Episode #90: Peptide Therapy with Dr. Kent Holtorf, MD

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Hello everyone and welcome to episode number 90 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Dr. Kent Holtorff and the topic of the show is peptide therapy. Dr. Kent Holtorff is medical Director of the Holtorf Medical Group. He is founder and director of the nonprofit National Academy of Hypothyroidism which is dedicated to dissemination of new information to doctors and patients on the diagnosis and treatment of hypothyroidism. He has personally trained numerous physicians across the country in the use of bioidentical hormones, hypothyroidism, complex endocrine dysfunction and innovative treatments of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and chronic infectious diseases including Lyme disease. He is a fellowship lecturer for the American Board of Anti Aging Medicine, the endocrinology expert for AOL Health, and is guest editor and peer reviewer for a number of medical journals. Dr. Holtorf has published a number of peer reviewed endocrine reviews including on the safety and efficacy of bioidentical hormones, inaccuracies of standard thyroid testing, testosterone replacement for men and women, the diagnosis and treatment of growth hormone deficiency, and on the diagnosis and treatment of adrenal dysfunction in chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. He has helped to demonstrate that much of the long held dogma in endocrinology is inaccurate. He is a contributing author to Dennis Wilson's Evidence based approach to Restoring Thyroid Health. He has been featured on CNBC, ABC News, CNN, Extra TV, Discovery Health, the Learning Channel, the Today Show, Dr. Dean Adell, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Sean Hannity and more, and quoted in numerous print media including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, US News & World Report, San Francisco Chronicle, WebMD, Elle, Better Homes & Gardens, Us Weekly, Forbes, Cosmopolitan and Self Magazine, among many others. And now my interview with Dr. Kent Holtorf. It is an honor for me today to have Dr. Kent Holtorff on the show to talk with us about peptides. Thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Holtorf. Oh, thank you for.

Having me. Thanks. I know that you do the work you do today because you had your own personal experience with chronic health challenges, including Lyme disease. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about your story and how your own personal journey led you to the passion that you have today helping so many other people dealing with.

Chronic illness. Yeah. And it's not dissimilar to, I think a lot of people in this arena, they've had loved ones or themselves go through it and you know, basically growing up normal, great childhood, but had weird things going on. Like one at anisocoria, one pupil bigger than the other. All of a sudden I would just get like arm weakness, weird Reynalds, like you know, basically autoimmune stuff come and go. So it was strange, but it wasn't like, oh my gosh, it was very functional. Then went on to, on to college, things did okay. Started getting more tired, couldn't get up. Terrible temperature tolerance. The big joke was I have a 2 degree temperature tolerance if it's hot. Just pouring sweat, night sweats. And then went on to medical school and just started found that's when it really started progressing. I'm like, something's wrong. I like, I can't function. I'm just so tired. I'm achy, you know, brain fog and like, oh, you're distressed. Here's an antidepressant. Like, I'm not just, I'm not, I'm not depressed. I'm like, I can't function. And just talking to a patient was so overwhelming. But I figured out, what the heck can I do? So I went into anesthesia because you don't have to talk to them because they're asleep. Right. But went into that and it, you know, I could function. But that is no disrespect to anesthesiologist, but is the most mindless specialty ever, you know. So I get over it anyways. But so then I started going. I was very evidence based. I'm still very evidence based. And it's really ingrained in you in medical school and residency to don't seek anything alternative. Alternative means basically no evidence. Right. So I'm like, I got to do something because I'm dying here and you know, could never sleep and just. You get anxiety and panic attacks. And so I started going to some so called alternative conferences and I went, I'm like, damn, these are more evidence based than what they're teaching me in residency. And just got really excited about that and took a lot of therapies home and helped myself on my, I'm a new person. I go, this is great. And so from there I said anesthesia is not for me. So I went into family practice, opened a family practice, and then concentrated on the patients that were like me and the ones that just don't fit in any box. And we found a lot of thyroid patients. And it was early on with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia. It's interesting, my dad really had chronic fatigue syndrome before that was even heard of. But. And then, so started progressing more and then learning more. We opened 22 centers across the country, fibromyalgia fatigue centers, then started doing franchises. And then what happened was, you know, we find emotional stress is just a killer for this illness. And which is unfortunate because that's why a lot of doctors go, oh, she's a stressed out woman. You're just, you're going through this. A loss of, you know, of a pet or, you know, divorce, but divorce, very stressful. All of a sudden I could not get out of bed. I was hit by a truck, night sweats, just terrible neuropathy and just could not function. And then so basically started going around the world to try to find treatments to help, help me. I knew I had, I knew I had Lyme. That's what we treated. And my blood was so thick you couldn't draw it out at all. And you know, so end up with Babesia and Bartonella, Babesia, really huge in that coagulation. So basically just found all these treatments that potentially work and brought them back to patients. And a lot of great treatments. And actually even kind of early on I was using peptides. I was flying to Switzerland and Belgium and other places to get peptides for myself. Couldn't use them on patients, but found that I had basically two, three and a half years of the highest dose antibiotics that I would never give a patient. Right. And two weeks later I could be back to where I was, if not worse. So there seemed to really need a different way. That's where we started looking at, you know, the immune system, immune modulators and you know, it's, it's really a multi system problem where one thing affects another. And so you can't say, well what's the cause? And over the years it becomes, it's like chicken or the egg, it kind of doesn't matter. But then when I really started focus on peptides and also stem cells, that, that really brought me out of the.

Fog. Wow. So let's start them with kind of a high level for people listening. What are peptides? How are they similar to or different from amino acids, from proteins, maybe from hormones? Are they available Today, is it something that we can get? And if so, why are better known? Why aren't more practitioners using them.

In practice? Yeah, I'll answer the last question, like, how come my doctor doesn't know this? And I give talks around the country to doctors and do these, you know, PowerPoint presentation with hundreds of references and just unbelievable. And everyone says, why haven't I heard of this before? You know, so it's. It's because they're not patentable, so there's no drug company going to do it. And so it just hasn't caught on. But peptides, yeah, peptides is kind of an arbitrary term. So peptides are a link of amino acids and basically you'll see different definitions, but generally 50 and below is a peptide. Over that, it's a protein. So just think of a peptide as a small protein. Now, we didn't know much about them. Everything was hormones. Hormones, that's what controls everything. But we're finding the peptides actually are the master controllers. And they're working at really the cellular level. And the difference between the hormones tend to be basically long on, long on for effect and long off. So they kind of work like this. Peptides tend to be more specific and quicker on, quicker off. Exceedingly safe. And you look at majority of these peptides, I mean, they give, you know, rats hundreds or a thousand times a dose. And they can't find a toxic level, for instance, like bpc, they can't find it. So they're very safe. And they just can do so many things. And we're learning more and more peptides. There's so many peptides in the body where, you know, I would say we probably know about 10% of them. And the ones that happen to be studied, those are the ones we use and.

