The Link Between Autoimmune Disease, Chronic Fatigue, And Hidden Infections with Dr. Steven Phillips and Dana Parish

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Farmacy on F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. If you've ever been chronically sick and struggle to find the answers, you should listen up because this conversation is going to matter to you because it's about something that's pretty prevalent and mostly ignored or overlooked by traditional medicine, which are chronic infections and autoimmune disease. We're going to get deep into this with our guest today, which is Dr. Steven Phillips and Dana Parish. Dr. Phillips is a well known physician. He's renowned Yale trained doctor, International lecturer and a media go-to expert. He's published many papers in the medical literature and treat over 20, 000 patients with complex chronic illnesses from nearly 20 countries. He's experienced firsthand the nightmare of an undiagnosed serious infection, nearly dying from his own mystery illness and having to save his own life when 25 doctors could not. And that sounds exactly like me, Steven. So I've been there. I get it. And Dana, thank you for joining us today. Dana Parish has Someone who's recovered from a Lyme disease induced heart failure, which is not actually uncommon, and was improperly diagnosed by some of the top doctors in the country and Dr. Philip Saved for Life. She's a chart-topping Sony ATV singer-songwriter who's written songs for people like Celine Dion and others. She's become a major voice in the world of chronic illness and her popular column on Huffington Post has been read by more than 1 million people globally.

Welcome, Steven and Dana.

Thank you. Thank you.

Great to see you. It's great to be here.

Okay, let's get into it. So we are living in a planet that's very polluted. The air is polluted. There's toxins everywhere. We're eating processed food and refined foods. We're taking all kinds of medications and antibiotics that affect the microbiome.

So many are born by C-sections and.

All these have screwed up our immune systems and we're seeing part of the immune dysfunction in COVID, but it's much deeper than that. It existed way before COVID which is this chronic low level diseases that make people just not be able to live their full lives. And I know I felt that clearly both of you have been through that. And what we're seeing is this increasing autoimmune pandemic. You know, there's 80 million people who have some type of autoimmune disease. That's almost two or three times as much people who have diabetes or heart disease, which is kind of staggering. But they're all different ones like MS, rheumatoid arthritis or Hashimoto. So you have different Specialties talking about them. When you look at autoimmune disease as a whole, it's a big deal. And the question is why are we seeing such a rampant increase in autoimmune disease? Is it a toxin? Is it food? Is it infections? Is it something else? And you both have written a book together called Chronic, which starts with the premise that a lot of autoimmune diseases are exploding often because of underlying chronic infections.

So Dr. Phillips, tell us how you.

Kind of figured this out. How did you come up with this hypothesis and what made you interested in this idea of chronic infections and autoimmune disease? because even though we know in medical school we learned a few autoimmune diseases may be related to infections, it wasn't.

Really a predominant theme.

Right.

So thank you. So I've been in practice since '96 and I started treating lots of Lyme patients and at that point Lyme was the infection that got all the intention and for a lot of us it's the one that any of us has heard about. We haven't heard about these many other chronic infections. But people come in with diagnoses of is it Lyme? Is it MS? Is it Lyme? Is it fibromyalgia? Is it Lyme? Is it inflammatory arthritis, and I would treat them for the underlying infections that I found. And what was diagnosed as a possible autoimmune illness just kind of evaporated. And I would see it time and time again. And it wasn't all lime. I was looking for other chronic infections and finding them. And then I came upon the realization about the fact that there's this precipitous rise in chronic and autoimmune illness around the world has been like this slowly exploding, exploding pandemic rather than, as opposed to covid, which has just taken the world by storm. this has kind of just crept up on us over the last 30 years. And, it's shockingly common and because it is siloed, because it's between different medical specialties, no one's really putting the pieces together about why is this happening? Because the infections have been here forever and like you mentioned, we're living in an increasingly toxic environment. I think that a lot of us are less able to deal with infections that are common in the population.

So, what happened to you? I mean, tell us about your journey with chronic infection and what happened. So.

