Tips on Pediatric Lyme: “The Poop About Poop”

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Thank you, Robby. I’m here because at this point in my long career and life, I’ve decided to align myself with people whose values resonate with my own. That’s a choice as an elderly woman. That, that’s why I’m here, because I believe in what you’re doing. I just want to say that for your listeners. That’s number one. Number two, let me go to the end and then I’m gonna start a little bit at the beginning is that, again, I’m aligned with Jeffrey Smith and just like literally hot off the press your listeners are hearing it first, joined on with him with his newest project called Protect Nature Now. 

People should check it out. I believe in it, and I’ll give you the link. So, briefly, ’cause we’ll be here for a few years. My journey begins basically as a western-trained physician. Mount Sinai, NYU, Bellevue, New York Medical College. I was deep. But, not convinced. And what I mean by that is, things didn’t feel right. I’ve always believed in children. Children are my passion, they’re my calling. It’s not a career, it’s my calling. And my biggest overarch is injustice. Medical injustice. And for those who have not been served. And yet, how does that relate to today’s conversation, 

Robby is that those who have not been served are children who have experienced chronic infection. And they have been neglected, mistreated, maltreated, ignored and called crazy. And we need to dispel that myth before we begin. So, let’s just lay that out there that that’s one of my… And that’s another reason ’cause Jeffrey and I talk about gene editing of microbes. Oh yeah, it’s all linked. So, my journey, I came to California from New York. A little lower east side girl to crunchy Fairfax, California. And lo and behold the world get shaken up when I had a kid and my kid had health challenges and I stumbled into homeopathy. 

I’m a proud homeopath and user. Things that I often don’t share with mainstream medicine because of the eye rolling. I got so tired of eye rolling, Robby, that I just couldn’t even say I was a homeopath anymore. And nobody died from an eye roll, okay? Yeah. My skin’s a little bit thicker after four decades in the medical establishment, I should say. And my son got better through homeopathy. I have other kids as well. But my own journey, I had a patient and she had Bartonella Striae. And you say, “Whoa, why’s she jumping into the Lyme conversation?” Bartonella is a microbe, it’s a bacteria. It’s carried by ticks, it’s carried by cats. And it’s often not diagnosed. 

And this was many, many years ago. And I didn’t know what the heck that was. I’m talking decades ago. And, later I learned that was Bartonella. And I thought about all the kids decades ago that I missed ’cause I wasn’t educated. My son got diagnosed with Lyme when he was five in Martha’s Vineyard off of the northeast. It’s 80% of Martha’s Vineyard denizens, I think are positive for Lyme as last that I saw. And then I treated him when he was just a little guy. He’s a big guy now. And I thought, “Oh, I’m done. Wow! I’m amazing.” Oh, stop, stop the press. Not so amazing. Little did I know about persisters and co-infections, terrain, psychic aspects of healing I didn’t know. My son is doing great. It’s been a rough journey, he’s doing great, he’s married, I love my daughter-in-law. So, that’s how I got here. Lots of bumps, bruises, missteps. 

But the one thing I share with your listeners today is that you need to work with someone. This is complex, it’s chronic and before we get into the nuts and bolts, this is a hard journey to go alone. As a practitioner, who’s done a lot of self education, super difficult with one of my own, I’ve lived this journey with very close family members and my patients whose little sick souls I carry around my little aura, along my energy field their little sick souls with me, trying to help those families as well. And so, that’s the palette of paint that I wanna lay out before you and I converse about what I think is probably one of the most important things affecting children.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

There’s so many chords that you’re striking in what you’re saying to me. The family dynamic is one of them. The fact that you’ve chosen to focus on pediatrics and children is also completely interesting to me. Children have challenges articulating what’s going on with them to start with. We’re big people looking at little people and little people, it’s kinda scary and they don’t feel well. And then you overlay that with oftentimes Lyme and the co-infections, the symptoms are diverse. They’re very individual from person to person. So it’s not a very easy one to diagnose or to figure out. And then, just recently, in the last five years there’s been some great advancements but if you dial back 20 years ago, 25 years ago, when we got started on our journey with our daughter, there weren’t a lot of Lyme-literate doctors around. 

