Memory Loss Is Not Aging, It's an Infection - Dr. Richard Horowitz | TUH #302

42% of people 55 years or older expected to become demented. And yet they spend $2.4 billion a year at the NIH and no one has come up with a solution for it.

When we realize that we spend $5 trillion a year on healthcare, we estimate that 85% of all chronic disease is preventable. We have to start looking at things like our chemical supply, our food supply, our water, our air as microtoxic environments that accumulate over time.

And ultimately, what does it come down to? Inflammation in the brain. All chronic disease is driven by chronic inflammation, but Where's the inflammation coming from? Bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, microbiome issues in the gut, vitamin mineral deficiencies, sleep disorders.

We are waking up to infectious disease and toxicity as a root cause of some of the most prevalent chronic conditions that plague society and mankind.

And I don't know why this happened in medicine, but they're like naming a disease and throwing drugs at it instead of getting to the underlying causes.

For folks that are watching this, like, where do we start with testing to just get a dashboard of what kind of villain we're after?

For those of us who want to optimize our health, I discovered that.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka. Today's episode is deeply personal for me. Like a lot of people my age, I've been watching my own mother's memory decline. I've been searching for answers, not just a diagnosis of it's aging. My guest is Dr. Richard Horowitz, a board-certified internist who's treated over 13,000 patients over 41 years. He is widely considered the closest thing that the chronic illness world has to a master diagnostician. Dr. Horowitz developed the MSIDS model, 16 hidden factors from Lyme disease and Bartonella to mold and toxins that quietly drive everything from brain fog To Alzheimer's, he just published the first study showing this same model reversing P-tal 217, the most sensitive Alzheimer's biomarker there is, using a nine-week protocol. If you or someone you love is dealing with unexplained chronic illness or watching a parent decline like mine is, and being told there's nothing that can be done, this conversation is going to give you real actionable hope. Let's get into it. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging biohacks. Longevity and everything in between. And today is one of those in-between podcasts. It's going to be a very personal journey for me and my family. I am so excited to have this guest on the podcast because his core competency fills a void that I have been trying to fill for over ten years. You know, we talk about the body spontaneously just going wrong: Alzheimer's, dementia, early onset cognitive decline, neuroinflammatory disorders, autism, ADD, ADHD, OCD—all of these. Chronic illnesses, autoimmune, and we just seem to have adopted the philosophy that for whatever reason the body has somehow spontaneously just begun to malfunction. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've been talking about mold, mycotoxins, parasites, viruses, and heavy metals for the last ten years, but it's it's really a paucity of expertise in the medical community. And our next guest, Dr. Richard Horowitz, is probably the closest thing that the chronic disease world has to a master diagnostician. And he is a monolithic giant. I'm excited to read his book. And welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Gary. It's great to be here. Dr.

Horwitz, I'm so excited for this. And when I was prepping for the podcast, I thought about the framing around this and all the different avenues that we could go down. But I'm on a very personal journey right now, like a lot of people my age. 55 years old. I know I look 20, so don't let that shock you.

I was thinking 25. I was like, sure.

25, okay. I'm just trapped in this gorgeous body. But, you know, like a lot of people my age, you know, we are facing that decision about our parents. You know, is it time to bring them back in with us? Is it time to get them into some kind of assisted care, memory care, you know, skilled nursing facility? And it's a really hard decision. And what really prompted this journey for me, my parents live in Tennessee and I'm in Miami, so I wasn't seeing them that often. My dad was calling me sort of more and more frequently about my mom repeating herself all the time and sort of forgetting things. And then the pattern tightened, meaning, like, her short-term memory got worse and worse and worse and seemed to cataclysmically go off of a cliff. So this is a very personal journey for me around neuroinflammatory issues, Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline, because nothing's worse than losing a living loved one. And to be able to alleviate that pain for people would be one of the greatest gifts to humanity. And I feel like your work is heavily centered around That very problem that I'm dealing with right now.

You know, it's interesting. When I started off as a board-certified internist, I was not expecting to be a specialist in Lyme disease or Alzheimer's disease or autism or ADHD. None of these things. But interestingly enough, my spiritual teachers— I did my training in Belgium for 7 years in French at the Free University of Brussels, and I met Tibetan teachers. I was learning meditation there at the time. And I went to one of my spiritual teachers at the end of medical school, and I said to him, Lama Gendun, what's the most important thing you want me to know? I'm about to go out into the world as a doctor. And he said, Richard, the most important thing is exchange yourself with others, put yourself in people's shoes, and do for them what you would want done for yourself. He said, if you do this, everything will go well. Well, interesting, on my journey, so now it's 41 years in medicine, having seen over 13,000 people. I just turned 70, by the way.

Yeah.

And I just can't believe at this point that I've developed a model that is extremely effective for not just chronic Lyme, but I just published the first study in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease reports.

I saw that.

Where we found that all 16 of the same factors, which I call MSIDS, Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome, the same 16 factors I've been looking at in chronic Lyme that have gotten people better are now published for Alzheimer's disease. And I just reversed P-tau 217, the most sensitive and specific Alzheimer's biomarker, for the first time ever in the world, using a 9-week oral antibiotic protocol, very short-term.

Wow.

So I'm, I'm really curious to hear about your mom's case and see how I can help, because these are the kind of people I've helped all the time. in my practice.

Yeah, I would love it. In fact, you know, I'll document it. I'll put it transparently out on, on social media. Um, I'm doing everything that I can do, um, with the knowledge that I have and, and the community that I have, which I will say has been very effective. You know, last 12 weeks has been incredible shift in, in my mother's journey. Um, hyperbarics, you know, red light therapy, lithium orotate, very, very, very clean diet, getting her glycemic profile down. She's been in that pre-diabetic range like so many elderly men and women for almost a decade, heavily insulin resistant, on statin medication for 25 years now, heavy statin medication. I mean, just the cessation of her cholesterol medication, I saw not an immediate, but I would say a noticeable return.

And that's been talked about in the literature that sometimes statins, you do have to be careful with cognitive decline.

Yeah, exactly.

Because they also lower CoQ10 levels. And we know that mitochondrial dysfunction is one of the things in Alzheimer's disease, right? And dementia, you have to watch for it.

Yeah. But what I find fascinating, you know, thankfully, your work is now starting to receive the bright light that it deserves because HHS is very focused on Lyme. And I think that we are waking up to infectious disease and toxicity as a root cause of some of the most prevalent chronic conditions that plague society and mankind. Mold, mycotoxins, parasites, viruses, heavy metals, and that once these things are in the body, you get these behavioral characteristics that mimic all kinds of chronic disease, and we start trying to treat the chronic disease. But nobody's going into the soil and saying, "Hey, what is the bug or the parasite or or the viral pathogen that lit this fire? And why aren't we going after the villain? You know, why are we only focused on amyloid plaques and and neurofibrillary tangles and and?" you know, the byproduct of these conditions and not the genesis.

You're absolutely 100% on target. In fact, it is in the 16-point model, it is infections and toxins that is always at the top of the list. So in this model that I describe in Ending Chronic Illness, which has been the model I've developed over 41 years of 13,000 people, the infections that we've seen are not just one bacteria. It's not just Lyme disease. We find chlamydia pneumoniae. We find mycoplasma species. There are 18 different species of Bartonella, which most doctors have never even heard of.

You've tested for one.

Maybe. Yes. And, and on top of that, we do see viral reactivation in people. Long COVID caused people to reactivate Epstein-Barr and herpesvirus 6. But people get toxoplasmosis. A third of the world's population has toxo. It's been associated with neurocognitive decline. Babesia, the parasite I see all the time, is associated with it. Um, and finally, even fungal infections. They find fungus in the brains of people with Alzheimer's.

Wow.

Not just in the gut. And it's interesting, most people know about Candida syndrome, right? If you're in the functional medicine space, right? They may not realize though that when you get leaky gut and intestinal hyperpermeability and you've got Candida overgrowth in the gut, it's actually affecting your brain at the same point. And they found fungus there. You combine these infections with toxins like mold— 90% of my patients are now showing positive for multiple mycotoxins.

90%. 90%. I don't want to gloss over that statement. 90% of your patients are showing positive results for mycotoxins.

Ochratoxins, trichothecenes, gliotoxins.

Aflatoxins.

Aflatoxins. They're showing up in all of these patients. And we do find that when we detox the patients— and I've created some very simple protocols. Everything, by the way, I've tried to do over my career is oral, generic, easy-to-find, you know, solutions that anyone in the world can find this to do it. So I've detoxed thousands of people from mold. I was loaded with heavy metals myself. I had to take the amalgams out of my mouth because I was so mercury toxic.

Same.

And, and I was afraid of what it was going to do to my body from the free radical oxidative stress. So this is common at this point. So as you said earlier on, as we're getting older, Alzheimer's disease at this point, the NIH, these are figures from them, 42% of people 55 years or older expected to become demented. That is mind-numbing. That is ridiculous.

That we would even remotely accept that.

And yet they spend $2.4 billion a year at the NIH. And no one has come up with a solution for it. So this article that I just published where there's 16 factors now gives people hope.

Yeah.

It's like, hold on, I have cognitive decline, I have Alzheimer's, and we'll talk about the biomarkers I'd like to see your, your mom get.

Yeah.

But there's things now that give people hope. Like, I don't just have to go on an anti-amyloid antibody like lecanemab, donanemab, which they just showed in a Cochrane review is really not making much difference. Now, maybe if you addressed the infections like Lyme and Bartonella and pulled out the mold and addressed all these other inflammatory factors, these drugs might actually be more effective. And that's something— and I know Secretary Kennedy is very interested, right, in looking at these chronic diseases. God bless him, because we needed someone to take a look at this.

Yeah. You know, I think that, you know, when we realize that we spend $5 trillion a year on healthcare, we're the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world. We estimate that 85% of all chronic disease is preventable. And, you know, we have to start looking at things like our chemical supply, our food supply, you know, our, our, our food, our water, our air as microtoxic environments that accumulate over time. You know, I, I, I've, I've sat in front of so many functional medicine doctors, and I think they would all agree that immunofatigue, this, this slow, progressive overwhelming of the immune system, is, is one of the greatest hallmarks of aging, right? Just, just exhausting the immune system with low-grade fights going on. on so many different fronts.

Absolutely. And in fact, what I think most people don't know is that regarding your immune system, Lyme disease causes chronic variable immune deficiency in 20% of my patients, and 85% have subclass deficiencies. You then get Bartonella on top of Lyme, you'll see again even worse immune functioning.

And what is Bartonella?