A lot. Yeah, I went through the mill. So, I first got lime, just regular garden variety lime, like so many people do that live in Connecticut. And, it was a moderate case. It wasn't dramatic. It didn't disable me. But, I realized by going to many infectious disease doctors and ultimately ending up in the office of doctors like myself, Lyme doctors, that there's real discordance among the medical community and how they approach chronic illness and they didn't, no one seemed to know what was going on. I gradually got better and I had many relapses and it wasn't a three course of doxycycline that got me better. And then I was really fine. I still had occasional relapses, but I was a healthy guy. I could run like five miles. I could play tennis all day and work six days a week, which I did for many, many years. Then in 2010, while I was sleeping, I got spider bites, and I didn't think anything of it. And with those spider bites, a couple months later, my body exploded with arthritis all over, rapidly Progressive to literally every joint in my body, especially my spine. And, wow, I went to 25 doctors that couldn't help me. I went to other doctors like myself who thought it was maybe prior Lyme, but I was the only one that's saying it wasn't and. none of the antibiotics that helped me previously helped me for this case. And I went to rheumatologists who diagnosed me with rheumatoid arthritis and spondylitis, which is arthritis in the spine. And it progressed very rapidly within six months, despite treatment with different medications, including many antibiotics. I couldn't walk and ended up not walking for almost two years. I had to give up my practice for two and a half years. I was completely bed bound for about a year and a half and I almost died on many occasions. I lost 50 pounds. I couldn't turn over in bed. I couldn't sit up on my own. I needed 24-hour home care. I got severely anemic and I had fevers 102 every night. It was a dire situation and I figured out in the last minute and put it all together and I saved my own life. It's not just like save my life, I'm back to a full life. I, back in practice since 2013, you know, I lecture all over the place before COVID traveling around the world, and, you know, not limited in any way. And when I went back to my three top rheumatologists, when I recovered and I told them, you know, this is how I got better. Will it change how you practice? Like, no, I'm glad you got better, but we're not gonna. We're not gonna change.

Tell us more.

What. What actually got you better? What you did to recover and what was the root of cause? Because functional medicine is really about looking at the root causes of disease, and this is really what you're doing. You're looking at not just a label that people get, like rheumatoid arthritis, but.

What'S underneath it and how do we fix it? I went to regular doctors and I went to functional medicine doctors as well. Like I said, I went to every specialist I can find, and I did the elimination diets. I did. I didn't. I didn't find any heavy metals or anything like this. She wasn't able to help me, to be. To be perfectly honest. And I took lots of antibiotics that flared me up, but didn't get me better. And really, it came down to that. My infection was Bartonella, which is. antibiotic refractory infection, and it needed really just specific antibiotics. And that's what got me better. I took lots and lots of herbs that didn't help. And at first, I wasn't a believer that herbals were helpful. And then I took my first herb to rock my world, and it caused this huge Herz-Simmer and massive Improvement. And that was liposomal Artemisinin. And I was like, oh, so that's how an herb's supposed to work. And. And then I ended up getting tremendous benefit from liposomal oil of oregano and. my second herbal and then monolaurin. So there were a few supplements and herbals that were found really, really beneficial, but primarily for me, it was antibiotics. It was things like doxycycline and rifampin and Bactrim. Yeah.

So those antibiotics, you know, are strong antibiotics, but, but Bartonella is really one of those tough infections. It's one of those tough infections. It's often hard to find and hard to treat. And so, you know, people suffer for years from leading things like this. And I've seen people literally for decades have problems, and then you treat them.

And they get better. It's pretty miraculous.

No.

I went back to a hematologist and they looked like I was a Martian. I mean, one was delighted that I got better. One treated me like it can't be like in disbelief. And I did a little dance in front of him to try and convince him. I mean, because he saw me not walking and I was like, look, I'm dancing. I'm not a good dancer, but, and then one was just looking like I was a one off, like I'm a one in a million case. And she's like, look, one in a million things happen. I'm like, I'm not one in a million. I mean, I always, my mommy told me I'm special when I'm a kid.

But I don't think I'm one in a million. And I think there are other people that have very similar things. yeah, yeah. That's funny. I remember giving a talk at Harvard, and I was presenting about a case of autism that had dramatically turned around. And one of the pediatricians there was like, well, you know, this might just be a case of spontaneous remission. And then one of the other doctors, well, Dr. Hyman's had, like, five cases of spontaneous remission. His practice is here so far. Yeah. If you, if you understand what, what the roots are. And you also talk about in the book your dad, who had pretty bad heart failure and needed a heart transplant.

No, he did not need a heart transplant that they wanted.

He was going to need one, right? So, what was the sort of the discovery there? Tell us about your case.

