Intimacy, Hormones and Medical PTSD

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to another great episode of Lyme Voice. I am here with Dr. Brad Montaña. Dr. Brad, thank you so much for being here with us again today.

Yeah, you're welcome. It's always a joy to talk to you.

It is. So Dr. Brad has been studying and applying functional medicine for over 30 years. He is a researcher and a pioneer in developing breakthrough approaches to resolve chronic health. Dr. Brad specializes in resolving chronic Lyme disease, Candida, and leaky gut by being methodically thorough and addressing the entire body. So here's what I'm going to say about Dr. Brad. Him and I have spent hours now talking off air in preparation for these different interviews that we've done, but I would say his value bio is that if you are looking for a practitioner that is very intuitive, that understands chronic illness, that understands the mind-body connection, Dr. Brad is an absolutely phenomenal resource for those of you out there who are looking for answers, not just for dealing with symptoms, but also just understanding the emotional PTSD side of things, which is what we're going to talk about.

Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for that. That's, uh, it's always interesting when you said that. I'm stepping on my cord and getting it out of my way here. It's always interesting to hear other people's perspectives of who somebody is. They're oftentimes more honest than what our own are. You know, it's interesting, I was listening to somebody doing a conference last night on financial things, and I'm watching how they're interacting And, and it's in this whole field of working with chronic illness, Lyme disease, it's enough to really anger somebody. And somebody like me, it kind of sets me off quite a bit in that there's so many lies, there's so much deceit, there's so much mistruth out there. Lyme disease should be something that could be resolved fairly quickly, and it's, it's because of all this misunderstandings that people go get the wrong kind of care, may things worse and just really never heal up.

Yeah, we—

our way of getting people healthy is over the top.

There's very few practitioners in the world that are close to the arena that we're at.

Over 90% of the people that we work with get healthy again. And I'm not talking get over Lyme disease, I'm healthy again.

And for those that follow instructions, it's over 95%. It's huge.

It's really huge.

But we're really, really different in the way we approach that, which is kind of what we're going to talk about today.

Yeah, so we're going to talk about one, hormones, how hormones impact intimacy, how trauma illness— trauma— how chronic illness impacts intimacy, and then the aspects of medical PTSD that go into this. And the reason I got you back on air so quickly, or you got me back on air so quickly— we're doing a collaboration here— is, um, I got so many messages about your interview that I went back through, and I hear the interviews multiple times before they air and take notes and do usually tons of prep work. So I'm aware of what the conversation was, but when you're in production mode versus just listening mode, you hear different things. But I got so many messages that I went back through and relistened to it because I was like, what exactly are people hearing that's slightly different than the episodes, because this is not unusual. I get a lot of messages from listeners saying, "Oh my gosh, like, you validated something about my experience. You said something I've been saying and haven't been heard." You know, so it's— or, "Hey, I made the decision to choose not to commit suicide when I heard you guys talking about suicide." So I get a lot of messages from listeners because of what you said at the beginning. There's a lot of misinformation. There's a lot of partial truths. You have to dig deep to find truths, to find protocols, to find something that's going to help heal not just your body, but your heart and your soul. So, but it was interesting because I'd already heard the interview and I listened back through and I actually like was brought to tears 4 times off of things that you had said, especially the like the last 15 minutes of the interview.

Yeah. And I think he said that and I said, that's not uncommon.

With me.

It's really not me. And yeah, I used to not be able to speak, speak at all, doing some mission work in the middle of Siberia, and Lord just kind of set me free from that. And he just chooses to speak through me in a different way, which is an interesting thing because we got to recognize a lot of people have been wounded by people and fellowships and things like that, and, and that's just not really a reflection of who the Lord is. There, there's reasons for why that happens, and pretty much the The institution has invaded the organism, what the Lord intended for people to be able to relate to and believe in community. And those who understand his kingdom, they bring health and they bring life where they come.

And those of the institution, they bring death.

Well, and we haven't talked about it on air much, but religious PTSD is a really big thing. It's a huge thing.

It's really huge. It goes along the line of relational abuse. When we look at trauma or we look at toxicity, okay, you— toxicity, hormones, and intimacy, you cannot separate them. Absolutely not. The thing that's ignored the most is toxic relationships. That's starting to change in some fellowship circles. Lord's been having me address that quite a bit because of the gravity and the reality of there's so much PTSD PTSD involved in both of them. And then you have all these people who have these innocent faiths that get destroyed by the institutional push of people using what they believe to be a scriptural truth as baseball bats to manipulate people into something the Lord never intended in the first place.

And yet droves of people leaving fellowships because all that's being exposed.

And, you know, we need to be tender and gentle to, to those who, who've been beat up in that whole institution, because that's not—

that's not the Lord's heart at all.

He brings life and healing, and those who really know him, they do the same thing.

What were the 3 things you said that couldn't be taken apart? Toxicity, intimacy, and what?

Hormones and intimacy. When we look at hormones, we have two primary controls of our body: our nervous system or our hormone system. Hormones control basically everything. Whenever there's undue stress, it starts to dysregulate the adrenal hormones. And once you dysregulate the adrenal hormones— adrenal hormones, it's when they're upset that causes anxiety, depression, and different things like that. It's absolutely part of the whole picture of PTSD. There's emotional parts, there's relational parts, there's misunderstanding parts, there's hormonal parts, there's physiological parts that upsets all the physiology of basically everything, and everything just falls apart in a hurry.

So you can't separate them.

You really can't separate them. And when we look at the whole arena of intimacy, it's relationally driven. Relational health is the biggest issue that creates intimacy dysfunction. Next after that would be hormones. After that would be nutrition. So, and, and then we throw health in there also. And talking within the arena where people have a chronic illness, it becomes this really huge nightmare.

So, you know, if we open it up and we bring some understanding of that, we bring some of that to light, it can really help this arena a lot.

You know, as you were talking, I said that you're a very intuitive practitioner, and you're emotionally intuitive, experientially intuitive spiritually. But I was just thinking, like, for me, I remember going to the doctor with chronic fatigue, which I didn't even fully understand because it was after a car accident, and just trying to explain, like, okay, I can't— like, the weight of my purse is heavy on my shoulder when I'm walking through the store, I'm going through Costco. Like, that doesn't make sense to me. And literally being told, well, you do have a heavy purse. Like, the lack of intuition that exists within Western medicine is so horrible because he did not address on any level what I was saying. And then he simultaneously diminished what I was saying and then was like, oh yeah, well, like, if getting a smaller purse would have solved my problems, I would have done it, right?

Well, so let's springboard off of that.

Okay, what causes PTSD? You know, you've worked with a lot of people. What's your experience? What people say is the cause of PTSD?

The cause?

Yeah, what's behind it?

Traumatic event.

Okay. And do you think that's a— from an emotional register going on with traumatic events? Do you think, you know, that's driven off of memories? What do you think happens with it?

It's all of them. It's psychological, it's emotional, it's financial, relational, hugely, hugely. Yes, hugely.

So let's take that, that right there, and let's explain what happens inside the body with that. Whenever there's any kind of a stress— so it doesn't matter whether you're talking physical stresses, gravitational stresses, chemical stresses, nutritional stresses, relational stresses, belief Stresses are huge, really, really huge, and we were just talking about those. But when we take any kind of stress, the body has this response pattern that goes on with it.

The adrenals cannot differentiate one kind of stress to another, and they're what drive the PTSD.

