative across the board, and you've got signs and symptoms. You know, I mean, I was taught in school, you know, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. So kind of the same with Lyme. When you've ruled out other things, you've got signs and symptoms. And if you certainly have a test that suggests that you've had exposure, you know, you can kind of put two and two together totally.

So co infections or like, constellation. Because, you know, a lot of times folks with not nefarious, but it's like this constellation of symptoms that people are showing up with for sometimes decades, and they've been to all of the specialists and your heart goes out to them of like, wow, like, that's a lot of suffering to go for so long. Where if you get into the right kind of group of physicians that have been educated about, like, you're saying, proper workup and diagnostic diagnosis. What's. What's the constellation that you're seeing most commonly for folks or a presentation for folks coming in. So, you know, like, you know, my encouragement to folks listening is to share these. Our podcast out with their friends and family because, you know, this is information that they're not really getting from the news or from the media. And we're really just educating people about what to look for, to really get plugged into a. A specialist and a professional that can really help them navigate. Because there is. There's a lot of miscommunication, maybe misperception about what to do if you have Lyme. Right. Like, so many people are saying, well, now, you know, as it's gaining in, you know, awareness, people are like, well, maybe it's Lyme. Right. So what do you see kind of, what do people bring predominantly presenting to you with this constellation of symptoms?

Yeah. So, you know, there's upwards of like 100 different symptoms associated with Lyme disease. And again, because there's so many symptoms that affect so many body systems, it really can present Quite differently from person to person. So I tell everybody who does have Lyme, your Lyme is your Lyme. And it can look a little bit different than someone you know next to you that also has Lyme disease. You know, the classic Lyme symptoms of headache, fever, swollen glands, fever, chills, bullseye, rash, Bell's palsy, where one side of your face starts to droop, you know, that's classic with acute Lyme disease. And again, I don't think that's what most of us are seeing. People who experience that, they're usually acutely ill, they go to their doctor. Often they do get the right testing or there's at least something that warrants that they need more investigation. But the people have more insidious onset, where over the course of weeks to months, they start noticing that they're more tired, they get a little achy, their brain doesn't seem to be working very well, they're forgetful, they're dropping things, they're tripping, they're getting other types of neurocognitive decline symptoms, they're getting more arthritic symptoms. For me, that combination of arthritic symptoms with neurological symptoms, there are not a whole lot of things that combine the two. It's not just Lyme disease, but that should definitely be on the radar. So when I hear people that are having various neurological symptoms and joint pain or other joint muscle problems, that, at least for me, is a red flag that we need to investigate. This is a possibility. And the one symptom that's really actually very classic for Lyme disease is what we call migratory joint pain, where one day it's your right shoulder, the next day it's your left knee, then your right ankle. And that pain seems to kind of move from joint to joint. As far as we know, there's no other condition that causes that. If you've got rheumatoid arthritis, if you've got some other type of inflammatory autoimmune problem, those symptoms tend to be a bit more consistent. But when you hear of moving from one body part to another, again, that's a pretty good indicator that it might be Lyme disease. You mentioned co infections. We talk so much about Lyme, but in reality, we know upwards of a third of these ticks that carry Lyme disease also carry something else. So it's just important if you're doing that investigation with your healthcare provider, that you're looking at some of these other viruses and bacteria that can be transmitted through a tick bite, because again, it's a Good possibility that if you got exposed to one, you got exposed to something different in addition to that. So that does help sometimes change treatment.

Got it. How do you differentiate? So obviously it's so unique to the individual. I like that comment of your Lyme is your Lyme and your picture is going to be different than your neighbor that may have been exposed to the same field of tick or whatever. Why do some people develop the long term consequences of this and other people are able to get put on the antibiotics and clear it with no further issues through life?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I think there's so much about persistent Lyme disease that we don't really begin to understand. And unfortunately there just isn't a ton of research being done in this area. I think we could argue that epigenetics, genetic disposition plays a big role in that. Certainly environment is a big role. I mean, I see a lot of people who were relatively healthy prior to getting Lyme disease and after they get Lyme, now they're allergic to everything, they can't eat anything, they start having thyroid problems. The way I think of Lyme is if you're standing on the lake in the morning and it's a nice quiet lake and a motorboat goes blowing by, you know, the boat can be long gone, but the waves are still rippling in its wake. And I think Lyme kind of does that to our body. It leaves this wake of destruction in its path. And even if we're successful in eradicating the organism, we can still be left with the residual effect of what it did to the immune system, what it did to our hormone system. So often we do have to go back and correct those problems to get people really feeling well. So that's where, you know, our approach isn't just, you know, let's kill the bug. I mean, that's part of it. But let's look at all these other things that Lyme's done to your body. Let's correct those underlying issues too, because ultimately I think that's what gets people to better health.