That's what galvanized my interest in doing what I do. It wasn't my own case. Like I said, my case of Lyme was pretty moderate and I wasn't planning on doing this as a career. But when I started learning about this, my heart, my father had had a case of what they thought was a viral meningitis in 1975. And then shortly after that became a non-specific heart palpitations. And it got just worse and worse. Then he turned to atrial fibrillation, a specific type arrhythmia. And then he went into heart failure. And we took him to all the best doctors in New York City, at all the top teaching hospitals. And we don't skimp. We went to the best. And they all couldn't save him. And he got worse and worse. He had ejection fraction. between 10 and 20. They said that his lifespan would be measured in months without a heart transplant. And I was just finishing up my residency at Yale. I was doing Lyme research. I'd already had some experience with Lyme personally. And I was like, looked it up, and I was like, holy crap, Lyme can do this. So I went to the cardiologist. I said, you know, Lyme can do this condition, dilated cardiomyopathy. Can we evaluate him? And he rolled his eyes and discounted the whole thing. And, you know, they published a study in 2015 where they looked at people with his type of condition, this type of heart fire. went in and did heart muscle biopsies on all of them and found that 20% had Lyme DNA and made a point in the study to say that almost two-thirds of them had negative Lyme tests. So if you don't really have a big suspicion about what these infections can do, you're gonna miss it. And I've treated about 50 cases.

See, what you just said was really important. I don't want to, I want to emphasize it. You say that, you know, 20% of the biopsies in the heart muscle were positive, but two-thirds of the people who had the positive test had a negative blood test. So in other words, you can get a blood test, it can look fine. Your doctor says your labs are fine, you don't have Lyme, but actually if you look deeper, you can actually find it because it may not always show up in the regular lab test. It's an important point. Yeah, if you have to ask yourself.

Who goes to get a heart biopsy to diagnose Lyme, it's the silliest thing. The tests are antiquated, they're like 40 years old. I would say I won't get on a 40 year old airplane. I'm not going to trust my health to outdated technology with blood testing. But long story short, he wouldn't evaluate them because my dad never had arthritis and he didn't have a bell's palsy. He said, you,'re a doctor, now do it. I was just a fresh out of school, basically. And, I basically treated him and his heart function completely normalized. He's 88 years old now. He never needed a heart transplant. He's not in heart failure at all.

And, that's the story. That's incredible. So, what you're saying is essentially you've cured an incurable condition according to traditional medicine. with treatment of his Lyme disease, which was causing his heart failure. And, I think this is important to underscore because so much of what we see in my world, in your world, people who are suffering from chronic illnesses who just don't get better bounce from doctor to doctor and are often misdiagnosed because doctors often don't have a framework for looking at root causes. And, functional medicine is this framework for looking whether it's heavy metals, which I've had, or Lyme disease, which I've had, or Babesia, which I've had, or Mercury, which I've had, or mold, which I've had. These are things which are typically ignored by traditional doctors. Even diet, for God's sake, which is more obvious, is often also ignored as a root cause of so many chronic illnesses. And I think what you're talking about is that there is hope for people who suffer and who struggled if they can figure out how to get to the right person, which is not always easy, but to even advocate for yourself. and say, look, I've got this problem, but I'm not giving up. And I'm going to go kind of dig until I find what's going on. And, yeah, it could be a number of different things from, from a perspective of causes that can cause the same syndrome. So you can have rheumatoid arthritis, but it could be heavy metals, it could be gluten, it could be lime, it could be Bartonella, it could be all kinds of things. But we, we basically just lump everybody into the same category. Oh, you've got rheumatoid arthritis, or you've got this or that disease. And we go, we know what to do. We give you the drug for that disease, but it doesn't really speak to the cause. and that's really what you guys have been talking about. It's so refreshing to hear you talking about that. So, Dana, I want to jump to you for a minute. You got sick and you also developed Lyme-induced heart failure and you're a pretty young woman. And you start talking about how you got a tick bite and a rash and everything kind of went downhill from there and you went to doctor to doctor until you kind of found Dr. Phillips and got treated. So tell us about your story and how you ended up being treated by Dr. Phillips and what happened to you and how you got better.

