The Hidden TRUTH About MCAS: What's REALLY Going On? (Mast Cell Activation Disorder)

The worst the case, the worst the reactivation, the worst the CO activation, the more of them you have. Hi, I'm Dr. A and we talk about all sorts of integrative medicine content on this channel. And today we're talking about mast cell activation syndrome, also known as MCAS or MCD for mast cell disorders. Today I want to answer some questions and address some common frustration with those of us that have mast cell issues and talk through just my experience over a long period of time with patients with mast cell problems. So let's dive into this first. It's no surprise to anybody who's been either diagnosed or has a high suspicion just on their own that they have mast cell activation. That is very frustrating. And I grouped together a large number of questions that came from frustration. So I wanted to talk through some concepts, give you some perspective and hopefully help out with at least some of the questions that I got. So the first thing is why is my doctor not seem to understand mast cell disorders? I have them, they have given me some drugs so I don't die, but that's all the treatment I've gotten. There was a couple of levels to this. The first thing is that the education, medical education generally, especially western medical education, has traditionally thought of mast cell disorders as extremely rare and extremely unlikely to cause trouble unless you had one of the high grade mast cell disorders or diseases. Now the problem with that thinking is, number one, it actually was not correct as far as the statistics go as how many people had these problems. But number two, because of many, many reasons, we have had an increasing number of mast cell triggered patients in the last decade especially. So the doctors kind of come out of medical school in their training thinking, well, I'm not going to think of mast cell problems except in very rare instances. And I'm going to send those people to the immunology, allergy people anyway. They don't realize that it's a big bigger percentage, bigger slice of the pie of humanity have mast cell problems. So their propensity for recognizing it is very low unless they see a lot of people with mast cell and they've done some, you know, additional training or looked into it. So this is why you'll get symptomatic treatment, which is great, it can keep you alive, but they're not going to generally have strategies for anything else that might be a trigger. So that's a big frustration. And I was talking to one of the premier, probably top 20 mast cell research and clinician people in the world who I work with in other venues and I said, you know, what's it going to take to change? And they said, it has to start being taught in medical school as not an oddity, but a common presentation among humans. And so that means that that change isn't going to take place if it does, for many, many years, decades. Okay, so that's the first thing. That's why your doctor may not think that it's a big deal or think that you have an actual mast cell problem. The next frustration is for your doctor and you very hard to test. We got a lot of questions. How do you test for mast cell? Well, you can test for the higher level problems with mast cell issues by, say, doing Tryptase and certain other chemistries. And. But that's not 100% sensitive and specific, so it doesn't lead you to diagnosing people with more of the mast cell activation syndrome problems. And there's sort of two groups of science publications now about diagnosis. And some of the scientific publications have minimized the symptomatic changes that can help you with diagnosis, especially the neurological and mental emotional changes had been minimized in some of the publications. So again, you have clinicians looking at this and saying, I can't diagnose you. We don't have a hard marker. So that makes it difficult too. So then you have to look at, do you have the symptoms? We did another video on symptoms. You can look at that. Do they respond to mast cell calming therapies? So that could be histamine blockade, that could be mast cell receptor blockers, could be steroids, could be all sorts of stuff. They do. You have some level of mast cell triggering issues. So the big frustration there with the medical system, that's sort of that end of it now triggering. So the first thing to remember is because of this lack of awareness in the general medical community, that mast cell is as common as it is. You wind up with people saying, well, you must have something else. Or maybe you get gaslit by a doctor. Or they say, well, I can give you antihistamines and steroids so you don't die. Great. Okay, that's wonderful. But, you know, that should take care of all your problems. Well, here's why it doesn't. For most people, those will keep you alive. But mast cell problems are not just mast cells. The first thing to remember is there's a quartet of cells that include mast cells, basophils and eosinophils. And those are all one CD class of cells. So there's three of those. And then there's a CD40 class, which helps to dump out IgE, which is the allergy atopi, immunoglobulin and those four types of