Deb 0:00
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Deb 1:12
Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find this episode both insightful and thought provoking. Listener discretion is advised. Now for the show, Welcome to Let’s Talk wellness now. I’m your host, Dr, Deb, and I’m thrilled to have you here together. We’ll explore the cutting edge of health and wellness, uncovering powerful strategies to help you look, feel and live your best at any age,

Deb 1:35
from alternative medicine to integrative therapies, functional nutrition to mind, body healing. We’re here to challenge the status quo and empower you with knowledge. As a nurse practitioner, naturopathic doctor, shaman and someone who’s walked the path of healing firsthand, I’m passionate about helping you thrive. So let’s dive in and discover the tools you need to unlock a vibrant, healthy life. This is your journey, and I’m honored to be your guide. Let’s talk wellness. Now today, we’re diving into a fascinating and critical topic about how symptoms in our bodies often serve as red flags for infections. Understanding these connections is essential for both timely diagnosis and effective treatment.

Deb 2:25
Symptoms that our bodies show us in our ways of signaling something’s wrong, but often they can be misunderstood or misdiagnosed, and by connecting these dots, we can uncover hidden infections that are driving chronic health issues.

Deb 2:44
You know, I’ve treated chronic illness now for over 20

Deb 2:49
plus, maybe 25 years, close to that somewhere, and

Deb 2:55
it always presents in very similar patterns of things, and unfortunately, what ends up happening are the symptoms that people go to their primary care doctors with often, I believe, overwhelms them. And we’re taught that if somebody has multiple symptoms to think about depression and anxiety versus thinking about an infection or something chronic in nature and in our naturopathic world, we’re taught that the body is a whole and as a whole, every symptom gives us another answer or another glimpse into exactly what’s happening. So symptoms of infection are quite common, right? We know fever, fatigue, pain or swelling, that these are not necessarily the problems themselves, but these are the things we pay attention to. And if you remember having the flu. We’ve all had that, right? You feel achy, you feel tired, you feel flu like this, what we call it. But what if you felt like that more times than not? What if your symptoms kind of ebbed and flowed? They were here for a couple of days, and then they were gone. They were here for a week or two, and they’re gone. And you’re trying to find that pattern that

Deb 4:30
trigger, so to speak, that makes these symptoms present or makes them worse. And that’s where you become the medical detective. That’s where I’ve become the medical detective, and it’s learning to identify those symptoms between acute and chronic symptoms in nature. So acute symptoms tend to be fever, sore throat, rash,

Deb 4:56
they’re usually linked to short term colds and.

Deb 5:00
Lose. But you can have these symptoms as chronic things as well. Or, like I said before, they can come and go in patterns. Typically, when we see chronic symptoms, it’s chronic fatigue, fatigue that can be so debilitating that you can’t get out of bed. Or maybe it’s just fatigue. When you wake up in the morning and you don’t really feel rested, you don’t feel like you’ve slept, you’re not ready to hit the floor running and get going through the day like you used to. And then there’s brain fog, that fog over your head where you’re just not quite remembering things properly, or something that we call word finding. You can’t find the right word. You’re looking at an object, and you know what the name of the object is, but you can’t quite grasp the word for it, or you’re mixing up words. You’re calling a chair, a table and a table, a bench. You can’t find a person’s name like you used to we tend to think that’s common with age, but it’s really not. Or what about the joint pain or the muscle pain that comes and goes one minute, it’s your wrist or your finger, and it’s a knee, then it’s an ankle, then it’s my neck, then it’s my shoulder, then it’s my elbow. That type of migratory is what we call it, joint or muscle pain is not common. It’s not normal aging process. It’s a red flag for us and tells us that something’s going on. What about symptoms like numbness and tingling that come and go, or the feeling is, though something’s creeping and crawling inside of your body. We call that the circulations. These are all symptoms that are not normal symptoms as we age, chronic headaches where you feel like somebody’s just driving a stake or a spike in your head, the blurred vision that comes and goes, the floaters, those squiggly lines that happen inside of your eyes, or the eye pain, jaw pain,

Deb 7:17
these are just some of the symptoms that we see with chronic illness. What about the bladder? Symptoms that happen, that urgency, that frequency, or that pain in the bladder, that burning in the bladder, or food sensitivities. One minute you can eat something like gluten, and the next day you can’t you’re feeling sick from it. Or one day you can have tomatoes, and the next time you have tomatoes, your joints are on fire. These are all signals of a bigger problem, a bigger thing. Now, oftentimes it is infection. It’s something like Epstein Barr or chronic strep, which gets now diagnosed as pans pandas. It could be Lyme disease or some other tick borne disease. And these are all symptoms of Long Haul COVID as well. These things that come in waves about every two weeks, you see a pattern arising. These are chronic symptoms, and their chronic illness, things and they really, truly debilitate people’s lives and keep them from working, keep them from doing the things that they absolutely love in life. Now, viral infections like Epstein Barr Virus can create a lot of these same type of symptoms, this chronic fatigue, the swollen lymph nodes that come and go, the low grade fever.

