028 Author Katina Makris gives a voice to those suffering from Lyme disease.

From the creators of Lyme Voice and Disappearing from Society comes a brilliantly simple idea, but this time it comes as a book. Imagine a world in which birds can talk like people. You'll get a bird's-eye view of life with Lyme disease as one bird family must unite to overcome the obstacles of life with Lyme disease. Guaranteed to make you laugh and dry. Written in a way that helps you articulate the losses you are experiencing as a household while simultaneously empowering you to keep fighting. Little Bite, Big Trouble is available today at Amazon.com.

I want to go organic. It's a expensive, so how do I go about this process? Going organic, yeah, you want to get the chemicals out of your foods, but just to make it simple, I always have told my clients in my office for years, start with your animal products because they contain fats, and fats are where most of the chemicals are stored, in particular, as I said, the growth hormones are stored. Things like that. I try to simplify it for you. I teach you how to get away from plastics, how we've got to Go back to glass containers and use wax paper, and like you said, with cookware and— you can do it, but I think it's overwhelming if you think you're going to make these transformations in your kitchen and in your family's eating habits in a couple of months. It's really 6 months to a year, really, in all honesty, without overwhelming yourself, but food is a huge —player, you are 100% right.

Congratulations, Lyme Fighter! Today you had the courage to open your eyes and face another day. Welcome to Lyme Voice. This show's purpose is to help you put the puzzle pieces of Lyme into place. Each episode is designed to inspire, educate, and encourage you on your Lyme journey to wellness. Together we will fight. Together we will heal. Together we will live. Here are your hosts, Aaron and Sarah Sanchez.

Hello everybody, so excited for you to be here with us at Lime Voice today. This is probably the best episode we've ever released. It's so wonderful that we ended up dividing it up into two chunks, so be a little more bite-sized. And what we're going to do is release one for a week, and then we're going to torture you and make you wait a whole nother week to hear the second part. I'm sure you'll survive. Anticipation is great. Anticipation is awesome. I hope you guys really enjoy this episode though. Um, it's with Katina Makris. You guys are gonna really enjoy her message and everything she has to say. I feel like her message is exactly what we've been looking for.

Yeah, Katina's book is called Autoimmune Illness and Lyme Disease Recovery Guide. Mending the Body, Mind, and Spirit.

This can actually be found on our show notes, and we'll have a link where you can purchase it right off of our website through Amazon. So please check out that link and purchase her book. We'll also have some of her other books, uh, that we talk about during this episode— Out of the Woods: Healing from Lyme Disease, Mind, Body, and Spirit, um, and a few other awesome resources that she has. So please take the time to look up the show notes By purchasing her book through our site, it gives us a small percentage of the sales, so it's another way you can help support LionVoice. Anyway guys, I know you guys are going to enjoy this episode. Get the book any way you can and enjoy. If you like what we're doing here at LionVoice, one thing you can do to help us is simply by going to iTunes or Stitcher and leaving your review. This really helps get the message of LionVoice out to others. Don't forget to go to our Facebook page, LionVoice, and while you're there, give us your like. Also, go to lionvoice.com and you can find all sorts of information and past episodes. Don't forget to share while you're there. Talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining us. You are going to love this episode. We have been waiting all of this year and of last year to talk with today's guest. For those of you who don't know, Lyme disease is the number one spreading vector-borne epidemic worldwide. Unreliable blood tests and a lack of a globalized treatment program result in millions of individuals going undiagnosed with disabling symptoms for years and years. Today's guest has been described as dynamic, authentic, and compassionate, and upon meeting her, we found all of these to be very accurate. Please put your hands together and welcome the lovely, the talented, Miss Katina Macris!

Hey there! Great to meet you and to be on air with everyone.

All right, so glad to have you, Katina. Are you ready to help us put the puzzle pieces of Lyme into place? Definitely. All right. All right.

We got to meet Katina at the Living Well with Lyme Disease conference in 2015 in New York, where Katina was one of the speakers. Wasn't that a fantastic conference?

