Undiagnosed Infections Are Silently Causing Chronic Disease! Fix It With This

At this point, like you, I've seen over 13,000 chronically ill patients who've been to 30, 40 doctors. The most was 100, by the way, who ended up getting better. The key six root causes that I was finding is number one, these infections, a bacterial infections like lime, but also one that a lot of people don't know about, which is bartinella.

What you're saying here is that all of these have similar underlying causes. And if you treat those underlying causes, the downstream effects tend to get better without treating them directly.

Correct. And that's the problem in medicine. And the way we were taught is name the disease, throw the drug at it, but you didn't get to the root causes of why they were sick.

All right, Dr. Horowit, it's Richard. So good to have you on the podcast. We were just chatting a little bit and we've known each other for more than two decades and we have shared so many patients together. And you and I are those kinds of doctors that people go to after they've seen everybody. Like I used to work at Kenya Ranch and my joke was it was a health resort and I was the doctor of last resort.

I'm I'm resort doctor. That's exactly what they would call me as the doctor of last resort.

Resort doctor. Yeah. And so I think I think you know we're going to talk about this chronic disease epidemic. You recently wrote a book called ending chronic illness which is a really important book. We've come all to the same conclusion. Anybody who's really seriously looking at chronic disease, who's looking at root causes, who's trying to understand the body, who's seen 10,000 plus patients knows that what we thought in medical school was not the right map for the body. and that so many of our chronic diseases have very similar underlying root causes and need a very different approach to address the defun dysfunctions we see in people and so your book is really kind of a road map on how to do that which is amazing cuz so many people are struggle and they suffer and they don't need to suffer. Maybe you can kind of take us back to how you're kind of a regular doc and you know you got trained traditional medicine like I did. When did when did you go wait a minute I think we're missing something here. When was that moment for you when you were like, "Wait, this isn't the whole story."

For me, what was kind of interesting was it was almost a spiritual path because I did my medical training in Belgium and French for 7 years and I started studying with Tibetan Buddhist llamas in 1981.

Oh.

And when I was leaving, I don't know if you knew the story.

I do. I do. I Yeah, I you know, we talked about this. I actually majored in Buddhism in college.

Uhhuh.

And Tibetan Buddhism was the same thing. So, yeah.

So, you know, I'm leaving medical school and I go to my Tibetan teacher and I go to Llama Gandon and I say, "Lama, what's the most important thing you want me to know as a doc?" And he said, "Richard, the most important thing is put yourself in people's shoes and do for them what you would want done for yourself." They call it exchanging yourself with others. Basic advice, you know, love, wanting other people to be happy, compassion, wanting other people to be free from suffering. So here I moved to the Hudson Valley, New York after being at Mount Sinai, getting my internal medicine, you know, residency and uh board certified. And I move into the largest limemic area in the United States, which is where the mon Tibetan monastery was for me to continue practicing meditation.

And here these lime patients are coming in. This is going back now to 1987, right? They're coming in. They're coming in with bullseye rashes. Nobody knows exactly what to do. I start a medical detective journey of like why these people are sick cuz I sent them to neurologists and rheumatologists and infection. Nobody knew what to do. Especially because the infectious disease doctors thought, you know, 30 days of antibiotics, that's it. Except they kept coming back sick. So I started on this journey and ultimately functional medicine came in because as I was discovering root causes of why they were sick and I'll give you some examples. This woman in a wheelchair comes in. This is early on.

She can't walk. She's in a wheelchair for 5 years and she's sweating bullish. She's got drenching night sweats. I just got back from a line conference and learned about besia, this malaria like parasite.

Yeah.

Um it's not supposed to be in the Hudson Valley. I test her for it and I test the ticks. It's positive. I give her MPronithramax, which I had published at the conference the year before. And lo and behold, she starts walking out of a wheelchair after 5 years. And she was on 5 years of antibiotics for chronic lime. It wasn't until the parasite got treated. Another patient then comes in shortly afterward. She can't speak. She's got disarthria. And I found out it was bartinella. It was another bacteria. She went to a very famous Boston hospital, said it was a migraine. I treat the bartinella. She talks for the first time.

So one by one, what started happening is I started discovering these pieces to the puzzle. um and mold toxicity started showing up shortly afterwards where these people were getting better from the protocols I've developed for lime but still something was off and I started discovering other viral infections longcoid patients were relapsing with Epstein bar and herpes virus 6 they had candida overgrowth in the gut um they were loaded with heavy metals on top of mold the microbiome was off they had leaky gut and intestinal hypermeability so one by one as these sick patients were coming in I started discovering these pieces of the puzzle and that's how the 16 points model came to be.

I don't know if you know this about me, but I was one of those patients. Like really. I was 36. I was really healthy the year before riding my bike 100 miles a day for 3 days from Boston, New York on an like an AIDS ride. And I could, you know, remember 30 patients at the end of the day with no problem. And I went from one day to the next just like my whole system collapsed. And it was a very long period of recovery. But I ended up having heavy metal poisoning from mercury from living in China. My gut went crazy. I had leaky gut. I developed bacterial overgrowth. Like my belly was just bloated like I couldn't even eat anything. I had severe cognitive impairment. I couldn't sleep. My muscles were aching. My muscle ends were like 600. My autoimmune antibodies were high. My white count was low. I had all these like weird things going on. I ended up having Lyme disease, besia. I lived in a 1825 building in a house that was there was the mold with the mold in the basement and I it was like so moldy and just I had everything. I had heavy metals, I had mold, I had tick infections, I had gut issues, all of it and my hormones started going wacky, my mitochondria went wacky and all the things that you described in your book I experienced as a patient. I only discovered all this because I was desperate to get better for myself.

right? And I started treating me with with my with what I learned from functional and systems medicine. And I started getting better and I started treating my patients and they started getting better. And I was I was flabbergasted like you did what and you got better. You just changed your diet and you did this or you did that and your you know your your migraines are gone or your arthritis is gone or like I was like sort of stunned as a traditionally trained doctor that these things were working because

no and and I had the same experience. I came in with allergies and asthma. Yeah. My father was a surgeon. Every time I was sick, it was like, "Haris, give them a shot." And nobody used probiotics right at that point. I had candida overgrowth in my gut with leaky gut with mass cell activation until I figured out I had to get off histamine foods. My asthma wouldn't go away. It was it was interesting. I went to Yeshand the Daly Lama's personal physician at one point because of this connection. He takes my pulse and he goes,

"Oh, trauma at 6 years old caused asthma." I went, "Oh my god, my parents got divorced at Seriously."

So you know the type of exper so the type of experience you had I also had leaky gut intestinal hyperboom I metals I keelated myself from metals for a year and a half I think the doctors by the way like us who do this who've had the personal experiences they probably have more compassion for the patients because they've been through this themselves

well because because these are the patients that the joke in medical school was they have a super tentorial illness which means it's all in their head it's like a big fancy word for how doctors sort of basically are pretty you know derisive about patient and cynical and they think that oh people are complaining of all these weird and vague things I didn't really learn about in medical school so it's not really real but it is and people suffer tremendously and that's what drives me so much in my work and I know you too you work tirelessly and I see so many patients you've written all these books too and your last book was why can't I get better and how can I get better which was great so you you've really been on this path a long time and what I want to do is sort of get into the details of it because I think people listening really need to understand like what are the root causes and then you came up with six things and very it's a very similar thing we come up with in functional medicine and one of the downstream effects and at the end of the day a lot of the suffering that we're seeing in chronic dise is inflammation and there are many roads to get to inflammation whether it's metals or mold or ticks or gut or food sensitivities or whatever the list is but the end result is it has harmful effects across every system of the body. So let's talk about like what are those six principal causes of inflammation that you describe and how how how do you start thinking about digging around being a medical detective because that ultimately you have to be really good at finding these things.

Yes.

Which by the way are things that traditional doctors never look for.

At this point, like you, I've seen over 13,000 chronically ill patients who've been to 30 40 doctors. The most was 100 by the way, um who ended up getting better. The key six root causes that I was finding is number one, these infections, a bacterial infections like lime, but also one that a lot of people don't know about, which is bartinella. Now, there are 18 to 19 different subspecies of bartinella. So, if you try going to labcore quest to get a bartella test, you're going to miss it, right? And a lot of these longco patients who come in with VGF with vascular endothelial growth factor. It's not from spike proteins that are actually inflaming the end the endovvascular air. It's basically bartinella. So you know we find bartinella in a lot of these patients which drives inflammation. Reactivated virus is definitely Epstein bar herpes virus 6 especially in the long co population. Um parasites like besia very common at this point. Um and candida. So it's you know it's basically bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. But the second is the environmental toxins.