Well, that's a great segue then. So let's get, let's launch into that. So, you know, you've written this book, it was, you know, dawned out of your own protocol and then what you noticed was in your practice and you're getting some great support and actually results for people. So yeah, what do you, what do you have there? So you've got this five part plan. So what's your kind of the meta picture? Paint us a picture here, Dr. Engels.

Sure. So it's really, you know, looking from the inside out and, you know, the five steps. You know, again, in practice, we do treat people very individually, but I wanted a book because I had so many people contacting me that live in parts of the country. They just weren't getting any help at all. So this is really designed that anyone can pick up. And even if you're not getting support from your local practitioner, here's something you can be proactive and you can do yourself. So, you know, we start from the inside and, you know, gut health is really critically important. If your gut's not functioning well, your body doesn't function well. This is no mystery. We know that up to 80% of our immune function comes from the gut. So step one of this is really taking stock of how your gut's functioning. Are you eliminating well? Do you poop every day? Is it healthy looking? Are you digesting and absorbing your food well? Because so many people end up with, you know, leaky gut or some kind of dysbiosis that interferes with normal gut function. There's very specific things I talk about in terms of supporting your enzyme pathways, supporting your gut flora, particularly for people who'd already been on antibiotics and may have had a disruption in their gut flora. Because again, that ecosystem is really important for having a healthy immune system. That really is step one. Step two is about diet. What you put in your mouth does make a difference in how you feel. Having tried various diets with people, the autoimmune paleo diet, I've tried the keto diet. And what I find is what people can do and is sustainable for them is what's called an alkaline diet. And an alkaline diet is really about eating foods that when those foods break down, it really moves your cellular ph into more alkaline state. And if you look at our body, with the exception of the skin, the stomach, the bladder, which tend to be very acidic to protect against outside invaders, most of the rest of your tissue is actually very alkaline. When it's in that right ph state, the cells work the way they're supposed to, the enzymes work the way they're supposed to, and we facilitate better tissue repair. I outline basically a list of foods and in a nutshell, without going into a lot of detail, it's basically a mostly plant based diet. You're eating mostly vegetables. We limit animal protein and fruit to about 20% of your total intake for the week. These are either neutral foods or mildly acidic. Then I have a list of basically no, no foods that are, it's basically junk food, dairy products, things like coffee, things that are very acid form in the body, at least initially. We want to pull those out of the diet completely. We find that people can check their urine about 30 minutes after they eat. You buy these little PH strips at the pharmacy and you can find out yourself how you're doing with your diet changes. And as long as you see that your urine ph is moving in that alkaline direction, we know we're on the right track. Between step one and step two, that's really about facilitating better gut health and immune health. Then step three really gets into using herbs. How do we really target the organism in the right way so that we're going after the organism but we're not causing so much destruction like often happens with antibiotics. Often with antibiotics people get diarrhea, they get abdominal pain, it can cause mitochondrial damage. So the benefit of herbs is we get that efficacy in going after Lyme and these co infections, but we're not damaging the mitochondria. And herbs have a lot of other effects. In addition to being antimicrobial, they're anti inflammatory, they help promote better circulation, they're demulcent, which means they're soothing to our mucous membranes, they help support our immune system instead of suppressing it. So we get all these other health benefits of herbs outside of just killing the bug that you're just not going to get with antibiotics. For people out there who have a lot of experience with herbs that feel like, well, they're just not as strong as antibiotics, it's just not true. I have people that will take a tincture of one drop of one herb and they start to get a die off reaction. It really depends on the sensitivity of the individual. But in 20 plus years of practice, I've probably written less than five prescriptions for antibiotics because I just haven't needed it. I find that herbs are very effective. You just got to find the right protocol that works for each individual. But the herbs again target the organism and help support the body in other ways. Then step four really gets into lifestyle management. This is making sure are you sleeping well? Sleep is critically important for everybody because when you sleep, when you get that deep sleep, that's when your brain repairs itself and restores itself. Your mitochondria repel itself. That's looking at sleep, it's looking at exercise. I think movement is also important for both our physical and our mental well being. It's also just taking stock of you know, what's around your environment that might be undermining you, things like chemicals and toxins and things of that nature. And then step five is just looking at sort of an extension of other environmental factors. I talk particularly a lot about mold. You know, mold is one of those things that probably mimics lime more than anything else out there. And, you know, for those of you who live in the Pacific Northwest, East Coast, I mean, pretty much most of the United States has an issue with mold. If there's moisture, there's a potential for mold. And when I moved out to California, I was kind of surprised, being mostly a desert, how many people I've seen that have had issues with mold in their homes. I talk about how to check your home for mold, how to check yourself for mold, to make sure that there isn't any kind of other underlying issue that might be playing a role in that. So the whole five steps is really more of a global approach to the person, where we're looking at your environment, we're looking at you as the individual. We're trying to do therapies that are really helping support your body in a positive way without really getting any kind of negative side effects.