So whenever the stress comes, the cortisol levels start to rise inside the adrenals. As the cortisol levels rise, the adrenals have a bunch of really important functions. They control postural blood pressure, stressed blood sugar. They control the kidney function, control inflammation. With inflammation, control and direct immune system. They make all the precursors to all the sexual hormones. Well, when the stress rises, the need for cortisol starts to rise. Cortisol is supposed to knock down inflammation, but when it comes chronic with PTSD, it makes more inflammation.

All right.

So it's disrupting. As more cortisol is being made, it takes all the precursors for the sexual hormones and it pushes them over to make cortisol. So there's nothing to make the sexual hormones in men or women. Men and women make our sexual hormones the same way. Pregnenolone, DHEA comes off of the adrenal glands. It's converted more in the peripheral tissues than the gonads that people think. And once we get older. Once women are in the perimenopausal area, men get older, all of women's hormones get converted in the peripheral tissues, like the muscle is the biggest. And in men, it's 50%. So it's not all just in the gonad, not just in the testicles and the ovaries where this occurs. But when there's a lot of stress, the adrenals aren't given the DHEA and the pregnenolone to make sexual hormones. And that progression goes from DHEA and pregnenolone to progesterone in both men and women. Progesterone converts to testosterone in both men and women. Testosterone converts into estrogen in both men and women. We make the same, our parts are the same. It's just about 7 weeks after conception, if it's a male, there's a shot of testosterone, uterus drops down, wraps around the base urethra, becomes a prostate. The ovaries grab the round ligament, holds the whole woman's reproductive system in place, drops through the inguinal ring. The ovaries drop into the the labia. The labia become the scrotum, the ovaries become testicles, round ligament becomes the spermatic cord, and then the clitoris— there's actually 3 erectile, um, what they call cruxes. They're like, like long balloons that people make the, the balloon art with, you know, tie balloons. They're like those. There's one in the clitoris in a woman, one in each labia majora, and when arousal comes, those labia majora engorge with those. That opens her up for intimate interaction. Where the men, they're all in the penis. Well, those, those 3, if it's a male, they wrap around the urethra and elongate, become the penis. So it's important in this arena that everybody understands we're the same. We have the same parts, they're put in different places. We have the same hormones, they're in different places. All the issues with men's prostate is hormonal. And when the stress starts to rise, it upsets the hormones. When that happens, you start to have genital atrophy in both men and women.— it's a bigger issue in women than it is in men. You start to have erectile dysfunction in both men and women. It's a bigger issue in women than men, but because they can still engage sexually, it's ignored. But when you talk to any woman who's been in chronic illness or perimenopausal, postmenopausal, the problem of orgasm is really huge. That's because the erectile function of the clitoris no longer engages. And can't bring the excitement. So it's the same thing. It's blatantly obvious in a man. It's a bigger issue in women, but it's ignored, and it shouldn't be. It really shouldn't be. So when we look at something like PTSD, it's taking all these hormones, and for one, it shunts them over that way. Once it shunts them that way, then the hypothalamus and the pituitary, they can't regulate it anymore. Once they can't regulate the adrenal hormones, they start to disrupt the other ones trying take up the slack. Thyroid tries to take up the slack for doing energy. It gets beat up and it can't keep up with it.

Toxins drive a lot of this, a huge amount of this.

And as we talked about, toxic relationships and interactions are just huge as far as that goes, and it really needs to be brought out in the light. Those aren't things you can just resolve. And when you get chronic illness Relational health comes into light in a huge way, and that light is, is very traumatic for most people. Most people's—

very few relationships are very healthy to begin with, and you put the stress of a chronic illness on one side or the other, then it's just over the top.

But both men and women's sexual fluids carry Lyme bacteria and all the co-infections, and it is absolutely a fluid transfer disease, transfer through mosquito bites, deer flies, to the blood bank, sexual fluid transmission, saliva transmission, just some kissing. Yeah, I mean, there's so many different ways it transfers.

It's not just a tick-borne disease. It's absolutely not.

And that brings this into the arena too, because if you have a spouse, if one of a spouse, one of an interactive sexual partner has Lyme disease, the other one's being exposed.

It's just automatic.

And that's something else that you got to bring into the play.

Is there a way to protect it?

Not really, because if you take something like a diaphragm, there's all kinds of leakage around that. That doesn't work. And the toxic lubricants that go with that aren't very healthy for a woman anyway. If you take condoms, those have pores in them also. And the pores of two co-infections are Lichia and Rickettsia, absolutely are smaller than the pores, can go right through it.

Babesia is close.

It's really close. It's just barely bigger than the pore. And it depends on which stage of— one of the stages of obesity is close. And when we look at Borrelia that cause Lyme disease, it's close to the size of the pore. So if there's deflation around it and fluid leaks out, it doesn't matter anyway, which is one of the really big problems. So we have all these different dynamics going on with all of this, but everything's completely hormonally driven. And when you look at Genital health. One of my talks, I've got two Greek statues. One's of a lean young man, one's obese. And you look at all the, all the different dynamics of the way the physique, the way it's put together.

Every hormonal dysfunction shows itself in a different way.

The thyroid, the neck thickens, the body gets thicker, gets lumpy, bumpy thickness all over the place. And somebody's just a little bit larger. Adrenal dysfunction shows up as a sagging, hanging abdomen that commonly folds over the waistline. If it's a liver dysfunction, commonly they'll have that classic beer belly where it looks like they got a watermelon under that, and then you thump it, it's— it seems hard. Estrogen toxicity gives— makes the hips and the buttocks enlarge quite a bit, and you see that men and women. Testosterone dysfunction gives men man boobs. Growth hormone makes the calves get a whole bunch bigger. So you can look at somebody, you can see what these hormonal dysfunctions are.

Oh my, wow. That's fascinating. You can look at people and know that their hormonal dysfunction— that's fascinating. I would not have known that. Dr. Wine of the Lime Laser, he talks about— I don't have my notes with me, but he talks about how he can tell if someone has liver, if especially like if someone is thin but they have a pot belly. I think it's liver. It's usually indicative of something liver. So he's in the same boat you are where he's like, I look at someone's body shape and can tell what organs are suffering.

Right. But the pot belly, going through some molecular physiology, you come to find out that the abdomen or gut is— if we cannot excrete our liquids through the kidneys, it stores in the abdomen until we can. So if you have somebody at the end of the day, if their abdomen is more distended and they wake up and it's smaller, especially if they're getting up and urinating throughout the night, their abdomen is storing liquids. Something's going on in their physiology. Their adrenals control that, and salt intake controls that. Minerals with water will completely upset that whole thing because we can't absorb the minerals that go with water, so it gets stored in another compartment until the body can deal with the, the wrong form of those minerals. So it really depends. The liver, when it's the liver, it's a classic beer belly where it sticks way out in this round thing and you can thump on it, it sounds like a ripe watermelon.

That's That's liver.

If it sings and hangs and moves around a lot, that's adrenal. If it's going up and down throughout the day, that's adrenal kidney function.

So a lot in that.

Yeah, I know there's so many questions. I'm like, how do we go backwards? It's funny, you know, some doctors are starting to say that Lyme can be sexually transmitted, some are not.

And well, if you think of this, if it's found in It was first found in semen, discovered in semen, plenty of literature to prove that out. It was years later they found it in the cervical mucus of women. If it's in the sexual fluids and you sexually engage, what's the likely consequence?

Well, and then there's the reality of just where someone's health is at to begin with, right? Because you can take someone who gets an actual tick bite and it doesn't tank their health or destroy their health. They get a tick bite, it goes away.

That has to do with immune function, right?

The immune function is so properly designed, so efficiently designed, we should never be able to get sick.

It's only because somebody's health is beat up in the first place that we do get sick.