Sure. So it was the summer of 2014. I was truly at the prime of my life. You know, I just signed a brand new deal with Sony and just wrote their songs for Celine and I was supposed to be traveling all over the place. And I was incredibly happy. So I say that because when doctors start saying like it's in your head or you're making it up or you want, you know, you just want attention, like those kinds of things are absolutely insane to me because so many people are like me where they get really derailed at the prime of their lives and nobody would make this stuff up. It's absolutely devastating. So, I got a tick bite. I saw the rash. I got it within five days. I caught it because I knew when I got back from New Jersey and got back to Manhattan where I lived and I saw it, I was lucky that I was in a minority that saw the bite and the rash on my shoulder. Most people never see it and many strains of Lyme do not produce a rash and many other tick-borne infections produce no rash. So that's an important thing for people to know. So I went right over to urgent care. I knew it was Lyme. They knew it was Lyme. They gave me three weeks of doxy cycling, an antibiotic, and said, you,'ll be fine. Go on with your life. They also told me not to Google Lyme and that I would get scared and that I don't want to be a crazy Lyme person. That was a clue that something really weird was going on. I had no idea that this very common ubiquitous infectious disease that drives a pandemic of illness was a political hotbed. Like I had no clue. So I do take the doxy cycling. I try to move on with my life and three months later I wake up all hell broke loose. The first symptom was that my breast was swollen overnight. I had all these fibrocystic changes and extreme pain. went to the internist. She sent me, she panicked. She sent me to an oncologist that day at Mount Sinai. He ruled out cancer. He agreed my breast was swollen. He agreed this was weird, didn't know why, just knew it wasn't cancer. Sent me on. I went to go on to have fibromyalgia, you know, exercise induced incredible weakness. There was a little gym in my building. I did my same lame workout that I do all the time. And just one day my arm stopped working in the midst of all this. Literally couldn't lift a fork, couldn't feed myself, couldn't walk. walk my 29 pound dog. And I went on to have incredible body pain, brain fog, visual disturbances, anxiety, depression, intrusive suicidal ideation where I literally couldn't stop thinking about jumping out my window, but I didn't want to, but I couldn't stop. It was something, it was like a monster took over my brain and my body. I went on to see three infectious disease doctors, tons of internal medicine and the oncologist and sports medicine, and nobody had any and what the, you know, I would ask them, especially the ID guys, you know, could this be related to the tick bite?

No.

Why not? Because you took the three weeks of doxy and it's cured 100% of the time in the test tube with doxy. Okay, that's actually totally not true. The other reason that one of them gave me, this is my favorite, you know, this well-known doctor at NYU said to me, because I went to medical school. So I'm like, well, Ticks carry other infections too, you know. Is there anything else? I was pushing them. At some point I said, Do you want to test me for inflammatory markers? Like anything? He goes, oh, that's a pretty good idea. Okay, well this is my third visit with you, you know. Are you kidding me? So I went on to have this horrible experience until December when I went into heart failure. And then everybody like really got serious, really believed me. I mean, I do think some of them thought it was in my head because they had so many weird, disparate, migrating symptoms that doctors are complete, when they don't understand something, they put you in the psychiatric bucket. You know, that's, that's a theme. I think, of course, you, you know that very well.

So.

And when you, when you have these things, you do feel crazy because nobody can give you any help. And also the fact that it's changing all the time and every day, it really feels crazy. So then in December, I went into heart failure. My ejection fraction was 40. under 50 is considered heart failure for people who don't know. And yeah, yeah. And it was, I mean, I was so healthy before all this. So then thank God, I had a friend who knew about Dr. Phillips and seen him testify at some hearing and like knocked it out of the park and said, you know, you got to go see him. He's brilliant and he's the only person I would see if I was in your position. So I went to him and he saved my life. Within like two months of seeing him, my heart failure totally resolved. And he did talk to the Mount Sinai cardiologist who had been very concerned about it, did take my heart failure seriously, just didn't know the cause. And Steve really educated him about Lyme carditis. He didn't really even know very deeply about it. He was interested and he was educable. He was the only one, but he was, and I really appreciate that. But I was treated with a rotating course of antibiotics, antimicrobials, Chinese, I did a Chinese herbal protocol as well called the Zhang protocol. There are plenty of them of different Chinese medicines you can take. That was the choice I made because I lived in Manhattan and it was in the city and I could see them. And anyway, Dr. Phillips really came in and got me better. It was a miracle.