That's awesome. From the very beginning, you are not an antibiotic advocate.

Well, from the beginning, again, when I had Lyme myself, I had not had a whole lot of experience treating Lyme disease. I was relatively new to Connecticut and just hadn't seen a lot of Lyme patients yet. So I did what everyone else did. I thought that was the right way. And again, I had acute Lyme disease. This is, I think, the case where antibiotics are very appropriate. Again, I think my pitfall with myself was just stopping there, just saying, okay, we're going to do three weeks of doxycycline and that's it, without really taking care of all these other things. It's a learning lesson, and unfortunately, it took the hard way to figure it out. But I'm not opposed to antibiotics. I think they have their place. It's just that depending on where people are in their process and depending on their constitution and what their previous experience with antibiotics has been, you have to really weigh the pros and cons and what I find for a lot of people, when they've had it for a long time, the likelihood of antibiotics being really effective at that point go down and the risk of side effects goes up. So you just have to weigh with each individual.

Yeah, that's a great point. And it's so huge. You know, a lot. I think before, you know, like, as you're saying, as you came into this and got Lyme yourself. Right. The standard of care is antibiotic treatment.

Right.

Especially acute. But on the chronic front, I mean, we're seeing people in the integrative care community with like PICC lines and they're just dripping antibiotics all the time. And it just doesn't seem like, you know, I see these patients that have gone to kind of the Lyme experts, at least in the Portland metro area, and it's like, wow, years of antibiotics and you can't stop the antibiotics or then the infection comes back. It's like, clearly we are not addressing the underlying root cause here.

Right, Exactly. I mean, I saw a patient years ago who had been to a very well known Lyme doctor, our area out in the east coast, and I like this doctor a lot. I think he's very well respected and very earnest. But this patient had been on continuous antibiotics for 12 years, and she had been hospitalized three times because of the antibiotics. Just logic dictates. Okay, at what point do you draw a line in the sand and say, this really isn't the best approach for the patient? She's not getting the benefits, she's getting all the side effects. So again, if antibiotics work well for people, great. I'm all for whatever works. But what I see a lot in my practice, the people who've been down that road, they haven't been successful, They've been antibiotic failures. And the next step is just another type of combination of antibiotics. Well, when you've already been through 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 different combinations getting no improvement, the odds of number 12 and 13 being the magic probably is pretty low. And when you look at some of the literature they've investigated using both oral and IV antibiotics in persistent Lyme disease, and in those studies, they pretty much show the same thing, is that either there's no benefit at all, or the benefit only lasts while they're on the regimen. And as soon as they come off, they go right back to square one. So if we're really not helping people move the needle forward permanently, then, I mean, look, there are times we might need to give some relief. I get that. But to keep people on that continuously, if we haven't been successful at getting them over the hump, then, you know, how much other damage are we doing to their mitochondria, to their gut ecology that's gonna cause some other problem down the line.