But okay, you talk about a health issue and somebody's symptomatically where they're at, the 2 to 3% of the blood bank in Minnesota and Wisconsin are infected with Lyme disease. This is their criteria to take blood draws at the blood bank in Minnesota, Wisconsin. If you have Lyme disease, they ask that you not come in when you're symptomatic. People need to realize one thing about these infections. They do not respect any barrier that people imaginarily place on it.

Not one.

There's nothing that keeps them out. They can go through every single barrier that we have. They can get into the bones, they can get the cartilage where there's hardly any blood supply, they can get into the brain, they can get into the covering of the brain called the meninges. They can get in every organ system we have. They do not respect one area at all. They don't have any dignity.

They don't respect our imaginations.

They have no dignity.

Well, they don't. They really don't. They're in survival mode, and they're really smart on how they do that. They're constantly mutating. They don't mutate together, they mutate differentially. And, and they do all these, these stellar things to stay alive, but they go wherever they want.

They don't respect our imagination.

They absolutely don't. And when you look people with Lyme disease. People have all these different ideas about what's going on.

Most of them are false.

It directs them to the wrong care, which makes what could have been a fairly short-lived acute situation become a lifelong issue, as you well know.

And most of that's infected belief systems with wrong beliefs, wrong truths.

I'm putting together a master class right now. That's one subject we are really addressing in a huge way is all these myths about Lyme disease. When we look at, you know, if we get back into the PTSD thing, the hypothalamus, it's right at the spinal cord comes into the brain, is right about where the hypothalamus is, just above the brainstem. It registers all the circulating levels of things like hormones, minerals, gases, different things like that, and it sends signals to other parts of the brain to regulate those. With an HPA axis, it sends things down to pituitary.

The pituitary sends these prehormone things out to the different target organs to, to create different hormones.

People talk about the HPA axis, but the brain is the most oxygen-dependent, nutrient-dependent, and toxic-vulnerable organ that we have, especially at rest. Everybody talks about the HPA. Nobody dresses the H, the hypothalamus. It's the most sensitive of anything we got.

To toxicity, totally dysregulates it.

So if you take anything—

because it controls the sensitivities, right?

But people are throwing adaptogens at it. That doesn't do anything. And the brain cannot detoxify itself.

You got to figure out what toxins in there, where it came from, pull it out, and get it back to liver where you can start a detoxification process.

And most people don't realize that.

And almost all the programs of detoxification are totally dysfunctional as far as that goes. Completely dysfunctional.

So when we look at the HPA axis, you really got to add the gonads in there, making the sexual hormones. You have to add the pancreas in there that makes the hormones that control the blood sugar and our temperature. You have to add thyroid in there. That's our basal metabolic rate. And, you know, becomes this much more interactive thing. Once you dysregulate one system, something else tries to make up for it. It can't do it and it'll tank itself. And so you have this domino effect of all of the hormones dysregulating. Once one does, they all do. Blood sugar does, then you got these real high highs, these really bad lows. You crash and you can't get up, you can't think, you can't do anything. So, and whenever you're stressed out, the cortisol levels, it makes you dissolve your muscles, that liberates amino acids, go to your liver, get converted into sugar inside the liver to raise the blood sugar so you can defend your life. We were designed— the stress was a life-threatening situation and we need to defend it. Well, we live in a society where all these things that everybody say it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, all these dysfunctions are literally life-threatening situations. Toxic relationships, toxic interactions, as far as adrenal is concerned, is a life-threatening situation. And it's responding to a life-threatening situation. Once that does that, when the blood sugar rises, the insulin has to come up to get that to push into the tissues. Insulin, cortisol, together with this stress reaction, turns on a hormone in our fat tissue called aromatase that takes all men's circulating testosterone and converts it into toxic estrogen Takes women's estrogens, turns them into toxic estrogens and testosterone. So you have this whole arena that's completely turned upside down. And with that, it's creating genital atrophy. With that, all of this issue of libido, sexual desire, it's going out the window. A lot of that ties into thyroid. You know, it's really funny working with people, women in their 70s, mid-70s, and 80s. We're working with them. They've been on thyroid hormone hormones for decades. They get off their thyroid hormones, their, their hair starts growing again, the life starts coming back in their skin. They start thinning off.

They get giddy when their libido comes back. I mean, they just get—

it's, it's really fun. It's really— what's that?

In their late 70s and 80s, right?

You know, this whole issue of sexual interaction, I mean, you think about it. Young children, they're playing doctor. There's this natural curiosity of what makes you different that's there from a very young age, and it doesn't end till you hit the grave. It was amazing thing for me years ago to find out one of the biggest pools of sexually transmitted diseases is in nursing homes.

I have heard that, you know, this is something that goes on forever.

And you get in the Blue Zones It's funny, people in their 90s—

explain the Blue Zone. Not everyone knows what that means.

Okay, Blue Zones are the places where the average lifespan is up to 120-some-odd years. They live longer than everybody else. Which, my wife was listening to something the other day, and a real tragedy with that. That's basically because they have different lifestyles. And, you know, we've developed this individualized lifestyle medicine because it's the only thing that really addresses all the issues of chronic illness. And that, that's pretty much how approach everything. And that's why we get such dramatic results. But my wife was listening to some interview of a guy in his 90s down in Costa Rica in a blue zone. He has his normal breakfast of tortillas and beans, goes to the tortilla factory, they're making tortillas, and they're talking to them and go, you know, so how is this going in your culture? And go, well, it's really sad, but the young people don't follow this. Well, why is that?

They set up— the American fast food industry has set up fast food restaurants down the road, and everybody's going to those.

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People, because of the false American dream, are throwing everything they have away. But in the Blue Zones, The average sexual interaction of couples in their 30s is a couple of times a week.

People in their 90s in a blue zone average 2 to 3 times a week. Interesting.

The whole reason why are—

and they're whole and their hormones are running properly and they aren't dealing with arthritis and sitting on the couch watching Netflix all the time and eating fast food. Right.

You know, so when we look at this PTSD, this hormone disruption, the— our dietary lifestyle is, is absolutely crucial.

It's half of the picture.

And all the tests for food allergies, food intolerances, only will give you 2 to 3% of the potential responses that are there. You have to do this a different way. The modified elimination diet doesn't work either because because the responses are distant and can be 10 days to 3 weeks after you eat something way away from the gut. You can't connect the dots, so you have to do an alternate way. And we, we do that with just a high degree of accuracy. It's one of the first things we do is get people to know what they can eat. So, you know, we add all this in. This affects the hormonal—

and you do this mostly not through testing but through muscle testing, or not like blood tests, blood work, but through blood work does not work.

2 to 3% accuracy.

And you can be spending— 10 years ago, $2,100 for the best allergy testing in the world. Took you 3 panels to do it, $750 a piece.

So that's $2,250 10 years ago.

And I, I don't know what it costs now through those labs for a 2 to 3% accuracy. The skin prick tests are less than that, way less than that. So, and they're the most expensive, most inaccurate testing you can possibly do. So what most people are basing their direction of care has a 2 to 3% accuracy max. How can you address the chronic illness with a 2 to 3% accuracy? You look at the lab test for, for the Lyme and the co-infections, 0 to 20% accuracy if they're done in a narrow time window. That's way less than And there's one study, 516 blood draws, 216 blood draws, did triple blood draws of everybody, sent them off the best Lyme labs in the world to get the results. Sometimes one result, one sample went to 3 different labs, sometimes all 3 samples went to the same lab. Out of those, all those samples of blood, no 2 results were the same. People don't realize how inaccurate all this stuff is, and they're trying to hang their hat on everything. And whenever you get a diagnosis, get a protocol, and protocol is a guess. It is is not a specific thing.