Oh my gosh. Uh, Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. For those of you who are not familiar with this historic, um, is really the temple of mind-body-spirit teachings in the United States. Some of the most profound figures that you can imagine— Pema Chödrön, Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer, even John of God— have taught at Omega Institute. So for me to share the stage that they've been on and to be teaching with Dr. Richard Horowitz, who we all love, for his amazing work, and Dr. Tom France Scott. The 3 of us in that 3-day workshop is just chock-full of information, and it's really an honor and a privilege for me to be a teacher there and to bring so much hope and healing to the Lyme disease crisis.

Yeah, it was so great. Do you know, are they— are they planning another one?

Yes, we are. We actually got re-signed up even before that one was finished. It was So well loved, it will run again this June, the 17th to the 19th of June, 2016. Awesome! Yeah, visit omega.org or Omega Institute, either one will bring you there to find out the details. And I think they even offer scholarships for some people.

Yeah, and that is how we ended up being able to go last year. And it was, yeah, it was so healing.

It was amazing. It was, it was such a blessing.

It really is. I mean, because you get the medical lens of Dr. Horowitz's MSIDS model, which is a 16-pronged approach of all the different pieces of, of the bodily systems that get affected by Lyme disease infections, plus we get the whole detoxification protocol that Dr. Franz Scott so beautifully teaches. And then I bring in the mind-body-spirit piece, which is so critical. This illness decimates people at all levels, and igniting the mind-body pathway, as so many of us know, is ancient. It's been around forever. And with Lyme, your nervous system gets damaged, your neurotransmitters go awry, and having the inner tools that that we all bear in play, which I can teach you to utilize, is really an intrinsic piece of recovery because tending to the body is only part of the equation. Yeah, absolutely.

So, Katina, you've been in the Lyme game for a number of years now, and we'll let you tell more of your story. You have absolutely made a well-deserved name for yourself, and you talk about your journey Before we talk about becoming an award-winning author, how did your first book, Out of the Woods: Healing Mind, Body, and Spirit, come about?

Oh, it came about in an accidental way. I was treacherously ill. I'd been bedridden at that point for really over 2 years, and I had been sick probably 7 or 8 at the time, misdiagnosed for 5. I had been a healthcare columnist for 10 years in a regional newspaper, so I was a writer. I'm also a very creative spirit. I paint, and I'm just one of those creative types. I was so isolated and deeply depressed, alone in my house, floating on my sofa, as so many of you know those states. One of my dear friends, she was trying to coax me out of the house. It was hard. It was hard to do anything socially. Sounds were too much. I felt overwhelmed in a lot of social settings. She said, "Why don't you come to my writing group with me? It's small. There's only about 10 of us. It's lovely. It's quiet. I think it would be really good for you, Katina, if you could just start writing again. Just take the creative prompt." She knew how forlorn I was. I'm an extrovert and I was alone. She drove me to writing group and it was a beautiful setting in a pretty old New England antique barn. And yes, the first 2 or 3 visits, all I could do was write 20 or 30 minutes because my arm would get all shaky and weak. But I would take the prompt and whatever it was, I wrote different scenes. Some of them were purely imaginative. And about the 4th prompt, I wrote a scene of my life when I was very ill with Lyme and it was just the feelings that I had, that decimating confusion and the despair. Anyway, it was very visceral and you read aloud when you're in the writing group. When I read out loud, everyone was spellbound and they said, "Oh my God, you have to continue." As I kept coming to the writing group each week, I would say 3 out of the 4 visits to writing group, I would be birthing these scenes. They were not in order, Erin and Sarah. They were not in any kind of chronological order of my illness. They just were scenes that would come to me in a doctor's office or 2 years prior when I couldn't make it to my son's Little League game. I just was writing scenes and then about— Oh gosh, about 6-8 weeks into this, I realized with the urging of my fellow writers, they're like, "Katina, you've got to tell this story." And I also at the time was in the midst of working with a spiritual healer, and during one of my retreat weekends with her, it really became vivid to me that I needed to write the story and tell it from the emotional side of the illness. I needed to put words. I needed to express the voice, the universal voice of Lyme disease. And it wasn't going to be, you know, like a how-to-fix-it book. This was a book that I felt was going to be a handhold of comfort and support emotionally to everyone walking the Lyme road so that they just didn't feel so abandoned and so crazy and doctors belittling you and family members not understanding and, you know, people just sloughing you off as kind of lazy or kooky or— so I wrote it with that intention to provide validity and validation to your emotional and mental and spiritual status. You're not making this up. And as a result, It is such a book of inspiration because, as you know, it has a happy ending. Yeah. And, um, it, it was purely birthed by a friend getting me out of the house and taking me to a writing group.

