Short transcript of a clinician (Robert Whitfield MD) explaining that treatment order matters: clinicians should address foundational metabolic/endocrine support (thyroid, adrenal hormones like cortisol and DHEA, micronutrients, mitochondrial and liver support) before aggressively treating mold and Lyme. The speaker usually recommends addressing mold-related toxins before treating Lyme to avoid overwhelming the liver and provoking severe die-off (Herxheimer) reactions.
Chapters
It backfires. Everybody, thank you for this question. I think it's really important because so many times I find that when patients of mine get these types of diagnoses it's like, oh, finally answers right. And there can be so much relief and there can be this desire, this drive to just be like let's just treat everything at once and just go for it. And it backfires. Everybody. Order is actually quite important. Typically I do find that before we even start with mold and Lyme, for most people it's really important to just also make sure some of those foundational things are in line. So making sure that people's thyroids are balanced, that they have enough cortisol and dhea, our adrenal hormones, that their micronutrient profiles and balance. So some of those things that are going to give the mitochondrial support, that are going to give the cell support, give the liver some support. So I always like to for most people start with like I know we're excited to get to these root causes now that we found them, but we want to give the body the strength. And then most of the time for most people I find that mold actually is better to do before Lyme. Now of course, you know, not everybody flows that way and there are nuances, but the reason for that is like most organisms, there can be a huge amount of biotoxins that get released when we actually go and we start killing the Lyme bacteria and those toxins, those biotoxins are things that our liver has to deal with. And since our liver has a rate limit, if our liver is already at its rate limit, dealing with mold, dealing with breast implant toxins, dealing with the other environmental toxins that it comes across and we then throw more toxins in the body as we're eradicating and killing Lyme and the co infections. Oftentimes that's where we get into that Herxheimer that feel worse from a die off eventually because the body can't get it's more toxins the body can eradicate most of the time. I do find for people it's better to work on those toxins to lower that inflammatory threshold to actually get the liver processing things a little better before we go off killing the infections.