It's only a guess.

We don't guess. We test everything on everybody before we give them anything, and we figure out what will make at least 80% of all their systems healthy again. I usually don't stop till we're 90%, 95% before we even start. We can prove that out with such dramatic accuracy. The 4-year-olds get it. You don't have to say a word.

They know it for sure because you showed I know your protocols are all individual but based and you don't have a standard set protocol. I've already taken calls, I've already gotten calls from the interview we had already done of people saying like, what's a ballpark of what cost? And here's what— why I want to talk about it, because you go out to a clinic, you're going to be spending thousands of dollars just on the specific testing. That's not going anywhere towards treatment or supplements like you're out-of-pocketing thousands and thousands of dollars just to be able to hang your hat on something. And a lot of people, you know this, have been sick for a long time and don't have a diagnosis to hang their hat on, or the diagnosis that they have is like fibromyalgia and they're not being taught that they can do anything about that.

So in your— we're a fraction—

does $500 get you in the game?

Like, it really does. Okay, it really does. It depends on what's going on with somebody. And the reason I'm not saying, okay, this is what it is, is because it's doing a consultation that I find out what's going on. And we have to know— a consultation, I can tell how many organ systems are involved, how chronic something is, how difficult it is. In my consultation, not generic, we're going specifically over what's going on with somebody, and then I can give somebody a ballpark work. Once I have some documentation in front of me that I know what's going on— and I designed my own paperwork and I reduced it down, it's a third of what it used to be. Some people still think it's too much, but it's things I absolutely have to know about them to be able to talk to them about what's going on and why it's going on inside of them. Yeah. And I, I just can't have that talk without the information that I have. I've reduced It's a bare minimum. I mean, it's a bare minimum, and I just got to have a lot of insight with doing all that. So yeah, it depends on where, where we got to start. If somebody just got bit and they don't, they don't have all the complications, for some you might be able to do a whole course of care for that. But if somebody's been through it all, have gone through all the treatment, created all the complications that are going on, that's a start.

It's a good start.

Yeah, it's a really good start. But, you know, Lyme is not hard to clear, all right?

It's not.

It can be done in a matter of weeks, and some of the simple things can be a matter of weeks. It's the complications that take the time to resolve. The bulk of the cost of care is dealing with all the crisis issues, all the infective issues up front, and the cleanup, it's way less going down the road. But, you know, most of the things you can deal with crisis issues in like 6 months and have a fair amount of healing going on in hormonal arenas and everything else, because we teach people lifestyle, how to, how to manage all that. So once I get the paperwork, then I can go, okay, this is where we're at and this is what we're really looking at.

But somebody just got bit, you could almost be through with it, what you just said.

Interesting.

Okay, so it's huge. We do all our own lab work in-house, so I'm not sending it out.

And that's all part of that, so you don't have added issues on top of that.

You know, I got my fee, supplements are something different, and the supplements are just all over the map. I mean, they're, they're really all over the map because the quality of what people get is so poor it can't possibly give them the result they want. You have to get high quality stuff. 75% of the fish oils that are out there are rancid before they buy them.

Probably 95% of the flora people buy out there has no value whatsoever at all.

Even the best companies, they might have 20 different products.

One or two may work.

That's all. I'm going to get messages from people saying, what fish oils should we actually buy?

What? Some of the foundational things Um, I have on my website on the product page, okay, a fish oil multivitamin.

Real simple.

You can't get the stuff cheaper from anybody other than us, and it's on my website. But Metagenics Multigenics is absolutely the best multivitamin you get in North America, period. There's just no arguing about it. We, we've tested the best of the best out there. Apex Omega-3 is the best fish oil. That you can possibly get. There's just no question about it. On a regular basis, we go into health food stores and we test people on what they have to see what they're doing. With some of the best doctors, they, they just promote junk.

It cannot do what they do, what they hope that it does.

And the reason why people get it is convenience.

It's not because of how it works.

We have different companies and different things because different products are different. The whole industry is always changing. Always changing. And they don't announce when they change a product and it goes from absolutely stellar that you can have everybody use to so toxic nobody can use it with no announcements.

And you got to keep on top of that.

So those things, as I said, there's— you can't get it cheaper than anywhere off of us on our website. So, you know, I list with calcium, that's a— that's CalMag crystals. It's about 30% calcium or magnesium to calcium. The ratio has to be in, you know, most important mineral mineral for every life function is calcium by far. A lot of people are trying to get away from it and do calcium blockers, which magnesium is, if it's out of balance. It makes no sense.

Nobody's dealing with foundational issues. They really aren't.

But as usual, it's pretty easy to, to take this all around and you get our rabbit trail, really get off, off topic with different things. Those 3 things could totally change change people's lives. Those 3 things— the high-quality multi, the fish oil, calcium— those 3 things, those are absolute foundations that do not change.

Well, and I know, you know, the clinics I'm most familiar with— Invita, Lime Laser, you— they make a lot of their own supplements because they are all saying the same thing. What's out there is garbage, which I know there's certain— there's people listening who who have been on hundreds of dollars of supplements a month. I, when I came out of Invita, I was spending like $1,200 a month on supplements, and they were helping. They were— I was, I was totally committed to doing it because it was way better than what I had not been doing, right?

When we test those bags of stuff that you have, you know, $1,200 on a high end, and that shouldn't last for more than 2 or 3 months. At that level.

That's, that's pretty high out there for just supplements.

Most of the time when we test what people are on, at least 80% of what they have is no good at all.

And of the 20% that's left, as far as its effect, very few people are using really high-quality supplements.

I wanted to go back to— we're on a medical PTSD we're in a medical PTSD conversation. But I want to go back because we started to talk about, you know, when you're in a moment— I get so many messages from coaching clients and listeners who are like, oh my god, finally got a diagnosis. I went to infectious disease, they shamed me. They told me there's no such thing as this, that I'm imagining all this. Like, I just— like, they're texting me from the parking lot of their doctor's visits with these deep levels of shame and disappointment and confusion. And then this is the journey we're talking about, like, okay, maybe you have been taking $1,200 worth of supplements and maybe it's kind of doing something, but you don't know what else to do. But, but there's people out there who have been doing their due diligence and taking the supplements or the antibiotics or doing everything they know to do, and it's still 3, 4 years down the road and they're suffering immensely. So I wanna go back, I wanna keep talking about medical PTSD, but I also want to address the people listening who are doing everything they know to do. And some of the information, I tell this to every practitioner I interview, you all say your stuff is the best. You all say your version is this or this. And there's, and I think that there's truth in all of them. It's not applicable to every single person. You have to keep trying because it is confusing because there is misinformation. Because protocols are a guess. Like, you may be doing your due diligence and having put in the time and energy and effort and money, and you still don't have results. And so I want to just talk to those people right now who are listening whose hearts are breaking as they hear these conversations because they're like, I've been doing it.