Yeah. Well, I hear this story so much. People often suffer and they really struggle with trying to figure out how to get the right treatment. But, you know, I think what you're speaking to is, is they need to think deeply about rethinking medicine and rethinking how we approach disease based on root causes. Hey, everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. One of the things I want to sort of jump into with both of you and it's and you talk a lot about these kinds of things in your book chronic, which is great. It's called the Hidden Cause of Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again. And it's available now on Amazon everywhere and people should get a copy. If you've been struggling, this is going to help you. understand what's going on and maybe guide you to the right resources. What really is going on is that, you know, there's these chronic latent infections with clearly the tick infections, which is Lyme, Bartonella, Babesia, Ehrlichia, and there are lots of varieties of each one of these. So, they're often hard to detect. The testing is sort of a little bit outdated, as you mentioned, Stephen. And, I just wondered if you could speak a little bit about the testing, and then I want to sort of jump into talking about COVID and COVID and latent infections and autoimmune disease because I think it's a topic that people are talking about a lot and I think people don't understand what that means.

In long haul COVID. So, the many infections do have an unfortunate commonality is that they're fastidious. It's a term that microbiologists use to describe infections that we can't isolate from animals and people that have the infection. So, Lyme is probably the best studied of all of them. If you inject Lyme bacteria into a dog and then let the dog get sick and then take the dog's blood sample a month later and you know the dog has Lyme, you can't find the actual bacteria in the blood. And, it's the same for all the animals studied and same for people. And, with the animal studies, they can cut them up and find that there's still Lyme bacteria alive after the same treatments that are supposed to cure it in humans. And, in humans, they don't cut us up, thankfully. And, that's the main difference in terms of the animal data and the human data. But they've isolated this bacteria, even though it's so hard to isolate, they've still isolated from about 75 patients, human patients, after up to two years of antibiotics. So it could be a really, really stubborn bacteria. But believe it or not, it's easier to treat, in my experience, than some of the other infections, particularly Bartonella. Tularemia is really rough sometimes. And so, Coxiella Q fever is very, very difficult. And then the parasitic infections that people never talk about because we're told to ignore them in med school. I do a broad range of a panel, a blood test panel for antibodies against nine different parasites whenever people come in. And, it's shockingly common. And, the interaction between parasitic infections and bacterial ones is such that the parasitic infections still facilitate and perpetuate the bacterial ones because they're a bit immune suppressive.

And, so you're getting also viral infections that underlie some of these chronic things too. And right now we're seeing this viral infection of COVID and what we're seeing even more scary to me than the actual COVID, because most people recover from that is the long hauler COVID syndrome, which we've talked about on the podcast before. Essentially it's a chronic fatigue like syndrome. And with the first SARS infection, you know, decades ago, about 40% of people who survived and it was a much more lethal infection, 40% of people who survived got chronic fatigue at three years. and we're seeing this now. We're seeing people who've not even been that sick, people who are young and healthy who got it and recovered and just never get better.

So can you talk about what this.

Long haul or COVID syndrome is, how it relates to the underlying potential other factors that are going on with people like chronic infections? What do we know? What do we not know? And what's your experience in treating some of these, these patients?

So my experience in treating just regular COVID acute COVID has been overall very, very good. and patients have responded to things like doxycycline, ivermectin, and a bunch of herbals like vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, quercetin, and bromelain.

However.

My experience with long COVID is a little bit different. I only have one true long COVID patient. She's a person who didn't call the office for her acute COVID situation. She called a primary care doctor and said, Just take Tylenol. And then three months later, she called 11 doctors. in desperation, I was doctor number 11 and I actually gave her ivermectin and she turned around in 24 hours. I do have one patient I actually just spoke to today who had a mild case of COVID and after that her Bartonella symptoms are very much flared up and we're trying to figure out is this still virus persistent in her body? Is that what's driving things? Or is it like the apple cart was just upset immunologically and her prior Bartonella is flared up? It seems to be actually the latter in her. because she's responding to the antimicrobial therapies she did before with Herxheimer reactions, which are these die-off reactions and all these things that all got worse since her COVID are responding to, you know, the same antibiotics that I would treat somebody with Bartonella. So I'm wondering if some of these long COVID patients that have people don't understand that, you know, we think about these infections that they always cause illness, but the majority of these chronic infections that we're talking about today don't make people sick or if they make them sick, they make them mildly sick and they never really get a diagnosis. What happens when you come with a long, you know, a bad viral insult? So before COVID came along, I would have people who had a really bad flu and then they were never the same. And then they develop a chronic fatigue like picture. And we do an evaluation for chronic infections, find some, treat some and get them better. I don't think it's that dissimilar. I think COVID is a terrible, terrible virus, but I think it has the same common features with other viruses that it could just like I said, be a big shock to the immune system. And, and it's, it's ridiculously common how, how, how much, how many of us are walking around with chronic infections we just don't know about that never get diagnosed.