Before we jump to that, I want to kind of dive in because a lot of people say, "I went to the doctor. I got my test done." You implied that, you know, they miss it. How do you get people tested? What are the ways that that people should think about finding out these things about themselves and these infections? If I want to check for lime and bart, I'll go straight to anxolot um their IGM IGG immunolot. Um and bartella IgMigg immunolot, bartinella fish, which tags for all these different species, or even tab, very good bartella fish, besia fish. Um, they even do a good lime PCR. So, I like these specialty labs. It's not that I can't use the local labs with an Elizer or Western blot, but I find these specialty labs are really needed. And I I play a game with people called Lime Bingo.

which means that if you come in and you're tired and you're achy and you have brain fog and you can't fall asleep and you keep waking up and you're depressed and you're anxious and you have chest pain and shortness of breath, right? All the multi-ymic symptoms of lime. Even if you go to a local lab and you get back one burillia specific band on a western blot, 23 outer surface protein C, 31 outer surface protein A, 34 outer surface protein B, 39 very specific 8393. Now the 31 is a little non-specific bar autoimmune. But if you come in with a disease with good and bad days where the symptoms come and go with migratory pain and here's the key. Lime patients have migratory joint pain, migratory muscle pain and migratory nerve pain, tingling, numbness, burning, stabbing, vibration. The hallmark of lime is migratory pain. So if you have migratory pain moves around your body, you can't explain why

and if you have that with even one of these bands that I mentioned on an imolot which is recominant DNA, you've been exposed to a burillia species. So you're saying you need to go to a specialy lab like hygienics that does testing differently than you'd get it a normal lab like Quest or Labcore.

Correct. You can still get a western blot and Eliza that

but it might miss it.

The C6 Eliza checks for three strains bellia burgdorfry abselangari from Europe but and even heartick relapsing fever bell miamotoy which you have a limeike illness you go to the lab oh it's negative but there's a relapsing fever belli it's like a cousin of lyme disease it's also showing up in 25% of these patients. So that's why you have to kind of understand we're in the middle of a tickborn epidemic. We're in the middle of an environmental toxin epidemic. I mean these infections and toxins together, they're really pushing inflammation.

Don't forget mold. So we'll get to that. All right. So So we kind of dive into those things. And then the toxins are the next big category, right? Tell us about the the way in which those are prevalent and how they

I tested myself early on. A dentist friend of mine tested himself for heavy metals was loaded. I tested myself loaded on mercury, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum myself. I keated myself for a year and a half to pull them out

with DMSA

with DMSA generally and then afterwards we had mold in our house like most people do right exposed and I started looking for patients so it's the same thing I found it on myself started looking for others and I didn't realize at the time how important mold was mold is a mitochondrial poison and mold affects your immune system so here's the problem you get lime and bartinella which causes immune deficiency you get so it destroys your B cells from the bone marrow that make antibodies 20% of My patients come in with chronic variable immune deficiency. 85% subclass deficiency. You can't fight infections if you have immune deficiency.

It's interesting you say that because I I after seeing so many patients with TIG infections, it was like I was like this is kind of like AIDS.

It is.

It just screws everything up.

Absolutely. People don't realize how badly this

affects you die from it, but it screws.

Then you get COVID with T- cell exhaustion on top of your B cells. Right. So now you can't your natural killer cells were thrown off. You can't fight viruses and cancer the same way. and they get mold toxins with glyotoxins on top of it which are imunosuppressive. How can you expect people to get better when their immune system is so profoundly affected by this? So yes, the mold toxins in heavy metals on top of these other infections, they're really important to go after. And I found that the majority of the chronically ill patients where inflammation was driving their illness, it was absolutely the mold and metals in these infections at the top of the list of what I call the six rivers of inflammation and which is an ending chronic illness. In your book, Any Chronic Illness, you do talk about how it's not just one thing. Like it's these things stack. It's like everybody has everything almost to some degree. It's all a whole system collapse and it's triggered by and everybody's a little different. Some more mold, some more tick, some more metal, but it's usually a combination of of the load of everything that just causes this system breakdown. People ask me all the time what supplements I take personally. I'm constantly evaluating new research, new compounds, and new products. And the truth is there aren't many that make the cut. One that does is timeline powered by mopure. If you followed my work, you've heard me talk about mitochondrial health. Now, mitochondria are responsible for producing about 90% of the energy in your body. And when they're functioning well, you feel the difference. More vitality, better physical function, more of the energy you need to do the things you love. The challenge is that as we age, our ability to maintain healthy mitochondria naturally declines. That's why I take Mapure daily. Mitoure contains uralithin, a clinically studied postbotic that supports mphagy, which is your body's natural process for renewing mitochondria. Now, what I like most is that it targets one of the root mechanisms of aging rather than simply addressing the symptoms. It's backed by more than 18 years of research, multiple human clinical studies. It's one of the simplest additions I've made to support my long-term health. And now, with Timeline's new lower pricing, it's never been easier to try. Go to timeline.com and use the codeman to get 20% off your order. If you're like me and tend to sleep hot, you know the summer months can make staying comfortable at night a lot harder. As a result, I found myself paying a lot more attention to the fabrics I use every day, especially the ones I'm sleeping in. Cozy Earth's bamboo sheet set has been a gamecher for me. The fabric is soft and noticeably cooler, so I'm not waking up overheated in the middle of the night. I've also been reaching for their all day tea a lot lately. It's soft, it's lightweight, and it still feels comfortable even on long hot days. Sometimes the small things in your life can have a bigger impact on how you feel than most people realize, especially when it comes to comfort and sleep quality. If you're looking to upgrade your daily essentials, head to cozier.com/fimement and receive 20% off.

Absolutely. And and in fact, my wife Lee, my my beloved, had all 16 of these MSI factors that I'm describing. But as an example, we didn't know at the time she had leaky gut intestinal and she had mass cell activation. So, she's thinking, "Oh, bone broth is good for me." And I had some chocolate the night before and a little bit of kimchi with some, you know, fermented vegetables. She wakes up the next morning vomiting on the floor with a migraine.

And I didn't And I said, "What did you eat?" And she told me and I went, "Oh my god, sweetheart, you have mass cell activation. We got her off the histamine foods. She has not had a migraine since." Now, my Sicilian mother-in-law may have played some role in that. That's a separate issue with stress, but the point is it was the histamine sensitivity, right? So each time I pulled a nail, I treated the lime, she got better. It's like peeling an onion in these people, right? So yes, the leaky gut and the microbiome issues also we now with the gut brain axis, what we know about the microbiome in every

that's the other that's the other main trigger you talking about. So I mean the the interesting part about every disease I looked at from ADD, ADHD to autism to Alzheimer's to allergies and asthma to cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, digestive disorders, irritable bowel, inflammatory bowel, immune disorders, autoimmune disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, um mood disorders, depression, anxiety, OCD, psychosis, bipolar. All 16 MSIDs factors showed up in all these diseases. And my wife is one example. I had to go after every one of these. And now she's in perfect. She's eight years in remission since she did the Dapsone protocol for lime. It's a nine-week oral protocol. And she's eight years in remission without one symptom.

That's incredible.

But she's got to be strict with her diet, right? Staying off candida, hypoglycemic diet. We both share similar like blood sugar swings if we're not careful with our diets.

I mean, it's so true. It's like, you know, you have to go systematically through everything. And it's not what we're trained to do. We're trained to the model that you talked about in your book, which is a single disease with a single label with a single drug. And that's just not how the body works.

No, it's just not.

No. And you know what's really sad for people, the number of people, and I think you've seen this too, the number of people misdiagnosed that they would come in with MS, right? Because they had deminisation and tingling, numbness, they had optic nitis, their bladder wasn't working, except they were given the ABC drugs, Avenex, beta, copone, ribbiff, god forbid, retoximab, the B cells were gone. They weren't getting better. So it's not a question of do you have MS it's a question of where's the deminisination coming from right in these patients we would find climate pneumonia bartinella lime mold heavy metals mercury lead arsenic microbiome and when we treated these things the demination got better and that's why the drugs weren't working and I found with a lot of these autoimmune illnesses I I had a patient recently with rheumatoid arthritis true rheumatoid CCP positive rheumatoid factor

but he had migratory joint pain so that's why the methtrixate wasn't is we had to treat his lime and he had drenching night sweats and he was like 40 and I said, "Oh, you're in menopause." He he didn't get the joke initially, but it's like it was Babeszia of course, right? We treated it and now the autoimmune disease was much better. So, he had a true autoimmune illness, but then had these other people, you said it before, these autoimmune markers, they're showing up. The lime is causing anti-dopenergic antibodies, anti thyroid antibodies, um anti-cardiolypin antibodies, antiin antibodies. It's it's causing this auto. So people come in with these autoimmune illnesses, but it's lime causing molecular mimicry. Your immune system is attacking the bug, right, the fugella, and it's causing these auto antibodies. It's not an autoimmune illness. It's the bacteria and the toxins that are combining to cause this type of

just for people listening, when you say lime, you mean the whole spectrum of tick infections.

Yes. Which is the whole which is

right. It's never Lyme disease anymore. I I called it the three Bs. Borrellia, Babzia, Bartella. That's one of the chapters in the book because these three are showing up in the vast majority of people.

Yeah. So, so the microbiome stuff is a big thing too and leaky gut and food sensitivities.

What did you and I know about chuching fatty acid bacteria years ago, right? Driving inflammation. I mean, I take prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics every day because I found out that the microbiome is so important from everything from autism to Alzheimer's to auto, right? You can't get around it at this point because of the gut brain axis. So, you know, that's how I support my health. I, you know, do prebiotics and all of this every day.

You got to feed your, you're not just eating for you, you're eating for your microbiome.

Yes. Yes. Of course.

You know, you you also said something in this long list of litany of diseases, which I think is worth doubling down on, which is all these conditions seem like separate diseases. They all have separate specialties. They all have separate experts that have to manage each one with all their separate cocktail of drugs. But you're saying here is that all of these have similar underlying causes. And if you treat those underlying causes, the downstream effects tend to get better without treating them directly.