Have research. How are peptides created? Are these naturally occurring? Are they synthetically created in a lab environment? Where do they come from when we're taking.

Them exogenously? Yeah, so you don't want people say, hey, are they natural? I like to use bioidentical because let's say like growth hormone, you can get natural growth hormone from the pituitary of a bunch of people, you know, and that's when all the problems with the prions and things like that, well, you can't get blood if you get growth from them. But now that's genetically made. So now they actually have peptide synthesizers where it's much more complex than this. But you dial up basically the peptide you want and it takes amino acids and.

Makes them do peptides have a place both in acute conditions and chronic conditions. What are some of the key conditions where you've clinically used peptides in your practice? And to what extent do people see symptoms improving in your.

Patient population? Well, it's just again, it's changed our practice focus and we generally have ended up being, you know, basically last stop. We did a study on patients. They saw an average 7.2 physicians before seeing us. That was 15 years ago. And, you know, 85% got significant visit by the, by the fourth visit. But now it's, you know, you know, the stories where it's, they just go doctor to doctor because now doctors compartmentalize everything. Oh, the neurologist says this, gastrologist says this infectious disease is this. And no one puts it together and they just, if a doctor can't treat it, doesn't exist. And I'm kind of disgusted with the medical community on how rude that they can be to these patients and just dismiss them, make jokes about them. And we found that the less a doctor knows, the more adamant they're right. And so it was kind of freaked me out the first 10, 15 years ago. We have a patient, been sick for 10 years, go back to their either primary or specialist better, and they're excited to tell their doctor. I thought they'd be happy. They're not. They're like, oh, whatever it was is quackery, you know, like, well, don't you want to hear what it is? No, I don't need to know that. And so it's.

Really interesting. Yeah. I think back to your earlier comment about the mental emotional stress aspect of these conditions. I think if we didn't have some mental emotional stress contributor to maybe setting the stage for a condition going through something like chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme whatnot creates its own emotional trauma for many people. The invalidation that then you have to also address that component in order to move through the.

Illness itself. Yeah, It's a very complex condition and our system is not set up for complex conditions. If you don't fit into a little box, you're going to get terrible care, you know, and doctors are generally the 8, 15 minute visit. This is what you got here, take this. Go. They don't. Hey, that's not my area. That's not my area. So.

It'S tough. What are some of the conditions where you're finding peptides helpful? Like Lyme autism, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia. All.

Of those. All the above. And the problem with the peptides especially, like, even just like a one Peptide BPC is, it heals almost everything. So it's everything from brain to gut to the Achilles tendons. Muscles regenerates, liver lowers, inflammation. I mean, that's just one. So really, neurodegenerative diseases, traumatic brain injury. In fact, three days ago, our accountant had a terrible pain in the bottom of his foot, and he basically had an inflammation of his sesamoid bone. And they tried a steroid shot, which is. And then he took a couple BPC capsules and he's like, this is weird. It doesn't hurt anymore, you know, so, yeah, I mean, and that doesn't work for everyone, but it's one of the things we found that also antibiotics have their place, especially for Lyme. But we found if you don't get the immune system working, you'll never get rid.

Of it. So for people that are hearing us talking about peptides and wondering, where do these normally come from? Is it true that most or all of the peptides that we might now be able to exogenously introduce or introduce from outside the body, that those also exist in the body, or is that not always.

The case? Yes, most do exist in the body or they're a little modified for stability.

Or delivery. So something like BPC157, which we're going to talk more about, though, that is something that we do have in the body.

Normally, correct? Absolutely. Yeah. It's tremendous amounts in the stomach, it's very stable. And it's a fragment of the parent compound. So we're finding fragments often work as well as the whole compound, if.

Not better. What are some of the different categories of these peptides that are available now for.

Clinical use? Yeah, so if you look, and let's say we're to break them down, I'd say immune modulators, which are considered the thymosins. So the thymosins are basically different peptides, you know, from the thymus gland, which is here in your breastbone, and they produce a number of different thymic peptides that modulate. So if you look at the immune system, one side's TH1, this gets stuff inside the cell, TH2 gets stuff outside the cell. Now, normally they're balanced. We find with any chronic illness, stress, inflammation, you know, autoimmunity, and everything's a cause and effect is that th1 is too low, so you can't fight intercellular infections and Th2 is too high, so you get all this inflammation and risk for autoimmune disease. And when you get the borrelia in the blood, it starts secreting substance to basically reduce Th1, the intracellular, and then it goes inside the cell. Now you have chronic lyme and that can actually occur very quickly. People say, you know, it takes number of weeks, but it could happen much faster than that. You look at the standard treatment, even if say, oh, if you catch it early, it's curable. They found that patients with proven acute Lyme caught early with the standard infectious disease society protocol relapsed. 70% of them relapsed with the illness. So it was.

Not cured. So when we have this TH2 dominance, essentially we become accumulators of these intracellular infections. Right. We're not able to address the infections inside the cells. And that then perpetuates the.

Whole condition. Exactly. And that drives it more. And this causes autoimmunity, Mast cell activation syndrome and just general inflammation. Brain fog, just that flu.

Like feeling. We know that many of the diseases of aging, even outside of some of these chronic conditions, are immune dysfunction or senescence as well as inflammation. So from your perspective, what are some of the key factors that lead to aging in the body that we potentially can address or support with.

Peptide therapies? Yeah, so if you look at the thymus basically involutes right about age 30 and as it goes, and that's when all the diseases of aging start occurring. And they're really all partially due to low immune system, to rather a dysfunctional immune system. The CDC said 80% of age related diseases are from thymic dysfunction. And many people, they also have a pineal gland dysfunction. When they get calcified, it gets old. One of the peptides we like a lot, probably the biggest anti aging peptide is epitalium and it's shown to increase telomeres. So you know, telomeres are basically what every time the cell replicates, the telomeres shrink. So the cell is going to go, go through so many different replications, but it lengthens those. So it's basically an anti aging hormone. And especially when you combine it with the thymosins. Some, some amazing studies showing that human studies, people over 65 with significant cardiovascular disease live much longer. They actually improve their cardiovascular effect, their cardiovascular function, less cancer. So you know, the ultimate anti aging stuff I think is, is with.