That's so neat.

Yeah.

And I imagine cathartic along the way.

It was, it was very cathartic. I didn't realize there was, uh, so much I needed to really move out of my own kind of brain storage centers. And I think also there's a lot of emotion that's trapped in your body at a cellular level. We know a lot about that now with epigenetic medicine, that emotions actually do affect our physiology. And I think, as you said, the cathartic process helped me released toxins, emotional toxins, which in turn free up your immune system. The catharsis was important, and to tell you the truth, probably a third of the book never was— is in print. You know what I mean? It got edited out. There's just so much that you can say without becoming selfish or whiny, and I didn't want any of that. I wanted this to be the universal voice and I didn't want it to be a poor me thing. And it's not a poor me thing. Yeah, right.

That's really neat that you say universal, a universal voice, because one of the things I felt in reading is that the way in which you articulated it made me better able to process through and understand my own illness process. And all that confusion and the chaos that comes with the isolation and the poverty and the, you know, not having the dignity of a diagnosis. And in reading your book, I felt like I was able to understand my own journey better.

Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you for telling me that. That's exactly what I wanted. I wanted you to feel empowered. Yeah.

And for me as the husband and not the one with Lyme, it was very helpful for me to see it through those eyes as well, because you do a great job of describing and explaining what it is to speak that language. And it really is, it's like a new voice or a new language. Lyme survivors have their own language, their own, you know, you recognize each other from across the room almost.

Yes, that's true, and thank you for saying that, Aaron. I'm glad that you found pieces in that book too that helped you understand and feel connected. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, highly recommend it for even if you don't have Lyme. Please read. So it's well worth it.

Oh, thank you. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, others have said that to me too. Even if you're struggling with something else like cancer or MS or whatnot, I mean, that That book shows you how to dig deep. It shows you how to have fortitude. It shows you how to have belief. Then not to overlook the latter section, the nuts and bolts section actually does have the recovery tools. The herbs, the antibiotics, the detoxification protocol, the homeopathy. There's a lot of pieces at the end that I was able to bring my healthcare provider knowledge to, 30+ years as a healthcare practitioner. I was able to bring that piece in and that's another passion of mine is that this country, the United States, sad to say, is the only Western culture that I am aware of that does not have integrative medicine as part of its healthcare system. You go to Europe and Italy, France, Germany, England, or South America, or of course Asia, you can find herbalists, acupuncturists, homeopaths, Reiki practitioners, and it's not an out-of-pocket expense, and they're often under the same roof as a medical doctor. So this illness, Lyme disease, is a wake-up call. One of the expressions I use, it is the epidemic of our century that asks us to unite the two hands of healthcare, the diagnostic tools and the pharmaceutical weaponry of traditional allopathic medicine with the restorative therapeutics of natural medicine because two hands working together are better than one.

Yeah, well put. Oh yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you.

Yeah, that's one of my big mottos that I bring around the world with me, specifically around the country because I, you know, I do come from natural medicine. So, you know, for 35 years I've been able to easily turn to an acupuncturist or, you know, easily understand the role of a clinical nutritionist or or a Reiki practitioner, but a lot of people don't know that. That maybe is not something they're familiar with or have been taught. They just go to their traditional medical doctor, who I call dashboard light doctors. They look for frank symptomology that would like shine up on the dashboard of your car, you know, a broken bone or a heart attack or pancreatitis or, you know, a very obvious infection. And if it shows up in a black and white picture, then they can go about with a pill or procedure. But when we have syndromes or we have chronic illnesses, our country is really in, in not a balanced healthcare model to address that. So I'm really putting a strong emphasis in my teachings and with my new book on how can we remedy this big problem in our country. I think it's gonna take a while, but the tides are turning.