Correct?

That's a big aha.

And that's the problem in medicine. The way we were taught is name the disease, throw the drug at it. But you didn't get to the root causes of why they were sick. You know, even in autism, I I recently had a young patient 12 years old. The mother had congenital lime and no one ever checked and the boy was living in a very mold toxic environment. So this kid at 12 years old, social problems, connecting, right? We gave him Dapsone combination therapy for treating the lime, treating the Bart, pulled out the mole. Miracul the kid's brain woke up. Now the kid had been sick for 12 years and everyone had given up with him, you know, regarding that he had autism. There was nothing we could do. So, you know, we clearly need randomized multic-entered trials and all of these things, right? There's no doubt these are these are all, you know, anecdotal stories. But this what the medicine says, what the science says with over 2,000 references by the way, you know, in ending chronic illness is there are 16 factors underlying the all of these illnesses. So no matter what you're calling the illness, if you're tired, if you're achy, if you have pain, if you have brain fog, if you have mood disorders, you can't just take SSRIs and say, right, I mean, you know, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is going after it right now with it to get people off of them. But if you have Lyman and Bartinella driving your illness with your mood disorder and mold, it's not going to be enough. You've got to get to these root causes and even trauma. I mean, I have to do vague limbic retraining. I you probably do this the same.

We find that probably at least a third of our population has such severe trauma that even if I address these other causes of inflammation, if I don't do liyic retraining with the anti-hopper dynamic neural retraining or primal trust or gapa amydala insulin retraining, uh using the Apollo neuro or the neuropod getting their veagal system and everything in order, they will not get better. Right? It's it's like

it's resetting the ner autonomic nervous system.

You've got to reset the autonomic nervous system. It's so that's why all of these 16 points are so important in these patients

and all the things you're talking about all these diseases whether it's dementia or autism or depression are heart disease or cancer or any of these chronic fatigue syndromes all these things they're all tied to inflammation. So autism is inflammation of the brain. Alzheimer's inflammation of the brain. I wrote an article years ago basically about how you know autism and Alzheimer's are very similar. If you look at these patients, they have a very similar profile of genes. They have very similar biomarkers are abnormal. They have like very different manifestations, but it's very very interesting.

It's funny you say that cuz I just did a medical detective substack on it.

The mTor pathway, right, we're using uh people using rapamy and other things to get to it. It turns out that with autism and Alzheimer's, it's the same biochemical pathway. Yeah.

Right. So, they're they're they just don't have enough autophagy. They're they're not getting rid of their damaged mitochondria. They've got an ongoing inflammatory response. And if you give sulforophane, glucosinylate, broccoli seed extract to the autistic population, they did it at John Hopkins. A third of these kids, their brains. And the same thing with the Alzheimer's. So you're right, autism and Alzheimer's on a spectrum of brain of neuroinflammation. And so instead of naming it, right, where is the inflammation coming from? And that's the whole point of chronic illness.

Yeah. What Sid Baker talks about the naming blaming game. We name the disease and then we blame the name for the problem. Oh, the reason you have joint pain is because you have rheumatoid arthritis. You know, that's just a name that we give to people who have that kind of joint pain. It doesn't mean anything about the cause. It could be mold, it could be metal, it could be lime, it could be a million things, the leaky gut. You also talk about one of the factors being vitamin and mineral or nutritional deficiencies. Can you talk about that because people think, you know, we're you know, we don't have malnutrition in this country and we're all eating plenty of food and what the big

No, in the in the top six root causes of inflammation, what I call the, you know, rivers of inflammation going into an ocean of inflammation, um, number five is vitamin mineral deficiencies. And what we're finding because of all the toxin loads is when you do not just serum minerals and you know this well I'll check magnesium you need it for 300 detoxification enzymes you need copper for super oxide dismutace um I need zinc for you know phase one liver functions and inflammation when we look intracellularly at the red blood cell zinc the red blood cell copper the red blood cell magnesium we're finding up to 20% of our patients are deficient which means you cannot detoxify properly and deal with inflammation so you know somebody may have for example a normal or slightly low B12 level, but their methylonic acid level is high. So, yeah, we're we're finding a huge amount of vitamin mineral deficiencies, and a lot of this is because you're fighting these infections. You're dealing with all these toxins. You're depleting your system, including depleting glutathione. I don't know if you knew this, but I wrote the first article in the world literature in CO 19 in April 2020 on glutathione and how it helps with COVID. And what I didn't know at the time, not one of my patients died from COVID 19. Not one, because I was blocking the first major inflammatory pathway. I discussed in the book NFCappa B. We were giving all of our patients an acetylcysteine, alpha lipoic acid, glutathione. I didn't know at the time that the virus needs to lower glutathione to replicate.

Oh, amazing.

And I also didn't know that NAC was blocking vonvillibbrand factor so they weren't getting micro clots and dying from it. So I was giving them the right treatment. I just didn't know why at the time. And then we were stimulating the NRF2 pathway, opening up detox using circ turmeric, broccoli seed extract, resveratrol, green tea. By simply doing these things with a little bit of vitamin D, you know, some extra zinc. Um I was giving him immunics 36 betalucan. By simply doing these things with a little bit of lowd dose nrexone, one of my favorites also for blocking the third pathway and LRP3 inflammosomes. Now one patient died and only two were in the hospital and I saw very few long COVID cases in my practice with it.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's it's the nutritional deficiencies are quite significant and and I think uh you know with function health a company I co-founded we're doing you know now we have I don't know we've over half a million half a million members we've been done over 100 million lab tests

70% of people are deficient in one or more nutrient not at the level you or I would think would be okay but at the level the lab reference range thinks is okay like a vitamin D of 30 or feritin of 16 or homoyine of like 14 or like so like the the numbers that are even greater than that when you look at what the optimal ranges are is staggering and vitamin D you know should be over 45 the 30 is their cutoff so all the all within their cut offs on the lab we're still seeing about 70% of the people deficient in one or more nutrient so you're right these nutrient deficiencies are so important and people understand that what they do is they they basically keep the wheels of your biochemistry working and if if if it's if they're not adequate then the system can't run and you get you know kind of like uh kind of rusting things just kind of locked down the last thing you kind of talk about in in your six principles is sleep. But I'm I'm wondering why you focus on sleep versus stress because I think I think of stress and sleeping under stress,

right?

But you you focus just on sleep.

So it's interesting that I also found with sleep, same thing. The 16 same MSI factors are underlying sleep. But in my population of lime, these people don't fall asleep. Um it takes hours to fall asleep. They keep waking up in the middle of the night. They sometimes have hyper hyperlins. They're sleeping for 16 hours. They're not refreshed. I have patients who came in on ambient lunesta god knows what they still could not sleep. So I mean you know when you when you don't sleep IL6 interlucan 6 is high it's driving inflammation but ultimately we were even finding some of our thin young women had sleep apnnea like something I would never have expected to find. It wasn't just men with BPH you know that was causing it. It wasn't just menopause with low estrogen. We were finding multiple factors. Um, and of course stress is one of them, of course. But the problem is we were finding these overlapping factors that until I treated the lime and the bart and the mold and healed the microbiome, right? And and dealt with stress and I have a whole section under Ellis for lifestyle and meditation. I mean, you and I both know we're living very stressful lifestyles for most people. The sleep I found that when people couldn't sleep, whether I treated the infections, I detoxed the mold, if the sleep was still off, I was having a tough time getting these patients better. But they were all interrelated, right? because the mold was causing problems with it. The Lyman Bartella was causing sleep. Yeah. So, it it it was all interrelated. It wasn't just, oh, I can't sleep at night, you know, why isn't my ambient or Lunessa working at this point in time.

So, you're able to get people who couldn't sleep back to sleeping.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, once the infections were treated, we detoxed the mold, the microbiome was treated, right? The mineral deficiencies once we started dealing with these first six rivers of inflammation, people were able to get to sleep a lot easier. Also, by the way, with the lyic veagal retraining.

Yeah.

Right. I mean, that that was a key point in these people because

I I don't want to get too far into it, but I think, you know, I I did I gain. I've talked about it on the on the show before. It's a uh you know, it's an incredible plant medicine that has powerful effects on neuroinflammation and on mitochondria and epigenetics. And in in one study, they they looked at MS and they looked at the white matter lesions, which was inflammation the brain before and after I began and their and their symptom profile. and they were there were only two cases in the report but they both had like a 70% reduction in white matter lesions which is unheard of and they were able to get back to much more normal functioning. So I think you know there's a lot of really ways to sort of reset the system. It's it's fascinating that you know um you know these these plants and these other things like some of the supplements can have these effects.

Oh absolutely and in fact you know I recently published an article in the journal of Alzheimer's disease reports and we can get to this just briefly about it. I reversed for the first time ever in the world the most sensitive and specific biioarker for Alzheimer's P27. Um so again we're dealing with neuroinflammation but where did it come from? In my patient it was coming from multiple MSIs factors. It was lime. She had exposure to besia bartinella. She had heavy metals. She had metabolic syndrome. She had food allergies. We need to treat it all. But interestingly enough, we were finding that when we treated the Lyme disease with the 9 weeks of dapsone combination therapy, and she was sick for 15 years, by the way, with positive rheumatoid factors, with joint pain, some cognitive issues, which she didn't think were bad, completely reversed PTA 217. Now, what's interesting is that the Cochran report, which came out about one week before my article got released, said, "Hey, we have no good things to treat Alzheimer's at this point." The article comes out one week later, and what I did is I proved the hypothesis, right? We're in the middle of an Alzheimer's epidemic where the NIH said that 42% of people over 55 years old are now going to become demented.