They were still poking around trying to figure out what to do. And most of the protocols were, the allopathic, very intensive with using antibiotics and so forth. And having homeopathy and having integrated approaches to figuring it out, getting people stable and getting on track to good health is a wonderful… Through your own journey to bring to all of us. And so, thank you for your contribution in many ways. Give us some tips. Let us know and let’s us unpack this little bit. So tell us, you know, we’ve got Lyme patients that are challenged and in bed because they’re symptomatic and they can’t seem to get out of bed, they have no hope. They’re a little bit sort of depressed because they may be exhausted both physically and financially. And everyone’s trying to help and trying to figure it out yet they’re not getting better. And then we’ve got the other scope where we got functioning Lyme patients that just wanna stay as healthy as they can be and stay ahead of the curve. And so, there’s a full range there. Give us some of your ideas of sort of where to start and what you would recommend.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Sure. I’ve learned a lot about Lyme. And I like taking… One of my favorite things to do is take a complex subject, which is Lyme, let’s just call it Lyme, and which means Lyme and co-infections, we’ll call it Lyme for simplicity. I’m simplifying it. If I can’t do that for listeners, patients, clients, friends, then I don’t understand the subject. I believed this can be simplified because parents, for example, are not practitioners. So you can’t learn what we all know and Robby, in all essence, you’ve become a practitioner. You get your honorary degree. So, a couple of things, a couple of key points, number one, listen to your child. Whether the child is six months old, there is congenital Lyme, you can acquire it through the passage of the birth canal. 

I believe transplacentally as well because the placenta is not a barrier. Things cross in the placenta. Microbes are small. And remember, if you get a tick bite or you have Lyme, you also have viruses as part of the infection package. So these viruses are super tiny easily cross the placenta. So whether it’s a six month old, a two year old or a teen, if your child’s not well you should listen to them. How do you know your child’s not well? Depends on their age. Is your baby crying all the time? Arching, not feeding well, not thriving. Is your two year old grabbing her tummy all the time, making hard poops, having just endless blow-outs of emotion? Is your middle school kid doing great and then falls off? Starts having elements of emotional distress, psychic disorders, bipolar, all of a sudden and you live near the outdoors or even not. Ticks are ubiquitous and they’re not the only carriers. Of Lyme.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Exactly.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

And then to your young adult, all of a sudden they don’t wanna get up in the morning. They have chronic abdominal pain. They’re refluxing, they have chronic headaches and emotional symptoms. Please, the most important thing I can say about that is do not negate the emotional health of your child. The head is not cut off at the neck. The head talks to the gut. There is a pathway called the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve, wandering nerve, that goes from your gut to your head. 

The microbes tell your body what to make, what to not make or right up into your head. These organisms are diffused throughout your body. There’s a conversation going on through this gut-brain axis. So mental health changes can be a presenting sign of Lyme disease. That should be an every practitioner’s differential diagnosis for your kid with new onset bipolar disease or whatever. Think about infection. So, one, listen to your child. Two, you see your practitioner and they’re blowing you off, writing it off, poo-pooing the child’s symptoms, leave. Leave.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Find somebody else.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Find someone else. And these are called Lyme literate. Now you may not think about their Lyme-literate practitioners and maybe you don’t even wanna start there. Maybe it’s not Lyme. However, maybe you wanna go to a more holistic practitioner. And holistic practitioners, this can be a bit challenging. Email your friends and colleagues say, “Hey, my kid’s going through this. Anybody, I need tips.” Someone out there is gonna know someone. And those can look like chiropractors, acupuncturists, holistic nutritionist. 