Bartonella is another bacterial infection. It's intracellular. It's showing up in 80 to 90% of my chronically ill patients at this point who say, Doc, I'm tired, I'm achy, I have joint pain, muscle pain, I have brain fog, I have mood swings, I'm depressed. I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I can't sleep. Bartonella is showing up in a large number, and most doctors don't even need to look for it. But when you combine Lyme and Bartonella, and then you get long COVID, which exhausts your T cells. So now Lyme and bart have exhausted your B cells from the bone marrow making antibodies. Long COVID exhausted your T cells, and then you get gliotoxins on top of that from mycotoxins. Now you've poisoned your immune system with these bacterial infections. No wonder people are coming down with cancer. Yeah. Your immune system is being basically impacted by these infections and toxins. The toxins are affecting the microbiome of your gut. You need a healthy microbiome because most of your immune system is in the Peyer's patches of the gut. Right. So all these toxins, if you're not supporting the microbiome with prebiotics and probiotics and even postbiotics, right, and eating a proper diet, how can you expect your immune system as you get older? Right. I'm 70. You're mid-50s. Yeah. How are we going to make it to 100 to make— be octogenarian in good health and strong? Yeah. It's not. It's not going to be as easy if you don't look for these infections and toxins.

I couldn't agree with you more. So, so to unpack all of this, because I want to try to keep this conversation narrow because there's so many, so many places that we could go. Let's just, let's just narrow in on, on, on Lyme, because I think Lyme is the, is the great undiscovered pandemic of the last century. I really do, because The number of patients that we have seen with chronic Lyme infections that actually manifested first as EBV or cytomegalovirus or another form of infection. And if you were looking myopically at it, you said, okay, I wiped out the— this, you know, the EBV titers are back in normal range and symptoms don't improve. In fact, symptoms get worse. You know, progressive cognitive decline continues, maybe even accelerates. So You know, for folks that are watching this, like, where do we start with testing, with panels, to just get a dashboard of what kind of villain we're after?

Sure. So the first thing, most important thing to learn about Lyme is it's a clinical diagnosis.

Okay.

You don't make the diagnosis based on a blood test. It's by taking a proper clinical history. Now, interesting, you learn in med school that 90% of all diagnoses are based on pulling it out of a patient.

Yeah, they say the patient will diagnose themself if you listen long enough.

And it's true.

Right.

And I can tell you, after doing this for 41 years, It is true. It is listening to the patient, but you have to know how to take a proper history. So I have on my website, cangetbetter.com, a questionnaire that we validated in 1,600 people. We published this in 2017 in the International Journal of Medicine. We looked at 3 medical practices who did Lyme disease, healthy patients. It turns out if you score over 63 on this questionnaire, it's 2 standard deviations above the mean. It's very high probability. But specifically, there is one specific factor people need to know about Lyme that shows up in 95%, which is migratory pain. If you have migratory muscle pain, migratory joint pain, where one day your knee hurts and 2 days later your shoulder hurts and 3 days later your ankle hurts, that is a hallmark symptom of Lyme, as well as migratory neuropathy. Tingling, numbness, burning, stabbing sensations, even vibration. If it migrates, that's Lyme. The number one disease that does that is Lyme. There's no other disease that causes migratory neuropathy. And we see neuropathy in 90 to 95% of our patients.

Wow.

So if you have a chronic fatiguing musculoskeletal, cardiopulmonary, neuropsychiatric illness, meaning you're tired, you're achy, you have brain fog, you can't fall asleep, you keep waking up in the middle of the night, you're anxious and depressed, which is also chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, long COVID, mold. They all overlap the symptoms. Yeah. The way you know it's Lyme clinically Lyme has good and bad days where the symptoms come and go. Not the case with viral infections causing chronic fatigue or fibro or mold that's in your body all the time.

Sort of consistent, not transient.

Correct.

Okay.

Also, you will see in women, especially around their menstrual cycle, when the estrogen goes down, the bugs come out. So all of a sudden women will tell you right before the menstrual cycle or during or right after, all their Lyme symptoms get worse. So if you have a chronic fatiguing illness where you have good and bad days, and it's right before your menstrual cycle, it gets worse with migratory pain. And then you start looking at Lyme-specific bands. And also, let's say you took an antibiotic for a urinary tract infection and you said, gee, my joint pain and my brain fog are better. Or you said, gee, I'm achy all over my body and I can't think. That's a Herxheimer reaction.

Wow.

You're killing off the bacteria, you're getting a cytokine storm. So reactions to antibiotics when you don't know you have Lyme is a clue for someone that Lyme might be there. But there's a game I like playing called Lyme Bingo. And, and, and in this game, you get a good lab like IGeneX Labs in California that checks for 9 different strains of Lyme. So why don't the regular blood tests work?

Right.

Well, the 2-tiered test by the CDC of an ELISA followed by a Western blot was done on one strain of Lyme disease, which is the B31 laboratory strain. That is not the strain that is in the environment that is making most people sick. So the tests are not going to be reliable. So we use IGeneX Labs, If you get a 23-band USP-C, outer surface protein C, 31-band outer surface protein A, 34-band outer surface protein B, 39-band, very specific, or an 83-93. So you get one of these bands with a chronic fatiguing musculoskeletal illness coming and going, good and bad days, migratory pain, better or worse with antibiotics.

Mm-hmm.

Bingo, you have Lyme disease. And it's literally that simple. You score high on this questionnaire on cangetbetter.com, over 63, migratory pain, even one band tells you you have been exposed. You do not use CDC criteria. CDC even had this on their website, by the way, a while back.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay, so, so somebody that has a profile that fits the description that you just said, On your website, does it say exactly what— can they get this test on the website? I assume this is Quest Laboratories.

So I call this the— well, so the test itself you'll get from iGenics, but the— I call this the Horowitz EmSIDS Questionnaire, HMQ. The link for it is on cangetbetter.com. You just download it from the site. Okay. And the nice part about it is it's, it's 38 questions, questions that you'll get in many chronic fatiguing illnesses. And it comes from my good friend Joe Boriscano. I just adjusted it and and statistically validated it. But it's nice because when you go to your doctor, most doctors have 15 minutes for patients, right, if they're in an HMO model. I was doing that kind of medicine when I first came out. These complex chronically ill patients are an average of 45 minutes or an hour that we have to take with them.

Right.

But if you hand them this questionnaire, you can just look at the questionnaire and go, question 1 in 22: fevers, day sweats, night sweats, chills, flushing, air hunger, I can't catch my breath, and a cough. Those are symptoms of a parasite called Babesia, which show up in 60 to 80% of my Lyme patients. So it's like having malaria on top of Lyme. So, so by just taking this questionnaire and bringing it to your doctor and checking migratory pain, if you then get one of these bands back, you've got your diagnosis. It's not so difficult to diagnose, but this questionnaire really helps.

Wow. Now, the treatment for Lyme, I think, is where you have so much divergence. Some treat it solely as a viral pathogen, ignoring bacterial and parasitic co-infections. Some will just look at Lyme titers and say, well, once we've done the doxycycline for 21 days and Lyme titers, you know, down, that's, you know, that's all she wrote. And then weeks, months later, patient starts coming down with these types of patients. They don't— these types of symptoms, they don't link it back to that diagnosis. They think it's something No. And now you're off in the wrong direction. Yeah. Listen, there's what I share on this podcast, and then there's what I share with my inner circle. If you've been following me for a while, you know how I hold nothing back here. But my VIP community, that's where the real magic happens. Picture this: you're struggling with energy crashes, brain fog, or just feeling like you're not operating at your peak, and you don't know where to get real answers. But here's what really sets this apart. You're not just getting my insights. When I have incredible guests on the podcast, VIP members get to submit questions for a private podcast segment. So that world-renowned expert we just interviewed, you get exclusive access to their knowledge tailored to your specific situation. This section is under the private podcast section in the Ultimate Human Community. And speaking of exclusive, you're getting my personal protocols, the exact tools I use for water fasting, gut optimization, and morning routines that have taken me decades to perfect. This isn't theory. This is what works in the real world. The community launches challenges throughout the year where you get direct access to me and my network of experts. It's like having a personal health advisory board for less than $100 a month. Your health is your wealth, and this investment pays dividends for life. Join the VIP community at theultimatehuman.com/vip and step into your ultimate potential. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

So, so as you said, and I think people need to really know this, 14.5% of the world's population has been exposed to Lyme according to BMJ. one of 7 people.

Wow.

Now, that's, I believe, probably— and you said it earlier— this is, this is a pandemic, right? We're in a really bad problem with this disease. So, so here's the problem with it. About 10, 11 years ago, Johns Hopkins researchers, same time it came out of the University of New Haven with Eva Schappi's group, Kim Lewis from Northeastern University, Stanford, they all came out with a very important, uh, study about Lyme disease, that it wasn't a normal bacteria. It's what's called a biofilm So how does that differ? And this is, by the way, how I came up with an answer and what I believe is a cure for chronic Lyme.

It tests itself, right?

Correct. So what are biofilm persister bacteria? Tuberculosis and leprosy. So when I was doing HIV medicine back at Mount Sinai in my residency, a lot of people were coming in with Mycobacterium avium intracellulare. They were coming with TB. This was right in the middle of the HIV epidemic. I got used to using tuberculosis drugs.

Mm-hmm.

And I always wanted to use these TB drugs in Lyme, but I needed an excuse. So back in 2015, when Johns Hopkins said, hey, this is a biofilm persister bacteria, and I went, oh, you don't just mean it persists, you mean it persists like tuberculosis and leprosy. Now, how do they cure leprosy? Rifampin and dapsone for a year.

Mm.

What did I do? I looked at the qualities of this drug called dapsone. So dapsone, number one, is anti-inflammatory. And as we're about to discuss during this podcast, every disease we're going to talk about today— ADD, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, Alzheimer's disease, allergies and asthma, autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, cancer, cardiovascular disease, digestive disorders, irritable bowel, inflammatory bowel, hormonal disorders, mood disorders, pain— every one of them has all 16 inflammatory factors on the MSIDS model that I discovered in Lyme. How do I know? Wow. If you want to do a deep dive in the medical literature, it's all in Ending Chronic Illness. But the point about this that's important to realize is by looking at the literature for Lyme disease and finding these 16 factors and discovering that Dapsone is number one anti-inflammatory, because all the diseases I mentioned have all 16 factors and they're all driven by inflammation, right? All chronic disease is driven by chronic inflammation. But where's the inflammation coming from? Bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, microbiome issues in the gut. I'm coming from leaky gut and intestinal hyperpermeability with mast cell activation, vitamin mineral deficiencies, sleep disorders. I call these the 6 rivers of inflammation...

Yeah.

...driving an ocean of inflammation, which then causes mitochondrial dysfunction. Your hormones go off. You have POTS dysautonomia and autonomic dysfunction. Your immune system doesn't work. You develop liver disease with fatty liver disease driving metabolic syndrome. and liver inflammation, as well as pain syndromes and mood disorders. So, in Lyme, when I— all these 16 factors were causing problems. When I looked at Dapsone and I said, hold on, this drug is anti-inflammatory, gets up into the central nervous system, so I might not need IV drugs.

Mm.

It hits autoimmunity. Lyme causes autoimmune reactions in the body.

Mm.

Many people who came to me said, I have lupus, 'cause my antinuclear antibodies were positive. It was Lyme causing antinuclear antibodies. Or, Doc, I've been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, 'cause their rheumatoid factors were positive. But the marker for rheumatoid, CCP, cyclic citrulline, was negative. It was the Lyme causing autoimmune reactions, causing rheumatoid factors.