I mean it is really frightening especially when they say we don't have answers. So there was always they looked at autopsy studies of Alzheimer's patients and they would find bofilms amaloid and phosphorolated tow in the brains. So there was an association but they couldn't say causation. This is the first time I proved causation by completely reversing this biioarker pout 217 with this 9we pro. And this woman was by the way was sick for 15 years

and the symptoms got better.

Her symptoms her joint pain got better. Rheumatoid factor reversed because it wasn't rheumatoid arthritis. It was from the lime bacteria driving rheumatoid factors. We

had her memory. Did it get better?

It also improved. She thought it was her meditation that was keeping her stable. And she noticed after she was done, she's like, "Oh my god, I'm so much clearer. I, by the way, I have a second patient. I just did the same. I haven't published it yet. We reversed his beta amalloid ratios with dapsone. So here, so here we have an Alzheimer's epidemic where I found that all 16 MSIs factors are associated with it. The Cochran report is saying, "Hey, we don't have anything good out there to treat." And the drugs that are used for it, leanabanab, they lowered phosphorolated towel by 23% in almost 7 years. I lowered it by 63% in 9 weeks. And that was because it was the infection driving the amaloid and the phosphorolated tow. And unfortunately, you go to a neurologist, they're not even going to check you for Lyme disease or bartinell or mold when you have Alzheimer's disease.

And it's important to find out. I mean, people people think, you know, Alzheimer's is one of those things there's nothing to do for it

because of the bad drug, you know, debacle we have in terms of poor drugs and and drugs that don't really work based on billions of dollars of research and hundreds and hundreds of studies. But but what you're saying is using this approach which is looking at root causes, looking at treating the whole system, peeling all the layers of the onion, you can actually start to see changes in these people. And I I've seen the same thing in my practice. And Dale Bredesen, who's quoting quote on your book, also has done this. And you know, for for us out there doing it, we we sound a little bit like quacks because well, we're reversing Alzheimer's. Well, it isn't really Alzheimer's is just a a symptom. It's a neuroinflammation.

And so if you can reduce the the load on the brain, it it can improve. Same thing with autism or ADD or depression, you know, and Chris Palmer's done this work at Harvard with schizophrenia, psychosis, bipo disease was it's a trial published uh I think the other day on ketogenic diets was a randomized control trial for bipolar one and schizophrenia and psychosis showing reversal. So the data is really starting to emerge around this and and ketogenic diets work by reducing brain inflammation. That's how they work. your your work is so important on on this and I think that uh I want to kind of double down on on what you've been kind of alluding to which is this dapsone protocol because it's you mentioned a few times Julia what are you talking about and what does it what does this do and how does it reverse lime how does it reverse Alzheimer's like it's tell us about what it is how you discover because you and I work together with many patients and often I would say hey I got this complicated patient with these three ticks or this thing what's the best drug protocol and you kind of coach me through it that's probably started that doing that 25 years ago with you but this is kind of a newer iteration of your thinking on this because I I think a lot of that you're you're part of the eyelid society and

I I was one of the founding members

founding members and you know you and I both seen people who've just been on years of antibiotics on IV antibiotics on heavy doses and they and often they don't really get that much better and I I really worry about that approach.

No, I and I do too by the way. So and that's why I never use long-term antibiotics anymore. The real key point for me is about 10 years ago, John Hopkins researchers found out that lime was a specific type of a bacteria called a biofilm persistro bacteria like tuberculosis and leprosy. We knew that lime persisted at least those of us who've been treating it for a long time because there's a lot of medical controversies but it's definitely a persistent infection in many mean meaning that the traditional medical establishment doesn't quite buy chronic Lyme disease.

Correct. They call it post- treatment Lyme disease syndrome. We don't know why people are sick. It's like you should read the 10 articles at this point. Well 10 I published and one by TUS where we shown reversal of all of these symptoms using dapsom combination therapy. So how did I come up with it?

So when Hopkins discovered it was a biophilm persist drug. I remembered from Mount Sinai when I was this is during the HIV epidemic. We would see these people come in with mcoacterium AVM intracellular and TB. I was used to using INH rafampen purizenomide and I said you know I wanted an excuse to use these TBT type drugs because they were specific for biofilm persistro bacteria. I looked at the qualities of dapsone. So tuberculosis is one that's known in traditional medicine to be this and that's why we use those drugs.

Absolutely. So I looked at dapsone and it was all right, it gets great penetration into the brain. Maybe I don't have to use IV drugs, which is true. I've never had to use IV drugs anymore since Dapzone. It's amazing penetration in the brain. Um number two, it blocks NLRP3 inflammosomes in the brain. So with Alzheimer's disease and autism and many of these uh different diseases, we know that there's an inflammatory pathway in the brain that gets switched on. Dapsone is an inflammosome inhibitor. So in a study by Leodol with like 3 to 4,000 people over 16 years he gave them 100 millig of dapsone the rates of Alzheimer's were like this and the people who didn't take dapsone was six times higher so it's lowering inflammation in the brain great penetration it has antimmalarial properties it hits not great but about 25% of the cases it's used for autoimmune diseases we talked about all the autoimmune manifestations of lime right and it's a biofilm persist drug so it checked all the boxes so I started trying it and I published my first article 2016 on 100 patients on lowd dose absone fatigue got better joint pain got better neuropathy got better brain fog headaches it was the only thing statistically that didn't improve but as I tweaked the protocol over the last 10 years I got it down to 8 to n weeks at this point and it doesn't matter whether you've been sick for 20 30 years if you have lime without active besia bartinella without mold this protocol will put about half of the people in remission from nine weeks of antibiotics

and and it's not just dabsone it's a cocktail.

It's a cocktail of drugs. So, we found and I did a study with Eva Shopppee from the University of New Haven in culture.

And by the way, this is a drug that was used for leprosy.

It is a leprosy drug, right? It's been around for 50 60 years, right? They also use it, by the way, for betett's disease and a severe autoimmune illness. Um, and so what I found is in culture, every time we added a drug like when we added doxycyc to dapsone, it it lowered the bofilm per, we added rafampen to doy and dapsone, it lowered the biofilm even more. We had a zithramax. So I came up with it because we found this four drug regimen sufficiently lower these biofilm persisters. And if you pulse it, you cannot get rid of these pers bacteria by with chronic antibiotics. It doesn't work. You've got to pulse it. That's how you get rid of them.

So we now do a nine-week protocol if they have >> every day. >> Well, it's nine weeks continuously. But they're on four probiotics with 500 billion of these different probiotics twice a day, right? With nystatin, very low carb diet. We don't see I haven't, by the way, seen a case of C. diff on this in years. No candida as long as you're staying. And basically, all the lab abnormalities of anemia and methemoglobinemia, they reverse within six to eight weeks off the protocol.

So right now, I applied for an a randomized NIH trial with a double-blind, placebo, multicenter trial. Unfortunately, it was turned down. >> So I now have to reapply. I I know Bobby Kennedy Jr. is big about Lyme. He wants to do something. Whoever. But I'm so confident. I submitted an R34 NIH grant because I know it's working at this point. But yes, it's a cocktail of drugs. But the generic is a worldwide epidemic where BMG Global Health said one out of seven people in the world have now been exposed to Lyme, right? So we're dealing with a massive epidemic of Lyme. And by the way, same time, massive epidemic of Alzheimer's. And nobody has put these two together at this point. >> And and that's true. I mean, nobody's connecting the dots on that. But but it's not that Alzheimer's is always this. >> No, no, of course. >> And I think that's, you know, you kind of hinted in your book and I, in my first book, I wrote, "Just because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you, right?" Alzheimer's is a syndrome, >> of course, >> and it's got many causes. And maybe a good cohort of those is ticks, but could be mold, it could be insulin resistance, it could be >> And and look, even some of these drugs that are used out there, the anti-amyloid drugs, there may even be a place for them, but first, let's get rid of whatever the reversible causes of inflammation are. And that's not what the neurologists are doing, right? They're giving Aricept and dementia and anti-amyloid drugs. It's we've got to get to the root causes of where the neuroinflammation is coming from. And and that's what I'm highlighting in the chronic.

>> You treat all tick patients with that same combination. >> I do. >> So it doesn't matter what the infection. >> Well, the beauty, the four used to be this regimen for this one, this for that one. Now you're saying everybody should get the same. >> Well, so if it's bartonella, bartonella requires a minimum of four two-week pulses of dapsone, but it's only six days of dapsone. We found with bartonella, bartonella is actually much more difficult to treat than Lyme. If you don't have bart, I can generally get you better much easier within this nine weeks. But bart requires about two to three months apart, just two weeks of antibiotics, short pulse, actually 13 days >> separately >> separately. If you have babesia, meronemax isn't working. The old drugs aren't working. So I have in my new book under the 3Bs, Tofacquin, Tofacquin is a newer drug for babesia. We mix it with malarone and herbs like artemisinin, Chinese skullcap, Japanese knotweed, aornnia. Uh, we find that when we mix these herbs with Tofacquin and malarone, we're getting much better results for babesia. So you do have to treat some of these infections, you know, differently and separately. Um, but the beauty is is we do have now some cutting-edge approaches that are getting many of the patients better.