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I've been swallowing the pills, I've been juicing, I've been doing the enema, or whatever it is, and I'm still suffering immensely. And so let me just say this: whatever you have done and tried to the best of your ability to get to this point, if you're hearing this information and you're like, oh man, where does this leave me? Because This is different than the information I had before, or this is slightly different than the information I had before. Like, it's not wrong. The journey— if you are listening to this and you took a ton of supplements or you didn't, or you were on years of IV antibiotics or whatever it is, and you're hearing new information for the first time, or information that is speaking to you on some level, there's nothing wrong. And don't judge yourself on the length it's taken you to get here. Like, I don't know, I just feel like this is a really important thing that people—

it absolutely is one of the most important things you can do at the beginning of working with somebody is to validate them, which you just did. And that's a huge issue. This is why I'm starting this master class, you know, and I— it's gonna, it's gonna go pretty soon, probably, probably happen before you hear this. Anyway, this is why I address the opening of this, the 9 myths about Lyme disease, because this is what drives people to make all those choices. There's so much deception out there. It's not their fault. It's not their clinician's fault. 40% of the research articles in the world are twisted to represent something different. In America, it's expected to be 75%, and a minimum of 75% of those twistings are overt Fraud. So people are basing all of their decisions on stuff off of fraudulent research. It's not their fault, they're doing the best that they can. The thing with people saying, okay, we have the best— we carry a bunch of different brands of things because we always test things. And the difference in those who are really clinically effective do is they test everybody on what they prescribe for them before they give it to them to find out what works.

The electrical methods of doing that aren't nearly as accurate as they need to be.

It's a generic guess, and commonly they're using an inferior supplement, and they, they type what's in the supplement into their computer rather than get electromagnetic read of the power of the supplement. Everything in the, in the body works by electromagnetic, so you have to have some way of measuring the electromagnetic effect inside of people to find out what empowers them. I don't have a love affair with any supplement company. I talked to a real eye-in doc who was just given some supplements by one company, and I told him the history of that company, told him because of that history I refused to deal with them.

He goes, wow, I felt something was wrong with this. I didn't know what that was. That's just huge.

I've been around enough where I know a lot of the history of a lot of these things. And some of the best companies out there have just— they've sold out to big institutions. They're no longer directed. They're no longer managed the same. Their product lines are changing. It's a major frustration, which puts us in this huge scramble of how do we replace this one thing that was absolutely the best best you can get in North America. I'm always in search doing that, but I'm testing that everybody to find out what that is, to see what their response is. It's not guessing. Your good people will test it so they can prove that it's going to make somebody well, not convince them.

That's the difference.

And the Lord gave us the grace to figure out how to do that at a distance, which Clean Heart does at a It's completely backed by science. We did split testing on that, and we started doing stuff on a distance. The end of our testing, we were doing people at a distance electronically over a phone.

We didn't even know who they were, doing full evaluation, bring them in the office, and our results were 100% the same, which is pretty much unheard of. You know, there's some grace in that, there really is. And not everybody's going to be able to do that.

Very few would be able to do that. With that integrity, because you can't do that without integrity.

It speaks volumes of somebody's character when they can do that and do that honestly.

Well, and I know for so many people, they're talking to a practitioner who has 15 minutes of time, is operating within CDC standards or guidelines, and then that doesn't— like, we haven't even talked about how FDA is controlling certain supplements. And you can have great supplements that are working, and then the FDA can pull them or change the ratio, and that impacts centers and clinics all across the country. But there's such a shift, there's such a learning curve. And my coaching calls are 2 hours and we barely scratched the surface because there's so much of that mindset work going in of like, oh wait, well, I'm going to this doctor and this doctor and this doctor. And I'm like, yeah, in that 15-minute conversation you have with that practitioner, they're operating under this mindset or these beliefs or these guidelines. And everything you have going on and you've been sick for 15 years and you have 12 doctors you're seeing and you're on 10 medications, like, you're not going to break through.

You got to step out of that system. You, you reminded me of a seminar I was at years ago where a chief administrator in a hospital was talking about what insurance has done to the interaction of doctors with their patients. He said when a doctor walks into a room, in the first 3 seconds he's formulating what his idea of the situation is. Within 6 seconds he has his diagnosis. Within 9 seconds he has his treatment idea. The rest of the time he spends with you is fluff.

Now that's scary.

That's sobering scary. You got to step out of that arena that to get the right kind of help. You absolutely do. A healthcare giver cannot sit down and have a conversation to find out what's going on in your life.

They don't have the tools to be able to help you. Just, just that simple.

Well, and okay, on the flip side of that, early on in when I did not have a diagnosis outside of fibromyalgia chronic fatigue and chronic pain following a car accident, I have been going and saying the same thing over and over again. I can't walk up the stairs. I can't breathe when I walk— get to the top of the stairs. Like, what's going on? And heard all this garbage from your purse is too big to you, have too many kids. And I'm like, okay, so I felt like the opposite of what you were saying were true. They were having conversations with me about my lifestyle but it was not in the sense of helping me to, you know, they were over and over again saying, oh, you're stressed. And I'm like, no, I've run my own business. I had my kids on purpose. Those are normal everyday stresses. The stress of not being able to carry my purse through Costco or not being able to walk out the door or unload groceries, that's what I'm trying to get at. But I felt like because they did not have answers for me that they were using my lifestyle, which was raising children and trying to be a business owner, things a healthy normal person can do. They were using what little they knew of my lifestyle against me to justify what was going on because they did not have answers.

Okay, well, you just described the ego reflex that pervades healthcare. It also pervades fellowship.. And we have all these reflexes react self-preservation recoil manner to self-preserve. A lot of doctors' egos are extremely fragile, and they're always reacting to preserve their fragile egos. If you really had a good clinician, they would start to dialogue with you about what's going on to try and figure out, okay, what are the parameters going on? You're talking about a classic adrenal fatigue issue.

With adrenal fatigue, you're going to have a huge toxic state in the entire body.

With that, you're going to have the guts going to be not functioning right. You're not going to have proper absorption of nutrients at all. So you have nutrient depletion, you have toxicity. The toxicity is just regulating all of your hormones. It's showing up with the adrenals and with the fatigue issues. Along with that, the thyroid's been tanked a long time ago, and so you have no way to make energy. The mitochondria are turned— energy powerhouse inside the cells— are turned on by thyroid hormone. Primarily T3 is what they study, but that conversion from thyroxine to T4, T4 to T3—

each step can be regularly reversed.

The more toxic you are, the more reversed hormone you make. Reversed hormone registers on the lab test as normal. It registers now hypothalamus as normal, but it's biologically inactive. Active. So it can't do anything to turn the mitochondria on. And you're, you're talking about somebody, you know, saw somebody go, okay, there's no such thing as adrenal fatigue, it's all mitochondrial dysfunction. Well, you know, you can't separate this stuff. We're not compartmentalized. And a really good clinician is a GP who can take all of the broad spectrum what's going on with somebody, put it all together in one package, go, okay, this is really what's going on with you. So when you talk about something like that, somebody that understands what's going on physiologically your gut's a mess, you're probably full of all kinds of Candida, it leaks like a sieve, your brain's leaking, your thyroid's shut down, your adrenal's shut down, your hormones are completely upside down, you're nutrient depleted. What in the world can we do to somebody like this instead of guilt them and shame them? And the answer is real simple. You start to become methodical. You start getting their elimination to work right. You, you get them drinking healthy water. If they're in city water, get them off of that. Have them drink steam distilled water. It's way, way better. City water is toxic. It's full of all the hormones and all the pharmaceuticals that all your neighbors are taking.

Every municipal water supply is full of oral birth control, heart meds, and everything else.