These peptides. So many people say that aging is tied to chronic inflammation, but what I'm hearing is it's really more dysregulation of the immune system that leads to inflammation and that combination that actually is what causes aging in part. And that the focus on fixing the immune system and or modulating the immune system is one anti aging.

Strategy. Correct? Right, right. And you look at a lot of the mast cell activation syndrome guys, they are brilliant and very true everything they say, but they really focus on how do you directly affect the mast cells. But the key is look upstream and affect the immune system that's affecting the mast cells and we get much, much better results. And have good luck with those patients that are sensitive to everything, you know, just have multi system problems and. But they go, I can't tolerate that. Can't.

Tolerate that. Is the mast cell activation then tied to the.

TH2 upregulation?

Absolutely, yes. Let's talk a little about hormone therapies and peptides. So oftentimes as people are aging, they reach for hormone therapies. Are peptides an alternative to hormone therapies? Is it the peptide that then is signaling the body to produce more hormone or is it similar to exogenous supplementation of these.

Different hormones? Yeah, I would say they're their adjuncts. They work very synergistically. And I just actually last night was reading a paper on how younger women now are so scared to do hormone replacement therapy because the Women's Health Initiative study, which, you know, we can go on for hours about that. When you give oral synthetic estrogen and progestin, you're, you're gonna, it's gonna get. Causes breast cancer and heart attacks, no doubt about it. But if you use transdermal estrogen and natural progesterone, natural progesterone prevents breast cancer. If you want to give someone breast cancer, give them progesterone, want to prevent it, give them progesterone, transdermal estrogen, no association with increased clotting. Actually trend for less heart disease, actually a good trend for less heart disease. With.

The combination, many times people with chronic illnesses like Lyme and fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, are introducing thyroid, maybe testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, maybe even growth hormone, a lot of these different hormone therapies to support their system. So my initial question was can those potentially be replaced by peptides or are there some of them that we still need to supplement separately, like thyroid for example. And it sounds like what you're saying is they really are synergistic and we may need to do a little bit.

Of both. Yeah, well, growth hormone is a peptide and now we got growth hormone releasing peptide, growth hormone releasing hormone that we give which can stimulate your body's own production of growth hormone. But in terms of, there's, there's certainly peptides that can stimulate estro progesterone. But we're not to the point where you know that it can be done consistently what dose. So it's much cheaper and much easier to just give again. Estrogen progesterone. Now thyroid. Almost every, I would say every lyme patient is low thyroid. Despite what your doctor says, the normal TSH and I give lectures on this and show doctors at our nonprofit, the National Academy of Hypothyroidism. NA hypothyroidism.org a bunch of review papers, hundreds of references shows that the way that we're diagnosing and treating thyroid in this country is terrible. And this is especially true if anyone has any chronic illness, depression, inflammation and who doesn't? Or even aging. So it's you know looking at the TSH pituitary is like different than every other tissue in the body. And we're looking at that to determine the the level of thyroid in the rest of the body. Like so the quick thing everyone learns in medical school, the endocrine just learned that. So the puitary in the brain produces thyroid stimulating hormone TSH which tells your thyroid discrete T4 which then needs to convert to T3. It needs to go into the cell and then or it can be converted to reverse T3 which blocks the thyroid. Now when you have all this inflammation, pituitary sees more T3. The TSH suppresses and a lot of people will have a high T4. And the doctor goes oh you're kind of high thyroid? No, because if there's low cellular energy, the thyroid hormones can't get into the cells. And that's shown to be the rate limiting step. So we look at different tests. We can pick people out pretty well. You look at sex, hormone binding, globulin, measurement of thyroid and estrogen in the liver, thyroflex which measures basically first medical journal showed that a knowledgeable doctor looking at someone's ankle reflex was a better test than blood tests for thyroid. Like how could that be without a normal reflex goes. But with low thyroid goes. And so we have a computer that measures that. We'll check everyone's basal metabolic rate. A lot of people have trouble losing weight, especially if they fasted a bunch of times. Yo yo dieting. They usually have 25% lower metabolism, about burn 3 to 500 calories less a day and depression. They also be on T3. And the studies, I can go through studies on thyroid like crazy. It's just unbelievable that these people are just told suck it up, exercise more and it.

Doesn'T work. Coming back to TH1 and TH2 dominance, what are the best ways to test with a lab test to see if you are TH1 or TH2 dominant? I know for a while there were a lot of these cytokine focused tests that didn't really seem to kind of pan out. So for TH1 and TH2, what do you look at as potential indicators of.

Their levels? That's an excellent question. And we found it is so difficult to basically process the cytokines in a way that they're going to be accurate. They're just all over the place or a lot of them end up all zero. And also it's interesting when you look at research, this is a Th1 disease, Th2, but you go look downstream too. So Th1 basically cytokine may stimulate Th2. So it's kind of what's the end effect. So what we do look at is. So an endpoint is natural killer cell function. So they basically take your natural killer cells which are the cells in the body that monitor the body for intracellular for infections and cancer. And those get very dysfunctional with, with low TH1. And then with TH2 we look at C4A. Although there's problems getting that test has to be on dry eyes and people have to know. Know what they're doing. We, we work deal with with LabCorp to do a new one. I don't know if it's really working out like we thought. We can also use human transforming growth factor beta, which is another marker that's. That's a big TH2. And you'll see. And you'll see those with treatment. You'll see them go down and.

Come up. Yeah. It's interesting with C4A since LabCorp started doing them on their own, I have not seen an elevated C4A. When I used to go to National Jewish in Denver, I saw lots of C4As that were elevated. But have you seen very many from LabCorp's own processing.

That are. No. And they promised us they did a special. We talked to the medical director says okay, we're going to do the same methodology as the quest. And the quest is difficult to deal with. We're excited but yeah, everyone kind of seems to be put in the normal range. The same thing happened with reverse T3. So what you want to know for thyroid, what your 3T3 reverse T3 ratio is. And when they use the radio immunoassay RIA it had a nice range. Correlate clinically. Now they're using the GCMS lcms, and everyone just crunched in the middle. So it's much less clinically useful. It's funny to say, well this is more precise, it's more.

Precisely wrong. It sounds like we're talking about the fact that in these chronic conditions the immune modulation piece is so key to moving people forward that you need to modulate the immune system so that the body's own immune system can focus on these chronic, chronic intracellular infections and shift things back from Th2 dominant to a balance of Th1 and Th2. So let's talk a little about the thymosins. Tell us a little about Thymosin Alpha 1, Thymosin Beta 4, what these are doing and maybe how you determine when one might be more appropriate than.