They may look in natural pathic doctors, people like me, MDs with integrative training, functional medicine MDs. Look for somebody with a holistic mindset. Even if they cannot treat the Lyme, they can at least help you sort it out. And that is a key component. So now, you’re listening to your child, you’re finding an appropriate practitioner to work with, you’re getting rid of all the people who are poo-pooing you, misguiding you, telling you, “Yeah, I did some labs. Your kid is normal. There’s nothing wrong with them.” And then you’re seeking out someone to work with. This is a hard journey to go alone, folks. I don’t recommend it. It’s a bit too complicated. There are other things you can do on your own but not this one. And so that’s how we start. 

And three is, diagnostics are great. I like lab tests, Robby. I do like testing. I like to see what we’re dealing with. And western labs are not very good. Traditional mainstream medicine labs are not so good in this arena. Some are okay, most are not. Vitamin D levels, checking zinc and magnesium levels. Looking at B12, looking at potential stool testing. Yeah, those are pretty good. But you really need labs that are outside. And those are often not covered by insurance. 

So then you say, “Well, gee! I have no money to pay for a $400 Lyme test.” And I say, “You know what? It’s a clinical diagnosis.” If your teen has migratory joint pain, chronic headaches, brain fog, fatigue, intermittent rashes, visual changes or any of those combination of stuff and lots of gut stuff, all kinds of gut stuff, I’m gonna treat them for Lyme and co-infections and get the labs that I can, that your insurance will cover because it’s a clinical diagnosis. I don’t need lab tests to know that this sounds like Lyme. Now we’ve got that piece. So for the listeners, we’re listening, we’re finding the right provider, we’re doing diagnostics in the system or out, depending on your finances. And then we’ll get into, where do you go from there.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Let me jump in just for one sec.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Jump in.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

It occurred to me a few years ago about the internet and the information sources that we have there. Now, people are COVID-bound so they’ve got plenty of time to jump and research. And it’s sort of a double-edged sword because you’ve got this internet as a resource that enables you to research things but there’s lots of bad information there too. Now when you’re basically feeling okay, you sorta have all the time in the world in a sense to look around, poke around and ask around. But if you’re feeling yucky, you’re not thinking clearly many of the Lyme community they’ve got cognitive challenges, you know? And so it’s not clear to start with and then they jump onto to the internet and they’re just swallowed up.

And that’s pretty much why Melanie and I are putting together this program for the month of May because we wanna cut through all of that smoke and mirrors, what we call noise out there to really get down to root causes, root challenges and certain root solutions to all this. That’s why we so appreciate you. The chat rooms, the Lyme chat rooms in particular, are great communities to go to to just talk about what you have. If you’re a mother or a family member and you think that your child is going off the road a little bit, to just sort of say, “Well, could this be?” And then that is clues. Because they’re super sensitive. It really is a great sense of community. And we’ve been participating in them from inception basically for the last 25 years. I love that. 

And then I wanna just say, I have a dear friend that’s a practitioner, like yourself, integrated, holistic and he has Lyme and his family has Lyme. And what he said to me was pretty interesting. He uses a homeopathy approach rather than doing a diagnostic like a blood test because many times you can get false negatives, false positives and all that, right? He actually uses a treatment. A homeopathic treatment in low dosing. And then he starts dialing up the doses over two weeks. And if you have a Herx reaction, which is like a flu-like type reaction, then most likely you have an overgrowth or an imbalance of either your microbiome or Lyme or the co-infections. When he puts that together with clinical representations as symptoms like you mentioned, he doesn’t really need that confirmation from a blood tests he just jumps right in on the protocols. What do you think about that?

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Okay, that’s wonderful to hear. And he’s a practitioner, right? Or he’s a dad? He’s a practitioner.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

No, no, he’s a practitioner. He’s actually an osteopath.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

He’s an osteopath. Yes, we practitioners can do stuff like that. For a parent to do that on their own, it’s really hard. So for example, there is something, these homeopathics series kits they’re made by a company that I love and I teach for, in full disclosure named DesBio, Deseret Biologicals. And these series kits have different organisms and homeopathic dilutions that dial up and then dial down. It’s a two-month treatment. And I’ve had great success using these homeopathic treatments that do a lot, just like what you were saying your friend did. So one of the things I love to do with kids is once I regain the terrain and I’m gonna be talking about that in my own website is, you have to get kids’ guts healthy first. 

