Episode #27: LDI - Low Dose Immunotherapy with Dr. Ty Vincent, MD

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Hello everybody and welcome to episode number 27 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Dr. Ty Vincent and the topic of the show is LDI or Low Dose Immunotherapy. Dr. Ty Vincent attended medical school at the University of Washington and finished near the top of his class. He achieved honors designation in 22 out of 27 pre clinical courses during the first two years and won a special award for excellence in the study of anatomy. He completed his residency at Alaska Family Medicine where he was selected as chief resident. Dr. Vincent served on the boards of the American College for the Advancement in Medicine and the American Academy of environmental medicine. Dr. Vincent has had an intense interest in complementary and alternative medicine since before attending medical school. He has continued to ask difficult questions about health and wellness and pursues the answers in many directions. Dr. Vincent has devoted years to studying nutrition and many other methods of natural healing, always with a firm grounding in science and scrutiny of the available scientific literature. Dr. Vincent has completed further training in bioidentical hormone therapy, acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, allergy treatment, environmental medicine, chelation therapy and Reiki. He now practices full time from Hawaii and tries to effectively balance work with enjoying his wife and seven children. He's the author of the book Thinking Outside the Pillbox which is available on Amazon.com he is probably best known for his work with LDI or low dose immunotherapy which is the topic of today's show. And now my interview with Dr. Ty Vincent.

I am excited to have Dr. Tai Vincent on the show today to talk about LDI or low dose immunotherapy. This has been one of the most exciting emerging options in the realm of Lyme and other chronic conditions to emerge in recent years. Thanks for taking the time to be here today. Dr. Vince.

Absolutely. I have to.

Awesome. Very excited. So how did you get interested in integrative medicine and more specifically in Lyme disease? Did you have a personal experience with Lyme disease or was it just that you had a tool and there was a need?

Well, I was interested in what I didn't realize would be Integrative medicine. Before I even went to medical school, I was reading Andrew Weil's books, and I was trying to, on my own, understand nutrition and health. And I was naive enough before starting in medical school to think that that' what they were going to teach me. And as I went through medical training, University of Washington, very standard MD School, it became apparent pretty quickly that they weren't going to teach me how to make people healthy. They pretty much focused on prescribing drugs and managing symptoms. And so after medical school and entering residency, I continued to have to learn about those things on my own. That learning was mostly driven by the fact that my patients didn't get better. You know, I learned everything medical school had to offer me. I was in the top of my class. I scored in the top 1% on every national exam I ever took. So I learned what I was supposed to learn, and I did everything correct according to them. But it didn't work for those who had complicated chronic illness problems. And so me, my personality being driven largely by failure and absolute distaste for failure, I kept needing to learn more and more things to try to help these people. So even during my last year of residency, when I was chief resident in my family medicine program in Alaska, I learned acupuncture. I did the acupuncture training for physicians course. I learned Chinese herbal medicine to some extent. I was training a lot in nutrition on my own. And I had three kids at home, too. So I had a lot more energy then than I think I do now. But I kept picking up new skill sets in an attempt to find other ways to help these people. And when I went out into clinical practice, the first year and a half, I worked for a large group, delivered babies. I did colonoscopies and upper endoscopies, managed my own ICU patients, full spectrum medicine. And then after a year and a half of that, I realized that my real passion was trying to solve these puzzles. I've always really enjoyed the intellectual pursuit of figuring out puzzles nobody could figure out. So that led me towards these chronically ill people. And they're everywhere. When they find out that somebody else may have an answer for them, they gravitate there very quickly. It's interesting. So I didn't have to go looking for them. They kind of found me over time. And the patients you're trying to help should keep guiding your learning process and steer you down a narrower and narrower path, I guess. And over the years, I picked up one new skill set after another, became kind of expert in bioidentical hormone therapy, learned a lot of environmental medicine and started to learn about immunotherapy techniques. And what I found over the years was the best tools that I have gained have been hormonal regulation and a lot of the physiological effect that can have on people, and then immune modulation, which where I learned LDA about nine years ago, and then I've adapted it from there into what I call ldi. But some of the people that I saw the most frequently that are failed, perpetually failed by the conventional medical community are people diagnosed with things like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, Chronic neurological problems that don't have a diagnosis. And that ends up being your Lyme disease community to a great extent, as well as other things. It's a big basket of different causations, but lyme is one of the common things. So over the years, I finally started to realize that some of these people had lyme disease. I was in Alaska practicing full time. And of course in Alaska they don't have Lyme disease, right, because we don't have ticks and things like that. So I still believed a certain amount of the conventional world's dogma about Lyme disease and what that was. And then it all starts with a few real key cases. I had some people who had been diagnosed previously as lyme disease and had done some kind of treatments that helped them temporarily. So I started to become more aware of that as one of the underlying disease process issues with these chronically ill people. And I started treating them with antibiotics to some extent at the beginning. And based on my experience with some of these early cases and how they responded and what their histories were, I came to realize that Lyme disease, as it's understood, isn't really an infectious process, it's really an immune mediated process. And so I took the skill set that I had already been developing for years as what I now call ldi and applied it to this disease process too. And I had actually great results with that.

So for those people that are not familiar with LDI or low dose immunotherapy, can you maybe tell us what that is? And my understanding, and it's very basic, is that the attempt is to create immune tolerance and that a lot of our symptoms come not from the organisms, but from the immune system's interaction with those organisms, creating inflammation and thus creating symptoms. So what do we mean by immune tolerance and how does LDI work to create that tolerance within the body?

Yeah, that. In a word, the key behind LDI or LDA Even or what used to be called epd. The key is tolerance. I mean, we use the term desensitization, but that's not quite correct. In my opinion. People take tolerance for granted. Okay? When a baby's born, everyone just sort of thinks you're this immunological blank slate, and you tolerate everything by default. And then you learn what to attack over time. Like the learning process they believe it seems to just be focused on finding out who the enemies are. But the thing that people don't realize is that in order to identify enemy correctly, you have to know who your friends are are first. And if you look at either tolerance or defense as two global categories of immune function, the tolerance aspect is far greater in scope. The number of things in your world, external and internal world, that you have to intentionally tolerate is vastly greater than the things that you really need to protect yourself from. And what I now understand about the immune system is that your immune system has to learn that it's not passive, it's not innate. Your immune system actively decides what not to attack, what's okay. And this is part of why kids put everything in their mouth. If you've ever had a kid, I have seven of them, they put everything in their mouth, okay? And you can't stop them from doing that. And that's a biological necessity. This is an area where you have a very large number of what we call regulatory T lymphocytes. And we think with LDA and ldi, that's the target audience for antigen delivery, is regulatory T lymphocytes. Their job is to identify what's okay. All right? And so this is one route that I now use instead of injection, because it's simpler and doesn't hurt where you can train the immune system. When I first learned LDA about nine years ago, I was amazed at how much simpler it was than the other desensitization techniques I'd been taught. And the elegance of it. Part of the elegance of it is that you can administer hundreds of things simultaneously to the person, and the immune system can process all that data instantaneously. Basically, you can give 200 different food antigens to the person, and it will promote tolerance to all of them at the same time, provided that it's the right dose for that person's immune threshold. And that's where it gets more complicated. But that's kind of the key behind ldi, which is a global term in my mind for this type of immune therapy. Lda, in my opinion, is a subset of ldi, and EPD was as well, it's all just terminology to describe different key antigens. But what we're doing is promoting tolerance to the immune system for things that are in and of themselves not harmful. And then that goes to the rest of your question. Like in Lyme disease in particular, the dogma has always been that this is an infection, which really by definition has to mean that the organism itself is directly going to harm you or anyone who has it. But with Borrelia and Babesia and Bartonella and mycoplasma, a lot of these things people consider co infection infections, which aren't. They're really more like normal flora. If you start testing healthy asymptomatic people, the loved ones and spouses of your Lyme patients, for example, you find that they're present in all those people as well, and those people are not sick. Well, if that's true, then that is not an infection. I mean, that's just. It fails Koch's postulates, which go way back. You know, if the organism is present, the disease has to be present as well. So if you can identify a significant portion of the population who is carrying these bacteria or organisms and they're not sick, then that begs the question, what's really underlying the illness? And therefore the real crux of the problem is how the patient's immune system is reacting to those bugs. Some of the patients we have, you know, they've never had a tick bite. They never had any known inoculation with the organism. They probably acquired them at birth from their mother or in utero, for all I know. They probably cross the placenta and everybody's colonized prior to birth because they're interstitial organisms. Right? They're not gut flora. So if you've had them your whole life, and then you only become sick at age 30 because something stresses your immune system, that's really the problem, is the immune response. And when I started to think about it in those terms, I got away from the kill them all strategy of eradicating the organism, which really fails the vast majority of the time, where people rebound even after years of antibiotics. And I just started to focus on the immune tolerance aspect. The results were very convincing. That that is truly what's going on here. And in Lyme disease, it's a big debate. And people have been entrenched in the infection theory of this disease for so long that folks will argue with me till they're blue in the face about this. But it's really just a matter of belief and the evidence, in my opinion, and in My world, having this new tool with which to study the disease process is really clear that what we're dealing with is more of an allergy. You know, people understand the concept of allergy. If you talk to them about, oh yeah, I react against something that should be harmless. Well, if you're allergic to something that lives inside of you, then you're sick all the time and you can't avoid it. You can't do an elimination diet or clean up your household. You're stuck with those inflammatory symptoms all the time 24, 7. And that's what people with Lyme disease are suffering under.

Yeah. And it's interesting because I followed Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt's work for a decade now, and that's really been one of the things that he's been saying for a long time as well. 90% or more of the symptoms that you have are from your immune system's reaction to the organisms and not the organisms itself. So it sounds like from that perspective, this approach to treatment essentially is very much aligned with that. Let's talk a little bit about one of the questions I get is what is the difference between LDA and ldi? My understanding is that LDA is more the foods, the inhalants, the chemicals, those types of things where LDI has more of a focus on the Microsoft microbial interaction with the immune system. So is that kind of the distinction or are there other important differences between the two?