>> And and you also use, um, in addition to the dapsone, doxy, menfampen, hydroxychloroquine, which is >> And the the reason for Plaquenil, by the way, is it alkalizes the intracellular compartment so these antibiotics are more effective. Helps with the autoimmune manifestations, um, even hits the cystic forms of Lyme, another form of the bacteria that exists. So it took me a long time looking at the biochemistry of the bug and the science and the biology to figure this out. And and 10 years later, you know, I've published 10 studies. TUS, by the way, published one that showed that this combination, rifampen, dapsone, cures Lyme in the animal model. So now I have a culture study, we have animal studies, and I have 10 published studies with around 375 patients retrospectively, all statistically significant. Fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, muscle pain, nerve pain, uh, day sweats, night sweats, neuropathy, it all gets better from the protocol.

>> And you also use methylene blue, which I found. So tell us about that, because I think people hear about it and people think, oh, they take these lozenges, their mouth gets blue. >> Well, they're using it for Alzheimer's, right? I mean, they're using like low-dose methylene blue as a mitochondrial supplement for Alzheimer's. So one of the side effects of dapsone is elevated methemoglobinemia. It's where you don't carry oxygen well in the blood. >> So we started adding methylene blue because many of our patients, about 90%, have bartonella. John Hopkins, again, they published that if you do for six days in culture, rifampen, Zithromax, and methylene blue, it kills bart. So when I was designing the protocol, I realized I needed methylene blue to not only hit the bartonella, but to lower the side effects of dapsone, and it's got mitochondrial regeneration properties at the same time. And we do a mitochondrial regeneration when we're done with the protocol anyway for all the free radical oxidative stress. So, yeah, the methylene blue is is an integral part of the protocol, and we slowly go up to make sure people tolerate it.

>> It's also anti-infectious. >> It is anti-infectious. They use it in the blood supply, by the way, to kill, I don't know if you knew this, in the blood plasma supply when they're treating for all the red blood cells they're storing. Methylene blue is what's used to kill all the infectious agents that's in our blood supply. >> Oh, that's fascinating. So it's an anti-infectious. It protects against the side effects of the dapsone, one helps mitochondrial function, energy production. >> And it's hitting bartonella at the same. You know, when again, when I designed it, I was looking at all of these factors at the same point. And and again, I've been doing this for 42 years, right? With all these thousand, it took a while to figure this out. But, you know, we're kind of there. I know it's pretty, pretty crazy. I think it's and you, you, you outline all these protocols in your book, right?

>> So, what I do in "Ending Chronic Illness," a lot of people, I did it like a cookbook. In the chapter under the 3Bs, I do this literally week by week. These are the medications. These are the lab tests you need to do. This is when you need an electrocardiogram to make sure your QT interval is good. It is written out literally like a cookbook that anyone can take "Ending Chronic Illness" to their doctor and they can just do it step by step so they know exactly the protocol. And I, I even put in here a low-dose dapsone protocol for people that are sensitive because many people get Herxheimer reactions where you're killing off the bacteria. The inflammatory response is huge. I, I told people how to do it much lower and slower um for those people who um. And as an example, my wife, when we didn't know the dosage, um, we gave her dapsone 50 milligrams for a year, repeated her test, PCR positive in the blood. I gave her 100 dapsone for six months, relapsed within a month or two. A patient came in, by the way, this is how I discovered the dose. A patient came in who was sick for seven years. Came in, he was his third month, fourth month on dapsone. He comes in and says, "Doc, I'm feeling terrible." I said, "Oh, what are you taking?" "I'm taking, you know, doxy twice a, rifampen twice a day, and dapsone twice a day." I said, "Oh my god, you're taking too much. You're taking 100 twice a day." I said, "Stop it. Come back in a month." He's been sick for seven years. He comes back in a month and goes, "Doc, I feel great. I have no symptoms." I went, "What?" I said, "Stop. Don't take anything else. Just come back in three months." Gives back in three months, no symptoms. Comes back in six. So I said to my wife, "Would you like to be a medical guinea pig?" This guy took a double dose of dapsone, 100 twice a day for one month, and he doesn't have symptoms.

>> And he felt sick because of the side effects of it. >> He was herxing badly when he did it. My wife did it for one month. She's eight years in remission. >> I had to figure out it's not long-term antibiotics. It was it took me years to figure out the dose and how to combine the medications in a way that it was a very short-term effective protocol. And my wife was one of the first people actually who got better from it.

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Again, I've been following you for a long time and tracking all the different iterations of your thinking, and this is this is definitely an evolution, and it it seems more elegant and and it answers a lot of the questions that I have around these long-term antibiotic patients who just don't get better. >> I I do not do long. I don't believe long-term antibiotics should be given to anyone because, you know, the effect of the microbiome on the gut, and it doesn't kill the Lyme. It's suppressing the bacteria, right? By the way, they've even shown in some of these, you get more biofilm formation if if you do this. So we need an entirely new approach, which is pulsing short-term while supporting the microbiome and then using these biofilm persistator drugs like dapsone. And and I do believe, by the way, even in Alzheimer's, because dapsone inhibits this pathway in the brain, NLRP3 inflammasomes. I don't know why anyone has not taken dapsone like they did in the study from South Korea. 4,000 people, their Alzheimer's rates were like this, used low-dose dapsone. >> They used it for what? >> They were using for leprosy. >> But they found when they looked at the Alzheimer's cases, dapsone was stopping people from getting Alzheimer's disease. And it's 4,000 people over 15 years that they looked at this. >> That's incredible. Wow.

So, let's kind of back up. We we talked about all these six principal causes, the uh rivers of inflammation creating an ocean of inflammation, right? The infections, the toxins, the microbiome, the leaky gut, food sensitivities, vitamin/mineral deficiencies, and sleep. And then you talk about the 10 downstream secondary effects. And this is really when you have all these insults and you don't have enough of the right inputs. There's a cascading effect of dysfunction throughout the body that echoes and it's is all the systems of the body. It's basically a network and all the different ones are connected. Hormones, gut, immune, mitochondria, detox, they're all they're all kind of connected. And and so this is how we think about things in functional medicine. But it's you came to this through a different pathway and ended up in the same place. And and I'd love you to sort of unpack the sort of the things that tend to go wrong because you can treat those directly, but if you don't treat the root causes, the six rivers, you those things are you might be able to move the needle a little bit, but they're going to kind of not really get better.

>> Sure. I mean, and as an example, so one of the 10 downstream effects is mitochondrial dysfunction. If you have ongoing inflammation in your body, the mitochondria have nothing to protect them against all this free radical oxidative stress, right? It's not like the DNA that has histone surrounding it. So that's why we do a mitochondrial regeneration protocol after we do these treatments. But if you're somebody taking ATP 360 and CoQ10 and Uthran and, you know, MitoQ and other things I'm taking myself because I'm doing my own biohacking, it's not going to work. You may say, "Hey, I'm doing everything right. I'm exercising. I'm on a low-carb diet. I'm getting enough sleep. I'm doing mitochondria. Why isn't it working?" Well, you didn't get to the first root causes of where the inflammation is coming from, right? But also in this inflammation, it affects your hormones because the inflammation is affecting the hypothalamic-pituitary axis. So men come in with low testosterone in their 20s with 100 to 200 testosterone and they're getting beta hCG shots and they're getting, you know, Tes, and it's like, hold on, it's the Lyme that's causing your low testosterone, right? And the adrenals are shot. Close to 100% of my patients have low adrenal function on a DHEA cortisol. And again, if you treat these six rivers of inflammation, but you don't treat the adrenals, they're not going to get better. I have a I have a person. This guy was treating years ago. >> He was sick for about eight years. We found Lyme, babesia, bart. We started looking for it and we found low adrenals. And before I even had a chance to treat the Lyme, and this was going through his hospital records, his cortisols were really low. And I said, "All right, I'm going to have to treat all this, but I said, "Let me give you some hydrocortisone for the I mean, it was really low, literally Addisonian type low cortisone." He said, "I don't want to do it." They gave me prednisone in the hospital. I never want to take steroids." I gave him an adrenal glandular. Now, this guy had multiple MSIDs factors making him sick. Lyme, babesia, bart, the rest. >> Within a week of taking an adrenal glandular, he said, "Doc, I'm 80 to 90% better." So, personalized precision medicine, you know this, the way I do. Even if you have eight or nine MSID factors on your list, it might be one factor that's keeping you ill. And in a lot of the patients, it's adrenal. We do the mitochondrial, but you got to definitely get the hormones balanced. But the other downstream effects is immune dysfunction. Many doctors don't check immunoglobulins subclasses. They don't check natural killer cells. They don't do CD4, CD8. Well, if this is in an, you know, how do you check your immune system? Or they have autoimmune disease.