So if you're getting your water out of a city water supply, you're drinking all that toxicity down, and it's upsetting your hormones even more. All this stuff is a nightmare. And so, you know, you put somebody on a higher vegetable diet, you give them starchy vegetables, grains, and the fruits, things like zucchini, squashes, and all that. You get them on a diet so their, their bowel habits regulate. You can't ever help anybody till the bowel habits are minimum 2 times a day. 3 to 5 is normal. The more toxic somebody is, the more weight they have on, the more they need to have. If somebody's really toxic or have over 20 pounds overweight, they got to be 3 times a day, just period. Period. Just period. Get them on really clean water, get them urinating a lot. You've got to get that stuff out of the end of the toilet. Then you got to deal with the gut issues. The, the hormones don't respond directly to hormones. Something's creating the issue. You got to find out what's toxic. And a lot of times it's relationships, it's people's beliefs, it's people's ideas and things like that. You got to help them through that, which you just did a moment validating people. You're doing the best you can with what you know, but understand it's not working. You should be able to resolve Lyme disease in— okay, the true Lyme infection, you should be able to resolve that in most cases in close to 6 weeks or less. The BC is not— there's the biggest problem with all that, and that's 4 months on average. With divergence, Babesia divergence.

If it's one of the other forms, you know, it's way, way, way less than that. The biggest issue is Candida in the gut, absolutely the biggest issue, and that's what takes the most time with care. So if you have chronic Lyme, you absolutely have Candida, and it's yeast mold fungus in the form of parasite.

Most, most people with Lyme have at least 3 of those forms, usually 4.

I mean, if it's not being dealt with, you won't get better. You just plumped. Just, you'll never be able to get nutrients, and it's— that upsets your own hormonal system and everything else. So, you know, when, when I hear somebody like what you just said, it's like, okay, so what's going on? What can be causing this? Why is she so weighed down with what she normally used to carry? The kitchen sink in the purse. The issue, the issue is your physiology is completely upside down.

And why? What's going on with all that?

Take a look at it. Look at the eyes. What color are they?

Yellow?

Are they reflecting light or are they not reflecting light? Are they pink? I mean, if they're yellow, your liver is really toxic.

You got a ring around it, you got around the iris, you got copper toxicity. There's all these visuals you got to have.

You can't work with people without visuals. That's why we always have people take at least 3 pictures, one of the face, one from the front, one from the side. We need to know what they look like. You need to know who you're working with, what's going on with their hormones and all that.

So all this has to come together.

You can't compartmentalize and go, "Oh, I'm going to deal with the purse issue." Really? How do you plan on doing that? Guilt and shame somebody for the size purse they like because you don't care for one and you don't wear one?

It's a very convenient thing for women to use a purse.

It's extremely convenient. As long as she's not using it to shoplift, it's very, very practical and healthy. And that happens. It does. It's, you know, some of what goes on in life. It's really a sad issue how many people are ripping stores off and all that.

But, you know, that's a whole different issue.

So we just talked two different ways around the very same subject, and all this is linked into, you know, where we started. You start looking at the issue of intimacy. It's interesting, the Hebrew word for intimacy is to to know. The Spanish word is acost, which sounds like an abusive type of a thing, but it means to lay down. And when we look in Spanish and Greek terms, to know, there's two different forms of to know. When you start to study a foreign language, it highlights what a garbage language the English language is, because there's no descriptive term. You can use one word and it can a bunch of different things. And what you intended and what somebody heard or read may not even be close to the same because of all these different ways where it can be interpreted. And if you don't qualify it, it's like, what do they mean?

So, you know, we get in the Greek and the Spanish, their root word is very similar, the same. Spanish is conocer and saber. Saber is to know one intellectually, to know something intellectually. It's to to study them with reasoning and logic and understanding, to try and understand them. To know one through connoisseur is to get to know them in relationship by spending time and interacting. And you look at, you know, one passage says, "Husbands, love your wife in an understanding manner." It is a mandate for a man to learn both aspects of women in general, his wife in particular, what really makes them work in a general sense, and what specifically with the wife that you want to interact with. And when we look at this issue of intimacy, we need to divorce ourselves from this idea of an Because an act demoralizes, demeans people.

It makes them feel used and abused.

Men and women feel the same way. It's not what the arena was intended to be. The arena was intended to be this very ongoing conversation of soul touching soul. Spirit touching spirit and body touching body. And if we change the idea of the approach to that kind of a conversation, it opens up the arena of intimacy in a whole different way. Because if we go back to the PTSD thing, there's something called interstitial cystitis. I was in a meeting with a bunch of docs a while ago. And what that means is inflammation all around the bladder.

Well, which a lot of people in this community have extreme amount.

And there's really reasons why. The tissue around the bladder, if you understand how the anatomy is, the bladder is held in place just behind the pubic bone by the uterus, and the round ligament holds them both there. You take the uterus away, the bladder falls all over the place, and that's why you get the tummy tucks and things don't work and all the nightmares that go on. So the bladder is held in place right there. The urethra in a woman goes down the backside of the pubic bone and exits just below the clitoris. In a man, it goes through a different route. Different people talk about different sensation zones. In a woman, the G-spot is literally the—

it's the urethra behind the pubic bone is what it is.

Is. Doing marital counseling quite a good time ago with a young couple who was getting married, and we talked about that, and the husband-to-be— actually, I think they were married before we had that talk, and we had that talk before they left the reception. He goes, so is that a specific spot, or is that an area?

And I go, well, that's actually an area. It's not a specific spot.

But inside of men and women, you have all these different areas that are—

have all these different sensations all over body. And everybody's body is different.

In a woman, those can be different at different times of hormonal fluctuations. The ear, at one point in time, may be more of an excitement and arousal than any other part of either one of their bodies.

It may be a neck.

It can be a foot or an ankle.

It can be a finger.

Anger.

It's not just a couple target areas.

And when you look at the idea of intimacy in a conversation, when it opens up to that, there's this caring, honoring, covering exploration of what is it in you, what do you respond to at the moment, and how How can I wake that up at the moment? And when you approach it this way, it's not energy-depleting, energy-giving. Yeah, it's because it takes so little physical energy for cut-touching and caressing and things like that as compared to a really heated, sweat-locked session of intimacy.

Intimacy.

There's a whole different thing. But you can bring people, men and women, to heights of sexual interaction, intimate interaction, by touching other areas and waking things up and slowly coming into it without expending the energy, which is a critical thing for people in chronic illness because energy conversation is it's huge.

It's absolutely huge. But when we talk about the PTSD issue and the interstitial cystitis, you start to have inflammation of all these tissues inside a woman. The man just shows up as ED.

But because all these internal structures—

and a lot of it is because the bladder and the urethra is trying to excrete toxins that aren't processing properly, and that's what's creating the interstitial cystitis.

Is.

Food intolerances and toxins is commonly what does it.

It can be so, so dramatic in a woman that the top part of her reproductive tract can be so tightly constricted, it's, it's like you took a balloon and filled it full of sand.

There's no way to penetrate it.

Wow. And when that becomes the case, Interaction in that arena is painful. It's extremely painful for a woman. It's not that she's just not in the mood. You're talking stuff that's on fire. I mean, extremely on fire. And if you want to do stuff to be in the mood and be intimate, if she's in that place, it takes a sensitive partner in interaction.

You're okay, I'm gonna caress it, I'm gonna touch in other areas.

Areas and sweep into these and make this conversation to calm those down, to give her fulfillment, to give her enjoyment.

And the whole thing reciprocates back and forth with that.

You can bring people to, to heights of fulfillment in this, in the intimacy arena, that is beyond most people's experience. And as people get older, they start to understand this is what it's at.

It's It's not about an action. This is a conversation. How do we do it?

And you get so much of the yoking, especially if it's a woman with chronic illness, of a husband who's just, "I just need some sex right now." You mean instead of yoking, do you mean like expectation? Right.

Right.

And there's so much of that that's there. And commonly biblical things are thrown out as a manipulative tool and all that. And, you know, there's a classic issue of scriptural interpretation that's always bypassed, and that classic issue is apply it to yourself first. It's not to be ever used for leverage to get anything.

It's to apply the principle to yourself first. And then that's, that's pretty much ignored.