Yeah, yeah, great point.

And.

And, you know, it's not. It is not Willy Nilly or we know there are long term repercussions of continuous antibiotic use.

Right.

So on your, your five part plan there, you're individualizing in this alkaline diet for folks. You've got that in your book. You employ health coaches to help support people with their diets or how are you doing that? Or is it really on the patient to put that in?

Well, for people who are my patients in my practice, I mean, we give them a lot of support through our office. I also have a nutritionist, actually, it's a colleague of mine who's a naturopathic physician up in Seattle where her whole practice is really nutrition oriented. I'm a pretty simple cook at best. So she's an amazing cook and she's been very helpful with a lot of my patients. And she's available for people just out there who just want extra support to guide the diet. And often people just need a little hand holding. Sometimes making diet changes is really a huge step. This is not just food. This is a social thing. This is a pattern you've developed since you were a child. Making diet changes can sometimes be very challenging. If we can have someone there to give you a little more hand holding while you're making that transition, I think it just makes it a little bit easier for people.

Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, it is loaded, right. With the emotional component, the social aspect that, just patterning, you know, it's a, that is a big threshold sometimes for folks.

Yeah. And I think with people with any kind of chronic illness, I mean, it's not unique to Lyme. You're tired, you're exhausted, you're mentally spent. The idea when it comes to dinner time of like, what am I going to make? Get up off the couch, go spend half hour in the kitchen. It just becomes overwhelming. So I think a lot of it is really about good preparation, doing things when you are feeling better to not have to put as much energy when mealtime comes. I've also worked with Allison Schaff out of Austin, Texas. She developed a whole month meal plan based on an alkaline diet where you go like on Sunday, you buy all your food, she tells you exactly what to buy. You do all your prep on one day, and then during the week, all you have to do is pull everything out and throw it together. So it makes things really, really simple. And a lot of my Lyme patients have really enjoyed her program.

Oh, that's awesome. Do you have that link on your site or where's that at?

Yeah, it's through our website and I can provide you with that link to put in your show notes.

Lovely. And yeah, all of your contact on social media and site are in the notes. So that's great. And if we get that specific one, that would be really awesome just to expedite for folks because that's, that is such a big thing with the chronic illness and especially Lyme in particular, where you got the Lyme brain and the brain fog and fatigue and just, you know, sometimes flu like symptoms just don't feel like really motivating to do that.

Right.

Implement that. And that is a big piece that you're talking about of changing this terrain for folks. What about, you know, so in, in Chinese medicine, we kind of call this the goo syndrome. Right. These bugs are hanging out in the, in the system and they're pretty persistent.

Right.

So you go through all of these cycles. I love that you're one, treating herbally and two, you're actually getting resolution for people. Because I think misperception is once you have Lyme, you've got it the rest of your life. Is that true?

I think a lot of people have that perception. It's interesting, I made a post on my Instagram page several weeks ago, made a comment about Lyme being curable, and I was surprised the number of people that snapped back at me and said, no, it's not curable. Maybe you get it under control, but you can never cure it. Well, I guess maybe we're splitting hairs at this point. I have plenty of patients that live symptom free. Is that cure? In my mind, it is. I think the question we have that we don't really have a good answer to is do we ever completely eradicate Lyme? 100%. And because we can't measure at least easily directly in the body, we don't truly know. My opinion is I don't think we do. We've got good evidence that you can get these things called persister cells that even if you've been treated with antibiotics, there is a percentage of these bugs that just are completely unaffected by the antibiotics and they persist. We may have these persister cells that stay with us long term. But I also equated, look, there are plenty of people who get chickenpox as a child and then get shingles as an adult. It's the same virus that's been in your body for 50 years. It's just, it becomes opportunistic when your immune system is compromised. I think Lyme to a certain degree is somewhat similar that, you know, when the immune system is healthy, it's able to control it. When it's not, you're more compromised. And when people are already in that compromised state, it can definitely be a challenge to get over the hump. But you know, this concept that, you know you have to live this way your whole life doesn't mean that you can't, you can't heal. I think people forget that it is built into the DNA of every cell in our body to heal. We as naturopathic physicians understand that we just need to get whatever obstacles in the way out of the way so that that process can happen naturally. And this is where again, I sometimes sort of discourage antibiotic use just because I think it is one of those obstacles that can get in the way in the effort to try and kill the bug. We're also creating a climate where it's very hard for your body to do what it's naturally designed to do. So maybe working against that. But I think, you know, that it certainly is possible. I mean, it happened to me, it's happened to a lot of my patients where they are living symptom free, healthy, happy lives. So it's always possible. It can be long, it can be arduous, it can be challenging, but it's also not impossible.