>> People don't really realize that you can actually test your immune system. >> Right. So, and same thing, we check the autoimmune markers. One of the downstream effects, or you get neurological issues with brain fog, and you're going from doctor to doctor, understanding why your memory is off, right? And you've got amyloid and tau, now maybe from other sources, right? Or psychological factors, trauma, where you need the limbic retraining. And then you're deconditioned. And a lot of people also, and you know this, have fatty liver. One-third of the world's population has non-alcoholic steatohepatitis or fatty liver. >> Now they call it metabolic >> Metabolic dis. But just like PCOS is now PMOS, right? It's the same thing. >> Reproductive, but it it causes insulin spikes with metabolic syndrome. And it's a silent factor for cirrhosis and for liver cancer. And you could go to a doctor with normal lab tests. Your liver functions are normal, but you're overweight. The doctor doesn't check an ultrasound, and there's the fatty liver. We were finding it. So these 10 downstream effects is again the liver, the immune system, autoimmune, mitochondrial, hormonal dysfunction, deconditioning, neurological issues, psychological issues, POTS, and POTS dysautonomia. People come in with Long COVID to my practice, right? They're tired. They've tried everything. Nobody did sitting and standing blood pressure and pulse rates to find out if they had POTS dysautonomia. And so POTS dysautonomia is not treated with antibiotics, right? It's salt, fluids. It's midodrine. It's vagal retraining. It's limbic retraining too >> because it causes fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, palpitations, right? POTS dysautonomia has a lot of the same symptoms as Lyme and bartonella and mold. So that's why a differential diagnosis is so important in these patients. And and dysautonomia shows up in 40 to 50% of our patients at this point.

>> I'm going to I'm going to push back a little on the differential diagnosis because that in in medical speak, that's what doctors do is they they try to winnow down what your story is to one single diagnosis. But you're really talking about a true differential diagnosis, which is thinking through past the diagnosis, okay, what is actually the root cause? What are the systems that are out of balance? How do I treat all those, you know, six causes and 10 downstream factors? And, you know, you come upon the same framework that I have, which is that you have to deal with the root causes, but you have to also deal with the train wreck that happened as a result of those root causes. The switch is adrenal dysfunction or hormonal dysfunction or gut issues. You have to kind of clean up the mess. It's like, yeah, you have to put the if the train's off the tracks, you got to fix the tracks, but then the train also went off the tracks and created damage everywhere. So you got to clean that up. And but if you, if you did the cleanup first and you don't deal with the root causes, people tend not to get better. That's the kind of trick people, oh, and a lot of people out there are doing this. They're giving hormones or they're giving, you know, gut stuff or they're giving different treatments, but they're not actually getting to the things that matter like the mold, the tick.

>> I was surprised that when men come in in their 20s and 30s with low T and their testosterone is off, for some reason, a lot of the doctors didn't know that Lyme and bartonella, because of inflammation in the brain, cause low testosterone. And I will give them a little bit of Clomid, Clomiphene, 25 milligrams two or three times a week with Arimidex um to stop aromatization and I'll get their testosterone from 100 to 600 without beta hCG, without shots, resetting the hypothalamic-pituitary system, getting the hormones back in balance. So, you know, I have all of these tricks in the "Hes" for hormone chapter, you know, in "Ending Chronic Illness" because if you're a man and you want to have kids growing older, you can't be getting these shots. These testosterone shots are shrinking your testicles by 15% and they're stopping your own hormone production. So, yes, it's it's always about the root causes. But I find that, you know, even the functional medicine community, you see a complex patient that you're with them for hours. The beauty of the 16 points model, it's a checklist, right? It's just make sure you've just gone through these things just to make sure you're not missing anything. And I, I find, you know, you can get caught up, you know, in these in these very complex patients where you might forget to check the molds or do the adrenals or because the patients are, you know, you're the first doctor really listening to them and taking the time to listen to them.

>> You're right. I mean, it is it is a checklist and I and I do go through that mental checklist, you know, and I, I often have the uh the echo of Sid Baker, who's my mentor, in my head. He says, "Have you done everything you can for this creation?" Which means, what haven't I thought of? Like, what am I missing? Like, not what did I find, but actually, what, what am I missing? And when you go hunting, you find stuff. And it may be the thing, or it may not be the thing. But you, you have to actually go hunting. And I think most doctors don't know how to hunt. They don't know how to hunt for the root cause. They don't know how to test for mold. They don't know how to test for metals. They don't know how to test for ticks. They don't know how to test for the gut microbiome. They don't know how to test for leaky gut, for food sensitivities. They don't know how to test for hormonal dysregulation. The whole gamut of things that you and I deal with every single day with our patients. And it gets these people who are literally incurable cured. It's not rocket science. It's it, it's just good science.

>> But, you know, you've got to teach. Doc, I had a mentor just like you did with Sid Baker. My mentor was Dr. Rosenk. He was the most brilliant internist I ever met in medical school. He's the one who influenced me like Sid Baker did for you. And what he taught me is also to keep getting underneath to the root causes. But, you know, what I did in "Ending Chronic Illness" regarding that is I have, starting around page 30, if you have symptoms like, let's say, you have neuropathy, and you've been to all these doctors, you're on Lyrica, and you're on Gabapentin, and you're on Elavil, maybe somebody's not checked you for Lyme and bartonella and mold and heavy metal toxins that cause neuropathy. What I find is I, and I did this in the book, I list the disease, right, the lab testing for it, right, and how you do the differential diagnosis so that people can actually work with their healthcare providers so they don't miss anything at this point. And um, the Harwood-Sensid questionnaire, which is on my website, cangetbetter.com. If you take this questionnaire, it will give you a probability of tick-borne, but also you bring it to your doctor. There's 38 items on there. You might forget to tell your doctor you have drenching night sweats intermittently, which was the babesia, the parasite hiding in the background. So the beauty of the questionnaire is we validated it in 600 people. It's an easy questionnaire um to bring to your doctor so nothing is missed, right? And and so that's why.

>> Is that available in the book and online? >> The questionnaire is in the book as well as these uh these different. It's online also in under cangetbetter.com. You can just download the questionnaire. >> Cangetbetter.com. >> Cangetbetter.com. >> Yeah. And and, you know, people have been referring to MS what it stands for is multiple systemic infection >> infectious disease syndrome syndrome. Just to just to ask about that. What if it's not always infectious? Like what if what if it's just mold or heavy metal? It may not be Lyme, right? How does how do you have the eye in there? >> The way I'd now look at chronic illnesses after finding that these 16 factors are underlying literally autism, Alzheimer's, chronic fatigue, is it you don't have to have Lyme making you ill. Absolutely not. But it could be, for example, chronic fatigue syndrome, MSIDS, meaning you don't have Lyme that's causing it, but you may have bartonella. You may have mold. I, I was surprised when I did the research on this book. Fibromyalgia. I didn't learn in medical school that mycotoxins just showing up in 70 to 80% of fibromyalgia patients. They're they're getting drugs from their doctors for the pain and the >> without understanding that the mold was driving the inflammation. I didn't know this, by the way, until I did my own research for the book. So these diseases for me are now kind of like Alzheimer's, MSIDS, chronic fatigue, meaning absolutely you may not have Lyme, you may not have bartonella, but you could have mold and heavy metals, you could have microbiome disruption, adrenal. The point being, you just go through the root causes and it's just a simple way of making sure that nothing is being missed because both you and I have seen the miraculous results in getting people better.

>> So, we we kind of dove into a little bit about the protocol for treating these infections, which is just for people listening, it's not what your traditional doctor will be doing or offering you, I promise, but it probably is what you should be doing. And and the book "Ending Chronic Illness" is a great resource for that. Metals, we talked about chelation, that's a little more straightforward. Fixing the gut, I've done a lot of podcasts about that. That that's that's not that hard. I mean, it's it's it's a process and it requires the five R program we talked about in functional medicine, which is to rebuild your gut. The mold thing is a bit bit of a can of worms. So I, I want to kind of double-click on the mold thing because you, you keep mentioning it, and it is a persistent thing. And then there's 50% of buildings are water damaged. In fact, I'm in my house now, every year I have a guy come and inspect, just because I got so sick from mold and almost died from it, and I'm paranoid about it. So every year I have it checked, anything wrong, I fix immediately. Most of us are walking around in a state of chronic stimulation. Your cortisol is elevated. Your nervous system is stuck in go mode, and we wonder why we can't sleep or focus. And one thing I've been using that I generally look forward to at the end of the day is the infrared PEMF wrap from BioCharge. PEMF, otherwise known as pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, delivers gentle electromagnetic frequencies into the body that mimic what you naturally absorb spending time on the earth. Combined with red and near-infrared light, it's one of the few recovery tools that works while you're absolutely doing nothing. I throw it on for 30 minutes while I'm reading or winding down, and I notice I sleep better on the nights I use it. It's lightweight, low EMF, it's free shipping, HSA and FSA eligible. And honestly, one of the simplest things I've added to my eating routine. So head to bonecharge.com/hyman and use the code Hyman for 15% off. That's bonecharge.com/hyman and you'll get 15% off. I often say that food is medicine, but there's another part of the conversation we don't talk about enough. How we prepare our food matters, too. The warmer months are actually a great time to reset your habits. People are cooking more fresh meals. They're grilling. They're eating lighter. They're focusing on feeling better day-to-day. And one small but meaningful upgrade is paying attention to the cookware you use regularly. I've been impressed with Made In's stainless clad collection because it's designed without chemical coatings and built for durability, for heat control, and for everyday cooking. Their five-ply stainless steel heats evenly, handles high temperatures beautifully, and is trusted by professional chefs in some of the best restaurants in the world. But what I like most is that it makes cooking real food at home easier and more enjoyable, which is one of the foundations of long-term health. If you're looking to upgrade your cookware, go to madeinware.com and use the code Hyman-5 for 10% off your first order.