So how do we then detect this long haul or covet? Because I think people are curious about, okay, well, I'm not feeling well. I've had covet. I want to get better. I don't know what to do. And one of the kinds of things you're seeing is, is one any diagnostic information you're getting on these people and two, what are you finding works clinically to treat these people and help them get better?

Well, it's hard to find the virus. In the studies, the people that have had persistent active virus, it's been basically GI tract biopsies and biopsies of the olfactory bulb near the brain. So, it's not just your listeners should know it's not just go for a nasal swab and when it's PCR negative that rules it out. so the virus can persist and hard to biopsy places. And these tests are not available like routine drive-through centers. It's really like a research test. So doctors don't have the ability to do that outside of a research setting. In terms of looking for these other infections, any doctor that's educated about these can look for them. I do 99% of my blood tests for patients at Chain Labs like Quest and LabCorp. and it's a long litany. It's like 17 tubes of blood, but we cast a broad net and we find targets that are treatable.

And, in terms of the clinical symptoms people are having and the treatments that are working, can you tell us more what you're thinking about how we should be approaching this?

So, there's a subset of long COVID patients that have some common features. the breadth of symptoms is really, really, it's incredibly broad. And there are some things that I'm hearing about in long COVID patients that I see in my chronic illness patients. And they're very weird symptoms, like a sense of internal vibrations. I don't know if you've had patients that ever complained of that to you, but this is a common complaint among my patients. It's something long COVIDs are complaining about, long COVID patients. So as soon as I heard that, I started getting very, very suspicious that wait a second, is this really flaring up underlying infections that we see? And in my one clear, you know, long COVID patient that I've seen, it's, she responded to ivermectin, like I said, overnight, and she basically had chest pressure and pain with breathing. And that was her persistent manifestation of COVID It's not something she ever had with her prior illness. She was a patient who was treated, you know, over a year or so before, you know, she'd been fine, you know, since I treated her, got COVID. and it had this chest pain. So, she developed a new symptom and very quickly responsive to ivermectin. Ivermectin, I don't know if you've talked about ivermectin on your shows before or no. Yeah, but ivermectin is an anti-parasitic. It's a really safe drug. Yeah. So, it's, I've had experience with it way before COVID came around because I used it because I do, like I said, evaluate and treat parasitic infections. And, I've also used it as an immune modulator. So, ivermectin has this really cool many effects in the body. It gets rid of abnormal inflammation and it gets rid of abnormal immune suppression at the same time. So it has immunologic benefits for people with inflammatory illness, but also in the case of COVID it has direct antiviral effect. So if I have a long COVID patient, I'm going to offer them something that's going to cover the virus and I'm going to evaluate them for the other chronic infections that could have stirred up and what we find will, will offer treatment for those as well. I'll take a dual approach. Yeah.

And are people getting better or you think? Because I think a lot of people are worried about the Long-Haul covet syndrome and people not actually recovering fully from it.

Well, I, I've been booked out for so long for so, I mean, I, you know, that we haven't even we, long COVID patients are calling the office, and I'm just gathering data among my patients now who had covet, like I said, limited experience in treating long COVID patients. so I'm going to start accepting long COVID patients and evaluating them the way that I said, using this dual approach to cover the possibility of persistent viral, you know, viral stuff going on and also the possibility of flared up other chronic infections like Lyme and Bartonella and other chronic infections that people may never have heard about. And, you know, I do think that I can help patients, but I don't have a big well, you know, of experience to draw from. I don't know how many long COVID doctors are there have a big well of experience on what's working because from what I'm hearing from the long COVID community because we're partnered with Survivor Corps, which is a large group with long COVID patients. And so far, there's very limited trials of stuff to get these patients better. Like none of the doctors are really taking it by the horns, so to speak, and really helping these patients. Well, we've got a clinic at Cleveland.