Autoimmune factor, yeah.

Right? So, the point being, dapsone was anti-inflammatory, got up into the CNS, affected autoimmunity, and it hit these biofilm persister forms, right? While lowering down inflammation. So, I decided to try it by adding in doxycycline or minocycline. I published my first study in 2016, it was a home run out of the park from the beginning. Wow. My wife, who had been sick for 25 years with chronic Lyme, is now 8 years in full remission since she did Dapsone combination therapy. Wow. And I have many people in full remission from this protocol.

So it can't just be that one silver bullet?

No, no, it's not. The, the point I'm making here is when we believed before with Lyme that was chronically persistent because it had different forms of the bacteria, cell wall forms, amoxicillin and ivermectin hits the cell wall Or the bug goes inside the cells, the intracellular compartment. That's where doxycycline or Zithromax or rifampin or quinolones go. Or it had what's called cystic forms, L-form, cell wall deficient forms. That was Flagyl or Plaquenil or metronidazole. We thought the bug kept changing forms, but until 2015, we didn't know it had biofilm persister forms.

Ah.

And I have now published my 11th article in the medical journals Right? There are 10 of them are by me. One is by Tufts University, where they showed that giving rifampin and dapsone cured Lyme in the animal model. We have a model in culture showing when you add dapsone to doxy or minnow and rifampin and zithro, it lowers down these biofilm persisters. So we now have 11 published studies, including the last one on Alzheimer's disease, showing that Lyme can be a cause. Before, it was a theory. It was hypothetical.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Difference between association, causation. We've now proven it. But the key was hitting the biofilm persister forms of the bacteria. So, yes, you're going to hear people do IV therapies for years. I had a woman come in with 1 year of IV Rocephin nonstop. She stopped the drug and within 1 month she relapsed. I gave her Dapsone combination therapy. She went years in remission with a 9-week oral generic protocol.

Wow.

So now it took me almost my whole clinical career to figure this out. This wasn't overnight.

But it was almost like right in front of your face. It's just that, you know, when we get off on the wrong track and we think, wow, this is, this is morphing like a, like a virus, you know, it's, uh, you know, sort of COVID replicated into less infectious forms, right?

Right.

But so we, we've— when we start thinking that this replicatory cycle where it's actually changing forms, you, you lost the genesis that no, it's, it's always been there. It's just been It has a biofilm that's protecting it not only from some of these drugs, but also protecting it from detection.

That is exactly it. Your immune system cannot recognize these bugs when it's under the biofilms. That's exactly right. And in fact, why do you go to the dentist?

Because then you don't have the antibodies.

Right. And why do you go to the dentist and take the plaque off your teeth? It's because Porphyromonas gingivalis, which causes a cause of Alzheimer's, is under the biofilms on your teeth. That's why you have to have the plaque taken off. We go to the dentist several times per year to do it. These biofilm infections, by the way, they've been around forever. Endocarditis of the heart, Candida infections of the gut is a biofilm infection. Salmonella is a biofilm infection. Joint infections, right? When you get a joint replacement, these are biofilm infections that happen. So these biofilm infections have been around for a long time, but for Lyme, it was not known until about a decade ago.

Wow.

That— and I tried putting in, by the way, for a randomized multicenter placebo trial, Unfortunately, the NIH turned it down because of politics, and that's why I'm so happy that Senator Kennedy, you know, finally got in there. Secretary Kennedy got in. Yeah, we need somebody at the helm who really is taking this seriously.

Yeah, and I think he is taking it seriously. And I mean, there, there are Lyme committees and subcommittees, and there is a bright light being shined on— shown on this disease right now. Because again, the, the end destination for a lot of these chronic infections is our other Neuropathologies, and now we're down the road of these neuropathologies, and we missed the genesis of them. So can we? I want to stick with Lyme for a minute, and then I definitely want to get into Alzheimer's and cognitive decline because you know first of all it's very vindicating for me to see that someone with your level of credentials and experience is is giving validity to the fact that a lot of these pathogenic invaders. Cause or mimic these chronic conditions. And I have long since held the belief that autoimmune is not idiopathic. It doesn't just spontaneously and randomly— the immune system just wakes up one day and decides to attack you, whatever random tissue it's attacking. There is something is calling the immune system to that location, whether it's a virus or parasite or mold or mycotoxin or, you know, Lyme. And having the diagnostics to give us that data so that we know who the villain is is the first step.

No, it's crucial. So I'll take 2 autoimmune diseases. Let's take MS, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis. All 16 MSIDS factors that I had published in the literature for Lyme, and this is in my new book, End the Chronic Illness, apply to MS. So I've had many patients come in with MS, Except the demyelination was not due to multiple sclerosis, which has now been shown to Epstein-Barr variants. But also, as you said, it's the immune system attacking from what? Chlamydia pneumoniae, right? By the way, MS was not in the Faroe Islands years ago until the British invaded the Faroe Islands. They knew that there was an infectious cause for MS from years ago. Rheumatoid arthritis— there's a bacteria in your mouth called streptococcus pneumoniae. If you have this bacteria, it tells your immune system to cause autoimmune reactions in the body, as well as having the wrong microbiome in your gut. You have the wrong Prevotella species, Firmicutes, Bifidobacterium. You don't have the right short-chain fatty acids in your, your gut.

Mm-hmm.

That's gonna drive some of these autoimmune reactions. So in both MS and in rheumatoid arthritis, and I've had many patients come to me with these diagnoses, we got them off their methotrexate, We stopped their ABC drugs for MS with Avonex, Betaseron, Copaxone, steroids, because it wasn't true MS. It was Lyme and Bartonella and mold driving an autoimmune demyelinating disease. But we also had to look at the microbiome. We still had to address the mitochondrial dysfunction.

Mm-hmm.

Their hormones were thrown off from the Lyme. So we still had to look at the 16 points. But once the bugs, the bacteria, and the toxins, these 2 major factors which were driving autoimmunity, these people got tremendously better.

Wow.

So, and even the people who have true autoimmune disease, you have a patient, it's in my book, the patient had true rheumatoid arthritis, but methotrexate and steroids and Arava and Enbrel, they weren't working. Why? He came in with migratory pain. Well, migratory pain is the hallmark of Lyme. Rheumatoid arthritis is bilateral symmetric pain. We treat it as Lyme, and then all of a sudden his autoimmune drugs worked. They weren't working because he had bacteria. and parasites like Babesia that were helping to drive this autoimmune inflammation in his body. It's no longer enough to name a disease and throw drugs at it. You must unlayer every illness into these 16 points, especially for you and I, people that are healthy.

Yeah.

Right? I feel great, but I have to look at my own toxin levels. I have to make sure I don't have infections. I'm taking prebiotics and probiotics. I'm doing everything I can to make sure I'm going to strive for these 16 points because I want to live a long, healthy life and optimize my health. But how can you optimize if you've got infections and toxins and issues with your microbiome? Yeah. So you've got to look at all of these factors if you want to stay well, even if you're not, you know, a sick—

Oh, I totally agree. Preventative zone. So, um, can we go through those 16?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah.

Because I, I think, I think this would make a lot of sense because, you know, these, these are ways to shine bright lights on areas where we're not normally looking in a human body. So where do we start? Obviously, we start with the panel, but—

Right. So let's start. So these 16 factors, let's start with the 6 rivers of inflammation that cause an ocean of inflammation. Okay. As we said, all chronic disease, we're seeing a real rise in chronic diseases. As you said, 86% of our healthcare costs, 70% of the deaths, 18% of the GDP in this country is from chronic illness. And we don't have a model, right, to address chronic illness. So it turns out when I did a dive into the medical literature and I looked for ADD, autism, all 16 points. So what are the 6— what are the first 6?

Mm-hmm.

Infections, there's 4 types: A, bacterial; B, viral; C, fungal; D, parasitic. So the bacteria that most of the time in my patient population will cause problems are intracellular. They're inside the cells. That could be Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Mycoplasma fermentans, um, chlamydia pneumoniae, Borrelia burgdorferi Lyme disease, other Borrelia species. 18 species of Bartonella. So whenever these bacteria go into the intracellular compartment, they cause a huge amount of inflammation, and you get chronic fatiguing, musculoskeletal, neuropsychiatric illness, right? So that's just one piece of the puzzle, especially when you've got these intracellular bacteria. But you can have strep also causing an autoimmune reaction with PANS/PANDAS, right? Not just causing acute rheumatic fever or glomerulonephritis, causing autoimmune reactions. And Lyme does the same thing with these bacteria. autoimmune reactions, right? So that's one piece of the puzzle is bacteria.

Bacteria.

Viruses. CMV, Epstein-Barr, herpesvirus 6, but also HSV-1, HSV-2, parvovirus. Many of these viruses are associated with Alzheimer's dementia. They're associated with autoimmune illness. Many diabetics, if you're not yet a type 1 diabetic, they show that early on in life, some of these viral infections will cause that autoimmune issue to start coming out. And most people have been exposed to these bacteria and viruses. Now we've got parasites. Toxo is one-third of the world's population, and Babesia microti, Babesia duncani, Babesia oedicolii— these different species of parasites are now getting in, driving inflammatory reactions in the body. So if anyone's listening and says, I have day sweats, I have night sweats, I have shaking chills, I have air hunger, I can't seem to catch my breath, or a cough— those are classic symptoms of babesiosis. We see this in a large percentage of our chronically ill population. And then Candida, you know, I, I didn't really learn about Candida except in immunosuppressed patients in med school. Candida syndrome— these people, let's say that you and I are well, but let's say you start falling asleep at 10 o'clock in the morning after breakfast, or at 2:30 in the afternoon, you just take a dive. That oftentimes is reactive hypoglycemia due to metabolic syndrome and too much insulin spikes, right?

Mm-hmm.

But Candida syndrome is associated with many of these people with hypoglycemia. So let's say people are optimizing their health. They're doing high-intensity interval training.

Yeah.

They're getting enough sleep. They're— they've got a clean diet. They're off sugar, but they're tired all the time.

Yeah.

Many of these patients I found have Candida overgrowth in their gut because they took courses of antibiotics and the doctors never gave them probiotics with prebiotics to get the right bacteria. I've had Candida syndrome. I know what it is. My wife has had it. It causes the same symptoms as chronic Lyme, as long COVID, you'll see exactly the same symptoms. Even with mold, it's fatigue, it's brain fog, it's muscle and joint pain. You treat with fluconazole or itraconazole or nystatin, the right— all of a sudden their fatigue and brain fog is better.

Wow.

So all 4— bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi— need to be looked at in this model, especially for people like us that are healthy but want to stay strong and healthy as we get older. The second is toxins, as we've talked about. Mold toxins, they're showing up in up to 90% of my patients with ochratoxins, gliotoxins, trichotoxins.

I'm in the mold capital of the world right here in Miami.

Miami, yes. And many other areas. You know, I think people, as the weather has changed and people have gotten flooding now from their basements, from changes in the climate, a lot of people are getting mold. We had it in our house. It was a $150,000 renovation because they did not shut off the chimney. and the water was coming down. We had black mold. Now, my wife and I never got sick, and I wondered, was it all these supplements that I'm taking all day long that's kind of—

I saw your supplement.