But I know I, I don't know if you know this either, but about 10 years ago, I had a series of things happen where I lived in an old barn in New England, not too far from where you have a place in Hudson Valley. It was an 18, I think, 1898 barn, so it was like 125 years old, you know. Uh, and and there was mold in the basement. And and I thought I didn't realize it there. One of the windows open, it leaked in. It kind of kind of got bad. I didn't really smell it, but I started having this cough and I, and I was, you know, running around, writing books, giving talks, trying to change the world, the usual stuff. And I was like coughing. I'm like, it's going to go away. Yeah, it's going to go away. And it didn't go away for a year. And then I was like, I think it's probably the my house. So like I had to check my house, check. It was terrible. So I moved out of my house, started renovating my house, and that was a whole project. And then I, I took an antibiotic for a dental, like a root canal that was infected. And I had the tooth pulled, but I took Clindamycin. And then I fell and broke my arm riding a horse in New Zealand. I was like, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I saw the lung doctor at Cleveland Clinic and I got prednisone for 10 days, which basically cured my cough, which was great. But then I just my whole system collapsed and I got um colitis. I got C. diff. Uh, I ended up just having this sort of cascading inflammatory problem and my whole gut was inflamed from basically my stomach all the way to my butt and I developed ulcerative colitis. I was in bed. I lost 30 lbs. The mold was just devastating me. >> Yeah. >> And I, even though I kind of cleaned up the mold, I was I was still my system was in total breakdown and I thought I was going to die. I literally thought I was going to die. I couldn't work. My month >> Mold illness is a lot more serious than people realize. Yeah, it's so bad like and it just it there was a cascading effect in my case, but I want people to understand this is a real thing.

>> And and by the way, you can't just pick it up on doing a Staccy box titer through, you know, Quest Diagnostics. So we mainly use RealTime Labs. Neil Nathan has been one of my mentors on this, with Jill Crista um, and they're mentioned by the way in the book um, but I use RealTime Labs from doing glutathione, getting people in saunas to mobilize the toxins and finding that up to 90% of my patients are showing up with aflatoxins, gliotoxins, trichothecenes. I mean, they're mine were just so high. >> Yeah. And the problem is is that they're mitochondrial poisons and they, you know, they're affecting your immune system and they cause fatigue, brain fog, um, pain, neuropathy, they cause all the symptoms you see with Lyme disease, right? So, I didn't, initially I was battling with Neil going, "Come on, Neil, it's mostly tick." And then I realized over time, no, no, it's a combination of factors. So, you know, so we did RealTime Labs and and I found a protocol and I have it in the, I think it's under the "Ellis for Lifestyle" chapter with an oral protocol because I want people to be able to use things that are generic, oral, that anyone can get. So, we're using oral, you know, phosphatidylcholine. Um, I'm using one from Ortho Molecular or Zyogen's phosphatidylcholine 4:1. Um, we're using Biocro. Um, we're using a whole host and even GI Detox from Bio-Botanical Research with bentonite clay and charcoal. And so I created a protocol and the protocol is written out also like a a textbook, you know, a cookbook in the book where people understand exactly when you take these supplements with NAC, alpha-lipoic acid, glutathione, phosphatidylcholine, when you take your GI Detox, you know, how you do this. And we do get rid of the vast majority of these mold toxins doing oral protocols. Now, some people would do IV phosphatidylcholine, patrician protocols. My goal in doing this book was something that was accessible for the average person, just oral, generic, that anyone could do. And so that's why I wrote it out this way.

>> Yeah, I think I think I think the orals can work quite well. I found, you know, um, for myself, what rescued me was getting ozone therapy, hyperbaric oxygen together. Uh, it sounds like a crazy treatment, but I was desperate and I did it and I was better within a couple of days starting to kind of recover. Um, I also um, I also did the the intravenous phosphatidylcholine protocol, which I think is one of the most effective things that personally I've ever done to resuscitate my own mitochondria and get rid of toxins. And it gets rid of not just the mold, but it gets rid of a lot of cellular toxins and it reboots your cell membranes and your mitochondria. So, is you can do it orally. Um, some people have a little trouble tolerating the high doses of phosphatidylcholine because it's like it kind of makes you have to the diarrhea sometimes. But but it's it's actually um important to recognize that this is a real thing that it has medical treatment, even though your traditional doctors are not hearing about it or knowing about it. The the testing, you know, I want to kind of dive a little bit more in that. You talked about this RealTime Lab, which measures urine mycotoxins, and I've heard some controversy that that might actually pick up, you know, food mycotoxins that aren't actually >> It's it's possible. There are food mycotoxins. About 25% are probably coming from foods also. Yeah. >> Yeah. So it may not just be what's in your system, but these are low molecular weight circulating mycotoxins or toxins that come from the mold that kept getting recirculated over and over. Even if you removed yourself from the mold environment, they stay persistent in your system and you have to get rid of them. So that's kind of what the binders and other things you're talking about. Exactly.

>> What about the other lab tests you use for for assessing this? Like the SERS, the whole concept of chronic inflammatory response syndrome. It's almost like your kind of MSID syndrome, similar, but it's really specific on mold. There's specific lab tests. Do you find those helpful, like the C4a, IgE beta 1, MSH, MMP9? >> What I did, what I did, again, I have a specific chapter on inflammation on how to use these biomarkers, and it's I did it as like a three-level biomarker. Like the first level might be, do a CRP, do a sed rate, do a C4a, look at VEGF, vascular endothelial growth factor. So like, there's a first set, I have 10 biomarkers I start with. Um, the next level, I do, for example, uh, looking at functional medicine labs, like what's your free radical oxidative stress with lipid peroxides, 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine for DNA damage, protein carbonyls, T-bars. And the third level, which I think people now need to get, is get your Alzheimer's biomarkers done. And these are these are from Quest >> like you can get a p-tau181, p-tau217, neurofilament light, and beta-amyloid 42/40 ratio from Quest Laboratories. And it is completely covered. >> Yeah, we do that. We do that with Function Health. We now, yeah, we have all the whole brain biomarkers on Function, and it's amazing. We're seeing people using them and then able to >> I mean, I was shocked that 50% of my patients were showing up with these Alzheimer's biomarkers, right? And I just thought, oh, it's Lyme and bart causing it. And then I, as I said earlier, it's like, oh, if you went to a neurologist with this, you're going to be treated for Alzheimer's without finding out where the inflammation was coming from. So, yeah, so I, I, I listed out these level biomarkers, which you've been doing actually for of course, for years um, you know, but the problem is, they're not all specific in certain areas, right? I mean, VEGF, we see with Long COVID, but we see it with bartonella. You'll see with cancer. You just have to know it's specific. Yeah, they're not, you have to know a pattern that they form. >> Correct. And I think we're looking for patterns because any one biomarker is not going to tell you the whole story. >> Right. Like somebody might have Lyme joint pain and their MMP is high, the matrix metalloproteinase is high. It's like, okay, that confirms that the Lyme is affecting your joints, right? The MMP, you you always have to clinically kind of put it together. >> Yeah.

When I, when I first kind of got the aha about mold was probably close to 30 years ago. I had a patient and her daughter who came to see me. And the the mother had chronic fatigue and the daughter had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. And they were sleeping in separate bedrooms. And I kind of kind of took a history and I got that there was some mold issue. And I started digging around. Turned out that I had their house checked and they had different molds in each of the rooms. They were different. And then I did a lab test which is not available anymore. It was it was uh ImmunoSciences, which is Aristo Vajani, who's I remember it. I remember well. And on that lab test, you could measure mycotoxin antibodies. So not just antibodies to the mold, which you could get, but also to the antibodies to the mycotoxins. And and I could see which molds they had in each, each the mother and the daughter, and they were different. >> And they matched the molds that were in their room. >> Mhm. And the because of this lab test and what we found with them, there was a lawsuit where they got to recover, you know, to get their house redone from the insurance. Insurance companies did not like this. And the the >> No, in general, the insurance companies do not like a lot of the uh the things we do as functional. >> I mean, the insurance companies that paid for the house to be rebuilt and so that apparently, I don't know if it's true or not. I heard rumor that the the lab was shut down by the by the sort of authorities in California because because it was a California lab because of some of the the pressure from the insurance companies. >> Well, right now, I mean, there are labs like Vibrant Laboratories and Great Plains. I mean, there are other ones that are now, you know, do you know some of these antibodies? But you're right, that was a very comprehensive protocol. >> Yeah. And I was like, "Wow, that and now it's, you know, it's it's important to look because when you start looking, you'll find stuff." And I think that, you know, the sad thing is insurance often doesn't cover things for these patients. And it's and sometimes the labs you're talking about are covered by traditional insurance, sometimes not. And I think, you know, people, it's unfortunate we're, you know, I don't know if you're aware of this, but you might, you might even want to apply for this, but there's a there's a grant that was established through um, the HHS Innovation Department, Medicare, Center for Medicare, Medicaid Innovation for $100 million to study functional and lifestyle medicine for chronic illness. >> Oh, I didn't know about this. >> Yeah. So, there's a big pot of money. They're looking for centers to study. So, if you're >> See, what I would like to do is take the 16 and MSID model and look at autism, ADHD, Alzheimer's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic Lyme disease, Long COVID. Look at all of these diseases that are making people tired and achy with brain fog. >> We already know they're associated to the 16 points, but how much is the causality? Right? So, just like I now reverse the Alzheimer's biomarker for the first time, but we need a randomized multicenter trial. I'd love to see that $100 million used that you take all of these major diseases affecting Americans. >> It'd be a great study. >> Yeah. I mean, look, 60% of Americans have one chronic illness, 25% have two or more, 86% of our healthcare costs, and 70% is chronic disease. And our GDP is about to go to 20%. >> And that's why Medicare is starting to go, "Wait a minute. We're we're we're not getting this right. We're thinking >> It's got to be root cause medicine is the only way this is going to be fixing what's going on right now. It's not what they're teaching in medical school of name the disease, throw the drugs at it. You've got to get to the underlying inflammatory factors.