The other. Those are great questions. Thymosin alpha 1 is probably the most studied. Again, if you look at the two sides of the immune system, thymosin alpha 1 is going to raise that Th1. So it's approved in about 30, 30 other countries or so for everything from cancer, HIV, chronic infections and shown to boost that and everything's a teeter tot. If you raise this, the other side is going to go down and that's where BPC comes in, lowering the inflammation. But thymos and alpha one studies on so many things, on, you know, autoimmunity, MS, any, any chronic infection and you can't believe the studies. People like hundreds of studies. So that's kind of our main, I would say the mainstay is the most, the most literature behind it, Thymus and beta 2. It'll put Thymulin in there, more of a modulator and has some different effects as well. It also is shown to regenerate heart tissue after mi. It's shown to prevent fibrosis in the liver from drinking. It basically is shown to work for neuropathy, traumatic brain injury. They give and dramatically improves all these conditions. So it's very much a.

Repair hormone. My perspective for a long time has been when someone has a quote, autoimmune condition, that there is generally some microbe there that the immune system is doing its best job to protect us from. Not that it's just attacking us for no reason. We oftentimes use tools that modulate the immune system, try to integrate our microbiome or create tolerance within our microbiome. Things like maybe low dose naltrexone or plaquenil or low dose immunotherapy. Ty Vincent's work, homeopathy. It sounds like the peptides present another option for really helping to Kind of address that what people think of as autoimmunity, which really is immune dysregulation with some underlying pathogen trigger. Is that.

A reason? Yeah, very, very much so. And there are studies showing that perhaps almost every, maybe every autoimmunity is being driven by a low level chronic infection and it just drives it. So we'll see people with Hashimoto's or so many patients with Lyme come in. Oh, I got diagnosed with pre lupus or mixed connective tissue disease. Means that go to rheumatologist. Well, we don't know what it is, but it's autoimmune antiphospholipid syndrome. You'll see a lot. And so, yes, modulating that immunity is, is really.

The key. Let's talk about then some of the maybe antimicrobial support options in the peptide therapy realm. So we have the immune modulation. I really, from what you're saying, and my understanding that's really kind of critical. First, you don't want to just go after killing bugs without having done some modulating of the immune system. So when we get to the place that we say we've modulated the immune system, but we maybe do need some antimicrobial support in the realm of Borrelia, Bartonella, Babesia and so on, what are some of the peptide options that can help.

Us there? Yeah, and just to kind of reiterate, when you look at your immune system, let's say you have a high immune system, you have an infection, all you need. Let's say you have a sinus infection. Normal person, good immune system. The antibiotics don't kill anything until there's nothing. The immune system has to be there. So let's say here's your immune system. If the infection is out of here now, it can take over. And many of these infections we never get rid of. Oh my gosh, you can't believe how many infections we have. You know, look at, you know, all the Epstein bars. I mean, there's just so many that if your immune system drop, they all just come out. Now those all also suppress the immune system, becomes a vicious cycle. So, and then, so antibiotics have their place. We can. A lot of people that come to us have been on so many different antibiotics. So we'll give them a break at their immune. We found if you want to get from point A to point point B, you're much better off to get there quicker by fixing the immune system before trying to slam them with every antibiotic. But they do have their place. And then there's the peptide LL37, which is natural in the body. It's also secreted by stem cells, which is interesting, is one reason why stem cells are very good for chronic infections. And it's basically body's natural defense, their defenses. Peptides that will. The nice thing is they're such a wide range of coverage. Viruses, bacteria, yeast, parasites. So we're reaching those. There's not a lot of that, but we're using that, we're incorporating that more and more. And I think that sometimes is becoming like, oh my God, nothing. You know, antibodies weren't working until I added that.

To it. And is that LL37? Is it helpful for Borrelia, Bartonella and Babesia, or is it more specific for one or.

The other? We don't know, but it seems to have a wide range. So would you expect it to. There's not that many studies on either. There's a lot of studies on it, but they're kind of research oriented. And no one Lyme, hardly anyone studies Lyme because it doesn't exist. Chronic Lyme. Right. So called it.

Doesn'T exist. One of the things that was interesting about LL37 to me as I was preparing for our conversation today was I read somewhere that it kills Borrelia cysts better than tinnitus all. And I know that tinnitazole from, I believe it was some of the research that Eva Shopi had done at University of New Haven in Connecticut. Tinnitusol is actually one of the better pharmaceutical medications for dealing with Lyme. And so that's a pretty, pretty exciting and compelling statement there, that this potentially works even better than.

Tinnitus all. Yeah, yeah. And we have the bar graphs up on talks and people are like, really? Why haven't I heard of this? It also lowers human transforming growth factor beta, which is like that th2 so works. Actually it works much better in the body than it does in a test tube because it also has immune.

Modulating factors. When someone's using LL37, how long might they use it? Like, I know we talk in Lyme with antibiotics. Sometimes people have been on antibiotics for years and then does it lead to traditional Herxheimer reactions when people.

Incorporate it, we see much less. And also when you get the immune system balanced, you find much less Herx. Herxheimer's. Because Herxheimer's a huge Th2. So if you basically get the immune system at Th2 down, you're gonna find much less Herxheimer's. And you know, I'm always Testing on myself, I did a huge dose, I got a Herxheimer on it, but I would never give that dose to anyone else. But so we basically go slow, but we found it to be very effective and some really exciting research coming out.

Of that. And what's the potential duration of something like that in a longer term protocol for something like.

Lyme disease? Yeah, usually we'll pulse it, we'll use it, we'll take a break because there's no great long term studies.

On it. Okay, so we talked a little about Herxheimer reactions. I mean, it sounds like many of these, if the Herxheimer reactions are tied into the upregulation or the dominance of Th2, that BPC157, the thymosins, LL37, it sounds like many of these peptides have the potential to minimize those.

Herxheimer reactions. Right, Very true. One study looked at that in particular with thymulin, showed dramatic reduction in Herxheimer thymosin alpha works, thymosin beta bpc. So yeah, you have a.

Wide range in patients that have been sick for many years with something like Lyme or chronic fatigue, a lot of times they just can't be very active. They lose muscle mass over the course of their illness. And so maybe even having low growth hormone, maybe for other reasons. But can the peptides then be supportive in terms of regaining some of that lost.