Oh, I have some with me if you want to see. You know, and we're going to talk about these inflammatory pathways, why I suggest— we'll get to this afterwards— 4 inflammatory pathways specifically that need to be either stimulated or blocked to stay healthy, because these infections and these toxins that are driving inflammation There are certain underlying inflammatory pathways that we can work with nutraceuticals and diet that can kind of balance this and keep it healthy. But so there's a test from Real-Time Laboratory in Texas. You take 2,000 milligrams of glutathione, you get in a sauna, you sweat a little bit to mobilize the toxins. We're finding mold in a lot. And again, you can do serum mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum. But a lot of times you need to do like an EDTA challenge or a DMSA challenge to look for metals.

Is it, is it, is it the 2,000? Uh, mgs of glutathione, is that oral? So you take it—

I actually do it orally.

Okay, take it, go in, what, a liter of fluid while you're in there? Maybe mineral water, or no, no fluids while you're in there?

No, no. So we, we make sure they drink an 8-ounce glass of purified water every 15 minutes to hydrate. They take oral liposomal glutathione, get in the sauna to sweat for 15, 20 minutes. We found the people that didn't take glutathione and didn't sweat, you don't see the mold toxin show up as much. So, and by the way, we're just talking about a few toxins among I know you know this.

Yeah, yeah.

Thousands that are getting into the body.

Right.

Right. So they have now shown that— the CDC has now shown between 150 and 200 toxins show up in everybody's blood and urine on a regular basis. The truth is, is it's thousands of toxins, all carcinogenic, affecting your hormones. Why are women having a problem getting pregnant? Why are men's sperm count down by 66%? It's from these environmental disrupting chemicals.

It's going to another 1% a year. And female fertility rates are going down. Male sperm counts are going down. I mean, these two are diverging.

These toxins are affecting the hormone receptors in the body, which is why people were having problems with fertility.

Yeah.

Right? So, and they're blocking your hormones. So your hormone testing looks normal for your thyroids and your adrenals, but you're getting blockage of these hormone receptor sites by the environmental toxins. So infections and toxins are the first two most important, but number 3 and 4 is the microbiome of your gut, followed by leaky gut, intestinal hyperpermeability, and mast cell activation. So every disease I looked at, from autism, ADHD, Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic fatigue, fibro, mood disorders, it was an abnormal microbiome of the gut with the gut-brain axis that was driving inflammation. So if you've taken any courses of antibiotics without the right probiotics, and even if you haven't, these environmental toxins are destroying the microbiomes of people's gut. So I take 4 different probiotics a day.

Really?

with a prebiotic from Orthomolecular called MGP Fiber. It's got soluble and insoluble fiber, so it's taking some of those toxins in the liver and enterohepatic circulation. I do that with fermented foods, yeah. And I'm even taking a postbiotic called PDC Activate with a type of a strain of a bacteria that drives my immune system to get my natural killer cells and T cells more activated for viruses. So the microbiome is extremely important. If you don't have enough short-chain fatty acids in the gut, From these bacteria, you're going to get inflammation in your body. And I had leaky gut. Do you know I had asthma and allergies early in my life and did not know that I had mast cell activation and histamine sensitivity? I was allergic to over 50 to 60 foods.

Wow.

I healed my gut, got off these histamine foods. I have no more asthma. My allergies are much better. So did I have to take asthma meds for the rest of my life? No. Yeah, I needed to get to the underlying causes.

Right.

Of where the allergies and asthma from. Gosh, asthma's such a pandemic. So, so 3 and 4 is your microbiome, leaky gut. 5 is vitamin mineral deficiencies. Now, most people will check B12, but they may not know there's a marker of B12 deficiency called methylmalonic acid. We see a lot of people with occult B12 deficiency, or they check their minerals, but they don't know that 99% of their minerals are inside the red blood cells. So you need magnesium for 300 detoxification enzymes in your body. So you got all these toxins in, If you don't have enough magnesium, you can't get rid of them. And then you're getting asthma, irritable bowel, and back spasms. What do these all have in common? Magnesium deficiency, right?

Wow.

So it's not a question of taking Robaxin for your back spasm or asthma sprays. You need to look for magnesium deficiency. If you don't have copper, you need it for superoxide dismutase to deal with all your free radical oxidative stress. If you don't have zinc, you have an aldehyde problem in your body from your phase 1 liver detox. But you have to check red blood cell zinc, red blood cell magnesium, red blood cell copper. We find up to 20% of these chronically ill patients are all mineral deficient.

Now, are these, are these intracellular nutrient assays? There's not serum blood studies like you would get at a normal LabCorp that says your magnesium—

Oh, no, those you get at LabCorp and Quest.

LabCorp and Quest, but they're not serum blood tests, they're intracellular.

We do serum. And we do red blood cell. Okay.

But it's through standard labs.

So it's okay. Yeah. BioReference, Quest, LabCorp, all standard labs.

So you could just add that diagnostic code and just do RBC, RBC hemoglobin.

Absolutely. And even R79.9 in this ICD-9 code is like, you know, laboratory abnormality.

Right.

We've never had patients had problems getting insurance to cover these tests. Okay. So vitamin minerals. And the 6th is insomnia, sleep disorders. Now, here's the problem with sleep. All 16 MSIDS factors that we're talking about But Lyme causes people to not fall asleep, keep waking up in the middle of the night. So does Bartonella. But you might have a young, thin woman who might say, I have sleep apnea. It's like 10% of young, thin women even have obstructive sleep apnea. Or men, as they get older, have benign prostatic hypertrophy. Or mood disorders, depression, anxiety, are keeping people up at night.

Yeah.

If you have insomnia, you get an elevation in cytokines like interleukin-6, And that throws off your whole system. So if you don't get to sleep, right, nothing else you're doing, right, you're trying to pull these nails, nothing is going to work. So those are the 6 main factors: infections, toxins, microbiome issues, leaky gut with mast cell activation, vitamin mineral deficiencies, and sleep disorders. Wow. Right? So those are the 6 main factors. So now you've got all this inflammation coming from different sources. It has downstream effects. What is the downstream? Number one is mitochondrial dysfunction.

Yeah, the genesis of everything.

I mean, you know this well because I know your work.

It's the genesis of aging.

Yeah. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. If you have mitochondrial dysfunction, your brain cells don't work. The heart doesn't work after heart attacks. It causes liver dysfunction, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Same thing with Crohn's. You need functioning mitochondria for every cell in every, you know, organ in your body.

Yes.

But there's nothing surrounding the mitochondria like your DNA of histones to protect it from the free radicals.

Mm-hmm.

There's nothing protecting your mitochondria. So everyone is doing mitochondrial regeneration, which I do daily.

Mm-hmm.

ATP 360 from Research Nutritionals, CoQ10, acetyl-L-carnitine. Um, people will take certain probiotics to get urolithin A to get higher. So I, I do ergothioneine from MitoPrime from Zymogen. I'm doing this daily.

Mm-hmm.

But if you're doing mitochondrial generation and you still have free radicals attacking your mitochondria, You might say, well, why am I still tired?

Yeah.

If I'm doing mitochondrial generation, I'm getting to sleep and I'm exercising because the infections and the toxins and the microbiome had not been adequately addressed. So your mitochondria is still under stress. And then the hormones get thrown off because this inflammation affects the hypothalamic-pituitary axis. So men in their 20s come in with low testosterone and they're coming in on beta-HCG shots and creams. And I'm thinking, Hold on, nobody figured out why a 25-year-old male has low testosterone? Lyme is the number one cause of low testosterone in my population. And how do we get it back up? We give them clomiphene and Arimidex. I give them a drug that they use for women in pregnancy, which stimulates luteinizing hormone in the brain, tells the testicles to make testosterone. No shots, no creams.

Right.

We get— we re-get the pituitary to kind of jumpstart again, and then we give them Arimidex and AstraZol to stop the testosterone from aromatizing to estrogen, right? I get the testosterone from 100 to 600 with a low dose of these drugs that are all generic, right? Easy to get from your doctor.

Yeah, our clinical director has done that for young males for, for years. I mean, because, you know, putting these young men on, on hormone replacement therapy and starting them on testosterone injections in their early 20s is mind-numbing. I mean, that's—

it shrinks the testicles, it shrinks the testicles, lowers the sperm count, right? I mean, you're not gonna have children easily. So you have to get to the— and I don't know why this happened in medicine, but they're like naming a disease and throwing drugs at it instead of getting to the underlying causes. And a lot of doctors and patients out there don't realize that is a very common cause. But also the adrenal gland. This may sound surprising to you, but 99% of my patients have low adrenal function.

Wow.

Everyone on a DHEA cortisol salivary test— not blood, salivary testing— We find phase 1, phase 2, phase 3—

Cortisol, aldosterone, like all of the—

Well, especially aldosterone's more with the blood pressure control, but DHEA, cortisol thrown off in most of this population because they're under stress. So let's say you're optimizing your health, you're exercising, you're doing— you're taking mitochondrial supplements, you're getting to sleep. A lot of people have never checked their adrenals through a salivary test. And we're finding in most, even in long COVID, all 16 MSIDS factors we're talking about today, and it's all in End the Chronic Illness. It's the last chapter of my book. V is for virus. All 16 factors are affected in long COVID. I published it 2 years ago in the journal Microorganism.

Wow.

Most doctors don't know that adrenal support is needed for these people with long COVID. It's not just Epstein-Barr and HHV-6 reactivation, right? And your serotonin goes down 'cause the Bifidobacterium in your gut was thrown off. So now they're giving them fluvoxamine, this drug that raises your serotonin. But why? 'Cause it threw off your microbiome from the COVID Affecting your bifido, but they're not going backwards to look at the biochemistry and the biology. It's a systems biology problem. Yeah. So we've got mitochondria, hormones, then we've got the immune system thrown off by these toxins, as we said, and infections or autoimmunity. Lyme causes ANAs, rheumatoid factors, antithyroglobulin.

ANAs, like just, just a high antinuclear antibody. One of my favorite biohacks outside of breathwork breathwork by far is mineral salts. Baja Gold Sea Salt. It's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient or fatty acid deficient, we are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this in water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today. I actually made a grass-fed steak with grass-fed butter, and I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary, and I sprinkled Baja sea salt all over the top. Try it. It'll be your new favorite for cooking too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks. I don't know, a $15 or $20 bag of this will probably last you 5 years. It's literally the world's best biohacking secret. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

So antinuclear antibodies are caused by environmental toxins and Lyme disease. Wow. Same thing with rheumatoid factors. People come in and say, I think I have Hashimoto's thyroiditis. My antithyroglobulin and antithyroid peroxidase are positive. Lyme causes that through a process called molecular mimicry.

Yes.

So your immune system is trying to go after the bug, but instead of just going after the tail of the spirochete, it goes after your thyroid. It goes after your pituitary.

Because the proteins are similar, right?