Deb 8:51
These are very debilitating. Some of these conditions, like Epstein Barr and HHV six, which is a herpes family virus can actually lead to bigger problems, like autoimmune diseases, thyroid disease, diseases like Ms. The literature is very clear that these things play a role in autoimmune diseases, the HHV six and CMB. So HHV six is a herpes family virus and CMB is cytomegalovirus. These are definitely linked to neurological symptoms, chronic pain and even cognitive decline. HHV, six for years, has been known to be a culprit in fibromyalgia, that sore muscle achiness that just doesn’t want to leave the body. And unfortunately, we’ve kind of gotten away from looking at these viruses as being culprits for the symptoms that we have, and instead we’re looking at, how do we treat the symptoms, instead of, how do we get to the root cause of these symptoms? Now there’s other bacterial infection.

Deb 10:00
As well. Lyme disease is one of them. I mentioned that a little bit earlier, this typically in an acute setting, will start like flu, like symptoms, joint pain, possibly a bullseye rash. But according to people like Dr Horowitz, we know that the bulls rash only appears in about 20% of the population of people, so that’s not always a telltale sign. Or if you get bit in an area where you wouldn’t necessarily see the bullseye rash like maybe on your head, it could also be missed. Now, some of these symptoms can evolve into neurological issues, numbness and tingling and even seizures. We see chronic pain is a very common one, and Lyme disease actually can mimic diseases like MS and other autoimmune diseases like lupus, and these symptoms can go on for decades, undiagnosed and untreated. And we have some other tick borne diseases as well, like Bartonella, which is commonly associated with psychiatric symptoms, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, there’s a common term that we use called Bart rage that will cause people to be totally normal one minute, and they go from zero to 100 in seconds, like they’re fine, they’re angry, and then they’re fine again. This is very common with a Bartonella infection, and then we have bacterial infections like chlamydia pneumonia that can directly affect the cardiovascular system and cause a lot of cardiovascular symptoms like syncope or blood pressure issues or pots uh, postural tachycardia orthostatic or sorry, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. And this can be very debilitating for people, because their heart rate goes up very high, sometimes to as high as 180 or 190 and then comes back down right away. So these bacterial infections can be very devastating. When they’re not diagnosed and they don’t continue to be diagnosed, they can create damage long term. And then on top of that, we have fungal infections as well. We have things like mold toxicity. This is going to cause very similar symptoms of infection, such as brain fog, sinus issues, chronic sinusitis, chronic sinus pressure and pain, especially if the mold is colonized in the nasal passages, we’re going to see muscle weakness, muscle pain, and these often overlap with autoimmune and neurological conditions, so testing for mycotoxins is key to really uncovering a lot of these hidden culprits as well. Now I know in our country, we’re very clean. We don’t travel anywhere, right? We never go outside of the country.

Deb 12:55
I’m being facetious here, but people in our country do get parasitic infections, especially when tick borne these diseases present, we can have an infection called Babesia. Babesia is a parasite infection. It’s also what we call a co infection of Lyme. It can cause night sweats and air hunger and severe fatigue. These symptoms are often mistaken for other illnesses like menopause or anxiety disorder, and there’s a whole host of other parasites, like liver flukes and

Deb 13:30
tapeworms, things like that, that we can get from traveling and walking barefoot or getting bit by no seams. And these parasitic infections can directly cause severe and debilitating chronic illnesses for us, and they need to be treated in this country. And we used to treat them when people lived more on the farm, but since we’ve moved away from the farm and into the city, and we don’t have a lot of exposure to farm animals, people don’t get treated for them, but I will tell you, they are very prevalent and very common, and there’s a lot of research and data right now going on that’s showing parasitic infections have a connection to cancer, and they’re being treated with medications that treat parasitic disease, like ivermectin or like Other anti parasitics, like prosequential and things like that, fembendozol. And so the research is very clear out of the NIH that these things are present, and they do play a role in that. And so understanding how to identify parasitic infections and treat them is so important. The sad part is, with parasitic testing, we’re very limited, and the only way to easily diagnose this is stool testing, and it’s not very accurate. It’s not very specific. So you can use a biofeedback system, like an on demand, or a bioscan or muscle testing kinesiology, to determine if somebody has parasites and there are.