And I wanna talk about that for a minute. I treat infections last, Robby. It’s something I do with a chronically ill patient. I go for the infection last and there’s a reason why I do that. I’ll just say that. But then, once you get everything working again, kind of, as best you can, these series kits have homeopathy, work great. And usually after about the first 10 days, kids can Herx as well. 

And that’s what you referred to, and that’s why you have a flare of the symptoms and it could be an exacerbation. And then you know you’re on the right track and those tend to resolve, and there are ways to offset those symptoms. It’s very simply with Epsom salt baths and a little alkalinization, and then some dietary changes, increasing hydration with higher pH fluids, simple things. And none of what I just told you, none of it cost more than three bucks. Some Epsom salt, some lemon water, you’re good to go. I like to do that also. 

Now there are a lot of practitioners out there who have these special techniques. They’re called EAV and they’re different techniques where they can test for… They can do muscle testing or kinesiology, and they don’t need labs. Hats off to those folks. And they often don’t need traditional blood work because traditional blood work is often antibody based and it can be a partially flawed system. So now we’re getting into a little more of the nuancing of testing, for example, and so testing for me is an adjunct to my clinical prowess. And it’s really helpful to have a clinician who’s somewhat experienced in this conversation. Experience matters when treating Lyme. Now we all have to start somewhere and if you have a newbie practitioner, and they could be okay too, we all started some… Robby, we’re more knowing this.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

That’s true.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

And so yes, if you find a practitioner who knows how to test, muscle tests, and great. There are other ways to test. There are other things to look for. I’m a big stool fan. I like looking at poop. That’s my favorite thing to look at and I get a lot of information. And remember, with kids getting blood all the time, it’s not so much fun. And especially when kids don’t have great veins and all that. Anything I can get from saliva, poop, and urine, I’m all over it. Well, that maybe was a poor choice of words. But anyway… And just to your point, Robby, where you get information from matters, the internet is like the inner mess. 

As far as I’m concerned, there’s so much, you buy your way at the top if you wanna be listed at the top. You can pay Google enough to get your thing up there. And so, it’s so much misinformation. But, the Lyme chat rooms, Iliad stuff, Dr. Horowitz, get some books from really renowned people and I’m a big fan of Dr. Horowitz and his books about Lyme he has two great books. Also lyme.org, right, lyme.org. It’s a patient-driven website, et cetera. So there are other good sources to get information. Just be careful in your not just old treatments, everybody has a magic cure. There is no magic cure. I’ve been doing this for a little bit and I have not found a magic cure, it takes a lot of different tools from the toolbox, but people do get better.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Interesting. You know, for Julia, we redefined the word health. And maybe you can appreciate this. I said, “Julie, you know, Lyme could be ultimately like hepatitis or like malaria, where you always have a little bit in you.” I believe that basically all of us have a little Epstein-Barr, a little pneumonia, a little cancer, a little this, a little that, it’s really just the change in your internal climate that creates the opportunity for pathogens to take advantage of the sense, right? Cause havoc. And so, wouldn’t it be better to look at this whole equation about health, more about how functional you are, like, if you found your passion, what kind of contribution could you make to yourself, your community, your family, your religion, the things you love and then how symptomatic you are. So if you’re not symptomatic, if you got that managed, and you’re someone making contribution then the rest becomes sort of a label. 

And we all know that many diagnoses particularly Lyme, it goes so long misdiagnosed because it can mimic so many other kinds of … The symptoms can mimic so many other diseases that we’d love to take a step back and go, “Hey, whatever it is, it is, that’s just the label.” Let’s just focus on what you are with central theme today is really listening and I guess, noticing what you notice, right? As a parent, as a family member, part of your community, either the patient themselves and or the family that’s supporting them around them. So, that’s really a more modern approach that we took to defining health, and once we did that for my daughter, particularly Julia, there was a big shift emotionally and physically for her. It’s a stress off, in a way. Does that make sense to you?