Awesome. I love that. That's such a great, powerful hope. You are giving hope to the folks out there. I am going to take a quick station break. This is what the health. If you're just tuning in, my guest today is Dr. Darren Angles and please tune in. You can go back to the beginning of the show@naturecuresclinic.com There's a podcast link there and you can subscribe to the channel. I'm going to encourage folks to write some reviews out there and please do share this with friends and family in your network because you're not getting this information anywhere else. My guest is Dr. Engels and he has written the book on it, the Lyme A five part plan to fight the inflammatory autoimmune response and beat Lyme disease. So one of the components here, Dr. Engels, is what Lyme does to activate the immune system. Right. So we see you. Okay, there's co infections, we got the Lyme in there and then the change that happens, like you had mentioned, like you've seen patients that get this condition. Now all of a sudden they're allergic to everything or they're sensitive to chemicals or mold, even odors, smells, environments. What is happening with that?

Yeah, you know, there's a lot of processes that go on after you've been exposed to Lyme. We know that Lyme definitely has this capacity to trigger autoimmunity. When you look at the research, it can target this thing called human leukocyte function associated antigen 1, which is a neurological protein. So that's why we got some of these neurological effects. There's a specific antibody associated with Lyme that targets our peripheral nerves, so that can cause neuropathy or numbness and tingling. And, you know, there's several other proteins that get targeted. So depending on what gets targeted in the body's effort to get rid of Lyme, it accidentally starts attacking ourselves. You know, that creates a lot of the different symptoms that we see associated with Lyme disease. But in addition, you know, the immunologically, it starts pushing this pathway we call TH2 or T helper cell 2. And we've got TH1, T helper 1, T helper 2, T helper 1 pathways. Really, when your body sees something that's foreign, it goes right after it. It just fights it right away. So that's our primary immune mechanism for getting rid of bacteria and viruses, where Th2 really is the pathway that drives more antibody. So what that means is that potentially more allergy, more autoimmunity. So as Lyme is pushing that pathway in making that autoimmune response, it's also probably tipping the scales towards the direction of being more allergic, because the pathway is very similar. So I think that's probably the mechanism by which people start becoming hypersensitive to food and mold, pollen and things that they weren't previously sensitive to. But again, even if you're successful at getting rid of Lyme, you may still be left with those allergies and you have to deal with them.

Got it. When you're dealing with kind of the microbiome and that foundational internal environment component, are you doing. Are there certain stool analysis tests that you're doing, or how are you addressing that? Are there specific ones that you're looking for in Lyme or not really?

Well, I mean, we do definitely do stool testing on people where we see obvious signs that they're having, you know, they're not having healthy bowel movements. You know, the people that are, you know, constipation, diarrhea, the stools themselves just don't look normal. It's a good idea to actually do a stool test, just to be able to look under a microscope, see what's going on. You know, I'm not a big fan of throwing a bunch of pills at people and See what sticks. I'd rather know whatever we're treating has a specific outcome where we want to see things change. We do a lot of stool testing on most of our patients, only in that most of our Lyme patients do complain of some sort of gastrointestinal problem. But we don't really have a good test that looks at the immune system specifically and the gut. We're sort of making an assumption based on how we see the gut is functioning. But there are tests out there like lactulose, mannitol, where you can actually see if someone actually has leaky gut. Again, we don't do it very often because often through clinical history, you know, they tell you enough based on their patterns, you kind of know if that's their disposition. And ultimately I don't know how much it changes treatment at that point. So again, I'm in favor of doing tests that are going to help change our treatment. But if it's something that isn't going to change treatment, sometimes it's just cheaper and easier to do a therapeutic trial of a supplement or nerve and just see how people respond. Sure.