It was interesting, I was just reading an author and he said that when you hear the phrase healthcare crisis, you need to think we're in a food crisis, because he said our nutrition is what fuels us, and there's a reason we're in crisis in the health world, there's a reason we're in crisis with our bodies. And it's literally that the type of food we eat has changed so drastically over the last 3 decades. Oh, definitely.

Ever since World War II. My grandparents, they were born in the late 1800s. They all lived to 89, 87, 89. One made it to 100. Only one died young of cancer, but those people did not have a hydrogenated oil until the 1950s or late '40s. So they were, what, 50 years old at the time. They did not have to have petrochemicals and all the plastic products that, as we know now, leach into the foods that they touch. Cling wrap in particular is one of the worst. They leach into our foods and what do they mimic? They mimic estrogen in the bloodstream. What we have is a population now since you know, after World War II that's estrogen dominant. So we see all these, you know, overly developed youngsters. We see overweight and obesity because estrogen tells the body to put fat on hips and breasts and belly to, you know, for a pregnant mother to be able to feed her baby. So if a human body's got all this extra estrogen mimicking hormone in it, it thinks it's got to lay this fat down. So then we see all these reproductive cancers, we see infertility issues, we see erectile dysfunction. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. We see GMO, processed foods, as we all know about wheat and gluten. I mean, that's a nightmare. We're eating a product that should not even be on the market. The old heirloom wheat of our grandparents' era was a high, tall growing plant, was high protein, low gluten, and it's only harvested once a year. It just goes on and on and on. The fluoride in the drinking water, it damages the thyroid. Dioxin fumes off of carpets in classrooms, it dumbs down the children. I could go on and on and on. The food, as you said, Sarah, is a very, very serious issue here. I was just in France this past summer teaching and they will not allow any American food products. I know.

Wow.

I know, a lot of Europe doesn't.

Nope, they won't let our food products in. I mean, every now and then you'll see something, but it's very rare. And they have a lot of small local farms. You get your local fresh cheese, your local, you know, artichokes and berries. And also, this was— this for me, like, I was in France for 2 weeks out in Brittany, such a beautiful area. Um, coastal and small farms and hay fields. And my first week there, I was, oh my God, I love raspberries. And we're, you know, go to get your fresh food and, you know, at the market. And each little town has their market day. And oh my God, it was raspberries, which I adore. And I'm buying like, you know, several of the raspberry bushels and I'm devouring them. Well, 2 weeks later, I You know, after I've gone through several different markets, I'm going for more raspberries and they're like, "No, no, Madame, no more framboises." And I'm like, "Why not? They're so delicious." And they go, "Oh, the season is over." So, you know, they don't even— they wouldn't import it. Right. You know, they just ate what was local and what was fresh and what was in the season. And I'm like, "Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah." In America, we can have raspberries around the, around the seasons because, hey, they're imported and they're sprayed and they're— right, right.

I know. I remember once I started really like wrapping my brain around what it was going to take to recover, and it was like, okay, you kind of get a handle on food, and then you kind of learn all the ins and outs on supplements, and then you're learning about water and all these things. It's like, what is— and the pans you cook with. And I'm like, When does this end? And now it's just like this ongoing process, I think, that keeps continuing because, yeah, we're at such a bad place. We are.