Deb 15:00
Are some blood tests that we can do as well to see if there’s some parasitic infections going on, and that gives us a better glimpse into what’s happening there. So you know, as I’m talking about this, I’m sure a lot of you are saying, Gosh, I feel that way, and I’ve talked to my practitioner for a long time about this. Why didn’t they pick it up? Or why is this so difficult to diagnose and how often is this misdiagnosed? Well, these overlapping symptoms can confuse practitioners quite a bit, the brain fog, the fatigue, the joint pain. This could mean anything from an autoimmune disease to depression, and without proper testing of the root cause, a hidden infection can often be missed, and if your practitioner is not asking about your lifestyle and where you live, and do you live in a water damaged building? Or have you lived in a water damaged building in the past, not asking you, do you live in a moldy place? Because most people say, No, I don’t live in a place with mold. But if you ask them, has your house ever been water damaged? Or have you lived in a water damaged or worked in a building that was water damaged? The answer oftentimes is yes, or Well, here I live in 100 year old house. Well, I’m here to sadly say, if you live in 100 year old house, you’ve lived in a water damaged building. That home has been water damaged at some point over the 100 years that you’ve lived in that and any damage from water, most likely is going to create some type of mold problem. And the question is, where is the mold How big is the mold problem? And are you reacting to this from a mold standpoint? And then the other aspect is, have you ever been bitten by a tick. And a lot of times we hear no not that I’m aware of, or I’ve never had one attached, but I’ve had them crawling on me. Now, ticks that cause Lyme disease are often very small. We don’t see them a lot of times, and sometimes you’ll see a bite that looks like maybe a spider bite. It’s raised and it’s red, but it doesn’t look like a traditional bulls eye rash, and you blow it off, and then the next couple of days, you’re sick, and you don’t make the connection between the two. And so really digging in and asking some of these questions is important to finding the answers and actually saving the client money on testing, because when we can identify these things, we know exactly where and how to spend your dollars for testing. We also do some testing through something called thermography and biofeedback with an on demand machine, which can really narrow in for us exactly what we’re looking for. So we’re not just spending dollars for testing to try to catch something. We’ll have a better idea of exactly what’s going on by using those two tests as well.

Deb 17:44
You know, also looking at different tests like PCR or Elisa or a western blot for Lyme disease is very important, but those tests are not 100% accurate. Just recently, maybe about a month ago, the FDA approved iGenex immunoblot testing for Lyme disease, and this is a very specific test and very sensitive, so it really helps us identify what’s going on. Unfortunately, it’s going to take some time before our traditional laboratories, like quest and lab core and some of those companies actually start ordering the test kit for immunoblot, and then we need time to educate the practitioners about immunoblots so they understand what it does and how specific it is, so they can order that test over a screen test or an Elisa or a PCR or Western Blot, so we can actually get better answers and quicker answers into determining whether or not you have a tick borne disease. You know, it’s

Deb 18:47
very difficult sometimes to work with practitioners who are uninformed and just haven’t learned this yet. And this is where functional medicine or integrative medicine or holistic medicine, whatever we want to call that today, plays a very specific and

Deb 19:05
important role, in my opinion, because in functional medicine, we look at the whole picture. We look at all of your symptoms, that history, that lifestyle, that specialized testing to the pinpoint the infection of the driving illness. We look at your gut function. We look at your immune system and how well it’s actually functioning. We look at the pattern of symptoms, of what happened. You know, did something trigger this? Were you sick? Did you get a vaccine? Did you get a travel or a move or a stressful event? What was the triggering factor that caused these symptoms for you, and that is so important to us, getting to the answers quicker than if we weren’t taking that detailed history for you. So I want to share with you a case study of a client that we had, that had.

Deb 20:00
Migraines and fatigue, and traditional doctors couldn’t find the cause for her migraines, but functional testing revealed that she had a chronic epstein barr virus, which is the virus that causes mono she had mold exposure, and once we started treating these mycotoxins, which are the toxins that get released from mold in her body. Treating the Epstein Barr Virus, her symptoms started to resolve, and she no longer was suffering from debilitating migraines on almost a daily basis. And this changed her life. I mean, just imagine waking up every morning with a horrible migraine. Nothing’s helping, no medication, nothing that the doctors have done, and nobody can give you an idea on what’s going on, and you find out that it’s an infectious process, and simply by starting an antiviral and anti fungal protocol, all of a sudden these debilitating migraines that you’ve been dealing with for years start to go away and you have a normal life again. This is life altering and life changing for people who’ve been suffering for these kinds of things for decades or even just a year or two. So I want to give you some really actionable steps that can help you, maybe even find your patterns, find your causes for your symptoms, and you can share this with your practitioners, and it’ll help them identify quicker for you, what’s going on. Tracking your symptoms is key, keeping a journal of the symptoms, noting when they appear, how severe they are. Are there any patterns? Is it changing with the weather? Does it change with what I eat?

Deb 21:46
Does it change with the stressful events that I have?