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Robby, it’s spot on because this is the kind of sobering news. I resonate with what you say because I don’t believe you ever clear Lyme 100%. And I think the best I’ve seen is about 85%, 100% functioning. There’s two definitions of health. And I agree, you live with what you have and it’s not to say acceptance, but the battle has to stop. You can’t battle it. The way you maintain it. And you’re right, there are certain viruses everyone’s heard of herpes virus. Once you get a herpes cold sore, right here on your face, it lives with you for ever. And that’s just the herpes virus. There are many organisms that you mentioned, Epstein Barr, that’s mono, that their stay within our bodies can be forever. The same thing with Lyme, Lyme can go into different forms and it hides for years, it can go into remission. 

Tuberculosis. People know about TB. It can go into a dormant state for years, so how do you keep it at bay? That’s when I talk about maintain, regain, terrain. Now, what does that mean? That means that this being, your body’s innate ability to heal itself has to be restored. Whether you’re 2 or 42. How do you do that? Number one, you’re right. I usually go to the food first, but let’s talk about this mental piece first. First of all, is the belief in yourself and you can do it with your two year old or your 22 year old, is that patients must believe that they can get better. And the way you do that, is to believe you can get better. And that you are in control. Lyme is dark. 

That organism produces a very dark mental state. It’s not the person talking, it’s the organism. They chat and they’re dark. All the Lyme patients. And I don’t say all frequently would tell me how dark their thoughts get, when their Lyme is flaring. And let’s introduce this idea that, yes, these organisms, and everyone has a predominant one, I rarely see anybody with just one, by the way, can ebb and flow, ebb and flow, ebb and flow, and they flare and they go into remission, they flare and go remission. Why? Depends on your stress level, do not underestimate the role of stress. 

Two year olds get stressed, high school kids get stressed, academic pressure, COVID, oh, pick it. There’s lots of stress source. The belief that this body can heal itself, you have to manage stress. They’re all your tools to teach your child how to manage their stress and parents, manage your own. Anything you feel, you’re generating energetically to your family. So mom, if you’re stressed out, all your kids will pick it up. You have a new mom, she’s stressed out, she’s nursing that baby, and she’s stressed, that baby’s gonna be stressed out baby. So, we manage parents. When you manage children with Lyme, you manage the whole family. When I say manage, you have to learn to manage it. It’s that journey. That’s number one. But number two, the most important thing I do first is get the gut working. Kids don’t have their guts working. They have chronic tummy aches, bloated bellies, they can’t poop, constipation, constipation, constipation. I ask kids every day, ’cause I do urgent care as well, “Does your food come up in the back of your throat?” “Oh yeah.” And the moms are looking at them like, and I just say, moms, dads too. 

What? Besides, they’re refluxing, not normal. So we gotta heal the gut, and otherwise, if you don’t get that gut working, I say, all bets are off. Don’t even bother. So if you’re kid, if you’re young adult, if you as an adult are doing okay, with your Lyme co-infections, get your gut working, heal the terrain, and there are ways we do that. And then, we chase the infection. It is an infection. I treat them. I do use antibiotics, but there are different kinds of antibiotics. There are herbal, there are pharmaceutical. I use homeopathic. And then that’s when we bring in all the tools in the trade. And so, yes, it’s in my toolbox, but it’s not the first thing I do. I wanna get your body as healthy as I can get it. Your immune system maximally function, your vitamin D, your vitamin C, all that stuff now we’re hearing about COVID. 

Get your immune system as maximal as it can be, Lyme likes to suppress your immune function. Why? So you don’t attack it. These organisms have been around for, oh my God, millions of years. And so, we maximize immune function via, a healthy terrain, via gut functioning, and then, we go after the organisms, which ones I go after? If you have one, two, eight co-infections, I go after the one that is giving you the most symptoms first. And then I start to peel ’em off. And some people can handle treatment of many at once, I don’t do that in children. Sometimes I’ve done it in adults and you just start peeling them away. 