It's sad to say, um, as I said, the commercialization of the food industry and the farming industry after World War II, uh, the original intentions I think were for convenience refrigeration, etc. They started putting preservatives to give foods shelf life, right? As a result, we lost all our little local bakeries and our little local dairy farms and the mass commercialization of food and processing of food. I mean, that's a nightmare. I'm so grateful to my late father who would never let us eat a a food item that was boxed, I remember him saying to me, "That's crapola. It's got chemicals in it. You don't eat that stuff. Your body's not going to— that's not good." As you said, here we are, we're looking at a country that's been overfed really with a lot of processed food. My new book, Autoimmune Illness and Lyme Disease Recovery, Recovery Guide: Mending Body, Mind, and Spirit is really a big book. It's 440 pages long, but it brings all these topics up that we're speaking about, and I give you a lot of tools in there to kind of simplify your life in terms of, okay, if I want to go organic, it's expensive, so how do I go about this process? And going organic, yeah, you want to get the chemicals out of your foods, but just to make it simple, I always have told my clients in my office for years, start with your animal products because they contain fats, and fats are where most of the chemicals are stored. In particular, as I said, the growth hormones are stored. So, you know, things like that. I try to simplify it for you. I learn— I teach you how to get away from plastics, how we've got it Go back to glass containers and use wax paper, and like you said, with cookware and— you know, you can do it, but it— you know, I think it's overwhelming if you think you're going to make these transformations in your kitchen and in your family's eating habits in a couple of months. It's really 6 months to a year, really, in all honesty, without overwhelming yourself. But food is a huge player. You are 100% right, and the other big player with Lyme disease and the companion illnesses of the autoimmune illnesses, which we can touch upon if you like, is the fact that we're very toxic. There's a lot of— there's a lot of toxins our bodies are carrying from Roundup, which is, you know, glyphosate, which has been sprayed on so many farm products and people even use it in their yard to control weeds. Then you get a lot of other toxins that we just breathe into our system or dyes and food colorings. The liver has to work so hard, poor thing. It's like a giant air conditioning filter. It's cleaning out the bloodstream, right? It's trying to pick up all these wayward chemicals in that poor liver. For God's sake. It needs to be cleansed and I have to say, you know, you look back to biblical times or you look at some of the older religious, you know, traditions and every spring they would go through over their Passover or Lent, right? Right. Which is you give up animal products and you would give up sweets and you give up, you know, some of these elements that are very demanding on the liver and the kidneys and the spleen. Those are our 3 big detox organs. And everyone would get a spring cleaning. And I can remember my grandparents, they'd all go through like the dandelion and go through all the spring greens. And my grandfather who lived to 100, every Saturday it was only a liquid diet because he'd give his digestive tract a break. So we've lost these customs.

Yeah, they have not been passed forward. No.

So, you know, we, we, you know, we— all these pieces add up, you know. So here we become toxic. We've got too many chemicals in our body that we don't even know how to break down, and then you throw in sugar, which is not meant to be consumed. Sugar is an inflammatory product and it does no good. It damages a lot of the endocrine system and the digestive tract. As you said, food is a huge issue and also stress. Stress, holy cow, stress pushes those adrenal glands. I could just do a whole show on the adrenal glands, which are really probably one of the really key players with Lyme disease, why some people fall prey to this illness. Usually people who have burdened adrenal glands or what we call adrenal insufficiency, they can't handle it when that microorganism gets into the body and it has to make all these natural anti-inflammatory steroids. If your adrenal glands have already been stressed because of your fast-paced living, or you've had trauma in your history, or, you know, various other issues, you can't make enough steroids to keep inflammation down. And then when one of your endocrine system glands goes, like adrenals or thyroid or pituitary, it's a daisy chain. The rest of them don't fire properly on cue, and, and it's just a perfect storm, the illness takes root.

Yeah, well, yay! I'm so glad you're here to talk to us about this. We are going to go to a quick advertisement and we will be right back with Katina Makris.

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Welcome back. We are here with Katina Makris. And Katina, normally we do a Fight, Heal, Live format, and today, in honor of your book, a Body, Mind, Spirit format. And so take us into healing body, mind, and spirit. Let's talk about the body and, and what has to go on to heal from a chronic illness. And then go on to the mind and the spirit.