So that's a big question and there's a lot of confusion about that. So like I mentioned before, low dose immunotherapy. LDI to me is an umbrella term that encompasses lda.

Okay.

LDA really is just a proprietary commercial term and it represents the stock antigens that are produced for practitioners by a pharmacy. And it used to be college pharmacy who produced it, and then they gave up on it after 15 years or whatever of doing it. And now it's Edge Pharmacy out of Vermont, I believe. But they make what's called lda and that term is low dose allergy mixtures. And they include a food mixture and an environmental allergen mixture, which is molds and pollens and such, and a chemical mixture. And therefore it's addressing primarily allergy. But the technique and the use of these antigens and the way that it works in the body is exactly the same as anything else that you would use. And so when I started creating all of my own antigen mixtures, which anyone can do, I mean, there's no magic with the ones that I myself have on the shelf. I Have a thousand glass vials in my closet, on my shelves. It's nuts. And I have more than 40, 45 different mixtures at this point. And I keep creating new ones every six months it seems like. And that doesn't even count the autologous samples that I take from the person themselves. So I had to come up with a new name because what I'm doing isn't allergy anymore. I'm treating autoimmune diseases, chronic inflammatory disorders and whatnot. So I just decided to come up with low dose immunotherapy, which is a more general term for how this is working and the technique itself. But LDA really is just this proprietary commercialized term for those antigen mixtures. But I desensitize people to single foods using this technique all the time. So I have corn and wheat and egg and milk individually diluted out to these homeopathic range spectra. And I treat people with severe reactions to those things with one food at a time. Right. So I'm also treating allergies for people to anything you can imagine using the same technique. And it's not the antigens I get from the pharmacy. So I don't call it lda, it's just under this umbrella term of ldi. Perfect.

Yeah, that's great. That's a good understanding for me as well. So what are some of the microbial antigen mixes that are available? Just so kind of get a sense of some of the conditions that they may have that might be benefited by ldi.

The first one I put together was yeast. Actually I identified six or seven years ago that a lot of people seem to be very reactive to Candida. And this is another area where it's important to understand the difference between a yeast infection, which involves overgrowth of the organism, and you can fix it with a couple of weeks of an antifungal drug and then they're better permanently or until they get another infection versus the people who are chronically ill with what seems like yeast related symptoms. And every time they stop their antifungal therapy, they rebound and they're sick again immediately. That pattern indicates that really their problem is an allergy or hypersensitivity to the yeast. So I made a yeast mixture years ago. And the scope of the yeast sensitivity symptoms overlaps tremendously with the Lyme disease population. The symptoms are very similar. People will have chronic fatigue, brain fog, muscle pain, joint pain, all kinds of digestive symptoms, skin rashes and itching. Just any, globally, any system in the body can be afflicted by the Inflammation that's triggered by yeast, very similar to what's caused, you know, triggered with the Lyme disease people, except they tend to have more gut problems when they're yeast related too. So the yeast population of people, the yeast hypersensitivity crowd, comes in with diagnoses, which, by the way, giving a patient a diagnosis is the least helpful thing a doctor can ever do because it deviates the focus. Doesn't care about causation, but they come in with irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, those kinds of diagnostic things. Sjogren's syndrome oftentimes is yeast related. I was using that for a long time. The next groups that I developed when I first started doing ldi, I think I only had four mixtures I would send out to practitioners who wanted to use this and the yeast. The next one was the lime group. And the first mixture I developed only had 16 species in it because I was kind of ignorant about the whole disease process then and the microbiology underlying it. Now the lime mixture I have has 74 total species in it, which include more than 20 of Borrelia, Babesia, Bartonella, and then a handful of Ehrlichia species and Coxiella burnetii. So those are the collection in what I call the lime mixture, But I also have them separately. So I have just the Bartonella mix, just the Borrelia mix. Because you find that people may have reaction patterns to more than one of these categories and they don't react at the same dose. So what you find as you get into the complexity of these patients is that you have to separate them and give them Borrelia at a different dose than Babesia and whatnot. So now I have those are five separate mixtures instead of just the one Lyme mixture. Another one that I came up with pretty early on is a mixture of mycobacteria, which are a very interesting group of bacteria that inhabit people pretty much ubiquitously as well. But those organisms cause conditions including including Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, but also more systemic things like sarcoidosis, I've been able to prove is a mycobacteria condition, the immune related mycobacteria condition, and something like Cher Strauss disease, people with unexplained recurring iritis in their eye. They're just a weird collection of things around the body that I find are due to mycobacteria. I actually have one gentleman right now who has persistent glaucoma, and we're using the Mycobacteria mix, because that seems like it may actually be underlying some case of glaucoma, which will be fascinating to find out. The next thing I think I developed after that, around the same time, was a mixture of clostridia, because a lot of people have had chronic gut problems after a C. Diff infection or something like that. That works really well for some of those. It also works for a lot of the autism population. And then it has kind of exploded from there. I've got a collection of different viruses, which include Herpes 1 and 2, Herpes Simplex, Epstein Barr virus, cytomegalovirus. I've diluted vaccines like the MMR vaccine, polio vaccine, for certain kinds of things. I have a mycoplasma, have anaplasma, and just the microbe selection has grown and grown and grown. I have a collection of bacteria that tend to work for rheumatoid arthritis and other related inflammatory arthritis conditions. It's interesting, as I encounter new patients that I don't have a current solution for, it forces me to come up with something new, which is what I really enjoy. I really like the new puzzle, the new thing. So I think the newest mixture I have now that isn't even available to anyone yet, because whenever I come up with a new toy, I play with it myself for at least six months before I share it with the other kids, is a mixture of collagen. It occurred to me that some of these patients that I have seen that seem to have autoimmune reactions to their own tissues, if you will, like interstitial tissue, not necessarily cellular. So the mixed connective tissue type of, of collagen, vascular disease, sort of people and whatnot. And people with what's considered routine osteoarthritis as well, they may be reacting to collagen. And collagen is the bulk of the human body. Actually. If you take the water out of a person, most of our dry weight is collagen. So that's gotta be an immune target somewhere. And there are more than 20 different types. So I did some research and I put together this mixture of 11 key collagen types. And the first person I experimented on with it was my sister. I actually experiment on my kids and family members every chance I get. Because they're not going to sue you, right? So she has actually a genetically driven arthritis condition and has had several joints replaced already. So I thought, well, you know, she has a genetic disease, and if it's going to have any effect on her, it'll work for probably anybody that has more typical osteoarthritis. And actually it has made a significant difference in her joint pain and inflammation, which is really exciting because if we can stall the need for further joint replacements or any joint replacements, if you catch somebody early enough, that's a huge burden of illness and something that we have always thought of as purely based on mechanical trauma. And that's. As I've gone through this journey in recent years especially, I keep finding that I have my own errant beliefs that have been in my way over time of figuring things out. We let our beliefs get in the way of our observations. And that's just a human characteristic that's probably key to our survival some time ago, but it's a real barrier to progress. And so what I've discovered is things that we've thought of as infections really have more to do with immune response and things that we believe are structural, maybe aren't entirely structural. And so I enjoy the challenge of taking anybody with a chronic inflammatory type of problem and seeing if I can fix it, you know, and most of the time I can, it seems, which looks really awesome.

That's amazing. So talk to us a little bit about the. You mentioned the term dose, the dilutions. How do dilutions fit in? Why is the dilution important? And then conceptually, can we think of that as a homeopathic dilution? And then when you give someone their dose or dilution and you're kind of looking for a flare to see if you're approaching the right dilution, what does that flare usually look like?