So you're not seeing commensal and co infection in the gut by any particular bug? No.

I mean, if you've got bartonella or babesia or anaplasma, you're not going to, you know, culture that out in the gut?

Yeah, yeah, that's more out of the blood. You know, there's an interesting. Are you seeing anything with molecular mimicry with Lyme?

Yeah. Well, I mean, that's really the concept by which your body becomes autoimmune. You know, based on this exposure to Lyme, your immune system, in the effort to try and go after the Lyme organism, starts targeting these other tissues. It's interesting when you look at the research, it really doesn't take very much to set that sequence of events off. We know as little as three amino acid residues can be enough to trigger that autoimmune response. There's a three amino acid sequence on the Lyme bacteria that happens also to be in our joint. As the immune system starts to target that, it's actually going to start causing joint pain and arthritis and things of that nature. So, you know, molecular mimicry is a big reason why we start to see again, a lot of these clinical effects. The immune system is trying to do its job, it's trying to go after these bugs, but it gets mistaken and it thinks that us is the bug. And then a lot of the symptoms we experience isn't really the bug. Directly invading the tissue. It's the immune response to the bug that we really experience. So a lot of the joint pain, muscle aches, headaches, neuropathy, a lot of that can be attributed really to the immune reaction to the organism itself.

Got it. Boy, it gets so intricate when you get down to it. Yeah, yeah.

And again, this is an area where I think, you know, Lyme research is really lacking. And considering the amount of money that we pour into so many other diseases that are less common, it's just been an unfortunate thing that because of this sort of divide in the medical community on Lyme and certainly persistent Lyme, it just hasn't received enough funding to really see the kind of clinical results we'd like to.

Got it. With regards to, how about environmental toxicity? So you talked about that as like really working on somebody's terrain. That's kind of, I think it's your fifth part of the five part component. Correct me if I'm wrong there. So you recommend detoxing or environmental cleanup of like safe rooms in your house and maybe speak to that a little bit?

Well, I think there's so much that we can do to help control our environment. Look, there's a lot of things we get exposed to that we unfortunately have very little control over. But when it comes to our homes, sometimes our school or work environments, there are things that we can do consciously to ensure that we're not exposing ourselves to something that might be potentially toxic, undermining our immune system. Consider the average American gets exposed over to 80,000 chemicals a year. Less than 200 of them have actually been studied for their long term toxic effects. So again, we have a big unknown on what happens when we get exposed to these different chemicals over the course of months or years. Again, control what you can. What that means is go through your house, get rid of the Windex, get rid of the 409, get rid of the Tilex, and start replacing with something that's more natural, that's not going to leave this toxic residue every time you spray it on your countertops or in your shower. So these kind of things are very simple if you're doing lawn care products. I think there's been a lot of press in the last several years on Roundup weed killer. We know it's highly toxic. It's in pretty much everything now. There's been an association with Roundup in autism. So I think based on the information we have on that one chemical loan, that's something I would definitely pull out of the home and get rid of. It again, there are plenty of alternatives to keep your home clean and safe without having to resort to using toxic chemicals. By and large, there's a really great resource out there. There's online resources like the Environmental Working Group ewg.org where you can look up to find out what substances are safer. There's another one called safecosmetics.com where you can look at personal care products, things that you put on your skin to ensure that they're safe. And then there's a book woman named Deborah Lynn Dad d a d d and I think the book is called Home safe and she recommendations for anything that's toxic. Here's a natural replacement. So everything from personal care products to shampoos to what to clean your laundry with and so forth. And there's plenty of resources out there for people who want to make those changes. But again, this is something you really have 100% complete control over, at least if you own your own home. Totally.

And you know, that is such a big play, I think, on changing the economy. When we start waking up to we're just bathed in this stuff, right? 80,000 chemicals a week in the United States. I'm excited. I'm getting to interview Stephanie Senhoff who has done some of that seminal work on glyphosate and autism and neurodegeneration. So that that's coming up as well for folks. So just wet your whistles out there and what the health land. And you know, it really, it proves the point of the kind of the title of my show is what the health. Like we're dealing like we're. It's a preventative component. Right. I love that you have that American Academy of Environmental Medicine background as well. And you know, we both share that naturopathic background where we. We've got the environmental medicine aspect of Go figure. We actually are in the universe. The universe is in us and it affects us.