Correct. It goes after your myelin sheaths. You get anti-myelin antibodies, you get demyelination, which looks like MS or looks like ALS. 10% of our ALS patients who came in did not have true ALS.

Wow.

They had Lyme-induced ALS. We were able to stop the process and reverse it.

Wow.

Right now, most unfortunately, are genetic with superoxide dismutase problems. But if you're the 1 out of 10 that's lucky, they didn't know that the demyelination was from infections, from toxins, from the wrong microbiome. So in other words, all these factors on the MCAS spectrum Yeah. Are interacting with all the rest, causing demyelination. And then your immune system is suppressed by these toxins and infections with autoimmune reactions. Then we have the liver. 1/3 of the world's population has fatty liver. Why is that a problem? And it's caused by PFAS, by the way.

Yeah. Non-alcoholic fatty liver.

Non-alcoholic.

Just not drinking.

It's called— yeah, it's called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So why is that a problem? It causes metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. and you get cirrhosis later on in life with liver cancer, and your doctor never knew because you had no symptoms. These are silent— a silent liver disease that is affecting 1/3 of the world's population.

Wow.

And metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance is related to Alzheimer's disease. It's related to cardiovascular disease. It's related to cancer. So every one of these MSIDS factors is affecting every other disease that's there. And this is not known, and I didn't even know this until I started writing Ending Chronic Disease. So we're dealing with the liver, the hormones, the mitochondrial, autoimmune, immune pain syndromes. People would come in. I had a woman come in on 480 milligrams of morphine sulfate for pain. This was a young woman. Oh, you're gonna love this story. Wow. She's 15 years old. She comes from the South. She's actually from the Tennessee area. She comes in with her mom.

No trauma? No, no, no post-surgical. It was just pain.

Just comes in. Her mother flies her up in a wheelchair from the South. And she says to me, I've seen 8 doctors, including 7 neurologists. No one can figure out what's wrong with my daughter. She's tired, she's achy. She stands up and she starts passing out. You'll probably know what that's about to be.

Yeah.

And she's got this incredible pain, this neuropathic pain in her body. I'm morphine. The pain is not controlled with 480 milligrams of morphine.

Oh my God.

So I take it, I give her the HMQ, the Horowitz-Emsitz Questionnaire, and she says, yes, I have migratory pain all over my body. Now, I'm going to show you how I made a diagnosis without a blood test. I went, well, there's only 7 diseases in medicine that cause migratory pain. You don't have lupus, right? Based on the way she was presenting with butterfly rashes. She didn't have gouty arthritis. She didn't have inflammatory bowel disease. She didn't have Reiter syndrome. So, in other words, she, she didn't have these other diseases that cause migratory pain, right?

Mm-hmm.

She then— we stood her up with her mom. And she started— her heart rate went to 140. She had POTS dysautonomia, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. What are the 4 major causes of POTS? Lyme disease, Bartonella, long COVID, which at the time when I saw her, COVID wasn't even around, and mold. Those are the 4 major causes that usually cause postural orthostatic tachycardia, although Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and Marfan's and other things with, as you know, with hypermobility syndrome can be affected by it.

Yeah, my daughter has it.

Yeah, she has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, has POTS. So we knew already, all right, so it's the POTS that's causing these pseudo seizures that she was having. So she picks up her shirt, I examine her, and she's got these stretch marks across her body that are purplish. And she was never overweight. She had the classic Bartonella stretch marks that were present across her breasts, across her back.

Never heard of Bartonella stretch marks.

They looked like somebody gained and lost 200 pounds. And these are very classic for Bartonella. So right now, migratory pain, I knew she had Lyme. Right. POTS, we knew because we stood her up and her heart rate went up and her blood pressure dropped. We knew she had Bartonella because she had the classic rash, like Lyme has the bullseye-type rash, which half the time— I've heard of the rash.

I haven't heard of the stretch marks. So, so, so this is a classic.

If you look it up, I can show you the journals. Yeah, no, I believe you. They're purplish or they're whitish, and a lot of times they're perpendicular to the skin plane, but a lot of times they're whitish and they look like a Christmas tree pattern where they're perpendicular. and they can be purplish, um, and they change, by the way, when we treat it. But she also said to me, yes, questions 1 and 22 on the HCP, I have drenching sweats. Now, this girl's 15 years old. Now, when men would come in with drenching sweats, I used to say, I'll bet you're in manopause. They, they like the joke, by the way.

Yeah.

Um, but so she had Babesia. So without ever doing a blood test, I said to the mother, I know why you saw 8 doctors and your daughter's sick. She has Lyme she has Babesia, she has Bartonella, and she has POTS. So she left the office, we drew the blood, I put her on— and at the time we weren't doing as much with Dapsone— I put her on doxycycline and rifampin. I gave her salt, fluids, and licorice to raise her blood pressure.

Salt, fluids, and licorice?

Just to raise her blood pressure, right? Um, and we started treating the Babesia with some Malarone. She flies in one month later. This girl was in a wheelchair unable to walk. She's off the morphine, she's walking out of her wheelchair, and she has no pain whatsoever after 1 month of treatment of her Lyme, Babesia, Bartonella, and treating her POTS.

Now you would use something more—

Now I would use Dapsone therapy with these biofilm agents. At the time, we didn't even know this. But the point being, that was the 90% we talked about, is how do you make a diagnosis? You pull it out of the history out of the patient. It was by taking a good clinical history and examining her.

Wow.

And I've had patients in wheelchairs who couldn't walk. We treated their parasite with Babesia. They get out of wheelchairs and they start walking because the parasite was affecting their immune system and making them so weak they couldn't. Or a woman who couldn't talk for 5 years. Words would not come out of her mouth. It was called dysarthria and aphasia, like if she had a stroke. She went to Mass General. Nobody could figure it out. It was Bartonella. We treated Bart and she started saying words. So I have seen these kind of crazy cases where people have seen 10, 20, 30 doctors. The key that I'm noticing for all these chronic fatiguing musculoskeletal neurocytes is you've got to go back to the 16-point MSIDS model. It's, it's where I'm finding the solutions. And I've done this for 41 years.

Does that panel catch all of these? I mean, the panel that you just described earlier in the podcast, it catches all these? Because I've got to put a link to that. to that in the, in the podcast notes.

Yes. So, so, and also, you know, in my prior books, but in Ending Chronic Illness, I discussed the panels in the first 30 or 40 pages. I discussed the panels for Lyme and Bartonella. What are my favorite labs? What, what are the labs you're going to do for mold? What are the labs we use for the adrenal dysfunction? All of this is in the book, so you can take it to your doctor, um, and you can work with your functional medicine doctor or, or train your doctor, right? And just teach them what these tests— but everything is laid out clearly as a roadmap to get these people back to health.

Wow. And then once you have this data on the pathogenic invader, it says it can't be as simple as that short course of antibiotics and then a long course of probiotics, or is it?

So the interesting part for Lyme is for the people— like, my wife was sick for 25 years with Lyme disease, and before I knew the dose of Dapsone that was needed to cure Lyme— and I'll tell you, the universe is very kind to me. So I was, I was in prayer years ago of, please let me have solutions for these chronically ill patients. So what happens? A guy comes into my office, he's 7 years sick. I give him the Dapsone protocol, but at the time I was using 100 milligrams a day. He comes in month 4 and he says, Doc, I'm feeling terrible. I said, oh, what's going on? He said, oh my God, I'm so tired. I'm achy. I have brain fog. I said, oh, what are you taking? Well, I'm taking Doxy. I'm taking rifampin. I'm taking Dapsone twice a day. I said, oh my God. Oh my God. You're taking too much Dapsone. You're taking double the dose. I said, stop it. Come back in a month. He comes back in a month. Now, he's sick for 7 years, and he goes, Doc, I feel amazing. I went, huh? He said, I'm off all my treatment. My energy is fabulous. My brain fog is gone. The joint— I went, what? I said, don't do anything. I don't want you taking any more medication. Come back in 3 months. He comes back in 3 months. He says, I'm well.

Is he still on it?

No.

No, he's off.

Because he took double— he took 100 milligrams of Dapsone for 1 month. which I didn't know at the time was enough to get Lyme in remission. We thought we didn't know the dosage.

Right.

So for Bartonella, it's a little different. But ultimately what we found out is it's a 9-week oral protocol. So my wife, who did 50 of Dapsone for a year, said, Doc, hubby, I feel great. She stopped it. She was PCR positive for Lyme in her blood.

Wow.

We did 100 of Dapsone.

Huh? The 100 of Dapsone.

We did 100 of Dapsone for 6 months. She said, I feel great. She stopped it. She relapsed. I said, you know, honey, this guy just came into my medical office. He took a double dose of Dapsone. Would you like being my guinea pig? She said, absolutely. She took 100 of Dapsone twice a day. She's 8 years in remission.

For how long?

8 years.

No, no, no. For how long?

1 month.

1 month. 30 days.

But now she had done a year of Dapsone at 50 milligrams.

Right.

6 months of Dapsone at 100. So she did a year and a half of lower dose and and she lowered the biofilm persistral load of the bacteria. So she only needed 1 month. But ultimately, I got this protocol after tweaking this and playing around with thousands.

Yeah.

It's a 9-week oral protocol. So if you don't have Babesia and Bartonella or mold, and you take this protocol for chronic Lyme, you will most likely go into remission. I published this. It's at least 50% of the people that go into long-term remission. Most of the people that don't, They have active parasites like Babesia. They have other intracellular bacteria like Bartonella. If you have Bartonella, you need 4 2-week pulses of oral— this oral generic protocol, and it's only 6 days of Dapsone, right? Just 6 days. And that will put a lot of these Bartonella patients into full remission.

Wow.

So I have gotten this protocol down to very short-term oral antibiotics while giving you 4 probiotics twice a day, 500 trillion of these bacteria.

4 probiotics twice a day.

So no C. diff, no problems with yeast overgrowth with nystatin.

And you can take that with the antibiotic, right?

But I'm also giving you— I'm blocking and stimulating 4 inflammatory pathways. So I'm blocking inflammation. So, and I want to go through this because this is really important.

Yeah, I want to go through this too.

For those of us who want to optimize our health, I discovered that not only are these 16 MSIDS factors underlying cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, autism, Every disease, pretty much the major diseases. But there are 16 inflammatory biochemical pathways underlying these 16 factors.

So you would recommend this even if somebody doesn't have Lyme, just to go through this and like, like, like I do parasitic detox? Correct.

So I'm going to talk to you about the first 4 pathways that when people take Dapsone—

I'm doing this. And this is what—

and by the way, this is what I take every day. So I don't know if this is embarrassing at this point. I don't have one at this point to show you, but like, that is my, my dinnertime and this is my breakfast. Now, wow, you and I might be—

You don't even need it. You don't even have eggs or steak or chicken or anything. It's all in there.

You and I should talk after this podcast about how to maybe put this in a drink. Yeah, get this so people don't have to swallow what I'm doing. But let me tell you why I'm doing what I'm doing. Okay. Every family member in my, uh, in my immediate family has died of a different form of cancer. My mother died of lung cancer and she had cervical cancer. My father died of pancreatic cancer and he had an early case of colon cancer. My Uncle Al, who delivered me at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, he had a form of prostate. Every aunt and uncle, they're all dead.