So, first, so I don't forget to address it, having a flare or a worsening of your symptoms is not desirable. That means that the dose you gave was too strong. So it happens incidentally all the time. But when that occurs, that means that it means two things. And it's a big topic for people. They're worried about this. If you give somebody an antigen at a dose that induces a worsening of their symptoms, it means two things. One, you got the right antigen, okay? If it wasn't the correct immune target, nothing would happen at all. So that means you've scored, right? It's same thing if you go into an allergist and they prick you with 50 different things on your skin. The ones that get red and itchy are the answers, right? Because that's sort of a flare response. It's just localized. And the second thing that it means is that the dose was too strong. So you have to back off and what we know about this therapy and pretty much any other kind of immune therapy, whether you're doing conventional allergy shots for hay fever, or you're doing provocation neutralization or sublingual immunotherapy, anything you do in terms of immune modulation using an antigen response, the key to the whole thing working is the dose that you deliver. And that has to match the patient and their particular immune threshold. So what I do is I take the engines and I dilute them out step by step by step over some spectrum, right? And with every antigen there's a unique or somewhat unique dosing spectrum that seems to work, and they're different. And that's where the experience comes in. I never know before I use something what the effective dose spectrum is going to be, which is really interesting. And so that means that the first people who are willing to try it, the odds of them flaring are very good, because I have no idea what I'm doing. Until you gather some data and you get some experience, you don't know what the right dose is going to be. But out of the dozens of mixtures that I've developed over the years, the most typical dosing range or dilution range that works is from what I call 6C to about 9C. Most things fall in that range. There's some kind of magic to that for a lot of different antigenic relationships with the body. So I use homeopathic terminology for this dilution strategy, and I do a homeopathic style of dilution. The letter C represents a 100 to 1 dilution, you know, C like century, you know, that kind of terminology. And so you take a series of little glass vials and you take a tenth of a milliliter out of one and put it into 10 milliliters of plain water, and you've diluted it 100 to 1. So whatever you start with, whether it's an antigen vial of corn or borrelia or whatever, your stock starting concentration is zero. And then you dilute it one step and it's 1C. And then you do that again from that vial to the next water vial and it's 2C, 3C, whatever. Okay? So 6C is a dilution with 12 zeros, because 100 has two zeros, right? So you multiply the number by two and you get how many zeros in the dilution? So 6C is a trillion to one. And I don't know what the magic is about a trillion to one dilution. But a lot of things respond around there like my own lyme reaction, which I didn't know I had until I started experimenting on myself. Like one day I gave myself the Lyme injection just for giggles, to see what would happen to me. And it was interesting. Plantar fasciitis and tendinitis I'd had been dealing with for about a year just went away. And now over three years I've been doing this. I find that when my shot is due, when my dose is due, I start to get plantar fasciitis and tendonitis in my elbows again. And I take my dose and I'm good for six weeks or more. And it's really interesting. I figured those were just mechanical structural problems, right? And in my case, apparently they're not. So for me, the 6C dilution is what works. The sicker a person appears to be, the worse their inflammation, the less exposure it takes to have a symptom, the more sensitive they are and the weaker that dilution has to be. And with the Lyme mixture and the yeast mixture, those two are special. And I don't know why. I don't know if it's because of the fact that they just live in people ubiquitously or because they're just more inherently antigenic or something, but the dosing spectrum for those is astronomical. Like the stronger end of the spectrum, people are in the 6C or maybe 5C concentration territory. Like me and my wife and my son and my parents. I've discovered that a lot of my own core family members have some kind of immune response to this antigen too. Or through experimentation, like, hey, let's try this, see what happens. It's really interesting. My own 6 year old son was borderline autism spectrum until I started to give him the Lyme mix. And then his language and communication and interaction and school performance just blossomed and he's no longer anything resembling autism spectrum. It was a real turning point for us through just trying that out. Anyway, I'm rambling a bit. So what I found with the Lyme population is that some of them the most sensitive people, you have to push the Lyme mix out to 35 or 40C. So mathematically it's a difference between 10 to 12 zeros of dilution at the strong end and then 70 to 80 zeros at the other end. It's a baffling spectrum of sensitivity. And the yeast mix is very similar. I have people that need to go a little past 40C so far that have Candida reactivity, whereas most things like H. Pylori, which works for a number of bizarre Autoimmune situations in people is almost always 6C, 7C, 8C. That territory and a lot of things same, you know, this really kind of core narrow range. So when I, when I try to teach this to other practitioners and whatnot, I have a manual that I'm updating right now, where I just am developing this appendix that has a list of all the mixtures and what kind of conditions they seem to work for and what my currently observed dosing range is for for those people. And that's really my biggest contribution for other practitioners. Like, here's my experience trying to distill it down so that you have a good starting point to take care of all these people in diverse conditions. This is just stuff that I've had to learn through experience and practice over the last several years. And it's fascinating to me. And what I've learned is the key is to keep an open mind and to continue observing and to try really, really hard not to have expectations or beliefs that tend to get in the way so I can see what's actually going on. And it's really quite amazing what we can do with this tool.

That was one of the questions that I had. What I've seen is that some practitioners, they'll maybe start with the 24C or a 30C, and then if they don't get a reaction, my understanding is then every week you can go to the next lowest dilution or the next stronger dilution, but then that can take some period of time if they're starting at a 30C before they get to the one that starts to create some type of reaction. So is finding the right dose or dilution, is that really just clinical observation and experience and knowing the patient? Are there other ways that you can kind of get closer to that in a shorter period of time?

Well, a lot of people who have the skill set are trying to do either autonomic response testing or muscle testing or use some bioenergetic device to see if they can can identify the dilution that that patient needs. My experience with that with a handful of patients who do their own muscle testing and whatnot, or have a practitioner who muscle test them, is that it doesn't work. It's really not any better than my expert guess seems to be. But I do have one colleague in California who is. She's reporting about a 5050 success using art at identifying a good starting dose. At least she's getting good results with the dose that she picks, which requires a little fine tuning to see if that's the best response or if it scores right out of the gate. So there are two factors that help me determine where I need to start with a person. It's how sensitive they seem clinically based on two things. The severity of their symptoms and how little exposure it takes to set them off. And then the other thing is the patient's personality or their desires. So let's say somebody has moderate Lyme symptoms to where? I mean, they're not bedbound, they still work for a living, but their life is kind of miserable. Their quality of life stinks. You know, their symptoms are bad enough that they're seeking help. They're willing to pay cash to a number of people. They've spent $50,000 trying to figure out what's wrong with them. Right. This is a pretty typical story. So they're sick enough for that, but they're still able to work, get through the day. It's just exhausting. Okay, that person is kind of middle of the road between someone who's disabled and bed bound and someone who's still really highly functional, like me, but I get plantar fasciitis, you know, so I'm at the 6C end of the spectrum. The person who's bedbound and has ALS diagnosis is like the 40C end of the spectrum. Let's say this person sounds like they're in the 20-24 C range of the spectrum. Like you mentioned, a starting dose, kind of mid range. You know, I take that speculation about where I think they're going to be, and then I ask the person, you know, how. Where do you sit on the decision between willingness to flare in an effort to figure things out quicker versus an unwillingness to flare because you can't afford to be sicker than you are right now, and therefore you want to be more cautious. And that's the decision. The trade off is if you want to be more cautious and start at a weaker dose dose, it's going to take longer to figure you out versus if you are in a big hurry and you need to see something happen, but you're willing to have a flare of your symptoms in the process, then you start at a stronger dose. And that's the decision to have with the patient. And it's case by case, absolutely individualized. There is no protocol, there is no starting dose. And I have practitioners email me questions like that, well, I have a patient with Lyme disease. Where do I start them? Like, I can't answer that question. I need to talk to the person for half an hour or an hour myself and feel out where I think their sensitivity lies. And then I need to ask them a very direct question like, what is your preference? Do you want to figure this out quicker with some increased degree of risk, or do you want really careful and patient? So you either have to be careful and patient or aggressive and accepting of risk. And you cannot have it both ways. So it's the people who want it both ways who say, well, I need an answer right away, but I don't want to flare like, well, I'm sorry, you don't live in reality. That's not how this works. And so there is a middle ground. Okay. As you mentioned, you can go through doses fairly quickly when you're trying to find the right dose, provided that nothing happens. Okay. So if somebody, if you give them the 20C dose, let's say, and they notice no change in their symptoms at all over that first week, and I tell people, I don't want to hear from you for a week, some people want to send me a daily email with their experience. I don't want that because so much of it's up and down and confusing in that week. I want them to wait a week and then distill it and summarize for me what happened over the week.

Okay.

Otherwise it's just too much static, too confusing. So after that week, nothing happens. Then I say, okay, 10 days is a good pace to go. I don't go one week per dose anymore for people because it's a little too fast. Sometimes the response is subtle or delayed a bit. And they can't necessarily be certain until after a week has passed. So I have gone to 10 days between dose and what I call this process dose titration, which is just sort of a chemistry term where you keep adding one mixture to another till it turns pink or whatever. Right. You find the reaction point. So if nothing happens at 20, 10 days later, they can take 19 C. 10 days later, if nothing happens, they can take 18 C. So you can go through a few doses per month at this rate.

Right.

And therefore, if you need to get all the way to 6C from 20, it's going to take six months for a lot of people to traverse that dose range. And not everyone has that level of patience. I'm usually pretty good at guessing the dose within 3-5C. So most of the people I work with, it doesn't take that long to get from where I think we should start to where they end up. Unless it's the highly paranoid, fearful person who wants to start at the weakest dose possible, which there is no such thing. Just, you know, for your viewers, people who email and say I'm the most sick person in the world, which apparently there are lots of the sickest people in the world because I hear it all the time. And they want to start at the quote, weakest dose possible. There is no such thing. I could pour a drop, I could put a drop of the lime mix into the Pacific Ocean and that's about as close as I can get to the weakest dose possible. Okay. Because you can dilute things to infinity until you run out of water. So what I do is I go like I tell them, okay, the weakest dose I've used for anyone so far is this. And we could start you there. But if that person really needs to get to 10C from 40, it's going to take forever to see a response. And a lot of people run out of patience. They get frustrated. So the middle ground, which I have discovered is very useful for some of these people, is to start at a weak conservative point and then to go by 2c at a time instead of 1c at a time. And you can traverse the same range of doses twice as fast. And you still greatly decrease the risk of flare or at least flare severity because you're not going to be that far off the dose. And so one of your earlier questions, what's a flare like? Let's say we give the person a 20C dilution of the Lyme mix and they really needed a 22. So they're 10,000 times stronger than what they needed, which is 2C off the mark. Most of those people will experience a flare up of their symptoms and it's usually their current existing chronic stuff that they experience all the time that just gets worse. It's like turning up the volume on a song that you hate. You know, it's just louder. But the same song, okay, that usually will last just a couple of weeks. If you're 2C off the mark, it's usually a two week flare. 1C off the mark, it's about a one week flare. The math usually works out. Not for everybody. Some people, it's skewed from that ratio and I don't know why, but we figure it out as we go through adjustments. So I usually say, okay, you flared for two weeks at the 20C mark. So the next dose I'm going to give you 23 or 24. I usually back off a little further than that just for a cushion of safety. And then I will send them Doses that are closer together, you know, because a C is 100 to 1 dilution step, you can make 10 to 1 dilution steps too. And therefore you can progress through the range more slowly. And when you get a partial response or something, that's a maybe I slow the progression and narrow down the adjustment increments like that. I'll go 20.5, 20, 19.5, that kind of adjustment range. So it's all case by case and based on what happens from every dose. And that's the other thing is people say, well, I want you to send me the booster doses I'm going to need. You know, they hear about these things. I say, well, I don't know what your booster dose is until I know what the core dose is, what your right effective dose is. So that's a unknown concept at the beginning. We don't know that. Okay? You have to get a response and then everything revolves around that. So I'll send people 20, 19, 18, 17, a series of doses. And sometimes they think, well, I'm supposed to take one of these every 10 days. No, you're supposed to take the first one and then you tell me what happened and nothing else beyond that. Because you don't know. Because if you flare from that 20C dose, you are not going to take 19, 18, 17. They're going to get exponentially worse for you. Right? But a lot of doctors have made that mistake. I've inherited patients from other docs who are trying to do LDI and they say, well, well, they started me at 10 and I got worse for a week. And then they told me that I should take nine. And they're giving the patient a stronger dose every 10 days, even though they're flaring. And after three dose cycles of that, they're in bed for six weeks and they're dying. And the doctor's saying, no, you just have to push through it. Eventually you'll get better. They did not read my manual or listen to anything I've ever said on the subject. So that's a complete misunderstanding of how this works. If you get a flare response, you have to wait seven weeks. And I don't know why. The dogma, the fairy tale that we choose to believe in the world of lda is that there's a seven week life cycle for the individual regulatory T lymphocytes you're teaching and you have to wait till they've all passed on to a whole new freshman class of lymphocytes. And then you can redose at a different level and that rule is solid. I have broken every other rule in the world of LDA and EPD with success, except that one. You do have to wait this washout period of about 50 days or bad things get worse, and then you can back off and try a weaker dose again.