cells get together and they all dump inflammatory stuff out. So it's not just mast cells. That's number one problem. Number two problem is once they start dumping their individual stuff out, they cross trigger each other, meaning cell number one of the four makes cell number three of the four dump more stuff out. Well, that triggers cell number two and you know the other ones and then you have this round robin effect. So since they trigger and put out more than histamine, just blocking histamine is not enough. It'll generally help keep you alive. But your mast cell problems are from multiple chemicals. Now these are normal immune chemicals we use. We're supposed to use them and we're fighting an infection or something. When you have mast cell problems, you're dumping these chemicals out for no apparent reason. And so they go and they change a lot. They change everything in your body. So it's not just histamine. So if your treatments are only aimed at histamine, you're not going to control the problem. So it's easy to be misunderstood. It's easy to be given partial treatment which would be histamine based treatment, which there's nothing wrong with. Okay, give somebody H1 and H2 blockers. And if they're real bad straights, they might get steroids and then there might be mast cell stabilizing drugs, mast cell blocking or slowing drugs such as cromolyn and other flavonoids, lutein and there, there's many other flavonoids that will do that. Chromolin's a drug, flavonoid, basically. But then you have triggers of the quartet of cells, so the mast cells and its other friends. So I can drug block either the receptor sites for histamine or the mast cell outer receptors or I can kind of put them to sleep with steroids. But none of that is getting in at the underlying problem, which is what's triggering all of that. So yes, I've got aggravated mast cells, but could I take some bricks off the load of the triggering? Now this gets to a concept I want to mention here because it was a separate question, but it was how could I have this mast cell activation syndrome and I didn't have it my whole life. I'm not an allergic person, non atopic person. I was fine and then all of a sudden X happened and now I have mast cell problems. How's that work? Well, what happens is often the overflowing bucket analogy, which is your whole life, the bucket's been getting more full with things that would trigger mast cells, but it's not full yet and overflowing. So your body doesn't notice symptoms or maybe minor symptoms. When that bucket of triggers gets full and then overflows, that's when you have mast cell activation that then will not stop. So it seems like it came on suddenly, but it's more like the last straw, like the straw that broke the camel's back. It's the last drop. Well, there was a billion other straws before, but they didn't overflow the bucket. They were there. And the last draw, boom, you overflow the bucket, you break the camel's back. So the problem with never better sense a certain thing, is you were working up to it. And then, for example, a really common thing now that we're seeing more research on is I didn't have mast cell problems. Then I got Covid, and then now I have mast cell activation disorder. That's really common. If you think about why would Covid overflow the bucket? The main reason is other infections do this as well. But SARS cov2 has a way of disrupting the immune system and imbalancing it. When we disrupt the immune system and imbalance it, that triggers a cascade of immune chemistry that unfortunately also triggers this quartet of cells that we call the mast cell family. So this is why a lot of people develop it after stressors, surgeries, traumas, infections like Covid, etc. And so then we have to think of what else was filling the bucket. So I can symptomatically manage, hopefully, the bad stuff with histamine blockade and chromalin and maybe some steroids or whatever. But what's. What can we take out of the bucket? What would be things that are in the bucket that we want to remove? Well, those are really in most areas of your body, and they insidiously, throughout your lifetime, keep getting more dysfunctional and fill in the bucket till finally you overflow. So let's go through them quickly, and we'll no doubt get questions and do other content on each one of these, but here you go. So the first is dysfunction in your cellular activity. So very quickly, that means you could have genomics genetics that get epigenetically turned on, and you can do that through your life. So you have the bad, you know, abnormal gene, but then you turned on until you get more stressors, then the genes get turned on, and then that can be one thing in the bucket. That creates more mast cell activation. And there's a number of genes there. So people asked about MTHFR and stuff. Well, that's one of them. But there's, there's thousands of genes that could do this. So that's in the cell function. The other is deficiencies in nutrients. The other is too much junk in the cell, not enough oxygen moving through and all that. The next area is toxins and toxicants and those could be from inside your body. So inside your body, toxin load can be from certainly histamine, it