Wow.

From— now, they were Ashkenazi Jews. I don't know what their BAC or their BRCA status was, but I discovered when I was looking at cancer that all 16 of these mSITS factors affected cancer, but there were pathways driving cancer. So when I did the Dapsone protocol, And people said to me, I feel horrible when you're killing the bacteria. I knew I had to block inflammation.

Mm-hmm.

As, as we've talked about, chronic inflammation is driving almost all these chronic diseases.

Right.

That's the roadmap to health, right? To both stay healthy and to reverse it. So what did I do? The first pathway on this protocol is blocking a pathway called NF-kappaB.

Yeah.

NF-kappaB is the number one switch inside your nucleus. When it turns on, You get tumor necrosis factor alpha, interleukin-1, IL-6. You get all these inflammatory molecules.

And necrosis factor is, is, is something that is prolonging or interrupting autophagy, right? I mean, what—

Correct. So you bring up a very important point. So our cells need autophagy. We need to do— we need to clean house.

Right, right. On time.

Yeah, in time. So if you have damaged mitochondria, if those mitochondria do not go through autophagy, Autophagy, if you can't clean those out and get rid of them, that's going to lead to Alzheimer's disease. That can lead to autism. That'll lead to cancer. Damaged mitochondria without autophagy is going to lead to this problem, right? Right. So these inflammatory pathways are showing up in autism and cancer and chronic— in all of these diseases. So when I give people this Dapsone protocol, I'm not just giving them antibiotics. I'm giving them probiotics to support the gut, but I'm giving them NAC. N-acetylcysteine, a precursor of glutathione, right? It also— Which is what? Huh?

Which is what? Which is a precursor for glutathione?

N-acetylcysteine.

N-acetylcysteine.

So N-acetylcysteine helps the body— cysteine, you need cysteine, glycine, glutamic acid to make glutathione.

Right.

So if you're eating a high protein diet with lots of cysteine, right, a whey-based protein, you're getting a form to make— help your body to make glutathione. Why is glutathione so important? It's the number one master antioxidant in the body.

I've never seen this combo.

Now, when people died of COVID during the first wave, we talked about this earlier, they were dying from ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome. They had whiteouts in their lungs. Most people don't know that you have 140 times more glutathione in your lung tissue than anywhere in the world.

I did not know that.

So if you have toxins from the environment and you used up all your glutathione, and now you got the virus using up glutathione, and you didn't have enough glutathione, you were going to get acute resp— In the protocols I use, we block this first switch that drives inflammation using NAC, alpha-lipoic acid. Really interesting. It regenerates glutathione intracellularly. It's water soluble, fat soluble, gets up into the brain. It regenerates mitochondrial function, and it's one of the most powerful antioxidants that exists while regenerating mitochondria and regenerating glutathione, right?

Mm-hmm.

And then we give them glutathione. So the first thing that I do, and this is the supplements I take.

Yeah.

NAC, alpha-lipoic acid, glutathione. I'm blocking that number one switch, right? NF-kappa-B, which shows up in autism, Alzheimer's, cancer, chronic fatigue, every major chronic disease pretty much you're gonna see.

Wow.

The second pathway I stimulate called the NRF2 pathway. So NRF2, really important pathway.

Yeah.

This is how you stop your genetics. So everyone in my family died of cancer. This pathway tells your genetic structure to hit the p53 cancer gene and shut it down and open up your detoxification pathways to help shoveling out these environmental toxins.

Also, it's called cytoprotective proteins.

Correct. Exactly. That's it. So how do you stimulate NRF2? Turmeric curcumin, broccoli seed extract, sulforaphane glucosinate. Sulforaphane, yeah. Oh my God. That is like one of my favorite supplements of all time. Because that is so important in hitting this p53 gene. Do you know that they gave sulforaphane to autistic kids between 100 to 300 milligrams and they started reversing autistic syndrome? Because it hits a biochemical pathway called the mTOR pathway, right? The mechanistic target of rapamycin, which you need for longevity.

Right.

Well, the mTOR pathway— people think autism and Alzheimer's, they're 2 different diseases. They're not. They're on a different spectrum of neuroinflammation in the brain. And if you— the mTOR pathway is hyperstimulated in autism and Alzheimer's. How do you lower it? Broccoli seed extract. When they give Alzheimer's patients— we're going to talk about your mom later.

Okay, good.

When they gave sulforaphane glucosinolate to people with dementia, they noticed their cognition improved because it stopped this overactivation of this pathway. So broccoli seed extract with curcumin, with green tea, EGCG, right? Very, very important. So curcumin, green tea, broccoli seed, and very, very important with, with broccoli seed extract. These will stimulate a pathway called NRF2. The 3rd pathway is called NLRP3 inflammasomes.

Hmm.

Now, this is important in cancer, in Alzheimer's disease, in most chronic illnesses that you're going to see. How do you shut it down? Well, it turns out these first 2 things we talked about, NF-kappaB, Nrf2. If you take these supplements with curcumin, broccoli seed extract— resveratrol, by the way, is also a great Nrf2 stimulator. Hits the sirtuin genes of the body for longevity, right? It's part of my protocol. It also affects NLRP3 inflammasomes, but you also do it with low-dose naltrexone and low-dose melatonin.

Wow.

So in—

Taken at night before bed?

Yeah. So, and if you have a problem sleeping with LDN, I take actually mine in the morning just just to make sure it's not. But I take 4.5 milligrams of low-dose naltrexone compounded through Infuserve in Florida. It's my favorite compounder.

Yeah.

And I take it with very low-dose 1 milligram melatonin to block NLRP3 inflammasomes. And the 4th is inflammatory prostaglandins. Take— if you're eating, you know, healthy fish, which difficult these days, you could, you know, wild organic salmon.

Yeah.

Fish has great omega-3s, but I take a mercury-free fish oil. I take Orthro Omega from Orthomolecular. But these first 4 pathways are among 16 inflammatory. But when you look at all 16 pathways, if you were to take things that block NF-kappaB, N-acetylcysteine, alpha-lipoic acid— now I should tell you, you have to be careful with alpha-lipoic acid if you're hypoglycemic like I am. If you take 1,200 milligrams, which is pretty much— you have to be careful with blood sugar swings.

Yeah.

Now, not one of my patients died during COVID when I gave them this protocol. Why? We now know that there were microclots that were forming with COVID And now some people think these spike proteins are in the body causing inflammation in these neutrophil extracellular traps. It's driving inflammation. Why did none of my patients have a problem? Because I told them, and it's still on my website from 2020, because I published the first article on glutathione for COVID. I told them to block NF-kappaB. I didn't realize at the time that COVID virus needs to lower glutathione to replicate.

I did not know that either.

So when my patients now get COVID— It needs to lower Correct. So influenza virus has to lower glutathione to replicate.

Wow.

So does dengue fever. So does HIV. So does COVID. So by taking— when I get COVID, I've had it twice, I take 2,000 milligrams of glutathione 3 times a day with N-acetyl-L-cysteine complex. 3 times a day? 3 times a day. That's the maximum dose that you normally can take.

Okay. 6,000.

And not one of my patients who did this generally ever fell ill. Not one person died. I only had 2 people in the hospital, and they were both immune deficient, by the way, for COVID. But when you stimulate NRF2 with curcumin, resveratrol, broccoli seed, green tea extract, you take NAC, alpha-lipoic acid, glutathione, you take LDN, melatonin, and a multi-mineral supplement. Very important.

Yeah.

I take Minerex from Zymogen, which has copper and zinc and magnesium. I take magnesium malate as well as magnesium glycinate. Sometimes L-threonate if I have a, you know, problem sleeping at night.

Sleeping, yeah.

But you need a multi-mineral, as we talked about, for these detox pathways. And I told people to do this with omega-3 fatty acids. All of my patients did well during COVID simply by looking at the virus driving inflammation and saying, how do we block inflammation? How do we lower inflammation? It was very logical. So Paxlovid is very good to stop the virus from replicating. People get less long COVID when they take that. But it's still, as you know, people get relapses and they get rebounds. And a lot of people get Epstein-Barr and HCV.

And this could be from the glutathione deficiency and—

Correct. So again, you've got to look at your immune system. It's not just getting COVID. Do you have these other infections and toxins and microbiome issues? All of this has now shown up with long COVID.

Wow.

So for these, like, 45 million Americans with long COVID who say, I don't know what to do, the last chapter in Ending Chronic Illness, V is for Viruses, It shows you every one of these 16 MSIDS factors is associated. Look at your adrenals. Look at the microbiome of your gut. Right? And you'll find if you address— by the way, a lot of these people that had a marker of long COVID called VEGF—

Yeah.

Vascular— it wasn't from the virus affecting the endothelium driving inflammation. It was Bartonella.

Was it the VEGF driving up to cause this angiogenesis? Because that can also be a good thing. Right? I mean, upregulating VEGF for tissue and wound repair.

Correct. Like anything in the body, it's all about balance, right? But in the patients, when I did a long-hauler panel through Patterson's lab in California, and I looked and I found that their cytokines and chemokines were up and they had VEGF—

Through the roof.

Through the roof. It wasn't just from spike proteins that were sitting inside the endothelium driving, right, the inflammation, because they didn't have the spike protein. didn't know they had Bartonella. Bartonella causes elevations in VEGF. And I suspect at this point that a lot of the long COVID patients out there, 'cause I've seen many of them that have gotten better, they didn't know they had Lyme, they didn't know they had Bartonella. They're viruses that reactivated. And I have in the book some solutions for EBV that I think need to be looked at. Epstein-Barr is a horrible virus that causes cancer, Burkitt's lymphoma, right? Not just chronic fatigue syndrome.

And everybody's got it.

But it's really widespread.

And so it undulates through us.

So if you look at the antivirals for Epstein-Barr, it's like all these viruses are— these drugs like artemisinin, they're not easy to tolerate. It turned out when I was doing the deep dive in the medical literature that spironolactone, a drug they use for women with PCOS to lower testosterone, and dipyradamole prasentine, a drug that's used to stop strokes with transient ischemic attacks, if you combine these drugs, which are very well tolerated, with an antiviral like famciclovir, it shuts down the virus at every stage in the replication. Now, don't get me wrong, I need a randomized multicenter trial.

Right.

Secretary Kennedy, if you're listening to this, let's get the monies in this. But the point I'm making is I did this dive in the literature and it's like I discovered all these things that it's like, oh my God, so many people are going to benefit. But yes, we do need the money put into these studies because association Does not always equal causation. But I do believe I found an answer for a lot of these illnesses that people are suffering. This gives them hope.