Right.

We can't just walk around up in the gray matter of our brains.

An important point is when you look at these chemicals, consider the way a lot of them work and metabolize and where they get stored. A lot of these chemicals get stored in our fat tissue. Well, what's your brain? Your brain is a big glob of fat. Your brain, unfortunately, is disposed to harboring a lot of these chemicals just because of the sheer makeup of what it is. So, yes, I mean, we can help people with their toxic load, particularly if they're overweight, by dropping their fat mass. But because the brain is a glob of fat, it does tend to accumulate a lot of these chemicals. So by reducing that exposure, we're really helping our brain and our nervous system. So again, what were they talking about? Lyme disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS, Ms. So anything we can do to lower that burden on our nervous system is going to help.

Oh yeah, that's awesome. Do you have a specific way that you help folks with detoxing the brain?

Well, I think, you know, kind of an understanding of what toxins they've been exposed to, you know, whether their exposure has been aluminum or a toxic metal, whether it's been a pesticide or herbicide. I think by and large, regardless of what that exposure has been, simple things like sauna. Sauna is a very effective way to help mobilize various toxins out of the brain and other tissues. I'm a big fan of colon hydrotherapy. Clinically, I've had patients who responded very well to that. Fasting, mimicking fasting, or straight up fasting has been helpful. We can employ a lot of different methods. Again, I like to really customize it to the individual based on their age, their size, their health status. But we've got a lot of tools in our bag. We don't just have to take a bunch of pills to start encouraging better detoxification. There's a lot of things we can do through exercise and some of these other modalities to get the same result.

That's awesome. Yeah, and it is. I think this day and age, we need to incorporate these to be sustainable for ourselves on longevity and as a preventative and as a treatment. Because if we're notit does bioaccumulate. Right. We can call each other fatheads, like you said. I took that as a compliment. So, you know, that is, that is a compliment. But we do store those toxins up there. And then you really started the conversation off this today around sleep as a crucial component and reset. Right. As we know, the glymphatics and the deep sleep in particular. Do you have your patients, Are you doing any monitoring of sleep or following any assays like that with your folks or, you know, really the five part plan and individualizing to them is really, you know, I think it's a brilliant outline and setup and kind of framework that you use. So that's awesome. Way ahead of the curve really, with helping people. Right. Because it helps to remember, oh, Dr. Engels has this five part component and you've written and codified it in a book. But I'm wondering like if there's A subset of folks, you know, we're all into quantification and what gets measured gets changed. Wondering if you're. Have you incorporated any of that into your practice?

You know, to a certain degree. I mean, I have a lot of people that use personal wearable devices like a Fitbit or an OURA ring, which I think is pretty, pretty spot on and monitoring, you know, what kind of quality of sleep people are getting. So for people who have those devices, at least have access, I do encourage them, I think. I'm not a big fan of emfs. I like to limit that. But something like, you know, I personally have an OURA ring. Yeah. I find, you know, it's very low emf. I can put in airplane mode. It's still collecting the information, but it's not connecting to my phone at the time. And I find it actually very helpful. And I didn't. I knew that I was not a great sleeper. I had no idea how bad it was. And until I got my. Our ring and started tracking it to see that I really wasn't getting as much deep sleep as I thought I was, which also kind of explained how I felt during the day. So if that's a possibility for people, I think it's probably the easiest way, short of going in and doing sleep studies and things that are a bit more advanced to really kind of measure how people are sleeping. And sometimes it's not enough to say, well, how do you feel when you wake up in the morning? There are people say, well, I sleep eight hours, nine hours a night, but I wake up feeling like I ran a marathon.

Yeah.

You know, again, I like these devices. And if there's other better, you know, ways of measuring sleep quality, boy, I'm all ears.