>> It's true. My daughter just graduated medical school and she went into orthopedic surgery because of >> Oh, congratulations. because, you know, regular medicine is kind of screwed. This book should really be a textbook for doctors, honestly. I mean, it really should be. And I think, you know, for anybody who's struggling with chronic illness, who's hitting a dead end, who's gone to 30 doctors or 20 doctors or five doctors or 100 doctors, there there are answers. And I think that's what drives you and I. I mean, we're probably, what, you're in your 60s now? >> I'm 70. I just turned 70. >> Congratulations. I'm I'm catching up soon. I'm going to be 67 this year. And, you know, we're still going at it because we just see the desperation out there in people and we so feel the suffering. >> I mean, the most rewarding thing you could do, which I think you know at this point, is getting these chronically ill patients better that have been to so many doctors. It's like, what gives you greater joy than getting these patients better who've been through, you know, the the the mill for years and years and years without answers. The and I really learned this over time. The thing that gives me the greatest joy, >> it's always getting a chronically ill patient better. And and that's why I wrote this book is I needed to get this information out for people so people would have it.

>> I'm working on a book now which is similar. It's not it's not it's not called "Ending Chronic Illness," but it's it's called like "How to Live 100 Years," essentially, which is a similar idea, but it's like, here's how the body actually works. Well, your what your book really puts out there is this thesis that the map we had, that the constructs we developed in medical school to diagnose people according to specialties and diseases is really outdated. And that it's helpful to a point, but it doesn't really help you navigate this chronic landscape. I mean, this landscape of chronic disease, it doesn't help you navigate these patients who come in who've struggled with vague symptoms that people often dismiss or the doctors dismiss or the relatives dismiss as, you know, they're just all in their head or this kind of way we kind of dismiss stuff that we don't understand. There is there is a map. And and I, and I'm so grateful that you took the time. And this is a very long book. I don't know. >> It's 6 It's 640 pages with over 2,000 scientific references. >> But the references are not even >> The references are No, in fact, the references are on my website, cangetbetter.com. If you want to see the references, go on cangetbetter.com and look on the bottom. You'll see. >> I have the same problem. My book's like 800 pages and I'm like, and like I've got thousands of references and I have to put them on the website otherwise the book will be even 100 pages longer. I, I think you and I um are part of a group, a larger group of physicians who recognize that the way we think about chronic disease is just flawed. And that there is a, there's actually an emerging framework of systems thinking, of root cause thinking, of looking at personalized healthcare and personalized medicine. No two people have the same disease. No people have the same causes. No two of you have the same treatments. It's very personalized. And that requires, you know, a level of of focus and understanding that, you know, most doctors just don't know how to do. And the the framework you have is really, it's really powerful. And it's, it's essentially what I do. I don't actually have the same labels. Although a lot of this, it's overlapping almost entirely because it's just the body. But I think I have, I have to wonder, you know, in terms of where you're going next with all this, in terms of the the the sort of Alzheimer's work, because that that paper you published, I want to sort of dive into a little bit, you know, just to help people understand, you know, you had a patient who had Alzheimer's who had elevated biomarkers of Alzheimer's and who also had tick infections. And then you treated the tick infections and their symptoms got better. >> Alzheimer's biomarkers reversed, got better. And it's the first time in the world.

It's ever been done. I didn't realize that by the way when I published the paper. It's in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease reports, April 2026. So anyone can read it.

But what, what astonished me is this PTA 217, which most neurologists consider to be the most sensitive and specific biomarkers. I reversed it completely to normal by 63% in 9 weeks with an oral antibiotic regimen. But here's the beauty: it's dapsone combination therapy. The number one effect it always had was improving people's memory statistically in these 375 patients.

But what I didn't have years ago, we couldn't get these Alzheimer's biomarkers. They didn't exist. Now that I started testing people, it's like, "Oh my god, I possibly can reverse some of it." So that this is kind of big news.

It's big news. It's almost like measuring your blood sugar for diabetes. You can see if it goes up, you can see if it goes down, it can be reversed, it can get worse depending on what you're doing.

And and also that Alzheimer's is not just, you know, an end-stage. There are 16 factors underlying it. And I prove the amyloid pa infection hypothesis that everyone's been talking for years, like chlamydia and pneumonia can cause it, viruses can cause it, but none of the studies they've done ever made a difference. That's what the Cochran report was saying. So this is really the first study that gives people a glimmer of hope to say, if you were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, go through the model, right? Go through A is for, you know, ADHD, autism out, go through the the book, go through these 16 points and work with your doctor and then see if you do have any of these Lyme bands like we talked about for Lyme or even bartonella. You need to be treating this because, um, it may do it.

Now, again, we need a randomized multicenter control trial. The case study. We need, this is one case study. I have a second case study. I recently did it also. I, in fact, I kept him in my practice longer because he had it and he was getting divorced and I felt bad for him. He was a, you know, with me for like 30 years and I said, "All right, I'll do my best." And lo and behold, the amyloid ratio, it reversed after he finished protocol. Again, it's two case studies at this point, but it means this is where the money needs to go right now. But we should be putting our research monies into this.

That's the thing, you know, when you think about it, like, you know, we spend billions of dollars on the wrong thing, and even a few million in the right thing could make a massive difference. But the problem is, like you said, these drugs are off-label. They're not, I mean, they're not they're not necessarily, uh, making people money because they're all generic.

Well, that's why I'm giving them to people so that, you know, they are generic and people can afford them, right? But yes. But it's the drug companies aren't putting millions of dollars into these research studies because the government has to. Right? But the top people at our government should really be looking at this, cuz if almost 20% of our GDP is chronic disease healthcare costs, we're going to break the bank in this country if we don't do something about it. Apart from all the suffering from people who have these chronic illnesses.

True. And I, I love that you you came at this in a similar way that I did through the Buddhist lens of like understanding that, you know, being in service to people and helping relieve suffering and compassion is like a, it's a good way to live your life, you know.

You know, I, I like to think of myself as a good person, right? That I would have done this. But the truth is, is I really do think my Tibetan teachers had a huge influence on that. I wouldn't give up. Like I kept putting myself in people's shoes going, "Oh, you're not better. What else is it? What can I like?" I just would not give up.

Stubborn like me. And 42 years later, it's like, "All right, I've got these 13,000 people. We got better, right? We're explaining it." Yeah. So, it's I, I think that motivation of, you know, loving kindness, compassion, and just not giving up, always trying to get people better. If you have to have this as a physician, if you don't have this, you're just not going to go the full, you know, the full length.

And you also were sick yourself. So, you understand it. That's the thing. Yeah. You know, not that we wish all doctors get sick so they can be better doctors, but it does help.

And my wife, my beloved, you know, had all 16 factors, made her ill, and she's now eight years without one symptom.

That's amazing. That's amazing. Wow. Well, thank you for writing this book. Thank you for the decades of persistent hard work, uh, being a medical detective, figuring all the puzzles out of the body and helping people understand what what they can do to actually get better from.

Now, this, you know, the beauty of this, this should give people hope that if you're someone suffering from chronic fatigue or aches and pains and neuropathy, brain fog, memory, concentration, mood disorders, there is hope for you. It's not like you just have to take drugs for the rest of your life or live with it. I basically broke down how you do the differential, how you look at the disease, right? What are the lab tests you need to do? What are the potential? And it's what I've done over 42 years to get people better. And every story, by the way, in Ending Chronic Illness are personal patients I have treated for with autism, with, you know, Alza, whatever it was. These are personal patients I've treated myself.

True. It's true. It's, it's quite, it's quite a career you've had. And people want to learn more, they can go to cangetbetter.com.

Cangetbetter.com. And my Medical Detective substacks that are free to sign up. Um, every week I do one. I did one today on heat stress and heat strokes because of the heat wave, the heat dome. Um, people, you know, don't realize like if you have cardiovascular risks and you're taking xylitol in your diet, which has now been linked, right, to strokes, right, that and now you have heat stress, that you are more at risk for certain strokes than you might have been from the past. So I actually did a substack today on it just because of the what's going on now in our country with heat. But yeah, so the Medical Detective substack, cangetbetter.com. I have Facebook, Dr. Per, period, Richard Horowit. People can follow me.

And lots of books. Lots of books. Ending Any Chronic Illness is the new one. It's great. Uh, everybody should get a copy. It's out now and, uh, I'm, thank God I got my copy. I, I definitely have thought of you over the years as one of my mentors and I, it's so great to have you here on the podcast.

Mark, it's so great to see you again. It's been, it's been too long.

Yeah. If you love that last video, you're going to love the next one. Check it out here.