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You wouldn't eat that, so why would you sleep on it? The Ultimate Snooze is different. No petroleum, no fiberglass, no boric acid— just GOTS-certified organic cotton and wool, 100% natural Talalay latex, and made in America. It's the only mattress that I back— Gary Brecka— because it meets my standards for human optimization. Sleep chemical-free. Visit theultimatesnooze.com and use code ULTIMATE for 10% off. Now let's get to sleep. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Wow. Wow. So I am definitely going to put this protocol in the show notes and even the lab values in the show notes. I want to switch gears to not necessarily my mother per se, but cognitive decline, Alzheimer's, dementia. Because as you said, if 42% of the population over 55 years old, which I'm about to join that population, is expected to get one of these cognitive ailments. That to me is mind-numbing.

It is.

And it can't be that all of a sudden half of the world's population at that young age is going to suffer from cognitive decline.

That's correct. And ultimately, what does it come down to? Inflammation in the brain, right? So all of these diseases that we're talking about, whether it's neuroinflammation, These, these microplastics that get into your arteries.

Yeah, insulin resistance.

It's the genetics. Increased strokes, heart attacks when they get in here. So whether the inflammation's— so what's interesting about inflammation: inflammation in the brain, Alzheimer's; inflammation in the heart, heart attacks, congestive heart failure; inflammation in the joints, rheumatoid arthritis; inflammation in the skin, scleroderma, psoriasis. Um, you name the organ and I'll show you where inflammation is causing disease we're talking about. So then the And the problem is, well, where's the inflammation coming from?

Hmm.

So unfortunately, they spend $2.4 billion a year of NIH funds, and I had to be the first guy who told them that there's not just an association of Lyme and Alzheimer's, but causation. And by the way, it's not the only cause. We'll talk about this in a second. All 16 MSIDS factors that we're talking about today, the 6 rivers of inflammation, of infections, toxins, microbiome, leaky gut, with mast cell activation, vitamin, mineral, sleep disorders, 10 downstream effects, mitochondrial hormonal dysfunction, liver disease, pain syndromes, immune, autoimmune. All of these factors have been showing up in Alzheimer's. So in this article I just published, if someone went to the neurologist and said, I have cognitive decline, and they did a MoCA test, right, uh, Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and they, they didn't score well on it, um— Exactly what happened to And they did Alzheimer's biomarkers. So what are these biomarkers you need to check? And these are not being routinely done, by the way, by physicians. So you first want to check— and this is, by the way, my favorite is Quest Labs, covered by insurance— the amyloid beta 42/40 ratio is the first biomarker you want to check.

Okay.

If you have a low ratio, that is bad. You don't want low. Normally we think, you know, a low ratio means you're taking the sticky protein amyloid beta 42 and you're depositing it in your brain. That's not what you want happening. So first biomarker, amyloid beta 42/40. Second, P-tau phosphorylated tau 181. Third biomarker, P-tau phosphorylated tau 217. Now that is the most specific, sensitive, um, and specific biomarker for Alzheimer's. And that's the biomarker that it reversed with the 9-week Dapsone protocol in my patient.

Wow.

Now what's great about this study that I just published This patient was sick with chronic Lyme for 15 years and had not touched one antibiotic in 15 years. All I did was give her the 9-week oral Dapsone protocol, and 3 months later, her Alzheimer's biomarker completely reversed to normal. And I didn't realize it at the time when I published this in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports. No one had ever done this before in the world medical literature.

Wow.

The anti-amyloid drugs lower these biomarkers by 23%. Oh my God. I lowered it by 63% in 9 weeks because the amyloid was being driven by Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi. Okay, so you need p-Tau 181, p-Tau 217, and the last one is neurofilament light. Now, this is a nonspecific marker of inflammation, not specific for Alzheimer's, but what's nice about that is if you have hypertension or cardiovascular risks or even other diseases, and you have inflammation from IL-6, no matter what the cause—

Like an endothelial marker?

Yeah. That, that neurofilament light will show up as a marker saying you better do a better job on the inflammation in your body. The 5th biomarker is if you are ApoE4/4, which is the genetic marker for Alzheimer's, which, by the way, none of the patients I checked in my practice were ApoE4/4.

Wow.

They still were reversing biomarkers. So—

Well, because of the pathogen.

Yeah. So, but the last one is, is called It's called glial fibrillary acidic protein, GFAP.

Okay.

So if you are Alzheimer's APOE4/4, you want to get GFAP, glial fibrillary acidic acid, because if that's positive, your 10-year risk down the line is going to be high you're going to develop dementia. You don't have to do that biomarker if you're not APOE4/4.

Okay.

Now, I discovered in my patients before I finished clinical practice, after 41 years of seeing 13,000 of these patients, were showing up with these Alzheimer's biomarkers.

Wow.

And I asked a colleague of mine—

The predisposition genetic markers or the actual blood markers?

No, no, no, P-tau 181. Oh yeah, they were showing up with low beta amyloid 42/40.

Without even having a predisposition, which means one of these pathogenic invaders.

Correct.

Wow.

And they were never— and you're not taught in internal medicine, do a prostate exam, go for a colonoscopy, check your cholesterol, check your blood pressure, check your hemoglobin A1c, All good. But now that you know the risk of dementia is 42%, wouldn't you want to check your Alzheimer's biomarkers? Of course you do, because it's silent. You want to know if you have neuroinflammation in your brain before it happens, right?

Yes.

So these are, these are covered by Quest Laboratories, by LabCorp. But I like Quest specifically the way they do it. So you would want your mom specifically, if she's having issues, to look at these biomarkers. Now, you also want to look, however, at the 16 MSIDS factors we talked about. Now, I don't know your mother's clinical history at all, but I would want her to fill out the HMQ on my website, Can Get Better, and see what her score is.

We're filling it out right after this podcast.

We'll speak about it. I want to know, does she have any migratory pain? I want to know if she has any neuropathy with tingling, numbness. I want to know what her symptoms are, right? So I want to look at the infections, but not just Lyme. I want to look at Bartonella. I want to look at chlamydia pneumoniae. So I— and this is all in my book. This is under A is for autism, ADHD, Alzheimer's, allergies, asthma. So in one of the chapters in Ending Chronic Illness, you will find all 16 MCITS factors. All you got to do is take it to your doctor, go to the lab, and go, these are the bugs I want to check. These— this is the way I'm going to check mold. You just go through the list. It's a checklist. It's simple. So that is what we need to do. And you and I are going to be in correspondence because I want to—

Yeah.

I want to show you that this is possible and prove this to you because I've already seen results in my patients. By the way, the number one effect of Dapsone, the number one of all these patients, is cognitive improvement.

Wow.

So when I published my test— At any age? Any age. I've had 80-year-old people come in, Doc, I'm tired, I'm achy, my brain's not working. I'm sure I have Alzheimer's. Like, you have Alzheimer's, you have Lyme. I treat them with Dapsone and they come back months later and go, oh my God, it wasn't I was getting old. Because I hear this all the time. I'm getting old. Yeah. It's like, Getting old doesn't mean anything. I'm 70 years old. I feel like I'm 25. That has nothing to do with it.

Yeah.

So, but you treat the infections that were underlying the fatigue, the pain, the cognitive difficulties, right? The neuropathy, the sleep disorder, the mood. Do you know that 1 out of 5 people in the U.S. is depressed and anxious? We have mental health— we have a mental health epidemic.

Yeah.

All 16 factors on the MSIDS model are causing mood disorders from depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. I've had people with schizophrenia with hallucinations. Reverse the hallucinations by treating the Lyme and the Bartonella and getting rid of mold, not giving them Zyprexa for the rest of their life for their psychotic break. Medicine needs to know you can't just name the disease and throw drugs at it. You've got to unlayer to the 16 root causes. And that is what is in Chronic Illness. And this is why I think Ending Chronic Illness will— I hope will be—

Ending Chronic Illness.

It will be really kind of the manual for people Both for patients who say, hey, I'm well, but I don't want to get sick. For the patients who say, I've gone to 30 doctors, I can't figure out why I'm ill.

Yeah.

Right? For the providers that say, oh my God, I'm seeing all these chronically ill patients, I don't know what to do. Right? So, and for those parents that say, I just got this call from this patient, this UK— I get calls from all over the world. I got one just yesterday from the UK from a mom. My 5-year-old is so sick with Lyme, I can't find a doctor to treat. How do I get him better? It's heartbreaking listening to these stories. I have— everything I have published is in the open access medical literature. You just go to the open access literature. All of my protocols are in the literature. You don't need to speak to me. It's all published for you.

Yeah.

Everything I did is oral generic. So it's the cheapest, fastest way to get you better because we're in a worldwide epidemic. So Alzheimer's, yes, you need to go through those 16 points. And you need to go through these Alzheimer's biomarkers. That's going to be, for me, the first step to see kind of what is going on. Do you know if your mom has actually been checked for these things?

No, she hasn't. I know that she hasn't.

For mold or for heavy metals?

For mold, yeah. I've done a Vibrant Wellness mold, metals, mycotoxins. Aflatoxin A was there. Aflatoxin B. So she had— Ochratoxin. Oh, yeah.

She had, as most of my patients have, too. Yeah, yeah. And and the beauty is I found that there's a protocol, and I describe it.

But I want to do the rest of this testing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In your case, so yeah. So in that case, this testing is going to be very important. But also, what I describe in Ending Chronic Illness, we now know that inflammation, chronic inflammation, is underlying chronic disease. So I have a part in the book where I'm going to give you stage one, stage two, stage three testing. Stage one testing is general inflammatory markers: CRP, C-reactive protein. C-reactive protein, indirect marker of interleukin-6.

Yeah.

Erythrocyte sedimentation rate, TGF-beta-1, which we see in Lyme, we see in mold. C4a, we see in Lyme, we see in mold, right? So MMP-9, which you can see in joint inflammation, we see in Lyme. So I'm going to give you the 10 general markers of inflammation, but then the second stage is, well, not all these biomarkers necessarily show up. So you can do— and I'm sure you know this— you can go to functional medicine laboratories Yep. To see how much free radical stress is affecting the outer membranes. You can do 8-hydroxyguanine to see how much your DNA is affected, or protein carbonyls to see how much oxidative stress affects your proteins. So you go to Precision Point Diagnostics or Doctor's Data, some good functional medicine lab, and you get— so all of these biomarkers done. This is the second level of testing with, let's say, a T-bars test to see how much free radical oxidative stress is affecting your cells. 'Cause CRP may be normal, sed rate may be normal.

Mm-hmm.

A VGF may even be normal with BART. Sometimes it shows up high with long COVID, sometimes it doesn't. It changes over time. But the 3rd level of testing is what we're talking about for your mom. You want to go ahead and get these Alzheimer's biomarkers done and maybe even get chemokines and cytokines done from like somebody like Patterson's lab to see whether you've got CXCL3, CXCL4, CXCL— look at these chemokines, cytokines, that are now looking at these very specific biochemical pathways. So you can go backwards and go, hold on, the interferon gamma's high. Is that maybe a virus? Or is it—

Yeah.

So you can kind of go backwards when you get back the results of all this testing. And so I divide it up into these 3 levels of inflammatory testing, which makes sense in seeing how you do these biomarkers.

Wow. And, and, and these are multiple labs. So, so far you've named 5 labs.

Right. But although the good news is A lot of them can be done through Quest, LabCorp, BioRef. They can be done through local labs.