So is the core dose the one that creates a mild flare, or is it the next higher dilution that creates no flare?

The core dose, I call it, or the dose that seems to work for the person and I'm going to repeat every seven weeks on the scheduled cycle, is the dose that gives benefit with no flare. Okay, so there's not a desire to cause symptoms to worsen at all, ever, which is a little. I mean, people in the Lyme community in particular have trouble with that because a lot of the Lyme treatments are antimicrobial strategy and they expect to have a Herx reaction, okay, at first, and then get better. That is not the expectation with ldi. That is not the desired goal at all. You want to see symptoms get better. Okay. So for example, I had a 31 year old mother of three kids back in Alaska who had Ms. As her diagnosis, right? She got like numbness and tingling and burning in her hands and feet, fatigue, weakness, a little tremor, that kind of stuff. And I gave her her dose. The first dose I picked, luckily was a good dose. It was like 12C of the Lyme mix back then. And the next day all of her symptoms were gone. Like she woke up in the morning, energetic and clear headed, no numbness and tingling, normal strength. It was like she'd never been sick. And it occurred like overnight and even over time with repetition of that dose. So we just gave her the same dose every seven weeks and she had another MRI a year later and all the lesions in her brain were even gone. Wow. People don't think can happen, and now we know it can. So that's what you're looking for. You're looking for improvement. That improvement may not occur overnight. That improvement may gradually manifest over five to seven days, which is why I tell people to wait to tell me anything. But there's certainly not the desire for symptoms to be worse the first day or two and then get better. That to me usually means I have to dial the dose back just a little bit. It's all based on the nuances and the details of that response.

So if someone has a positive response, their symptoms improve, and then maybe three to four weeks into the seven week cycle, they start to come back. Is that where the concept of a booster dose comes in? And how many times can you, can someone do a booster dose within that seven or eight week period?

Yeah, that is exactly the concept of a booster. So a booster is you want to make a good response better or make a good response last longer, essentially. But there has to be that good response first. That's the key thing people forget. They say, well, give me this dose, then give me booster dose as well. I don't even know if that first dose is going to work. So there's no concept there. And you can take as many as you need through the seven week cycle. It appears it's a decision about what fraction of the core dose to use as the booster. And that depends on how long the initial benefits lasted. So for an example, anytime the core dose or the dose that we give them initially seems to give benefit, a good benefit, I mean, like 75 to 100% resolution of symptoms. Okay. For more than one week, then I only will give them a 1% relative booster dose. And since every C is 100 to 1 dilution, 11 C is 1% of 10 C. Okay. And 10 C is 1% of 9 C. If you follow the math. The math blows people away. They don't get it. But it's all base 10 logarithmic progression, which is actually really simple in the world of mathematics. And I like it, but not everybody. So if I give you a 20c dilution of the lime mix and for 10 days, your headache goes away, your joints quit hurting, your energy seems nearly normal, you're sleeping through the night again for the first time in 10 years, you're like, oh, my God, this is amazing. And then at that 10 day mark, all those symptoms kind of come back on you gradually and by two weeks you're back to your baseline, then I'd give you a 21C dose of the Lyme mix, which is 100 times weaker. It's therefore only 1%. We're adding 1% more to that dose and in most cases they'll get benefit again for some period of time. Let's say that that period only lasts five days. This time they feel good for just five days instead of 10. They can take another one, another 21C dose. You can kind of add them up. But I have found that it's good to stop trying to add boosters about seven to 10 days prior to the next dose coming due, because the math is accumulative in both directions. Okay? So if you've added all these little 1% boosters or even a 10% dose or something within a seven week cycle, and then you take the next core dose, the 20C, again on schedule. You have to take into account all those boosters you took within the preceding seven weeks. Because your immune system is on a dynamic continuum all the time. There are lymphocytes being generated and degraded every single day. It's a calculus phenomenon. It's not a series of discrete events in life. And there isn't like, it's not like boot camp where there's one batch of troops and then they move on and a whole new batch of troops. It's more like two in and two out every day. Okay. So you have to understand the dynamic that's occurring. And it's an area under the curve relationship between the lymphocyte population and its dynamics and the delivery of antigen within any given seven week time frame. And it moves with you. Okay. It's not static. And thinking about it in terms of that calculus based mathematics instead of Cartesian points on a diagram or something most people don't quite grasp, I have to give most practitioners very discreet sets of rules for them to live under. I can't just try to give them the concept and let them run with it, it seems. So. You have to be aware of that. The bottom line is whatever happens is very instructional. So if I give you the 20C Lyme dose and it makes you feel good for a month, but then you've got a few weeks before your next dose, and I'm going to give you the 1% booster, the 21C booster, and you flare, which may happen. Just adding that 1% may be too much for that person. What that tells me is that the 20C Lyme dose that you took initially is probably spot on. And we're not going to get any better than that. And so we're not going to try boosters anymore for that person. We're just going to give them the 20c every seven weeks and expect that their period of benefit will by itself get larger and greater with repetition. And that's the history of LDA and EPD was there were no booster doses, there were no dose titration technique that was completely against all the dogma. You took this dose every seven weeks and you just don't deviate from that. And you might get two weeks of benefit the first time, three weeks the next time, four weeks, the time after that. And it may take a year of dose repetition before that person is consistently well. But that was the best you were going to get. And so I came up with the booster dose Strategy in an effort to try to yield better, more lasting results for people earlier on. But it's not foolproof. I mean, it has its risks. People will flare from a booster that I thought should just, you know, resume benefits for them. And it's not a failure of the technique. It just teaches you something. Okay, if you're.

Yeah, that's great. So you mentioned that if the dose was 2C too low, meaning too strong, that they may have a flare that lasts for two weeks approximately. So do those flares always resolve or are there some cases where someone will have a more long standing worsening of their symptoms after doing ldi?

Yeah, that's a really important question because the people who feel like they were made permanently worse by something, whether it's LDI or anything else, are the most apt to go on the Internet and tell everybody that this was a horrible idea. So it's important to clear that up. Right when the flare, like if the symptoms get worse from a dose that somebody took with LDI and they don't seem to resolve back to baseline within six weeks or two months or something like that, they seem to stay elevated. I no longer consider that simply a flare because to me, a flare is by definition a temporary worsening of symptoms and then you regress back to baseline. But occasionally, if somebody is overdosed to a pretty significant degree, what you really end up with is a threshold shift. Some people, their threshold of sensitivity suddenly adjusts and now their symptoms are permanently at a worsened level. And to me, it's simply because we just shook up their immune system to a great degree and that's what happened. And the same thing happens after vaccination or after a course of antibiotics, or after an ozone injection, or after somebody has a baby or that's like the most dangerous thing a woman can ever do in terms of their immune system response is to have a baby. Oh my God. Like everything goes to hell. They develop allergies and autoimmune diseases they never had before within three months of delivery. And it's just this dramatic shakeup of their immune system and shift in their immune thresholds. So you can do that with an LDI dose if it's too far over. But once that elevation of their symptoms has persisted more than a couple of months, I decide, okay, this isn't a flare anymore. And the duration that this is going on is no longer helpful to me in determining their dose. Now this person is just plain sicker. Okay, you've shifted their threshold. And that happens with food allergies. Using the LDA doses. I've talked to a number of people that were given standard dogmatic dosing of the LDA antigens without manipulating them like I do. And they said, yeah, I got three doses of the food mixture and now I have anaphylactic reactions to. To foods that I never had before. And it's not going away. It was like two years later I talked to the person. Yeah, I've been so much more allergic to food ever since I did that years ago. So they just created a phase shift, you know, a threshold shift for that person. And that can happen in Lyme disease, that can happen in yeast sensitivity. And all I can tell that person, it's very discouraging when that happens. All I can tell them is that the only solution I have for them is to give them a vastly weaker dose. Like, I'll usually go 10 or 12 C weaker in that case, and just try to. Or go to the weakest dose I've ever used and just gradually work back. Because the belief has to be, the philosophy has to be that there still is a right dose. It's just now it's a weaker dose than it was when you first started. Right. And we were wrong about what we first chose. So now we're going to be even more wrong if we stay in that same range. You got to go way weaker.

So how often does that happen, that someone has one of those really long, what we even think of as a flare anymore, but an actual worsening of their condition? Is that common?

Well, common is a vague distinction. So like in the world of pharmacology, a symptom is considered a common side effect. If it happens more than 5%. Right. So I would say it's probably around there. It's probably 5% or less. And that's really. It's generally somebody who's already pretty ill that's at risk for this too, which is unfortunate. You know, if it was the more robust person with minor symptoms, a threshold shift wouldn't be so devastating to them. But it's. I don't know, because I don't really keep good statistics. But it doesn't happen very often. It happens often enough to be a major nuisance in my life. But I also treat kind of some of the sickest people around and they're fragile. And it's just hard to say anybody coming in off the street, how likely it would be to happen to that person. It's not very common.

So since we're working with dilutions and concepts of homeopathy, when Someone's doing ldi, should they avoid other homeopathics that are also targeting microbial interactions with the immune system? And if so, should they do that only around the time that they're doing their LDI dose, Or do they need to stay off of those kinds of homeopathics for the entire duration of their treatment?