Muscle mass? Absolutely. And so you look at, yeah, the growth hormone releasing hormones and peptides, and there's a lot of those. And I do worry that they start getting in the bodybuilding world because that's not what we're using them for. But, you know, which brings unwanted attention. There's another peptide called Follistatin, which basically reduces body fat and increases lean muscle and again also lowers you and sorry, growth factor beta. And that can work very, very well. But it tends to be expensive. So not a lot of people.

Carry it. CD57 is, at least from my perspective, a somewhat crude marker that's been looked at in Lyme disease for many, many years. And at the beginning maybe it's useful to say, yes, there's another indicator here that your immune system is suppressed. I haven't seen it generally be all that helpful in terms of tracking progress of treatment. And I haven't always seen it necessarily increase, even when people start feeling really good again. But I'm curious, can we see CD 57 levels increasing with the incorporation of some of.

These peptides? Yeah, those tend to be the last thing to come up. And I mean, it matters what Lab as well. And it's crazy. I did a big panel. One of our employees, just basic stuff like with Quest and LabCorp. One his insulin was 4, the other one was 14. One, his average blood sugar was 5.9, the other one 5.3. And he went from one to the other, just got his blood drawn, went upstairs to the other place. It's scary. And so you can't hang your hat on any. One test is you got. That's why we do a huge panel to paint a picture. And a lot of times it's like, yep, yep. And people, people will call and say, what if you don't find anything? Well, it hasn't happened yet. You know, coagulation markers are huge, you see with Babesia especially, but can be with anything. And so it's, it's a, it's, it's an art still. It's not black.

And white. And unfortunately, what I see a lot of times with lab tests, whether it's genetic tests or whether it's CD 57, is, you know, it maybe does go down after someone's been treating for a while, they don't understand these variations that you're talking about, maybe even expected variations if the labs are even accurate and consistent. And thus they then lose hope that they're on the right path. And then that ultimately is the thing that probably affects them more than anything is the fact that now they feel less hope and what.

They'Re doing. It's totally true. And some people come in and they expect magic wand and get better in two visits. Happens occasionally. You know, we've seemed to speed up that time frame to getting better, you know, with the stem cells and peptides. And those are all coming down in price, which is good. But yeah, it's very true. And I like, you see the labs correlate especially like the inflammatory markers, the C4A, hematiti growth factor beta. But if you different lab, you get a different result. But. So you want to stick to the same lab in general. But you know, I'd rather have them feeling better and have terrible labs than have great labs and have them feel terrible. But usually it goes together.

In the overall healing journey that someone with a chronic illness might go through. When is the right time to consider peptide therapy? Is it early? Is it late? When do we generally introduce those? And then are there some things that people should do before they even start introducing peptides, like nutritional changes, detoxification changes? What do we do to set the stage for optimizing.

These peptides? Yeah, that's A very good question. And it all matters, it all helps. All the diet part, really emotional. But the problem is you wake up every day feeling horrible and you can't do something. You get really, you know, really down. And we find those patients are, are more difficult to get better. But once they get a glimmer of hope. So we try to get them at least see a good sense of improvement, you know, in a month or two, so they can have some hope. And you're right, because that is so huge. And they've already all their family. Sometimes, you know, some families are great, but other ones, oh yeah, she's sick again. And it's kind of human nature if someone's sick for more than two weeks, like, oh, you're sick, let me help you in two weeks, like, ah, just go eat better. Or, you know, the problem is a lot of them look okay. And so it's just the way that they lose their friends and you know, and basically get alienated from.

Your perspective. And we talked a little about mast cell activation, but how big of a problem is mast cell activation in something like Lyme disease? And then what do you think are the key triggers of this histamine intolerance and mast cell related issues? And then are there some key things that you do in clinical practice to support that beyond the.

Immune modulation? Yeah, I think mast cell activation is huge. The standard tests miss it. So we tend to not even do them and almost just assume it's there. But, you know, in terms of. So the basic mast cells, usually they go to an area and secrete histamine. So you think of allergic reaction, but what they found with these chronic illnesses, these chronic infections, that they're stimulating the mast cells, they're just pumping out all these inflammatory cytokines and basically they're not degradling. So they didn't know. No one knew that they were part of the picture. But, you know, so again, the standard is try to standard meds for mast cell activation. We'll do it. We'll put everyone on, you know, Allegra or Legla D or Singulair bioflavonoids, But we're really finding Thymosin Alpha 1. BPC can be tremendous.

For that. And do you think it's the chronic infections that are really triggering the mast cell activation? And if I look at a list of things that can, can trigger mast cell activation, it's everything from EMFs to heavy metals to viruses to all of the chronic infections. Is there anything that's really kind of come to the top of your list, that's the underlying trigger for.

These reactions. Yeah, and I think that's the problem. And I think most people that get Lyme are asymptomatic if you don't have anything else going on. But all of a sudden with this toxic world we're in, plastics, pesticides, all the EMF waves and then stress, all those things mold, then that's when all of a sudden it's like, hey, the immune system drops. Now everything just explodes. So those are.

All important. I want to sidetrack just for a minute into the hypercoagulation conversation. And based on some of what I had looked at your earlier interviews and things getting ready for today, it sounds like there's also a connection between hypercoagulation and mast cell activation. So why do we see so many of these coagulopathies in chronic.

Lyme disease? Yeah, so it's called immune activation of coagulation. And I learned this many, many, many years ago from Berg and you look at especially Babesia, but other infections do it as well, or they activate the clotting system. So it lays down fibrin on the vessels trying to wall off the infection, which, hey, that's good in the short term. But now with this fibrin, oxygen that usually takes two seconds to go in the cell can now take up to two minutes. So the cells are starving for oxygen. The mitochondria aren't working. Waste products can't get out, Antibiotics can't get in, nutrients can't get in. And sometimes while people on, they come in, there are a ton of ton of stuff. And then we go, oh, let's fix your, let's treat your hypercoagulability, put them on a little heparin. And also you go, everything's working. And now it's interesting if you look at and I'm on these mastermind mast cell groups. And so I posted it, it was basically a case of a couple cases of people with, you know, mast cell flares giving them heparin and improving it. Now the dogma is heparin is bad for mast cells. So I can't explain it, but I even, you know, based on the literature, I started taking my patients off heparin and using Lovenox just so you know that it's at least could be potentially better, not as bad, but no one wanted to go off. You know, you don't need do heparin forever. Once you get rid of it, you may need to cycle back on six months or something. But it's the thing that there's a direct effect. And heparin is very immune modulatory. So it has a lot of other effects. A lot of molecules in there that I have no qualms giving it with mast cell where I posted that on the mast cell mastermind. I said, you guys can kick me off the out of the group after you read this. But it was like, that's interesting. And a couple people said, oh, my God, you're right.