Clinic called the RECOVER, RE-CO-V, right? Like for COVID, RECOVER, clinic. It's a multidisciplinary clinic around how to recover from COVID from the long hauler syndrome. So I think that there's some interesting things happening around the academic centers. We're looking at all kinds of options. And I do think functional medicine approach is really powerful. I think for people listening, know there's a lot of approaches to chronic infections, antibiotics, herbs, lifestyle and more. Some of the other things that we've talked about in the show like ozone and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. hyperthermia and other approaches can be actually also very effective. And clinically, I find some of those really helpful in kind of resetting the immune system and resetting the way in which your body handles infections, even directly killing infections. So I think there's a lot of tools out there and options. We did a podcast from San Diego where I went and I personally had Bartonella. I was really persistent. I was having night sweats, still fatigue. I was functioning pretty well, but I still really struggled. And people who do kind of well, they're walking wounded are often the ones who have good lifestyles, but they still have this low grade stuff. If you have a crappy lifestyle and you get this, you're in trouble. It's really bad. But I got the chance to do hyperthermia, which was an interesting treatment that's not available in the United States. It's in Europe and in Mexico. And I was able to put my body to 107 degrees. And after that, and getting the antibiotics during that time, during the peak of the fever, allowed my system to start to respond and shift and recover. And, I just talked to another patient who had Parkinson's disease who also had Babesia and Lyme and many other co-infections and, you know, really found the same thing. We treated him lots of antibiotics and herbs and things over the years, but finally we got him to do treatments of ozone or hyperbaric oxygen and hyperthermia and he went to San Diego and it was really quite remarkable. So, it's not available to everybody. It's expensive, but for people who are really struggling, there is often a way out. So, Dana, tell us about your perspective in terms of interacting with your own health and the medical community and the struggles you've had and what you're doing to kind of change how people are shifting the perspective of how we can get better.

Well, one thing that I should have mentioned is that, which speaks to this, is that when Steve worked me up, he found another infection, Bartonella, that was also driving my symptoms. So my Lyme was definitely undertreated. There's no question. Three weeks of antibiotics is definitely not enough for many, many, many people. The data is clear. So I should say that. But the fact that nobody looked for anything else is crazy to me. and when he treated both of those infections, all my symptoms went away. My psych stuff too. So I think that that point needs to be made. I think a lot of people suffer from anxiety and depression along with their autoimmune diseases and people tell them, well, you're anxious because you have fibromyalgia or because you have RA. No, you're not anxious because you have those things necessarily. I mean, yes, they suck. it's depressing, but there's a brain component here. There's a neurologic component, just like we're seeing with COVID And I think it's a lot easier for doctors now, well, not all of them, okay? So they're coming around to the fact that infections can cause a humongous, multi-systemic illness that lasts and lingers, and that is driven by a stealth chronic infection. So that, you know, there's so much for them to learn. If they've been paying attention to Lyme for the last 30 years, we wouldn't be in this horrible mess with COVID in my opinion, with long haulers, because I think it would be very obvious that there are chronic infections driving some percentage of these people's symptoms. So, you know, it's a bit crazy making to me to watch this all being, you know, predictably played out the way it is where we're talking about immune suppressants already. And we're not talking about antivirals. You know, these things need to be put on the table. But in terms of my interactions with the medical community and my advice is just, you know, if I didn't advocate for myself and if I didn't trust my intuition, I knew they were all wrong. Yeah, it made me feel badly that I wasn't being taken as seriously as I felt I should have been. It made me feel badly to have the sense that people thought it was in my head, but I kind of didn't care that much because I knew they were wrong. And I think everybody has this inner voice that tells them, this is the wrong path. This doesn't make sense. But most people don't follow it. They need the confidence. So if I can be, you know, a guiding light in that regard and just tell people to keep going, and move on from doctors that aren't believing you and won't look at data or won't listen to other stories that are similar to yours, stories like mine where people were covered. I say move on, but I also feel very strongly that you need to bring somebody to an appointment with you because when you're really sick like this, you need somebody to advocate, ask questions, write down information because you forget a lot of stuff when you're in this state. And yeah, I mean I just say, as you just said, like, don't give up. There's a lot of ways to skin a cat. This is my journey, but there are many, many other people I know that got better in various ways. Just look for the root, though. Demand the root cause answer. Demand it. If you don't find it, that's what you got to keep going for. That's my opinion.

Yeah.

The challenge a lot of times, Dan.