Sure, thank you. Thank you for, um, honoring, uh, my philosophy. Well, um, I say it's a three-pronged approach, um, with Lyme disease and, as I said, the crossover to the autoimmune illnesses, which are like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, MS, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis. So the starting place, which is what worked so well with me when I was finally properly diagnosed after 5 years and 17 neurology visits, all kinds of top-notch New England hospitals and doctors, and, you know, I was labeled with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, migraine complex, and an anxiety disorder, which I felt like, what? This is crazy. Hello, I've been an athlete my whole life. I'm an outdoor enthusiast. I was, you know, holistic medicine for 20 years. I took great care of myself, yoga, meditation, was way ahead of the curve in terms of like organic living. And how could like the robust picture of health— I'd only had like a rare antibiotic for urinary tract infection. I'd never had strep. I'd never had bronchitis. I'd never had pneumonia. How on earth could I get so seriously ill and kept slipping, as you know, every few months, 6 months, I was worse and worse and worse with new symptoms and palsies and tremors and dementia and foot drop and MS-type things. Treacherous. So when I was finally diagnosed, I had a brilliant clinical nutritionist who had been in the field for 25 years. So my clinical nutritionist, uh, who had been working with these sorts of illnesses— Lyme and chronic illness— for 25 years had a three-pronged approach that I understood and adhered to. Number one, open up the detox pathways, which include the kidney, liver, and spleen, the three big organs. And we used herbals, we used homeopathics, and we changed my diet. So out went the sugar, the gluten, the, you know, fatty products, and a very simple diet of greens and root vegetables and fish. And everything had to be cooked— no lettuce and no raw fruit even— because my acupuncturist Chinese acupuncturist of 4 generations, she said, oh, your stomach chi is so cold, no ability to digest, everything cook. So, so even like fruit, you know, like pears or apples, I baked. Wow. So detox, number 1. And then number 2, he said the illness, the bacteria causes a lot of damage because the inflammation, it really damages different parts of your body. And so he ran these specialty metabolic profile analysis tests, and some of you have heard of these labs like Genova Labs or Real-Time Labs. And so they're very much more attuned to than what your traditional physician would use. So he isolated where the damages were in my body and they were rampant. I had like no essential fatty acids. My amino acids were really defunct, which is why I had such, you know, poor brain chemistry. My gut was a mess. The lining was totally inflamed. I had irritable bowel syndrome. My flora was way off, you know, the good bacteria and the bad bacteria. My poor adrenal glands were shot. The poor things could barely make any cortisol. My thyroid was like loping along at half speed. I had no magnesium. I had no B vitamins. My D, my vitamin D was like at 13 and it should be up at 80. I mean, I was so deficient. He started me slowly, slowly on bringing in high-grade nutritive supplements, which I was so sensitive. I had to take it at half, like pediatric doses in the beginning just to ease them into my body. So we started rebuilding these systems— the immune system, the endocrine system, the nervous system— and then we, um, went in to go after the infection itself. And we chose to use herbal protocols. I used the Cowden protocol. Yeah, with cimento and banderol, and, and then we added in teasel root and some of the other herbs.

So How long were you on that Cowden protocol?