If they're using the homeopathic agent that is affecting the same antigen, they should not be used together. Some of these homeopathic agents, though, they give temporary symptomatic relief. Like people will take them every two or three days kind of as needed, but the effect of it doesn't linger more than a week for them. And in that case they can take it in between. Like let's say it's a, it's a borrelia homeopathic that they have and I give them the Lyme dose and they flare. You know, I give them a dose that's too strong, they can use their little homeopathic borrelia to see if it'll calm the flare down. That's totally fine, but I wouldn't want them to use it within a couple of weeks of the next core LDI dose that I give them. It just, you don't want the effects of the two therapies to perhaps overlap time wise because most not that they're going to neutralize one another, which is theoretically possible too. But mostly you'll be confused. And that's a big problem in science. When you manipulate more than one variable at a time, you don't know what's going on. And the way LDI needs to be approached is that this is a scientific experiment with every individual person every time you do it. And you need to try to control as many variables as possible so you're not throwing all this into the mix. And people ask about other kinds of things like doing ozone infusions at home, doing rife machine sessions, doing other things that have some kind of effect on this disease process. What I usually tell them is either keep that other therapy totally consistent. Like you've been on, you've been doing ozone every week for the last three years, go ahead and continue if you want to, or stop it. But don't go off and on and off and on and on because then, and we're not clear about what's having which effect. So people don't have to stop their other therapies in order to do ldi. They just need to be stable. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, that makes total sense. Some of us remember back to the Days of the Pink Book with the EPD process and all the things. I remember when I did this years ago and could only eat potato bagels ordered from a specific bakery in Dallas, Texas, that had to be ship for three days and all that kind of stuff, it was a little crazy. So what kinds of restrictions are there now around LDI dosing? And then are there things that really need to be avoided, like antihistamines or curcumin? And then also are there things that improve the outcome, like vitamin D, for example? What kinds of restrictions do you really think are important?

Well, that's a real common question patients and practitioners have. For me, when what I started to do five or six years ago was to just let my patients deviate from all the Pink Book rules. I mean, the Pink Book is alive and well. It's still out there. I was still routinely giving it to my patients as recently as probably four years ago, five years ago. But what I found with loosening up on that was that those rules really don't matter for Definitely more than 90% of people, like, don't matter at all. I would have people that we would give them an injection of their antigen, it would get itchy and red. They'd go home and take a Benadryl two hours later, and their dose would still work just fine, you know, and that's not supposed to be allowed, right? Or they would take ibuprofen three times a day for their head pain or whatever. I had people break all of those rules with no consequence whatsoever. And so I stopped telling anyone to even follow them unless we're not getting results. So if I. If I run into somebody who. Who seems to not be responding when I really think they should, I will alert them to the rules and say, hey, you might be a rule follower. It could be because they're out there, right? Those rules didn't just come from nowhere. They came from careful observation from Dr. McKeown and Dr. Schrader and my predecessors in this kind of therapy who discovered that, hey, this thing can interfere with some people here and there. It just seems to be that the vast majority of people, let's say 90, 95% of people, the rules don't matter at all. And that's not to say that it wouldn't improve things. Like if you went on the LDA diet, which I think is the least useful advice, is that diet. Because I've got tons of people that are allergic to potatoes or carrots or the things that are okay on the diet, fish, even, you're allowed to eat fish if you're not allergic. But lots of people are allergic to fish. So the diet, I just tell people not to eat things that they know cause a problem for them for a week after their dose. That's pretty simple. They already tend to eat that way. Right. So it doesn't deviate from that. But avoiding medications and supplements and whatnot doesn't really seem to be important for hardly anyone. So you don't have to brush your teeth with baking soda and gravel, you know, or whatever the other rules were. You couldn't even have sex for a couple of days. This is terrible. Depending on your next slide. So, you know, you couldn't have alcohol, you couldn't have caffeine. These things are very disruptive. And. And dispensing with the rules has been very, very liberating for the people in my practice. What I found that when I handed people the pink book, only about 25% of people who really needed this therapy would be willing to do it because the rules were so oppressive and hard to follow. So when I got rid of it, I was able to treat so many more people with like 95% success. Not following the book. But again, there are rule followers out there. I have one patient in Spain who's actually a medical student student over there who we're treating for Lyme. And he has, through his own experience and experimentation, found that Ritalin, you know, so the add, because he's got brain fog and he's trying to go to medical school, so he's been taking, you know, stimulants to try to make it through school. He found that that interfered with his response. You know, he's very scientific. And I isolated this variable and found that Ritalin when he was using it every day, his LDI dose didn't really seem to help him at all when he got rid of the Ritalin. Made a big difference, and I have no idea why. And these things really, the lore, the dogma in the pink book was acquired case by case, just like that. So that would lead a new addition to the pink book to say, don't take Ritalin either, for everyone. Okay? So these isolated examples and experience become global recommendations. And pretty soon everybody has to put themselves in a bubble for three days or they can't do lda. And that's just things live. So I figure if I totally agree, yeah, I just dispense with it. And somebody does have to tighten up their belt and follow the rules if they want to get success. The vitamin D thing you mentioned is the only thing that I do push or suggest as a recommendation to assist the person's response. Vitamin D is really critical to immune function in every regard about what the immune system does, including the promotion of immune tolerance, which is what we're doing also immune defense. So in the world of Lyme disease, vitamin D is a difficult subject because some patients with Lyme disease, if they take a therapeutic dose of vitamin D, like 5,000 units or more per day, they'll have a herx response. It'll actually cause a die off reaction and they can't tolerate it. And so in those people, I just tell them, okay, take whatever you can take 1,000 or 2,000 units a day, just so your tolerance response from the LDI is somewhat better, but stay under the dose that gives you a die off response. And over time, as we get their tolerance to improve, they can take more vitamin D because they won't have a herx reaction. They're a difficult population in some cases.

Is there a target blood level of 25 vitamin D that you think is really good for people in general?

There is. And my feeling on the matter is based on hundreds, thousands of patients in Alaska, which is a nice laboratory for vitamin D because nobody makes any up there, and people with all kinds of chronic disease problems. What I discovered was that if you can get your 25 hydroxy vitamin D level between 120 and 150, that's the range that I found was therapeutic and was beneficial for people. That's above the reference range on the lab for most laboratories. And so another doctor sees that level and says, you have vitamin D toxicity, you have to stop taking it. There are some issues with that. Number one, vitamin D has no toxicity. The thing that has toxicity is calcium. Okay? So if somebody's going to take a dose of vitamin D, and I generally recommend 10,000 units a day for adults, will get most people into that range. That'll bump people's level about 100 points. And most people sit in the 30s at baseline, you know, roughly. So the vitamin D itself doesn't cause a problem. It's just that if they're taking calcium supplements or eating Tums for heartburn or something, you'll absorb too much calcium and your blood calcium go too high. You can get muscle pain, calcifications, renal failure, all these horrible things that you read about, your doctor will freak out about. But if your vitamin D level is in the 140s and your calcium level on your blood test is completely normal, then you have no vitamin D toxicity. You have Your biomarker right there. Handy in a metabolic profile that costs $25.

So.

So I would just monitor people that way. And I rarely ever have seen anyone develop hypercalcemia in a dose range like this.

Awesome. That's very good. Yeah. My Last one was 125, which I was quite happy about.

Yeah, I've had my own level up to nearly 500. As an experiment, I took 50,000 units a day for seven months just to see what vitamin D toxicity felt like, so I could tell my patients what to watch for.

Right. Didn't find any toxicity, it sounds like.

Yeah, no. The only thing I noticed was that I really. I didn't sleep much, but I had, like, this functional insomnia. I don't need as much sleep as the average person at baseline, but I was sleeping four or five hours a night and bouncing out of bed and was super hyper. I just had so much energy, and after a while it started to wear down my adrenals, so I bailed out after that.

So let's talk a little bit about the sublingual versus injectable LDIs. I understand it now. You primarily use sublingual. So are there cases where injectable LDI still makes sense?

Makes sense to the people who want to do it? So my feeling on this, my experience with this, doing it all by injection for the first five years and then transitioning, well, maybe four years, then transitioning since then, is that I'm saying 95% of people easily will have pretty much the same response if they take the dose under the tongue as if they injected it into the skin. No difference whatsoever. Occasionally the person needs a stronger dose when it's taken sublingually than if it's injected, and that's easy enough to do. And if you're finding their dose through the sublingual route to begin with, then there's no problem at all. You find an effective dose that way for the majority of people. I have a small handful of folks over the years since I made the transition who are convinced in their own mind that their response is significantly better when it's injected. So they've continued to want to be injected with the dose. But those people in all of those cases did not let me experiment with raising the dose sublingually. So I still have the belief in my mind, which could be a false belief, you never know, because I haven't been able to test it, that if I just gave them a larger dose sublingually, it would work the same, but they don't want to mess with it. They got good response by injection. They don't mind the injection, so they want to stick with it. I haven't really encountered people that I thought weren't responding sublingually, even though they really should. So we're going to try it by injection. So who knows? But there might be some cases out there that really do better by injection route than they do sublingually. But the other problems with that, I think, don't make it worth it. So it hurts, number one, a lot to get these injections. And if it's a kid, they really won't like it at all. It can cause a significant injection site reaction, redness and swelling. And one of the things that lasts for a week or more, which is annoying. And I practice purely from my home base in Kona, Hawaii now, and I mail the syringes out to people. So I don't have any control over how the injection is performed or if it's done correctly. And so I don't like that variable being involved in the outcome. The bigger reason even than that, that I don't want people doing this by injection is that if you're going to inject someone with these antigens based on FDA rules and interpretation, now you're using an injectable antigenic substance, and you have to make sure that it is proven to be sterile. Every doctor who was doing LDA or LDI would need to install a $50,000 pharmacy fume hood in their office. They would have to compound all of their dilutions every month. Like, I'd have to remake a thousand vials every month. And I would have to have some independent assessment of sterility on those vials before I could use them for people. If you want to really follow the letter of the law for the fd. Whereas if they're given sublingually, none of that matters anymore. It doesn't have to be sterile. You don't have to have an expiration date. What you have is an extemporaneously compounded homeopathic remedy which doesn't fall under those rules. And that's where people are worried that maybe LDA might come under fire from the FDA and things like that. And there are really two reasons why it would. One is the use of beta glucuronidase, which I no longer bother with either, because it has no FDA approval for use in human beings. And the other one is the injection factor and proof of sterility. Those are the problems we have with this therapy in terms of regulatory agency. And so using it sublingually and without the enzyme, I no longer worry about those things. Perfect.