You know. Yeah. My observation over the years has been that Babesia in Lyme is definitely one of the key players in these coagulopathies. And so I'm wondering from a testing perspective, Babesia is still not that easy to test for. So I know there's the ECP or the eosinophil cationic protein. Is that something that you find seems to match up if that's elevated, that oftentimes Babesia is playing a role in.

Those patients? Yeah, I think it's a great marker. It's sensitive with Quest the LabCorp ones, they're all normal and they'll tend to be high normal. That's what we usually see on the initial. Then if you treat for Babesia and then retest, the esophyll cation protein goes way up and that's. You've kind of confirmed the result.

Of that. Excellent. Let's talk a little about biotoxin illness with a little bit of a focus on the mold and water damage building side. But there's so much overlap here with Lyme as well. So we know in chronic Lyme disease, mold, biotoxin illnesses, MSH or melanocyte stimulating hormone is commonly low. Some people will use VIP nasal spray to potentially increase msh. And sometimes it seems to work, sometimes it doesn't. So I know in the peptide arena we have things like Melanitan 2 and PT141 that came can lead to increased tanning, weight loss, those types of things, and can increase msh. But my question is, when we use those and MSH increases, do we see the symptoms of biotoxin illness falling away like we might expect, or do we not.

See that? I haven't been impressed with it and with those and people like, especially if they're older and you give them melanitan, like some dark spots come out and they want to kill you. So, but I'm not against vip, but I've tried it so many times and just was not impressed. I'm not saying it doesn't work. You know, something where everything works for somebody, but yeah, not been impressed.

With that. And when you're saying not impressed, are you saying also with the peptides that increase msh, you haven't been very impressed with those.

Either, or. No, we haven't really used them because the. Basically, you know, okay, you're gonna get tan. You know, you're gonna do this. And we give some people PT141, which is a fragment of that for erectile dysfunction and libido for women as well. And. But I can't say that I've seen the bold people get better. Yeah. And, like, you know, really, one of the best things is bpc. You take it, it binds up all the neurotoxins, mycotoxins, and heals and heals that leaky gut, which is a huge problem. So we find that that is a key.

For mold. So that's perfect. That's a good segue into where I wanted to go next. But if we look at chronic Lyme and mold illnesses, there's often these impairments in detox detoxification. We know toxicity plays a major role in Lyme disease. Do the peptides help our detoxification capacity? So are they helping us from a toxicity perspective.

As well? Oh, I think tremendously so. And you look at, you know, really moderate the immune system, you detox much better when you see, you know, basically, BPC will protect against so many toxins, like even alcohol. You can, you know, they blast rats with alcohol. It doesn't affect the liver with cancer meds. It protects them. It's kind of a homeostatic, basically, peptide. So that's one of the key of the detox peptides. And we use other things for. I love phosphoridylcholine and other things like that and a lot of IV therapies and ozone. But peptides play.

A role. If we look at BPC157, which is body protection compound for people listening, so many things that it sounds like it's amazing for wound healing, tendon, ligaments, muscle tissue injuries, and so on, the nervous system. You mentioned the gut in terms of leaky gut, potentially, it can help sometimes with people dealing with pain, improving gut function, resolving leaky gut, irritable bowel, shifting. That TH1, TH2 issue that we talked about. Talk to us a little about where does BPC157 normally occur in the body? How does it work? And then what are some of the things you've seen clinically with your patients? And you gave us one story already, but I'm really curious what you're.

Seeing clinically. Yeah. So it's naturally in the body and it's stable in the GI tract and it does get systemic absorption. One study they looked at effects on the gut and then also with Ms. And orally worked for both. It really lowers inflammation and they're still elucidating as multiple effects but they can't find a toxicity to it. So one thing cleaning up the gut is reducing the inflammation also has antimicrobial effects, which is interesting. Or it may just be helping the immune system get better. But once you heal that inflammation now those big proteins aren't getting in and not causing the whole cycle of all the toxins getting in. But we basically find that that's great. We've seen it work for so many things. We use it as injections brain. We can do them nasal. It's unclear right now in terms of how what the absorption is, but people do get good results with that. And we'll combine that with the C max or C length which are another neurotropics to build brain. But yeah, as you said, if you read there's hundreds of studies showing almost everything. You sound like, oh, you're a snake oil salesman. Because it's like it helps this, this, this like anything with inflammation or healing it just dramatically in protection. It protects the body against toxins which is huge.

In Lyme. So BPC157 is now available or becoming available orally. It was not previously other than through compounding pharmacy. So it sounds like you're suggesting that the oral use of this compound does still potentially have systemic health benefits that it's not limited to to just the gut. Am I.

Hearing correctly? Yes, and that's what the research shows and we're moving on doing studies on that as well. And yeah, so we brought it out as a supplement which is much cheaper. Normally it's for 30 tabs, 500 micrograms each, 300 bucks or 600 bucks for 60. For 60. Ours is 84, something.

Like that. Wow. And as I understand BPC 157 because it's having a positive effect on the intestinal hyperpermia or leaky gut, that should also help some of the mast cell and histamine related symptoms. Right. Because now the especially if it's food driven, a lot of those particles are not getting through the lining of the gut. And so the immune system can kind of calm down just from that perspective as.

Well, right? No, that's very true. And we'll give just oral BPC and some people will go oh, wow, my lupus is so much better or my Hashimoto's numbers came way down. And because it's like all those things.

Driving it. Beautiful. You mentioned Epitalin earlier. So that's a peptide that potentially is interesting. We talked about it for anti aging telomere lengthening sometimes. I've read for DNA repair as well. When someone's recovering from chronic Lyme disease you kind of get to a point where you've addressed a lot of those underlying triggers, the microbes, the toxicity and so on. And then you need to move maybe into a restoration, regeneration, repair strategy. So I'm curious, what are some of the potential benefits of Epitalin in those that have had chronic illnesses but now need to repair a lot of the damage of decade or.