Deb 21:51
Does it happen for a couple of days, and then it’s good for maybe two or three weeks, and then it comes back again, if you’re a woman, is it triggered by my menstrual cycle or not, lot of these infections have patterns. They have life cycles, and as they ebb and flow in their life cycle, your symptoms will change, whether it’s every two weeks or every three weeks. This can be really important for your practitioner to identify what infection may be going on based on these types of things. And then certainly look at, is there anything that you’re doing that makes it better, or maybe even intensifies it, hot versus cold, sleeping versus not,

Deb 22:38
pressure versus no pressure, massage versus no massage, any of those things that can make your symptoms better or worse. Now I also think it’s really important to work with practitioners who understand advanced diagnostic tools to uncover hidden infections. This is key if you’re working with somebody who doesn’t understand mycotoxin illness, or doesn’t understand Lyme disease or chronic infection or pots or even chronic long haul these days, because we’re dealing with that now, then it’s going to be harder for them to get to the root cause of what you’re doing. Not every holistic practitioner deals with the same thing. You may have one person that’s an anti aging person, and they’re really great at hormones, but they’re not so good at infection, or somebody that’s really great at gut health, but not really great at hormones. And so it’s hard to find a practitioner that is an expert in all of these arenas. So sometimes you need a couple of different practitioners in your

Deb 23:41
in your tool kit, so to speak, you know, into your expertise there. But if you’re lucky enough to find practitioners that have been doing this a long time, and they are experts in every area, that can really help move things along a lot quicker. At Serenity Healthcare Center, the clinic that I own, our practitioners are trained experts in all of those arenas, and I have practitioners have been working with me a very long time. They’re extremely knowledgeable about these things, and can help put those pieces of the puzzle together for you. Now, you also want to find a practitioner that focuses on treating the infections in as quick of a process as we can now, some infections we can treat very quickly. Some take a very long time. If you’ve had these infections for a very long time, you can’t expect them to go away quickly. It will take time. You also need to explore proper nutrition, proper detoxification processes and stress management as well. This is so incredibly important to manage your stress, manage your nutrition, and you need to do this in order to heal a lot faster. So take the time to get all of this right. You know, symptoms are not our enemy. They’re our Messenger, and by.

Deb 25:00
Understanding the story they tell, we can uncover these hidden infections and take steps towards truly healing. So if you’re struggling with chronic symptoms and you feel unheard, reach out to a practitioner who will dig deeper. You deserve answers and healing. You deserve to feel better. You deserve to have your life back. Don’t stop if one practitioner isn’t the right practitioner for you, find a different one. Don’t be afraid to fire a practitioner that’s not connecting with you, right? It’s okay if they don’t connect with you. You don’t always have to connect with that practitioner. But find somebody that you can speak with that you can connect with, that listens to you and understands exactly what is important to you, and can help you get to the root cause and help you get over the bridge and not keep you on that sick Path forever. So I really hope that this episode has helped you and encouraged you to find answers and ask the right questions and keep that journal and really help you heal and grow as a person, as a healthy individual

Deb 26:21
and and just living the best possible life that you can live, because it’s so incredibly important for not just you, but for others as well. Thank you for joining me today on Let’s Talk wellness now, and I hope you’re leaving with new insights and inspirations to take control of your health and wellness journey. Remember, your body has an incredible ability to heal when we give it the tools and support it needs. If you found value in today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe. Leave a review and share this episode with someone who could benefit from it. Together, we can spread the message of empowerment and holistic healing, and if you’re ready to take the next step in your wellness journey, visit serenity Healthcare Center com to learn more about the programs and resources I offer. Let’s work together to help you thrive and achieve the vibrant health you deserve. Until next time, stay well, stay vibrant, and keep embracing your wellness journey. I’m Dr Deb, and this was, let’s talk wellness now.

Overview:
Dr. Deb, a nurse practitioner and naturopathic doctor, discusses how symptoms like chronic fatigue, brain fog, and joint pain can indicate hidden infections. She explains that common infections like Epstein-Barr Virus, Lyme disease, and Bartonella can cause debilitating symptoms and often go undiagnosed. Dr. Deb emphasizes the importance of functional medicine, which considers the whole body, and advanced diagnostic tools like thermography and biofeedback. She shares a case study of a client with migraines and fatigue who was treated for chronic Epstein-Barr and mold exposure, leading to significant symptom improvement. Dr. Deb advises tracking symptoms, working with knowledgeable practitioners, and adopting a holistic approach to healing.

Action Items:
Keep a journal to track symptoms, noting patterns and factors that make them better or worse.
Reach out to a practitioner who is an expert in identifying and treating chronic infections.
Explore proper nutrition, detoxification, and stress management as part of the healing process.