So what percentage of people with Lyme disease would you say improve with LDI if they stick with it long enough to get to their proper core dose? Is it 10%, 80%? Where does that fall?

That is really hard to say. I kept better track of this kind of data with the first 50 or so patients, and 40 out of the 50 had really great responses early on. And then what happens is when people catch wind of you're doing something that seems to work, your population changes. You know, you get a lot of the sicker people, which most of the time have more than just Lyme disease going on. And so it's harder to figure out every variable. And they're also burned out, and they don't have the patience that a lot of other people have. So I don't have good scientific data to answer the question. My feeling on the matter, with my experience over the last, I think, five years, four or five years, I've been treating Lyme disease patients with this and hundreds and hundreds of them is, I would say, conservatively, I should be able to get nearly 100% resolution of symptoms for at least 80% of people.

Wow.

And it's probably more like 90. And that's kind of the success rate with LDA in general for food allergies and things like that over the decades, it's been done, is about 90% success rate. But I've pushed my success rate up higher than that with the allergic population by manipulating the dilutions for those people instead of just using the rigid ones that were always used. It's a rare person that I can't fix with allergy problems. Now, Lyme disease is a complicated can of worms because they often end up with yeast sensitivity problems on top of it because they've been hammered with antibiotics. Their immune system is so dysregulated that some of them have begun having little other side reactions to Epstein Barr, to mycoplasma, to, you know, this or that. They develop chemical sensitivities. They have EMF sensitivity. They're just a disaster. So you have to unravel their problems kind of layer by layer. And I still, I get very good success. You know, you can easily say the majority. So more than 51%, no problem. But probably more like 70, 75%, I would say, in my current population, it drops down your overall success rate based on the complexity of the people who are coming to see you.

Right. So with people with Lyme, we know that Lyme is really good at kind of evading the immune system. We've talked about how a lot of the symptoms are really the immune system's interaction with these organisms. I guess my question is, do you think there's ever a place when someone's doing ldi? Is there ever a place for herbal or other types of antimicrobials in combination with ldi, or is that, in your opinion, never required?

Well, I would say as an ongoing core therapy for the person, it's never a good idea. Okay. The one time, and that's even in the setting of acute Lyme. So I've only gotten to treat one person with acute Lyme who was sick from a tick bite within a month of me seeing them.

Okay.

And I put that. It was an 11 year old kid and I put him on antibiotics first and he flared and got phenomenally worse. So after three days of the antibiotic, I stopped it. I gave him an LDI dose. I think I just picked 12C out of the hat. And he was asymptomatic the next day, just boom, overnight, his symptoms were gone. Fever, rash, muscle pain, fatigue, gone normal. Kid went to school the next day. So I was really struck by that because I wasn't even at that point in time. This was a few years ago. I was still thinking, well, in the first month, you know, acute Lyme, we probably want to give them antibiotics. And so that one opportunity to treat acute Lyme, I learned that I was wrong about that. It's still immune response. That's the thing. The one time I would say that the antimicrobial therapies might come in handy is if you flare. Maybe. But that's a big maybe. I don't want everybody thinking that I just said, hey, if you flare from Lyme, go ahead and take antibiotics because it could blow up in your face. The idea is if you lower the antigen load in the body, maybe the flare severity will mitigate, but the opposite could also happen. You could induce a Herx reaction on top of an immune flare and then it's worse. So it's not something that I really advise people do, but some folks will do that on their own accord. And there has, there has been mixed results to that.

Some of the most exciting outcomes that I've heard with LDI are in the Pandas and Pans community and kids with those conditions. And so I wonder if, if you could just share a few comments about Pandas and Pans and LDI and then maybe more broadly, how LDI might be helpful for children on the autism spectrum.

Oh, yeah. So pandas. If in fact it is pandas, the reason that that's so much simpler is because you have one immune target. And you know what it is. Okay. They react to strep. That's the S at the end of pandas, right? That's not the S at the end of pans, unfortunately. Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with strep. And they have an elevated ASO titer, a strep antibody or whatever. And they had recurring strep when they were young. You get that picture. And the kids got ocd and agitation and all these things. And you go, oh, okay. And you give them the strep antigen, which. The strep antigen is not at all like the Lyme or the yeast. It has a very narrow range of reaction. It's a lot quicker and easier to find the dose. It makes you look really smart. Okay. Because it's easy to treat in the scope of LDI and the potential for complexity. It's like, hey, you get the strep antigen and one of these three doses works almost every time. And then. And then the kid is like miraculously better, you know, and better and better with repetition. And it's just easier because of those factors. Autism, though, and pans, which is this made up distinction. You got to realize most of these diagnoses are made up. They are a basket of descriptive symptoms the person may have, and they do not speak to causation or any kind of understanding of the physiology. You know, like Ms. Well, we saw was this autoimmune disease that attacks myelin. Well, guess what? It's actually borrelia induced hypersensitivity borrelia reactivity in 90% of people. I didn't know that until a few years ago. And now I'm like, oh, well, now Ms. Is actually pretty easy to treat because now I know know what usually causes it. So autism is one of the most rewarding things I get to treat because it's a kid and because they're so dysfunctional and because it's just the difference it makes in their life and in the lives of their family. So it's very exciting, but it's one of the most complicated things also because it is almost always multifactorial, a lot like your Lyme disease population. And on that note, the Lyme organism, the borrelia, and other associated organisms are very common immune triggers in autism spectrum.

Totally agree.

Yeah. And I've just been able to observe that in a Lot of people I've treated, but there is a whole bowl full of other likely suspects. And yeast is another common one. Herpes simplex is common. Strep is common. Clostridia is common. The MMR vaccine sometimes plays a role directly and antigenically. Some kids will regress into autism after the mmr, but it's usually that. The vaccine itself was a catalyst for immune dysregulation. And the measles virus isn't necessarily the ongoing antigenic target in most cases. But occasionally, occasionally it is. Okay, how you figure out which ones to use for the kid first and in what kind of progression is just clinical experience and skill. You ask a lot of questions about what happened early on. Was this kid neurologically abnormal from birth, or did they regress after some event? Were they prone to food allergies as a baby? Were they prone to recurring strep infection? Did they get the mmr and then everything went south? You know, all of these important key bits of information in their childhood. And then the other big thing that is helpful to me with anybody with chronic illness is what interventions they tried and how they responded. You know, so if they say, oh, we've tried gluten free diet, we tried chelation, we've tried ivig, and that actually helped a little bit, but then it quit working. But chelation didn't work, work. Dietary elimination didn't work. You start crossing things off the list. Okay, it's not a kid with a heavy metals affliction. It's not a kid with a gluten sensitivity. You can narrow the field. And he would say he was fine. And then he broke out with a primary herpes sort of outbreak. And then he started to have weird ticks and regression and quit making eye contact. Like, oh, herpes virus might be one of the big key things. So there are all these possible variables you have to work through. And if they say, yeah, he took Valtrex okay, for six months, and that was the best improvement we ever saw, but then it just kind of quit working over time, which is real common with these things that are not infection. Right. There's a microbe involved, but it's not really infection. All you do is lower the antigenic load in the body, but eventually the immune system will catch up with you and the symptoms come back. So response to an antiviral puts viruses on the table. Response to an antifungal puts yeast on the table as an antigen. Those bits of history are really critical. And then you just try them one after another with some kind of approach to dosing. You figure out each one at a time, and what you often find is that different antigens relate to different specific symptoms. Okay, so like the strep antigen may improve the OCD behaviors the kid has, but not communication doesn't stop the stimming behavior or the aggression. And you find that the lyme mix totally improves the kid's communication, but he's still having rage outbursts. And then you find that the bartonella gets rid of the rage, you know? You know, it's just really an interesting thing to unravel, but it can be. This is an absolutely amazing tool. I was treating autism with the biomedical approach. I was in the DAN organization for years in the past and doing all the biomedical stuff, and I thought I was really helping about 25 to 30% of these kids. When you throw in this immunological set of switches, and that's the way I look at it, is like you just flip the switch to all the off and it's miraculous immediately, but you have to figure out which switch to flip.

Yeah, I mean, I think for kids with pandas, it's just amazing because the other tools that are commonly used, like ivig is really expensive. Plasmapheresis is somewhat invasive. I mean, it's not necessarily something that is realistic for a lot of families that have kids that are dealing with pandas. And so, I mean, this just seems like a phenomenal tool. And I've heard some amazing stories, stories with families that have kids with pandas. So it's pretty remarkable for people that have gut related issues, let's say maybe sibo, ulcerative colitis, ibd. You mentioned a couple of these Crohn's. We talked about them a little bit earlier. But is there a place for doing autologous stool based ldi? And when is that better than some of the premixed antigen tinctures that you already have available?