Longer illnesses? Yeah. So the Epitalion does a lot of anti aging. It's probably the ultimate anti aging supplement or product. You know when you look at the studies increasing longevity. And also the little trick is we use epitalion so it increases melatonin to sleep but has other effects. We use that combined with delta sleep induced which we use those together at night and not work for everyone. But they're like oh my gosh, I got deep sleep. It doesn't put you to sleep so it's not like a sleep bed but it takes a couple weeks and all of a sudden you're getting deeper sleep. So that's really helped a lot of people. And the delta sleep inducing peptide actually is very anti inflammatory in the brain. You can take it throughout the day for inflammation. What we're using now is even more BPC and sometimes the delta sleep where the narcotic. We have an issue with narcotics but they're making it so we can't write narcotics unless it's a terminal illness. And these people, they, they just discount their pain. I don't know who's making these laws but you know in our insurance company saying no, if you're on opioids, we won't cover it. It's, it's just so one sided. They just got to fix this problem and they don't care who they devastate in.

The meantime. Is epitalin something that is or will be available orally or is that one that likely is going to stay.

An injectable?

We'll see. Awesome. And do we know with that substance if we do pre and post telomere length testing, have we seen, have you clinically seen shifts in that way of exploring it.

As well? I've read research that has, we've Done a little bit. We tend not to test that. I think it'd be really interesting for like a wellness clinic or something like that. We treat wellness people or mostly hormones. People generally don't come in for just hey, I'm well, I want to keep. Well, we don't have, unfortunately, I'm jealous. People that have those patients, but we don't see those. So I tested a couple times on myself and mine went up. But I can't say that's an end of one that we've seen.

It consistently. Let's talk a little bit about autism. So we're talking now about 1 in 40 children, depending on what numbers you look at, that are potentially impacted by autism. Is there a role for peptide therapies in dealing with children.

With autism? Absolutely. Absolutely. And you look at autism, what is the cause? Multifactorial. But what is the underlying problem? It's immune dysfunction while the baby's in utero. For instance, the big controversy over vaccines. Vaccines definitely contribute to autism because they raise that th2 basically with these early immune system now it just sets everything off. They have that low th1, th2, they get all the inflammation and so many problems we've had people come in with totally fine, got the flu shot and they're just two weeks later like I'm in bed, haven't gotten out, you know, and basically they got chronic fatigue now. And I've sent letters to the fda. Of course they go, no, no association. But in particular people especially all these other things going on, you know, vaccines are a problem. So with the autistic kids, you look at a number of things. I like pitocin for them, which basically is the bonding hormone, also.

Immune modulator. So for people listening, that's the same as.

Oxytocin, right? Yes, yes. And just a little side note, for Anyone who's on IVIG, add 10 units of oxytocin pitocin to the bag or separate it will work probably two to three times as well. There's no studies on it. It's just we have found it consistently. Just just a little side note, but with autistic kids, the C Max and C Link are wonderful. The epitalion thymosin beta 4 again repairs brain. And then we found the stem cells and exosomes are the combination. We used to get them on the peptides first and then do the stem cells. And we've seen wonderful, just like heart wrenching improvements where one child who's been coming for quite a while, mom gave a video of him playing basketball and she gives a video. It's the basketball going vibe. Doesn't even look at it. Now he's like playing basketball. He wouldn't really interact with people. He's telling jokes, he's being sarcastic. You couldn't touch him. He would just throw the F bombs around. Like, you know, if we tried to touch him. Now he's like, can I have a shot? Oh, how are you telling jokes? Can I have a hug? And it just like, what.

A difference. I mean, it's very sad and difficult to work with these chronic conditions, but I can tell that you're making a big difference in a lot of lives. And I can tell that you still love every bit of what you're doing and being able to use a lot of these tools to help people. So, I mean, your passion for what you're doing really comes through very clearly. Let's talk about. In neurological diseases, we know neuroinflammation is a hallmark, but there's often also these myelin associated issues that can be a factor in something like multiple sclerosis, maybe in some symptoms that people deal with. With Lyme, like tinnitus, for example, do the peptides have a role in healing the nervous system and or helping to support the production.

Of myelin? Yeah. And you look at the research on thymosin beta 4 showed increased myelin BPC as well. So very healing. But we usually combine with stem cells or exosomes. We've got very good results. And like the neurodegenerative diseases with, you know, there's an infection going on in there, you know, these Parkinson's people. It's an als. My gosh, that's Lyme. To approve it, otherwise, like Michael J. Fox, we called him and said, look, let us help you. He said, does he check for Lyme? Oh, yeah, he had it, but he got treated for it.

You.

Know. Yeah. So. And you look at the autistic kids, they often have white and gray or Lyme Lyme patients. Well, big, non specific, you know, white matter changes, so they lose the myelin, but they go, oh, it's normal, nothing, you know, it's not abnormal enough to be.

A problem. So you mentioned als. Are you seeing that if you deal with the underlying chronic infections and then maybe use the peptides and stem cell therapies, are we getting close to a point where we have some repeatable solutions for people that struggle.

With als? Yeah. And you know, again, als, Lyme, or some other infection until proven otherwise. We've had patients come in a wheelchair and they're Jogging, I can't guarantee that. Not saying that we have a cure, but kind of a multi system treatment for that.

Is key. You've talked about the synergy between peptides and some of the stem cell therapies. With the stem cells are you now starting to use exosomes? And maybe you can for people listening, talk to us just a little about what are exosomes, how are they different from stem cells and then what is the synergy between these and.

The peptides? Sure. The. So basically we thought in the olden days, which you know, things moving very quickly that you give a stem cell it's going to go to that area that has damage and it's going to regrow and change into that tissue. That doesn't happen. It secretes cytokines, peptides, growth factors to stimulate that area to basically repair itself. And it will activate the stem cells that are naturally. They're dormant in that area. And so the exosomes that we found too is that they don't just secrete growth factors. So if you do that they're just in the blood and they get eliminated very quickly, but they'll bud off. So you have think of a lipid cell, they'll do little buds of lipids that have in there peptides, growth factors a lot of times ll 37 antimicrobial peptides as well as mRNA DNA. So she mitochondrial mRNA and DNA. And the exosomes. So they were. They're much more protective. They can go through the body and then attach to where they're supposed to go. And then when they attach they dump the contents right into the cell. So there it's kind of a special delivery system. That's a smart.

Delivery system. You work with a lot of patients that are very sensitive that have either multiple chemical sensitivities or mast cell related issues. Do we generally find that the peptides are fairly well tolerated in that sensitive.