And Stephen, you know, is that traditional medicine, we're not really trained to look at root causes most of the time. Sometimes we do. but most of the time we don't really have a framework for thinking about chronic complex illnesses. We're good at acute illness, we had acute infection. Okay, we'll say this bacteria will treat you, we'll figure out the cause and that's fine. But for these latent infections or chronic infections or latent issues, whether it's mercury or mold or lime or whatever, people are often struggling for decades and there really is a method of figuring this out and really that's what we do. at Cleveland Clinic at the Center for Functional Medicine at my practice, the Ultra Wellness Center, it's what you do, Steven. And, a lot of doctors around the country are moving towards this kind of medicine and people call it functional medicine, or whatever you want to call it, but it's essentially it's a new framework for thinking about disease based on treating the body as a system, about getting through a cause, about understanding the interconnections between these things and thinking out of the box. I mean, just the idea that you could cure heart failure by treating infection, you know, that's a kind of interesting idea. We know that viral viral effects, viral infections affect the heart and cause heart failure, but we never really, and we even know from the literature that Lyme does too, but it's just sort of a blank spot that doctors don't pay much attention to. So really grateful for both of you for taking this on, writing this book, Chronic: the Hidden Cause of Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again. There's a great chapter there on COVID and how we need to think differently about COVID and autoimmune disease and chronic long hauler syndrome and some of the stuff we're really struggling with. What advice would you give people who are just struggling, both of you, in terms of how to advocate for themselves, how to get the support they need, how to find someone who can help them, and how to keep going?

Okay, I would say that, you know, I like functional medicine. So, you know, if you can't get answers from traditional medicine, then I would go towards a functional medicine route. I'd go to integrative doctors, I'd find line doctors, I'd find somebody that's willing to listen and work with you. that way.

Yeah, I mean, it takes a village. You know, you need diverse views because you never know what the next piece of information will provide you. You know, I failed so many therapies before I got well. And people always ask me, how come you didn't give up? Because I knew that what was driving it was infection. There was tons of evidence that it was. And, I say that to people all the time. It's very easy. It's very disheartening to give you know, it's such a, it's like who gets up first, you or the chronic illness? And so it takes a village. I encourage people to gather a team that can support them the way they need to be supported.

I mean, I think it is persistence. I mean, I remember, you know, being sick and I don't know if this is your experience or what you see, but it's often not just one thing. People can have Lyme, but they might have many other issues that also need to be addressed. And if you just do one thing, you may not get it all. So, for example, you know, I developed mercury poisoning is my first insult. But then also got Lyme disease, which I didn't know probably for over a decade or more, which sort of prevented me from getting fully better. Then I lived in a house that had mold in it that I didn't know. And another house that had mold in it and finally got really sick from the mold. So I had barnella, I had lime, I had mold, I had mercury. And often you see a lot of patients who have multiple factors that are driving their disease, not just one. And you can't just often just treat one. You have to deal with all and the things, the other things do suppress immunity. For example, heavy metals will suppress your immune system or more likely to cause autoimmune disease and so can things like mold. So, and whether it's, or it could be your gut or it could be food sensitivities or a whole bunch of different things. So part of the trick is to understand how to address all these factors using the right kinds of support and tools, which I think you'll find through functional medicine and for people listening, you know, they can certainly go see you, Stephen or CS at the Ultra Wellness Center or Cleveland, but also there's a lot of incredible doctors around the country. You can go to ifm.org and go find a practitioner. Now, not everybody's going to be equally trained or equally knowledgeable or equally as good as being a detective. Not everybody's Sherlock Holmes, right? But most can kind of help get you started and figure out what's going on and point you in the right direction. And, I encourage people to not give up because chronic illness sucks. I can tell you from being there, I know Stephen, you've been there. And certainly, Danny, you've been there. Any last thoughts of words of wisdom for people listening about how to, you know, think about keeping healthy and getting their lives, you know, back on track if they've been sick?

Yeah. Just have faith in your body's ability to heal. You know, it is, like you said, Mark, it's a multi-hit process. We can sustain a lot of stresses, you know, and it's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. How many, you know, at some point, it's just becomes too much. so. And that was something that I had to really convince myself. Like, the days of my near-death experience are behind me, and I'm a fully functional person again. And there's a lot of, like, trauma from going through a life-changing illness. And, and again, I, I, we also, there's a whole section of the book about EMDR and other, you know, trauma therapies, because it's very hard to recover once you're physically better to even recover psychologically from that trauma. So I just want tell people that you have to treat every part of them, the body, the mind, and look at this, like you said, from a multi-hit kind of scenario that it's not just going to be, it's usually not just one infection and it's usually many other environmental exposures besides infection. Wow.

Well, this has been such a great conversation. I know people listening hopefully can get a little bit of hope and I encourage them to get your book. And, it's a really a great addition to our understanding of autoimmune disease and chronic illness and even COVID. It's called Chronic: the Hidden Cause of Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again. It's available now everywhere you get your books. And I hope you all love this podcast. If you know anybody with chronic disease or you've had it yourself, please share maybe how you've gotten better. Leave a comment.

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