can be from sulfites, it can be from salicylates, it can be from nitrogen type chemicals, it can be from all manner of things on the oxalates on the inside of the body. Again, those can be a low level and a growing problem, but they're one more brick on the pile to make the thing overflow. So toxins on the inside of the body, toxins on the outside. But we live in an incredibly toxic world. We now have problems with microplastics and forever chemicals and all this. None of that makes your body work better. And all of those toxicants trigger your mast cell family, the this quartet of triggered substances. The next would be your immune system proper. That's a whole bunch of things. But we boil it down to infectious side, which is chronic infections that keep growing under the radar. You don't notice them and so they're taxing your immune system and deregulating it. Resistance factors to those infections like biofilms and stuff. And then there's the other side of the immune system, which is autoimmunity. And what have we seen with COVID That's in the research. We see that people who never had autoimmune problems now suddenly have autoimmunity after Covid. Not everybody, but some people, well, it's immune deregulation. Okay, so if I've got some autoimmunity or I've got some chronic infections and they get it, that's one more brick in the bucket they can overflow. Then there's a huge one that's a big part of treating mast cell problems, which is your hormonal system. Your hormonal system talks constantly to your immune system and tries to help autoregulate your immune system. Now, it's not just one hormone. It could be thyroid related issues. It could be adrenal hormones, reproductive hormones, it could be blood sugar hormones, or all of them. If you're trying to unwind this wheel of triggering of the mast cells and hormones. On the big picture, are not being assessed. You're missing a big area, another brick on the pile, or another brick into the bucket to make it overflow. Your digestive tract. Your digestive tract is incredibly tolerant to things and it can put up with a lot. So you may not even get symptoms, or you might blame the symptoms on something else. But if the digestive ecology, so the good food flora, the good bacteria and other bugs that live there that help us digest and have an immune system, they get thrown off, that can trigger mast cell. If you get resistant forms of certain candida, other funguses that can throw it off too. And with COVID those are growing resistant funguses are growing parasites, other things, all of that can trigger them. So the gut is huge. And then there's other parts of your body too. But you see, if you try to unwind a mast cell case, in my experience, all of those areas have to be assessed and looked at. And then you have to start to take those apart by either healing or rebalancing whatever is wrong in those areas. And eventually you start taking bricks out of the bucket so that it doesn't overflow anymore. That's the only way that you get behind and get underneath a bad mast cell activation case is to deplete the bricks in the bucket, which are all these body system areas that have become dysfunctional. Now. Does everyone have all of them? No. Do some people have all of Those? Wrong? Yes, 100%. The worst the case, the worst the reactivation, the worst the CO activation, the more of them you have. Is it quick to fix those things? No, not usually. Are you maybe a little faster in treatment? If you never had problems and you got Covid or had a trauma or whatever, then you got mast cell. Yeah, you're probably going to go faster for treatment than if you're somebody who's been atopic allergic your whole life and getting more and more mast cell problems, that's a lifelong thing. And there's probably more genetics and epigenetic problems involved that are slower to work on there. So my point of all this is it's common to be frustrated because either you're getting gaslit or you're not getting help very much or, you know, whatever. It's also common for your health care practitioner to feel totally out of their depth with a mast cell case and a mast cell patient, because most of medicine is not trained to look at multifactorial problems. And if the mast cell quartet of cells being dysfunctional is anything, it is an exemplar of a system that has gone completely off the rails how much of the system is different for different people. But it's generally those areas I talked to you about. And so it's normal. And what you have to do is find usually sometimes more than one practitioner and work with them and see how many areas they can look at and then start to rebalance them and heal them up to the degree you can. And then you can start to take the bricks out of the bucket so it doesn't overflow anymore. Then you can get some traction with mast cell disorders. All right. There's plenty more questions. We'll answer them in other videos. I'm Dr. A. Thanks so much for listening. Please like share, subscribe, do all this stuff, subscribe. And thanks for all of you who are joining our YouTube community. We're having a lot of fun with this and trying to answer your questions. Thanks and I'll see you on the next video.