Patient population? It is, it will help the sensitivity. Now I can say I have a couple patients who are so sensitive. I mean, you know, I don't. They're intolerant to everything. So any little change seems to affect. But in general even the sensitive patients can tolerate those. And with like stem cells you'll see some people crash with the stem cells. Now one is especially with the adipose because there's so much inflammation of mast cells and adipose. You're just giving that to the patient. But there is also can be a flare with umbilical tissue, umbilical cord. So we like to do the. In the peptides actually stimulate the stem cells. So thymosin, beta 4, BPC, they're all they, they tell those to grow and still basically get going. And in return, the stem cells secrete those peptides. So it's very interesting, but we try to get their immune system somewhat regulated first. And then if they're, especially if they're prone to having to being sensitive, then we want to watch out and not try to send them downhill. Although a lot of patients, after they, if they crash the cells, they're much better after six months than they.

Were. Yeah. And it sounds, I mean, that's been my observation with stem cell therapies as well. I seem to observe that if people do stem cells early on, before they've started detoxifying, before they've started doing immune modulation, before they've dealt with some of their intracellular pathogen burden, that the results are not always what they hoped for. But if they do some of these early things and then bring the stem cells in towards the later part of treatment to regenerate and repair, then it seems like the kind of later in treatment is where people maybe have some better potential effects from them. Is that similar to.

What you. Yeah, I'll totally agree with that. But also we find that if we do it earlier, you can fix a lot of the problems and you get better. So it's kind of continuum and patient by patient, but I totally agree with both points of view.

On that. Okay. And then when we have peptides that are, let's say, stimulating the production of growth hormone or other hormones and things in the body, are they essentially modulators or can we overshoot the mark and that we have to still be observant of what the levels are and kind of titrating dosages and things.

Like that. Yeah. In general, for instance. Yeah. The growth hormone secretagogues, growth hormone releasing peptide, with which the hormone, they will stop working. They won't overshoot. They're basically giving more. Does not twice as much. Does not give me twice as much. So it's very difficult to overdose on those because you'll stay in the.

Normal range. When someone's on, let's say, a protocol that's incorporating peptides, My understanding is that they can be on several different peptides. Talk to us a little about how they're generally delivered into the body, the different ways of administering them. My understanding is that there's. There's multiple.

Options there. There is, and we're coming up with more, but we just want to validate the, you know, the absorption, everything but in. In general, we'll start people on BPC orally, and then most of the other peptides are given subcutaneously. Now, little controversy in this, but you give the vials and then you just pull up each one. So you're not doing a ton of shots. Just mix them together and give a shot. We will do some nasal, but I can't guarantee the absorption. But clinically, we've had very good results. And also we're doing like, exosomes, where stem cells probably too big to cross, like up in the nasal mucosa, but we're putting exosomes right in the sphenopalatine ganglia with a little catheter which are much smaller. They're tiny. Tiny. And can get right into the. Basically, they go up the nerve and get right into the brain. So we seem to be having some good results.

With that. So with all the things we've talked about with peptides, if you could only pick three. Three peptides to have with you on a.

Desert island.

Are there. Are there some of them that really have clinically for your patients, risen to the top of.

Your list? I would say definitely thymosin alpha 1 BPC, and would depend on what other condition could be TB4. But you're kind of. You got those. Those covered. Epitalion, probably maybe for brain.

C max. And we didn't really get into a lot of the brain, the nootropics. But that's exciting as well with the peptides, because it sounds like for people that have traumatic brain injuries from concussions, maybe even strokes and other things where there haven't been lots of options available to really help in those scenarios, that the peptides also potentially are helpful with those types of conditions as.

Well. Correct? Yeah. We're doing pre and post SPECT scans to show. So that should be exciting news coming.

Up soon. Beautiful. If someone's listening to this podcast and they're really interested, either a practitioner or potentially a patient, how do they find somebody who uses peptide therapies? How do they learn more about it? And then are there some trusted sources for how they access these tools? Because I know you can go online, you can find these things. I personally wouldn't want to be injecting something that came from a source that I had no idea what that was. So how do we make sure we do this in a way.

That, yeah, some of the online places, if they come from China in the manufacturing process, there's, you know, basically a substance that if they don't remove, it's slightly carcinogenic but it wants even slightly carcinogenic and you know, fake stuff and who knows what it is. So the probably the biggest supplier of peptides currently is tailor made pharmacy. And then there's other ones absolute and a variety of them finding up. And then they. There's the International Peptide Society which has a lot of great information. We had a lot of great information on our nonprofit site National Academy of Hypothyroidism and our Pultorf bed site. But because we have a product out, we're trying not to violate any, you know, any rules of advertising. So it's interesting. Like you know, we can't put a study up. No, you have a product. So it's, you know, it's, it's.

Strange.

But. Right. Yeah. Those are, those are generally the ones that are selling the most.

Reputable. So. So these are the peptides are pharmaceutical items that need a doctor to.

Prescribe. Correct? Correct. Except for the bpc. Now it's.

A supplement. Okay, beautiful. What are. This is a question I ask everybody. What are some of the key things that you personally do on a daily, daily basis in support of your.

Own health? Well, that's, you know, I tend to experiment on myself too. But I'm feeling good. I'll try something where the staff is, you know, here I'm usually at the office till 11 or 2am and they leave. I always got IVs in me or doing weird stuff. But I really think the core peptides and keep the immune system up. I think doing some ozone a number of times a month is key. You know, eating well. I can't say I do that very well with my starburst breakfast. But so I don't counsel people on diet too much or exercise. I'm actually religiously exercise 12 minutes every three months. So it's my passion. Right. So I give people leeway on that. But. And then I think the stem cells I, you know, maybe every three, four months I'll do some stem cells or exosomes. And that's kept me healthy and thank God. And I want to just tell everyone to blisters with Lyme and no one knows how bad you feel. It's like it's unexplainable, it's horrible. And the way that they're treated and no one believes it but it's like oh my God. But there is hope. There.

Is hope. Absolutely agree. This has been a super fun conversation. Very enlightening for me. This was a topic that I had just started here hearing about several months ago. And so Having the opportunity to hear all of this from you has been fantastic. It's nice that we have some new tools now potentially in the realm of Lyme and chronic fatigue and immune modulation. So I'm really excited about everything that you shared with us today, and I just appreciate people like you that are out there continuing to look for new solutions, look outside the box, and to try to find things to help people really improve their lives and minimize their struggles. So thank you so much for everything.

You do. Dr. Hey, I could say the exact same thing for you. So thank you for having me and I appreciate.

Your work. Thank you. Be well. To learn more about Today's guest, visit HoltorfMed.com that's HoltorfMed.com thanks for your interest in today's show. If you'd like to follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you can find me there as BetterHealthGuy to support the show, please visit BetterHealthGuy.com donate if you'd like to be added to my newsletter, visit betterhealthguy.com newsletters and this and other shows can be found on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher.

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