It's better. The autologous stool is better. When all of the other ones didn't work work or didn't work enough. And it's interesting, early on, probably five, six years ago now, I was treating a lot of people with autologous LDI that I developed. I came up with that idea before I developed a lot of stock antigens. And some of the first people I used that technique with were people with inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn's and whatnot. And I would. Sometimes it would just give me 100% complete resolution of the problem. And what that taught me about this Whole therapy is that you don't even have to know what the right antigenic trigger is. You just have to get a sample of it and dilute it. So human stool, if you were to count up all the potential antigenic epitope molecules in that, there's a billion things in there. Who knows what it is that affects that person. But if it's in there and you find the right dose, it flips off the switch. But what I found over the years, as I've identified more specific candidate antigens for that crowd, let's just look. Lump. Chronic bowel disease people kind of together in terms of like relating it to autism. It's almost always multifactorial. It's rarely one thing. A lot of them have food sensitivities that were either present early on or were acquired down the road after developing leaky gut and other things as a side incidence. A lot of them have developed yeast sensitivity. A lot of them react to clostridia. The biggies are yeast and mycobacteria for most of that crop. And then parasites, actually, so parasites of different kinds. The one parasite mix I currently have that I'm using is just a handful of protozoan species, six different protozoans, amoeba and cryptosporidia and giardia, you know, those kinds of things. And for some of my inflammatory bowel people, that's been the biggest key. So they all look the same, though, like their symptoms are the same, their description's the same, they respond to steroids, the same, whatever. So you have to do the detective work to figure out what's most important. Likely. But it's another. Like autism, it's another kind of, let's try this one, then this one, then this one. And some of my inflammatory bowel people, I have to give them four different antigens, all at the right dialed in dose to get 100% symptom resolution. But it can be done with greater than 90% of those people. If the standardized ones I have, that are all gut flora and food antigen and whatnot derived, if those don't really get it all the way, then I'll use an autologous stool sample and hope that it holds the rest of the answer for them. But the problems with that are that sometimes the target is no longer there. Okay, like let's say somebody got Giardia and they were get. They were sick for a month before it was diagnosed, and then they were given Flagyl and they completely got rid of the Giardia. They no longer have Giardia. But their immune cycle persists.

Okay?

It's still going on. Because even if you eradicate the microbe, you don't necessarily get rid of what is now an autoimmune disease. But if you can desensitize them to the original antigen, that is Giardia, you can stop the process, no problem. But in that person who cleared their giardia with a month of flagyl or whatever it took, you take a stool sample and the antigen is no longer there. And it doesn't work. If I use the parasite mixture, it works like a charm.

Okay, so if the parasite mixture has giardia, for example, in it person has giardia, is that also one where we say creating immune tolerance is okay? Or does the LDI by creating immune tolerance also help the immune system then to more properly respond to the giardia and clear it from the system? Or are there certain microbes like giardia where you still need to do some antimicrobial treatment as well?

That is a real interesting question that I think about all the time is what is the difference between infection and commensal flora or immune response? And in terms of protozoan parasites, if you go to India or if you go to the Amazon basin or whatever, everybody's loaded with these things and they're not sick. How does that happen? They also don't get allergies or autoimmune diseases. So there is an argument that early colonization with protozoan parasites actually is beneficial for your immune system. Right. But if you grew up here in the US in this clean environment, your body never saw them, acquiring them later makes you sick. So then what do you do? You know, and it's interesting, some people will carry blastocyst, as hominis is a good example. Like all kinds of people are colonized, we think, with that. And then occasionally it makes a person sick. It's really on the fence in there and it's in the parasite mixture that I use too. So we don't necessarily know. The key is whether they're symptomatic or not and how they responded to the anti parasitic attempt. So a lot of people, the reason I decide to try the parasite mix is because they tell me, oh, somebody thought maybe I had parasites. At one point I took alinea for a couple of weeks and I felt dramatically better. But then a month or two later, all my symptoms returned and alinea didn't work. I'm like, okay, well then you're reacting to maybe something that is killed by alinea, which is actually A pretty broad category of organism. So then you try that and you hope that you have the right bug in your antigen mixture. Otherwise what I end up doing over time is I keep getting new things, like I just got a sample of toxoplasm plasma, because I'm thinking, well, it's not in that mixture, but it may afflict some neuropsychiatric symptom in some people and whatnot. So I'm going to try it in some of my cases that didn't respond to the other things on my shelf.

So in people with Lyme disease, it's also very common that their symptoms are caused by environmental exposure to mold, that they're living in a home that's been water damaged and that that can create a whole cycle of inflammation. I know that may not really be an infection where there's a micro necessarily, but I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts or observations about LDA or LDI in terms of those people that have mold illness. And if you look at Richie Shoemaker's work where he talks about people that have an HLADR predisposition, not properly tagging those antigens and excreting those mold toxins, for example, is there a place here for LDI and LDA or is that more on the allergy side rather than the biotoxin illness illness side of his work?

Yeah, a lot of the people that I work with either have had definite mold related illness or it's been strongly suspected. Right. So what I explained to them is, as you discussed just now, mold makes you sick in two completely different ways. You can be allergic to mold, which is an immune response condition that I can treat. You know, you can treat it with LDA because the inhalant mixture and includes mold aller mold samples, or you can have a toxicity based illness problem, in which case you need to be detoxified. You know, clean up your environment, reduce your exposure, take cholestyramine or benziony clay or whatever the binders du jour are and get it out of your body. And you may have to do both, the way to tell the difference is how the symptoms fluctuate or respond over time based on exposure. So if your symptoms are chronic and persistent, fatigue, headache, brain fog, you know, whatever you're feeling and those symptoms follow you everywhere you go and are unwavering, then that might be a toxin related thing because it's in you and the exposure is consistent. If, however, you only notice that you get sick when you enter a moldy environment and you get Sick right away, then that's an allergy response. Okay, so that's the big thing. And you could have both, of course. Both. And so I get a lot of people that come and say I had mold illness, all this water damage. I was in this place for three years, whatever, and now I can smell mold when no one else around can smell it, and it makes me immediately feel ill. Like, okay, I can treat that part. And a lot of these people will have done the shoemaker protocol, let's say, or somebody else worked with somebody else to remove the toxin load because they thought, oh, yeah, mold toxicity. And they did a year of binders and toxin load, and then their urinary mycotoxins dropped down to near nothing, but they were not any better. Okay. They didn't get clinical improvement then. That wasn't the crux of your problem. You have more of an allergy than a toxicity problem. And that's the thing. And sometimes people have to do both. And sometimes all they have to do is desensitize the allergic response. And, you know, you can't change your genetics. So the HLA typing to me is a waste of money and an irrelevant thing to do, because what are you gonna do about it? You know, you see all kinds of people that have those HLA determinations who are not sick at all. All you can't change that. Therefore, it's not clinically useful. It's just an assessment of risk. Maybe. But people are either sick or they're not sick, and you have to treat them based on the symptoms that they have.

That's helpful. Thank you very much. So another big topic right now as we wrap up in the last couple questions, is mast cell activation. And so to me, throughout this whole conversation, the way I'm thinking of mast cell activation is that it's an indication of immune intolerance and that by creating immune tolerance to the various microbes and antigens and things that may be triggering the mast cell activation, that the mast cell condition itself, the release of histamine, the inflammation, and all those things should also reduce or resolve with ldi. Is that a reasonable thought process?

Absolutely. So people. People act like mast cell activation is a diagnosis, when really it's just a symptom. It's a physiologic occurrence from something upstream, like a fever. Like, okay, if you have a fever, that indicates that your immune system is reacting to something that's probably an infectious process, a true infectious process.

Right.

And you got to figure out. You still. It begs the question. You have to Figure out what kind of infection do you have and where is it in the body and how do I get rid of it. So mast cell hyper reactivity generally just stems from, as you mentioned, a lot of allergies or really intense allergies to some common exposures. And so the mast cells themselves are just like the guns with the bullets, but something has to pull the trigger, okay. And you have to figure out what's pulling the trigger, what's eliciting that. The complexity though, when people have been, have had allergies that went untreated for a long time, they tend to develop more and more allergic reactions to more and more, it gets more global. They start to become what we consider universal reactors to all sorts of things. And they'll even react to light mechanical pressure on the skin. They'll have what we call dermatographia, right? You can run your fingernail on their arm and write help. And it just raises into this red welt that says help or sos, whatever. And that suggests that their mast cells are now so utterly confused that they're responding to just mechanical things. And the same thing happens with people with gut problems. They'll get to where just swallowing water, a gulp of water will set off all these, you know, dramatic symptoms. It's not like, it's not that they're allergic to water, it's that their tissues and the cells they're in have become so hyper reactive that they don't even know anymore what to react to. Okay? They just have panic attacks constantly. So in some of these people, trying to figure out what their actual upstream allergies are is just so hard to do. And they, they have these crazy responses. They think at least, you know, to this or that one way or the other. And they're really hard to. So my current, and this is a brand new strategy that I'm only just now going to start to employ with some people. I've been thinking about it for a while, but never bothered acquiring the substances to try is, I'm going to try desensitizing them first to just histamine itself.

I knew that's where you were going.

A lot of these people say, well, if I follow a low histamine diet, I got to avoid histamine, blah, blah, blah. Well, the histamine is being made inside your body, so good luck avoiding histamine. Like try avoiding carbon dioxide. You make that stuff, you're not going to be able to. So if I can get that overreaching, crazy response of histamine under control, Then you might be able to see what the real triggers are instead of just seeming to react to everything in the world. If we can get that histamine thing to where you're no longer just overreacting to the exposure to histamine in your body, then we might be able to say, hey, you're actually just allergic to asparagus or whatever or cats or something. You just. You can get that to calm down. To where the real answers become more evident. There's buried in the sand right now. So I'm going to. I have a colleague of mine who's been doing LDI originally under my teaching, I guess, at first, and then has just taken off and knows more about autism in particular than I do and some of these things. Karima Harani in California, Houston.

Met last week, actually, at Dr. Klinghardt's conference.