And it's an interesting thing because when you start to interact in this way, both men and women are fulfilled so much more sexually sexually. Because, you know, sexual interaction isn't just about a moment in time. It's not just about an orgasm. It's funny, I started doing talks about sexuality with a bunch of different groups. I started doing it with college kids, and fun to watch their interaction. They grab big chairs and blankets and pillows, and they flop down. They know they're in for a really big drink. And it never started promiscuity between them, but somebody actually wanted to talk about the subject in an absolute, completely functional way without exciting all of these different things.

And when you start to interact, I'd ask them, so there's 3 different aspects of sexual interaction. There's foreplay, engagement, and aftermath.

How do you measure quality sexual interaction?

Interaction, which one of those measures it? What would your answer be?

Um, I think it would be engagement.

No, it's aftermath.

That's where all the value comes in. That's where all the reassurance comes in. That's where all the covering and protection and affirmation that I'm here for you— this is about our private, secret, sacred interaction.

It's the aftermath sets the stage for the next foreplay.

Well, because aftermath gets taken away with chronic illness, because if you just used all your energy—

no, because aftermath is just basking in the glow.

There is— she does— depends what's—

yeah, it may just be falling asleep in each other's arms. Arms. It's certainly not rolling over, turning your back, or jumping up out of bed and go get cleaned up and go on and play golf. It's absolutely not that. It's not that at all. It's the whole issue of that nurturing interaction.

It's not that anything's said. It doesn't have to be.

It's not that. It's the whole issue of embracing to value the person you're interacting with. And it doesn't have to be an energy zap. Absolutely doesn't have to be at all. You know, so for women in that place that, you know, they're looking at their husbands like, you know, he's got needs, to bring that conversation in ways that don't take exhaustion of all the energy they have. They can fulfill their husbands, the guy in their life, without exhausting all of their energies by turning it into a conversation.

You know, I've said many times that whether you want to be or not, you're in a relationship with your illness.

You absolutely are. And neither, neither side really bargained for that. Yeah, but it sure does put the spotlight on the health of your relationship.

It taxes it to no end.

And the one thing about being taxed, there is a beauty in shows who—

what people's character is. People with good character, it makes it better. People with bad character, it just exposes it in ways that would have been hidden otherwise.

And it's pretty hard to swallow that, but we need to really be honest with that.

Not everybody is a goodwill person, and it's been that way for thousands of years.

Well, and then there's what is going on, and then there's how you react to it. And if you come from a sense of victim mentalities, then you're the victim in every situation. "Woe is me," or "This sucks," or "This is unfair. I shouldn't have to be dealing with this." Or you can react and say, "Okay, yes, this happened. The only thing I can now control is how I'm reacting to this. Therefore, how do I transform this suck sandwich we got going on here? How do we learn from this, take notes, work through it so that it becomes something that benefited us? You're in this journey whether you want to be or not for years and years. And do you hate it? And do you hate the repercussions? Yes, they suck. They're very difficult, very hard realities that you have to face within this illness, and they're not fair. And you realize the government is not you. Your practitioners are not usually for you. Like, oh wait, city water has birth control in it. And, you know, like all this stuff. And Minnesota blood banks have Lyme in it because there's Lyme in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Like, those are hard realities, but it's how we react to those realities. And you had said earlier, Lyme doesn't respect our imagination. And this is symbolic of that in the sense that whatever illusions or disillusions you were under, or whatever you thought intimacy was, or whatever you thought the medical system was, or the FDA and the food that you're eating, whatever you thought those things were, you're now at this place of understanding that things are not— you're not being told the truth in a lot of areas of your life. So then how do you take that and transform it into something that does serve you? And my brother-in-law has this great quote. He says all the time, and I think of it all the time when I'm like bemoaning doing something. Oh, I have to do my taxes. I have to do this thing that I don't want to do. He says pressure is a privilege. And I say it, I say it probably 10 times a day. Pressure is a privilege. Like wherever I'm feeling pressed, I can be like, oh yeah, I have to go hand my son who has Lyme disease another round supplements. I have to, or I get to? No, I get to go hand him supplements. I get to go listen to that podcast that talks about a different concept or a different angle, or I get to transform the nature of my relationships so that they're healthier. Like, it's just this shift of understanding the realities you're in, understanding the relationships you're in. And you're in relationships with your food. You're in— whether you acknowledge it or not, you're in a relationship with your practitioners. So how do you take those relationships— your marriage, your food, your practitioners— how do you take those relationships and make them the healthiest that they can be?

One thing to say in there, we'll take something that you said or alluded to. I didn't write it down, but those who have been conditioned or groomed to feel this mentality That is one of the measuring rods of whether a relationship's healthy or not, whether it's toxic or not. Toxic relationships groom submission, submissive attitudes that are absolutely completely demanding of something, giving up something, whereas healthy relationships interact, try and bring resolution, Try and— they bend, they compromise, they try and look out for the best of you in them. That's called benevolent. And toxic relationships are selfish.

They're just really selfish.

But toxic relationships will always groom to demand some kind of conformity to some kind of standard that oftentimes is not very realistic.

So one of the first things is to really start looking at relationships and our interactions and categorize them.

What's healthy and what isn't? Put energy into the healthy ones because, you know, you really got to conserve what you have and just set the toxic ones aside because you don't have energy to deal with that. You really don't. You'll find out who around you is is healthy and who isn't.

You know, for the people been wounded in fellowships, it's a hard reality. It's—

those are some of the crucibles that get people really close to the Lord where he can really speak life into them.

But when they've been wounded with a fellowship, they feel like that's not possible. People have been wounded, sexually abused, raped, things like that. I remember years ago I had a young couple come they were camping, they both got gang raped by some men in the next camp, both the man and woman. And it's an abomination to both.

It's defiling to both.

It's something deeper in a man than it is in a woman that has to do with the creation issue. I mean, she could kind of deal with it, just totally broken spirit.

I'm just totally broken.

He wasn't very masculine, and, you know, it just broke it. You could tell.

And those aren't the kind of things that we want to open ourselves up to and, and deal with.

They're just— there's not the energy to deal with toxicity like that. And people that have had those experiences, there's ways to get healthy again, you know. We used I've seen so much that seems fairly impossible, but I've seen prostitutes get healed up enough to get married, have monogamous, fulfilling relationships. So it's not impossible. And if anything's impossible, that would be, but it's not. It's not impossible. There's ways to get there and do that. In those ways, you know, that's for another talk about doing that.

There's pretty simple— it really is.

But this, this issue of self-assessment has to be going on all of the time. Which it takes a lot of energy to do that. The worst thing that we can do is point fingers and blame, because all it does is take the adrenals farther over the cliff. That's the real issue of the conspiracy theory issues.

I mean, you look at the history, um, there's history of Lyme disease 500,000 years ago. It's They pulled that off in cadavers and different things with doing genetic testing and other things.

So the conspiracy theory of Plum Island, that is another assault that just brings people's adrenals over the top, like they've been wronged by the government and all that. And there's a high likelihood there's truth to it, but it's been around for a long period of time..

And it didn't start in 1975 with Plum Island. It just didn't. So coming to grips with, with things and doing the self-assessment of something we were talking about before we started this is valuing self is such a big, big, big, big thing. Healthy relationships will speak value and they will reflect value and they will show they value. And that's why the aftermath is so important in any kind of intimacy. You know, if you have a really, really good heart-to-heart conversation, you want to linger in that. That's what intimacy should be, is this really deep sharing of one to another where you just want to linger in all that. How that lingering is will have a different expression, even with the same couple, at a different time of, say, a woman's hormonal fluctuations or what's going on in the household, whether they're off on vacation alone or the kids are in the bedroom next door. I mean, there's all these different dynamics of all this interaction. It's not something that we hang over and say, you have to do things this way. They're completely expressed whatever really brings a couple honor, fulfillment, but it should always bring that rest and reassurance that I'm here for you. It should always cover. You know, it always interested me when I looked up what a woman's genital area meant. You know, the word is pudenda. Do you know what that means? It means modesty.