I want to definitely get the baseline done, as many as we can through Quest.

Yeah. I mean, I like, you know, Doctor's Data, Aaron. Like when I'm doing a DHEA cortisol saliva, I like functional medicine labs.

Yeah.

If I'm doing a—

I like those too, like Doctor's Data.

You're at the MSA Challenge for metals. I like Doctor's Data in Chicago.

Yeah.

But that's a $60 test, right? I mean, these are not expensive tests.

Right.

I think the saliva test is $100. These are not expensive tests for people. And, and yet they're so important because here you're trying to optimize your health, you're doing mitochondrial stuff, you're exercising. If your adrenals are low, you may never figure out why I just never feel like I've got that oomph to get through the day. That's all. Yeah. Because you missed that one nail in the foot of the 16 points that you just left it off. That's the beauty of a checklist. You don't have to be a rocket scientist. Just look at the checklist and start looking and just seeing what have you checked, what haven't you checked. Yeah, it's, it's a very logical way of just approaching all of these different chronic illnesses.

And even for people that are like in my condition that just want to be the best version of themselves, they should still just prophylactically do this protocol, um, so that you can— because we all have something, of course, right? I mean, uh, the, the, you know, just a daily environmental exposure, we all have something without even fearmongering, um, and And this is a way of at least cleaning that slate so that it doesn't accumulate and become—

Correct. I mean, look, I'm in good health. I'm 70 years old. I feel great. But my whole family died of cancer. There's not one person left.

Wow.

So, so here's the thing. I want to block NF-kappaB because I found out that NF-kappaB, even in cancer, it's not just affecting Alzheimer's and autism and ADHD. That same switch is affecting cancer as well as mood disorders. Right? So it's kind of like when you block that switch or you stimulate NRF2 with resveratrol and curcumin and broccoli seed extract and green tea, you're opening up your detox pathways, you're hitting the p53 cancer gene, you know, you're, you're lowering down inflammation in the body. So if you're doing hyperbarics and you're doing saunas and you're doing, right, all of the great things you're doing— I mean, yeah, you took me around. I mean, God bless you. I mean, it's fat— it's fabulous what you're doing.

Thank you.

But if you've still got free radical oxidative stress coming from infections and toxins of the microbiome. Yeah, you're, you're swimming uphill. Yeah, right, exactly.

It's like trying to detox someone from a mold infection while they're still in the moldy home. You can't do it. I mean, that's the cardinal rule of, of detoxification, you know, is remove the toxic load.

So I think living on the planet— I mean, the reason I'm swallowing these supplements is once I learned that these biochemical pathways, that there are these 16 MSIDS factors with 16 biochemical pathways underlying Even these first 4 pathways in ending chronic illness, just with these like 10 or 11, 12 supplements, you're already covering most of these 16 biochemical pathways. And it shows up in almost every chronic disease I looked at, from depression to anxiety. So autoimmune, you know, we've got a suicide— 750,000 people, right, who suicide, you know, worldwide.

We lose more of our military servicemen to suicide than we do to battle. Yeah. You know, when you start looking at those kind of statistics, statistics. It's the same with law enforcement. I mean, the, the, the, these rates are so high.

And by the way, in my population, a lot of these people had PTSD. And the mind-body connection was so strong in these people that if they had abuse, if they had physical abuse, emotional abuse, or sexual abuse— and I always ask about this because I had some abuse issues when I was young, and I understand, you know, what they were going through— if we treat them If we treat the infections and remove the toxins and work the microbiome and do the mitochondrial, and we don't affect and we don't work on the brain, we don't work on the mind and the emotions by doing vagal retraining and limbic retraining, right? I have to get these through people, not just through EMDR, eye movement reprocessing, or doing cognitive behavioral therapy. I've got to do limbic retraining with the Annie Hopper dynamic neural retraining or the Gupta amygdala instant sensory retraining or primal trust. I have to use ways of getting into your, your brain with the amygdala and hypothalamus and going, you're wired for illness because you had severe stress and trauma as a youngster.

Yeah.

A lot of these people took on like, I— there must be something wrong with me. And when you feel that, when you've been traumatized, your immune system won't work well. You can't fight the infections, you can't detoxify. So I found in some women that when I addressed the PTSD through vagal and limbic retraining, all these other things I was doing to make them better finally worked. But if I didn't address it— and that's also, think about it, people optimize their health with high-intensity interval training and mitochondrial, getting to sleep and proper diet, but stress, stress kills.

Yeah.

You might be in a high-stress job and all the things you're doing, your adrenals are taking a hit, your immune system's taking a hit. The only time I get sick—

And your immune system is taking a massive hit.

Is when I'm stressed out. I don't get a good night's sleep, the virus will show up. Otherwise, I never get sick from things. But I meditate on a regular basis, right? I do stress— so people, if they want to optimize their health— and by the way, I even have the meditation techniques taught to me from my Tibetan teachers. I have them in Ending Chronic Illness.

Oh, wow.

They taught me, and I have a medical—

How long do they take?

5 minutes, 3 times a day.

5 minutes, 3 times a day. Anybody can do this. You take a little mental break and—

Even walking meditation outside on the street, you can look at the empty, clear nature of your mind and pay attention to the inner environment and the outer. Once you learn how to do this, I was trained by— I've been very fortunate. I've been trained some really some incredible Tibetan masters. It's 45 years I've been training with them and working with them. So I have a Medical Detective Substack, by the way, that is free. I have a 5-part meditation series, and I took their 45 years of teaching On the nature of mind, of how to awaken. And I put it into a 5-part Substack on meditation. And again, this is all free for people to get because I wanted to make sure this information is out there. But even stress reduction, optimizing— how many people actually really unload during the day? And it's one of the most essential things for optimizing to stay healthy because you don't want to get short telomeres. You know what short telomeres does for longevity.

Right. Yeah.

You know what meditation does? It lengthens your telomeres. It affects your autonomic nervous system and brings down your cortisol and brings down your autonomic and all that epinephrine in your body. You need to take a little break from a high-stress job and environment. So true. Just 5 minutes, 3 times per day. And I made sure all of these kind of techniques are in the book so people could really benefit.

Wow. Dr. Horowitz, this has been just an incredible— I have to have you back. I mean, there's so much to unpack here. I am going to allow my audience to follow this journey. I've documented it so far with my mom, and I'll throw myself in there and document my journey. And this has been a really profound discussion. For my audience that wants to know how to find you, obviously I'm going to put a link to the book, but how can they find you on social media or website?

So I'm on all the social media channels. You can find me at cangetbetter.com, endingchronicillness.com. Facebook, Dr. Richard Horowitz. So if you look up Dr. Dr. Dr. Richard Horowitz, I have a Facebook account. Ali's helping me with Instagram. So yes, it's on all the social media. Okay, great.

So 2 other things. One, we're going to go into my VIP group because I told my VIPs that you were coming and they've got some great questions for you. If you're interested in becoming a VIP, you can just go to theultimatehuman.com/vip and just sign up to be a VIP guest of mine. You get private podcasts, private Uh, time with, with me, hours and hours of, uh, live Q&As. You can ask me anything. This is going to be an amazing journey, Dr. Horowitz. I'm really excited to go on it personally and, and to take my mother on this journey. Um, I wind down all my podcasts by asking all of my guests the same question. Um, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

What does it mean?

What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

So for me, an ultimate human is to Maximize the potential. It's to maximize the physical, emotional, mental, and even spiritual potential of every human being.

Wow.

So this book, Ending Chronic Illness, it addresses the physical. It addresses, obviously, all the toxins and infections we talked about, but also the emotional, about talking about— I had trauma when I was young. I've done my healing journey.

You did.

And— but I believe to be the ultimate human, It's physical, it's mental, it's emotional, and it's spiritual. And because I have had the blessing of studying with these enlightened masters, which I learned— I met them in Belgium in my medical school.

So very left brain, right brain of you.

Yeah, that's exactly it. And so what I got from them is they basically said that all things are possible. All things. But to get to that state where all things are possible, you have to go from your dualistic perception of me, you, good, bad, happy, sad, man, woman, what I can do and what I can't do, because our ego is wired in this life to limit our potential. And I believe because of— some people have had the blessings of wonderful parenting and some have had challenges, but because we've all had challenges in our lifetime, for me, the ultimate human means at this point, you want to do your best to find out what your gift is to the world. What is your— what is your unique gift? You've obviously discovered yours.

Yeah.

Which is sharing your biological insights, right, of systems biology and how you can get the word out to people. I hope I've discovered my gift. This is my new gift. I thought it was a gift for Lyme.

No doubt.

Then it turned out it was a gift for Alzheimer's and chronic fatigue and all these diseases. But how did I even get to this is because my Tibetan teachers taught me, always work for the benefit of others. Always work with compassion. People are suffering. Try and relieve their suffering. Have love. When you say, I want to love you, it's like, I want you to be happy. Suffering, Compassion, have people— if you combine love and compassion in your daily journey and doing all the things that optimize your health and doing high-intensity interval training and mitochondrial— but it's, for me, it's on all levels. It's got to be physical, emotional, mental, and especially the spiritual level.

Mm-hmm.

Because if you're missing, for me, that dimension, then some of achieving your full potential of what is really possible— I believe, by the way, that the only reason I have written this book or done anything I've discovered in medicine is because my teachers taught me that when you get to the state of the open, relaxed mind where you meditate and you go to the bottom of the ocean where your true nature exists and you can achieve this and touch this level, all things are possible at this level. And I believe that there is a way of working with that spiritual component, that when you have the proper motivation of wanting to benefit people and do the best for them in their lives, Mm-hmm. I believe with that particular motivation and then integrating the physical, emotional, spirit, the mental component. I think we can become the ultimate human. But I— for me, it's also that spiritual component. And that's why I've integrated into the book and I've done the Medical Detective Substacks, because I think they've given me such insights into the nature of mind, into what is possible. I think most people don't realize that they can go beyond the limits of what they normally think. That's so true. Because the ego gives you limits of, I can do this, I can do that. But once you transcend the ego, And you go from dualistic perception to this unlimited open state of mind where all things are possible in what they call the state of dharmakaya. It's very interesting because I didn't know in medicine I could maybe, maybe find a cure and an answer for certain cases of Alzheimer's, for certain cases. That's not— I only wanted to go in medicine to benefit. But the way they taught me to plant the seeds was plant the seeds of aspiration prayers. May I be of greatest benefit to the to relieve their suffering. I did that every day 45 years ago when I started doing medicine. I must believe that I am a spiritual human experiment, that these seeds I planted end up being with you today and writing this.

Yeah.

Because I can't imagine how else— how I meant publishing all these studies and finding all these things. It was through that motivation of trying to benefit others. I was just led to the right place. But it was ultimately working through that spiritual connection of, How can I benefit others? How can I be of service? And that, for me, I think that is really— I think needs to be integrated. And especially from the stress component, just living the lives we're living, you need little meditation breaks during the day.

Oh, yeah, you definitely do. Dr. Horowitz, you are the ultimate human. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Until next time, guys, that's just science.