I was on it for several years. I never went— believe it or not, they suggest, I think it's 15 or 30 drops like twice a day. I could never make it past 5 drops twice a day of, of Cemento, which is cat's claw, right? Because my body would start to make the Herx reaction. And I'm a homeopath, and homeopaths always say let your body be your guide. So I You know, as when you start having a healing crisis, which is a flare-up of the symptoms, that means your body's working really hard and it's using its immune function and different parts of its systems to work, right? Which we want it to work, but I don't believe in big herx reactions. So I let my body be my guide. So if it only could tolerate 5 drops, I stayed at 5 drops. So I was on 5 drops, 6 drops, for over 3 years, but it really— every 6 months or so, we could kind of look back and we could see the progress I made from being bedridden to up and cooking. And then eventually after 1 year, my GP, who was an integrative medicine doc, he allowed me to start walking. I had to relearn to walk again, which was just like across the room and back, and then out the house back door and in the front door, and then down the to the mailbox and back, and, you know, I started slowly rebuilding some cardiovascular and muscular endurance and floor yoga and then standing yoga. And, you know, so slowly, slowly, and then I added in the Rife technology, which that's pretty fascinating. Dr. Royal Raymond's Rife energy medicine, that was a big piece that really helped me kill off the infection, but I didn't start that until about a year into the Cowden Protocol. Physically, that was the 3-pronged approach: detox, rebuild depletions, and then kill off the bugs. My nutritionist said if we went after the bugs right away, which is what a lot of doctors do, they go in with either the antibiotics or the herbs, is that if your detox pathways are not opened up, you cannot handle the die-off and you're going to feel so bad you want to quit. He also said we need your systems working. We need your immune system working. We need your adrenals working. Different organs working. His belief was get these systems working better before we went after the bugs. We are like a little ecosystem, our skin being like the outermost layer of like the terrarium and inside's a habitat. This philosophy of recalibrating and getting good flora in there and getting all the toxins out and rebalancing your pH. My pH was down at 6.2. We know anything below 6.5 is prime breeding ground for bacteria and viruses and parasites and fungi. Below 6.0 is when cancers grow. You want your pH up at 6.8 or 7.0. It took a while. This was not overnight. It was 5 years of treatments for me. It worked. For those of you who have met me in real life, I am robust again. I'm filled with energy. Travel and dance and swim a mile and it worked, but slow and steady and stick with a good practitioner that you feel a really good alignment with and don't be afraid to bring in some of the modalities as I said, like the acupuncture or the craniosacral or the homeopathy. I mean, it's a multiple modality approach.

I think one of the things that was intriguing to me about your book was that you as a professional were already in that industry. And it still took you a long time to get a diagnosis. And then also, like, just how much— how many different people you pulled information from. Definitely.

And my beautiful healing art of homeopathy, which I adore, um, even homeopathy before we got the diagnosis could not cure me. It's like my homeopathic remedies, you know, they would be prescribed to me by some of the best homeopaths in the world, and I would only hold for like a few weeks and then I'd slip again. So as a homeopath, this is pretty interesting. There's another book coming out of me. As a homeopath, I actually learned how to treat Lyme at a clinical level, not at just what we call a classical constitutional level. And I was blessed with one of my early teachers back in the 1980s who is one of the premier clinical homeopaths out of Argentina who could take collapsed lungs and kidney stones and turn those cases around with low-dose prescribing of remedies repeated 2 and 3 times in a day. And it turns out that is one of the essential ways of using homeopathy with Lyme disease because it's a very, very strong bacteria that is, you know, working at a pathological level. So I learned as a homeopath, actually, it taught me a lot. You're right. Even my colleagues, it took a long time, but that was 15 years ago. I got sick in 2000. I got diagnosed in 2005. Honestly, when I go to the ILADS conferences, 4 years ago, they were still talking antibiotics a lot for chronic Lyme. Now, I see 4 years later actually a lot of natural medicine being taught at the ILADS conferences. My motto, like I said, the two hands working together are better than one, is starting to be embraced by the Lyme literate physicians of the world. They are realizing that yes, antibiotics are essential for acute infections, and I would not bat an eye. I'd jump on them immediately if I had a new infection, and I did when my son got bitten a year and a half ago.— there's a place. Cardiac symptoms or really serious neurological symptoms, really bad Bartonella infections or bad Babesia infections do respond to IV antibiotics. There is a place. It's important. I want to stick to your topic of mind and spirit too.

I'll read a quote from your book and then you can expound on it just as far as what it does to your body to live in that state. Said, Eli, you're way down in there. I can't really reach you, honey. Let me come in and push you up from behind. My head pounds in wicked shards of pain. It's another migraine. How fierce they are again. This is the third one this week, plundering my body and mind, making it difficult to think or to speak, let alone to attend to my family. And what that just did for me, as you know, you're describing that I felt like I had only little windows of my life where I was physically okay, mentally okay. And I had to fit like a lot of life and living into these tiny windows because then I was going to go back downhill or, you know, who knew I would maybe feel good for a day or a week or a month, but there was always an end to the feeling good.

Yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah. You just reading that passage to me, it threw me back. Yeah, my son, he was just a little thing. I think he was only 3 or 4 at that time, and we were out sledding, and the snows were deep. They were like 3 feet deep or more, and I couldn't get him up over the hill. And he insisted that he could do it, and he did. He got himself up. But yeah, it was— it's really sad what happens to families when Lyme disease enters, and it's not caught early early and someone falls ill and we don't know what's going on and you become so weak and you become so fragile and so emotional and, you know, some people just kind of curl up in a, like, almost like a little fetal position. That's what would happen to me. You know, you go into trauma mode. It really creates a PTSD state, this illness. And what I know now as a spiritual healer, our 7th energy chakra, which rules the nervous system and the brain, actually you do get disconnected because when you go into survival mode, you just, you do curl up in self-protection and, and just try to hold on. And yes, those windows when they come, oh my gosh, if you get an hour even of clarity or energy. I remember just trying to run a load of laundry or cook a meal or just do something basic. I couldn't drive and get to the grocery store. I had to depend on my husband when I was married, but once our marriage fell apart, then I had a friend or my teenage stepdaughter who I was still close with would help me with those kinds of errands that I couldn't perform. It's very— it's absolutely overwhelming and decimating, and you lose a sense of yourself and your identity and who you are, and your confidence breaks. And I was a very successful individual. I'd done everything right according to the American emblems of success, right? Right. I went to a great school. I went to Duke University. I I went to graduate school. I sat on the National Board of Homeopathic Examiners. I had an IRA. I had a house. I was married. I had a beautiful family, and I lost it all. And I'm not the only one. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who go into poverty status physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And This illness asks us to turn very deep inside of ourselves, and I say it's like being on a forced spiritual retreat or being in a forced ashram. You are dying, literally. I felt like I was physically dying, but it is a spiritual death, and it asks for personal transformation. And those times alone and in solitude and in reverence and in contemplation, I think you start to examine a lot of what is your purpose in life and what is your contribution. And to tell you the truth, in those times, like that passage that you just read, I felt the only thing that I could contribute in life at that point was love. It was the only thing I I still knew how to do was to love. And so I loved my children and I loved my husband, and I learned that I needed to love myself because to get well, you have to be an advocate for your own self and you have to come to value and treasure what are your gifts and what are you bringing to this lifetime. And a lot of our society is set up so that we love others, or we love our jobs, or we love things, or pets, or, or objects, or fancy cars, or trips. And they're all beautiful and wonderful, and I don't want to take away from them. But this illness has come at an interesting time in our history, I think, of our culture. And I learned, as I said, that all I knew how to contribute was love. And love is what helped me move through this illness and and to in turn finally recover, and now that's what I bring to the world is my love.

That's really beautiful, thank you for that. From an outside perspective, I really like the way you describe the pulls on your personality, and for me as the husband on the, on the outside to watch parts of her personality get stripped away was really hard. And I can see how so many other husbands could be so fearful of that. And, you know, even— and I could see why there would be issues in your marriage when it's not the same person that you married, right? But I am also here on this side to say that the new person that comes out of that is worth waiting for.

Oh, bless Bless you, Aaron. Thank you for saying that. You are a very wise man and a very patient man to understand that.

Disease is contrary to life. Therefore, wherever disease exists, life must also fight to exist.

Good job fighting, Lyme fighters. Keep it up. We'll see you next time. LymeVoice contains general information about medical conditions and treatments. The information is not advice and should not be treated as such. Okay, Lincoln? Okay. The medical information on LymeVoice is provided as is without any representations, warranties, expressed or implied. Okay? Okay. LymeVoice makes no representations or warranties in relation to the medical information on this podcast. You must not rely on the information on this podcast as an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. If you have any specific questions about your medical matter, you should consult your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. And for you, you consult your parents, okay?

Okay.

If you think you may be suffering from from any medical condition, you should seek immediate medical attention. You should never delay seeking medical advice, disregard medical advice, or discontinue medical treatment because of information on this podcast. Got it, Lincoln?

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