It means hidden.

And it's that after aftermath that covers that. And is that modesty that makes that so that it— the aftermath that honors that entire issue of modesty? Because that's something special just between those two for those moments, and it's cherished, it's honored, and it's respected. And a woman that's interacted with that way, she has so much more value. She has so much more dignity because she's treated in a way that's completely dignified. And, you know, this issue of self-respect— we're all uniquely made, we're all uniquely different. Men and women have, have different aspects. Like, I talk to different people about testosterone. People think testosterone's there just to give men sexual drive. It's not. It's to make them stay in emotion and interaction, is to give them the physical drive that they can provide for their families, is to give them stamina so they can deal with the things of life and protect their families and their loved ones. A minor issue is sexuality. Big issue is stability, stamina, and strength to provide. Look at women with estrogen. If a woman didn't have estrogen, there's no way she could possibly accomplish the things she does of being a wife, being a mother, rearing children, taking care of all the things that she takes care of. Without estrogen, there's no way she could do it. It's not a curse. It just needs to be balanced and calmed down with that progesterone that comes in, just says, it's okay, it's going to be all right. I'm going to just— we're going to take all that fire, we're going to calm it down. It's just— it's going to be okay. You know, the breathing of relational interaction needs to do the same thing, you know. You know, that, that issue of believing in yourself is absolutely completely critical. We're all precious. We all have a great gift to give to those in the circle around us. Some, some that circle is really big, some that circle is really small, but we all are here for a reason and a purpose. And the real empowering thing is to figure out about who we are and what's that purpose and how do we accomplish that.

Well, it comes back to worthiness, which we hadn't specifically talked about, but I had said one of the quotes that I really like, um, about self-improvement is that it's not about self-improvement, it's about self-respect.

And that's worthiness. Absolutely. And that's one of the belief things that has to change for people to come out of chronic illness. Yeah, they are worthy of health. They are worthy of a fulfilling life. They're worthy of fulfilling relationships. They're worthy of good nutrition.

They're worthy of stop spending on all this worthless stuff to invest in their own health.

You know, World Health Organization, they, they studied the investment investment in nutrition and health, it averages 20 to 1 return on investment. Try and play that one in the stock market and get close.

There's nothing that compares to dealing with the real issues of health and its return.

Nothing.

People are talking 10, 20% returns in the stock market. If somebody gets a tenfold return, man, that's a once in a lifetime home run. 20 One, the amount of people that get a 20-fold return on their investment in the stock market.

You go do a poll and see how many people have experienced that.

I had never heard that. And it makes me think, like what we talked about earlier, in the sense of if you've been taking supplements and then you realize, oh, okay, actually that supplement maybe isn't good for me, or I've been implementing this certain protocol and found out that actually it's doing more harm than good. Like, it can, it can be so heavy to go through this process when you're trying to do what you know to do, you're trying to operate within the systems you have or the economics you have. And but I really like that because if you have invested in yourself, in your health, whether it panned out or not, or whether you have to tweak or you have to switch to a different supplement or call yet another provider, that's okay because the return is going to it's going to come, whether it's instantaneous or long-term, which I feel about like juicing and a bunch of other stuff. I'm like, I'm going to be rocking it in my 80s because of everything I'm doing right now.

Right. The one thing I'll say about juicing is take your fiber and add it back into your diet. You need it.

Um, you absolutely need it. Don't throw it away. Put it back in your diet somewhere else. It's best for elimination.

But when you talk about something that's changing, I'll get a little understanding with that. Okay, say somebody comes in, they got a Clostridia infection. Clostridia, it rules everything and has to be dealt with first. That sets you up to a certain set of antimicrobials. Only a couple will work with Clostridia. Use the wrong ones, you can put somebody in the hospital. So that window, if you're dealing with it right, lasts 2 weeks, and that'll change. You got an H. pylori infection, it's a squid-like bacteria in the stomach. You H. pylori infection, that demands one kind of zinc. You should be able to resolve that in an average of 6 weeks or less, and then that zinc changes to a different form. Look at the gut. If you got rickettsia invaded the gut wall, if you got all the Candida issues, you got parasites in there with a leaky gut, the amount of times those things that you have to address that are going to change.

Every time one infection diminishes, it changes the physiology, which mandates you change your antimicrobials very, very commonly.

So, you know, say somebody's got 5 different major infective issues along with a leaky gut and an overload of toxicity. You're—

it's not inconceivable to have to change those antimicrobials 5, 6 times till you get down to the last ones, and the last ones that's going to leave. Is the mold and the fungus.

If you deal with the mold issues in people's surroundings earlier, that'll clear way earlier than the fungus. If you don't clear it, it's just not going to go away.

Comes in through the lungs, filters out through the liver, deposits in the intestines, and it grows.

So you have to— that's the reason why these things change.

As you heal, you shouldn't have to take the same things you took when started, and that changes quickly. As I said, Clostridia should be able to clear in 2 weeks. H. pylori should be able to clear in 2 weeks.

Rickettsia and Ehrlichia, they usually clear in, you know, close to 6 weeks.

Lyme disease usually clears in 6 weeks or less. You know, it's, it's all the complications from these infections that are what's giving everybody their symptoms, and those are the ones that are hard to deal with.

And somebody that's just going off the diagnosis, it gives them a guess of what's called a protocol. They're going to do somebody's protocol.

It's not going to address the things that's going on inside of their body. And you come back to your purse issue, what your experience was and what I said, they're two totally different ends of the spectrum.

Yeah, but one is, is just trying to blame shift because their ego is too fragile and they can't deal deal with what's in front of them, so they got to put it back on you, guilt you, shame you, make you feel like it's your fault that they can't figure it out.

And that's just completely wrong.

It's abusive. The healthcare giver starts acting that way, you shouldn't go back.

It's abusive.

Doesn't matter how good they are, it's not going to work.

It's just not going to work. You have to change your own belief system about your own value before you can start to heal.

Well, Dr. Brad, as usual, it was very intriguing, very lengthy, very intuitive.

Thank you for your time.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Hello friends, today's podcast is brought to you by these sponsors: Medical Bill Gurus. The experts at Medical Bill Gurus are dedicated to innovative solutions for any medical billing scenario, which we all have in this community. Oh my gosh. With empathy at the forefront of their daily mission, Medical Bill Gurus is dedicated to being in the trenches with patients and raise awareness for the daily challenges facing them. From medical billing errors to raising awareness for their diagnosis, Medical Bill Gurus takes pride in speaking with patients every every day and helping them find guidance on how to navigate our broken healthcare system. Their patient advocates are available to help reduce medical bills and assist patients with navigating a dynamic health landscape. I also interviewed Daniel Lynch, an founder of Medical Bill Gurus, in episode 111. In addition to helping you get money back from your insurance company, if you need help deciphering what health insurance provider to choose, and I have done this several times a year for years now, or you are looking for a clinic that is covered by insurance, they are a great resource for all things related to medical bills, figuring out which insurance provider you could or should have. They're an awesome resource. Again, I use them multiple times a year. Give them a call. All right, now on to the show.

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. Lion Voice 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.

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Got it, Lincoln?

Got it.