Did you? Yeah. She's fantastic. She is. She's awesome. And I have given her various antigens before I gave them to other people because she has a large autism population, so she can learn, whereas, you know, other people have certain other niches and whatnot. I try to identify who these people are, who get. Who get an opportunity for more experience than I have in one area, because I really think the collective can learn so much faster to help way more people than just me. So she's a good resource, and she experiments with new things, which I love, because that's what I do. People shouldn't just look to me to come up with everything that's new. I want to hear other people say, hey, I tried desensitizing somebody to this substance, and it works for this and that condition, and that's great. So she tried using histidine, which is interesting. So that's like the amino acid precursor. And I thought, well, if that works, she's tried in a couple of people and got response with some of these people that seem like global reactors. That made me think, okay, I got to get off my butt. And I've been thinking about this for a while, that this would work. I better actually make it happen, which takes me a while in my life. And so what I have is I'm going to make a mixture of histidine that she sent me a sample, plus histamine. So I'm just going to use them both together and create a series of dilutions and see if I can get some of these global reactor people to calm down enough. And maybe that's the only thing they'll need, right, to at least get their life back on track. 80%. But I think it'll give us a chance, a much better chance at going further upstream and identifying their other real antigenic triggers. After that, the questions are, what's the dose range for this substance going to be? And that's what we really don't know. So it all starts with some willing participants. So, yeah, I have this problem and nothing else has worked. So I'm willing to do something new that's completely uncharted. Terrible. Yeah.

She did a lecture on her clinical application of LDI at the Klinghardt conference recently, and I was very, very impressed with her. I hadn't come across her previously, and it takes a lot for me to be impressed, and I thought she was just fantastic practitioner. So that sounds like she's doing a lot of great stuff with the work that you're doing with ldi.

Yeah. And that, you know, that's where I got to where I am, and I encourage other people to do that. I am. It would be. Be ultimately so hypocritical of me to tell everyone that they should do things the way I do things, because that is not the philosophy that got me to where I am. I don't really do anything the way people tell me I'm supposed to. It's just part of my personality. I see that as the opposite of progress. So Kareem is one of those who I am really happy to communicate with, and she tells me that she's tried these things that I haven't tried. And what she finds out, and then I can take that to the collective and say, hey, this seems to work, at least in somebody else's experience. And we can. Can just get so much better at this quicker that way.

So, last question on LDI before we wrap up with a couple closing questions. I know there's a dental cavitation or dental mix. So is that something that could potentially help people minimize the need for some of these more invasive surgical procedures? What's the intent of the dental antigen mix?

Okay, so just to clarify that the dental mix I have is synthetic substances that are used by dentists. Okay. To put into your mouth. It's material from dental appliances, it's glove material, it's filling material, and really, it's good for either dentists who have developed occupational sensitivity and they can hardly even do their job because they react to all these substances that they've been exposed to for years. And that's the one person I've really used this with who actually gave me all my substances for the mixture is a dentist. Dentist out east in New Jersey. And he's been able, he's had great improvement in his occupational sensitivity to this by using this mix. And he needs like a 16C dilution like way out there. But other people will have dental work done and have artificial materials placed in their mouth and then become chronically ill. And so the, the average patient in the population may also be reacting to something that is in their mouth and it can have global systemic, multi system effects. And all they would tell you is, yeah, I just started last year kind of out of the blue. And you have to think, to ask people like, well, did you get any dental work done? What happened before that? And people won't even think about the fact they got a filling three weeks earlier and then they caught a cold. And that was the catalytic experience. So it will benefit some people with that instance you mentioned dental cavitation. So those people with cavitations or just periodontal disease, things like that, those are cases for autologous ldi.

Okay.

So, you know, if you can, if somebody's gonna go and have cavitation excavation done in their face, see if the dentist or the oral surgeon is willing to collect a little sample of the stuff they got out of the cavitation. Because that microbial pool would be potentially a goldmine of opportunity for a. Yeah, that's awesome.

What about heavy metals? Is that also one, Is there an LDI mix for allergy to metals, which I know happens as well?

Well, the chemical mix that is still, you know, the one that's been produced by the pharmacy for all these years, that generally covers most of the metal sensitivity you see is nickel. You know, people who have a contact allergy to watches and rings and things like that, that, that, that gets treated by the chemical mixture almost every time I have, I haven't really been able to nail down anybody to date that clearly has an allergy response to something like mercury, lead, whatever. I've got one suspect person I'm working with now who seemed to have a good response to this homeopathic Mercurius solution. So those people are going to be out there. I have one woman who just reached out to me here who has sensitivity to titanium, had a titanium input in. And so all I need to do is get basically a sample of. If the chemical mixture doesn't work, which is worth a try first I'll just get a piece of titanium somewhere, go get some ring or something this titanium and put it in some water, put an electrical current through it maybe and ionize some of it. And then Dilute it. You just have to be creative. Like, where do I get this? How do I react? You know?

Yeah, it's interesting. The reason I was thinking about that was Vera Steskel's work with the Malaysa testing, where they actually do testing to see how reactive you are to a whole list of different metals. That then the theory is that that's also a cause of inflammation. But it sounds like the chemical mix has a lot of those in it. So that that may already be addressed. So what do you do to optimize your own health on a regular basis?

If we had another hour, I could probably go through that. For one thing, I'm also a victim of being born in the wrong millennium. Like people ask me, why am I so sick? What's happening to us? We're all born in the wrong millennium. On this planet. 200 years ago, people really didn't have allergies, didn't have autoimmune problem. They weren't nearly as sick. We have inundated ourselves with chemicals and EMF frequencies and things the human body was never meant to experience. So I myself have type 1 diabetes that I acquired at age 39. So that's my autoimmune disease. It's one of the autoimmune diseases, ironically, that I haven't found a way to treat yet. But I have my own case to experiment on on an ongoing basis. So I have a handful of antigens and I'm trying to work with. I've had a couple of kind of exciting evenings where something I. And both of these, I think, were giving myself the Gad65 protein, specifically for those of you who know about the disease. And then all evening long I was chasing this crazy hypoglycemic problem I was having. So that made me think, okay, that's the relevant antigen. I just haven't dialed in the dose yet. So hopefully in the next couple years I'll find a way to resolve type 1 diabetes, which would be amazing. So I have to deal with that to keep myself healthy and fit. I've got to take insulin four or five times a day. I have to be careful how I eat. I found out that my testosterone was in the cellar about eight years ago, so I've had to be on testosterone replacement. My thyroid quit working properly about three years ago, so I have to take thyroid every day. Basically a hormonal mess. Which luckily was my big area of expertise before I became known for immunotherapy. It was bioidentical hormone therapy set. So I have to be on a bunch of hormone regimens. And I exercise regularly. You do meditative practice, things like that. And then I take a bowl full of vitamin supplements and mineral supplements every morning too. Most of us probably do. If you're like me every day as you're putting these things in there, you're asking yourself, do I really need to take all this crap? I'm going to, I feel pretty good. Why deviate? And patients will ask me, do I need all these supplements anymore? I'm like, I don't know, probably not. Don't do what I do. I make my wife take them. I give bowls of items to my kids every day with some variable sort of threat, what's going to happen if you don't take them? You got to do that. So I do all that. And I eat primarily organic, whole food, paleo kind of strategy. And from the outside I'm like six one, 240 pounds of solid muscle. I, I can lift 250 pounds over my head and bench press probably 400 pounds if I wanted to. And I can go charge through the surf for two hours without getting tired. From the outside, people think that I just look like an incredibly healthy, fit person. But if they knew what it took for me to just sort of not die every day. It's hard to look at somebody from the outside and understand what's going on in inside them and what it takes to maintain that. And these chronically ill people back to like, to the Lyme disease population, it's kind of the opposite. These people are sick, so sick they can't function and yet from the outside they look fine. And people choose to believe that they're just lazy or it's all in their head, or you just need a psychiatrist or you're just depressed or you know, and even the people close to you, your family and loved ones will treat you like that, which is horrible. And that's why it's one of those groups that I really like trying to treat. If you're missing an arm, you're going to get sympathy from everybody who walks by. But if you look fine from the outside and yet your body is on fire, every cell of your body is on fire from autoimmune inflammation and whatnot. Then not only are you suffering physically, you're suffering psychologically because nobody understands.

Yeah, absolutely agree. I had my own 20 year journey through Lyme disease and mold illness, unfortunately doing really, really well today, today. But yeah, that invalidation that happens from people not really being supportive. I mean that in and of itself creates a significant trauma for people that have been through it. So where can people find you and how can they reach out to your team to work with you if they'd like to explore LDI further?

Apparently, people can find me pretty easily on the Internet. I get contacted from people all over the world regularly. But what we have now here, based out of our home in Hawaii, is a new business name called Global Immunotherapy. And if you just search Global Immunotherapy, we pop up. You know, it's me and my wife to be Jeanette. And the website is www.globalimmunotherapy.com and you can go to that. And we have a phone number. It's easiest to get a hold of us through the email address that's on there, which is just customerservicelobalimmunotherapy.com you can email Jeanette and and ask questions, try to set up an appointment. What I suggest people do first is if they go to our website or if they just search me on YouTube, there's a whole list of little short instructional videos I've done educating people about LDI so you can kind of learn about what this is. You actually get a pretty good sense of me and who I am because I can't hide my personality. So it's in the videos, blatantly, and you get a sense of what we can do and how this works and whatnot. And, you know, there are networks on the Internet too fast, Facebook groups and other people that are talking about this all the time, which isn't just about me, but it's about the therapy. And I encourage people to look at those things and learn about this before they even bother, you know, approaching us directly and being interested in having a consultation with me, because those resources are out there and they're really useful.

Makes sense.

That's perfect.

So I want to thank you for the time that you spent with us today. You're obviously brilliant and you're obviously doing things that you're having trouble, tremendous fun with. I mean, I love it when I see a practitioner that's still excited about solving the puzzle and helping people get their lives back and really making a tremendous difference in the world. So thank you for your time today. I'm excited personally about ldi. I've used it personally, and I think it's something that people should explore. So thank you, Dr. Vincent, for spending time with us today. I appreciate it very much. And have a great rest of your day.

Absolutely. Thank you.

To learn more about Today's guest, visit globalimmunotherapy.com that's globalimmunotherapy.com I appreciate your support of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. If you'd like to follow me, you can find me on Facebook and Twitter as Better HealthGuy. The show can be found on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. If you'd like to support the show, please visit betterhealthguy.com donate and if you'd like to be added to my newsletter, please Visit don@betterhealthguy.com newsletters I'm looking forward to many more shows ahead and appreciate your interest.

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