Yeah, you know, I actually have track two off and on, and, you know, people have the whoop or the Fitbit or sometimes their Apple watch. That doesn't really get the. Some of the data that you get from some of these other peripheral wearables. But I really think that corporate quantification and as we get a little bit more plugged in, you know, being conscious of the MF component here. Right. And. But then using this in a metered dose, so to speak. Well, awesome. So we are coming down the home stretch here, folks. This is what the Health. I'm Dr. Greg Eckel and my guest is Dr. Darren Engels. On the last bit here, what would you. So we've got about four minutes left. So any other imparted wisdom that you'd like to share with our listeners? Big levers for you that you found maybe for your own health journey of like, okay, if you push on this one. You mentioned the sleep. How did you correct your deep sleep?

Well, a lot of it was sleep specifically. It's about being consistent. Sleep is a pattern. And often when sleep gets disturbed, people get out of their pattern. So you kind of have to force the pattern back into play as much as you can. That means going to bed at a set time, even if it's a weekend, just commit to going to bed. You may not fall asleep right away. Have a routine before you go to bed, clearly one that doesn't involve staying on your iPad, iPhone, that's going to potentially stimulate your brain. So a lot of this we can do by just changing our routine up a little bit. Have a pattern, stick to it. That's a big part of getting back on regular sleep. Sleep is very much in a hormonal event as it is a neurotransmitter event. So often we have to work on getting those hormones balanced and whether it's cortisol, acth, one of these other hormones that are involved in managing our sleep cycle, that may be part of it down the line. But a very simple thing, again, that anybody can do without doing more advanced testing is just get your routine set, stick to it. And that's a really cheap, easy way to kind of get you back on a regular sleep pattern. The one thing we didn't get really a chance to discuss, but I'll at least want to mention our last closing minutes, is, again, I find a lot of people who have various sensitivities, and we use a lot of immunotherapy in our office to help people get their immune system back on track. And I think this is something people should at least be aware of. If you find that you're having problems with food, having problems with, you know, pollen, mold, things that didn't bother you before, there are doctors out there, typically environmental medicine physicians, who have been trained in the right ways to both test and treat for it, so that, again, we can make a permanent change in your immune system so that you're not so hypersensitive to these different substances. So even though that switch may have been flipped after you got exposed to Lyme, there is a way to flip it back off and get your immune system back in good working order. So if, you know, if you've been suffering from allergies, sensitivities, definitely seek out an environmental medicine doctor that can help you out on that.

Are you talking about there the low dose allergen injections or LDI or SLIT or all of the above.

All of the above, yeah. We employ different types of immunotherapy, and immunotherapy just means it's immune therapy. So whatever it is that's bothering you, we're going to try and turn off that reaction. So again, we're not turning off your immune system, we're not suppressing your immune system, but what we are trying to do is turn off that one specific part of the immune system that's recognizing normal stuff is not being normal. That's that allergy, that's that autoimmunity. And if we can get that mechanism back into play or working more correctly, you know, people feel a lot better.

Love it. That's. That is so. That's awesome, right? Because, you know, I think a lot of times, you know, where you got the feedback from community of like, oh, no, you can't cure Lyme. We're taught in medicine that we can't really use the word. I don't mind bringing it back a bit, but, you know, our bodies are so powerful in the healing response. And I don't ever want to limit anybody's ability to heal. And even the thought process, you know, even in your own community, right? You got people saying, oh, no, you don't ever get rid of this. And, you know, maybe you're right. It's semantics. Maybe it's just around. Okay, well, yeah, we have this virus in us and it's still. It's still there, right? It's just manage. We're managing it. So I guess where my comment is, you know, watch your limiting beliefs out there, folks, and protect your headspace. It's very important.

Right? Yeah. Well, I think mindset is everything. And you know, Dr. Tom and I had a chance to talk about this for like 2 hours several months ago, but your mindset is everything. If your head's not in the right space, if you believe you'll never get well, you probably won't. So you got to start training your brain to have a positive mindset. There's a lot of great resources if you struggle with that. I've been training with a guy named Michael Bernoff in Phoenix. Helped with my mindset, learning how to better communicate with myself. But it makes a world of difference. And again, it's free, it's easy. It's something you just have to commit to working on.

Awesome. I put a plug in for Michael Burnoff too. So everybody, thanks for tuning in. This is what The Health I'm Dr. Greg Eckel. Come back every Tuesday from 2 to 3pm West coast time. I look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks for tuning in.