This is a very systematic approach. And you just start getting rid of the infections and so many ways to do it. And so that’s how you begin. But the beginning is the first recognize that the body has the innate ability to heal itself. You just have to restore that balance and get your kids into restoring balance as well. You can teach three year olds. They love yoga, for example. There’s kiddy yoga. So if you’re home with your kids during COVID, do some kid yoga. Mom, dad do it with your kids. Family fun project. That’s sort of my overall approach, Robby, on how I kind of look and remember, as you start to get better, a lot of other things peel away.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Even though, yes, we didn’t get your Lyme, Robby, but pooping, when the kids start to poop, they will start to feel better. You heal the microbiota, oh, their brain works better. You start giving them various omega threes, which I use a lot of, and you start healing their neurologic function. They start to feel better. They feel better, their outlook’s better, the emotions, up their immune function, depression decreases immune function, gut starts working better, flow, your chi, your vital forest starts to move energy. You don’t wanna be stuck, and people do better.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Well, it’s so important what you’re saying because, I almost think it’s sort of the upside down approach oftentimes that western medicine is driven towards these days. So you go to see a Lyme specialist and they wanna show you that they are really, know what they’re doing. So they’re gonna attack and just kill the Lyme. But generally if you’re symptomatic, when you go see the practitioner, your body is already toxic. If they were to go after the underlying source, let’s just say it’s Lyme and or the co-infections, and they’re right in whatever their approach is, they’re going to create an additional toxic event because, they’re killing Lyme, the bio films, the micro toxins that come from the Lyme itself, the dead Lyme, these are all toxins. And so now we’re creating a higher toxic event. And many, I hear this and you probably hear it too, that well, you know, if you take this antibiotic or you do this treatment, you’re gonna feel worse before you feel better. And so that’s how you know it’s working. And I kinda scratch my head because, in the stuff that we do, I like to take a foundational approach like yourself. 

Where, let’s heal the gut, let’s detox the body, so that when we start to get proactive and maybe go after the source, the underlying source, your body is not going to be further compromised, you’re actually gonna be coming from a position of strength. Almost like, I wanna say going into battle, isn’t it great to have a plan and then have all your troops together and then effectuate the plan, but coming from a position of strength where your body, your foundational support systems, your gut, your detox pathways are opened up, you’re well hydrated, I just think that that makes so much more sense to me. And as far as I’m concerned, if you detox beforehand, there’s really no reason why you would ever have a Herx reaction, that flu like reaction, which is really just your body’s saying to you that you’re cup runneth over with toxins internally. I think that that’s just brilliant. And for most people out there that are just tuning in, Dr. Michelle Perro is just a thought leader in many ways and have done so many things, but I just love the content of today’s discussions, because it’s so important for people to know it may have taken a decade or more, especially if you’re younger and you have a strong immune system before you even become symptomatic. 

Be patient as a patient on the back end and understand it’s gonna take a while to come down or walk down that toxic mountain or that symptomatic mountain. Going up, it’s hard to stumble up a mountain, Michelle, it’s really easy if you go too fast to stumble down, come down the mountain. So, slow and steady seems to be a little bit more of a healthier approach and a more foundational approach. And then, you know what? Everything else will sort of correct itself because your body has got an innate sense to bounce back and to heal. And I almost think that, I don’t know if it’s just about Lyme or just today’s epigenetics and how our whole environment is affecting us, but I believe it’s almost like our GPS systems, our guidance systems, our immune systems, they just sorta get turned off and so we lose our way. But once you start to tune up, get the gut in balance, back into balance and work on the foundational pieces, all of a sudden that guidance system turns on and then it’s almost like an orchestra tuning up. Your body wants to heal. It does have memory. Your cells and your muscles and your brain, it all has memory. And so just show it the pathway back home. 

And it’s amazing how exponentially as you start to heal, that your healing process really moves at a much faster pace, but it all comes from having that strong foundation. The last point, just that you brought up just in passing is vitamin D and it seems to be something that’s just bouncing off of all of my walls in research, people call it a vitamin and it really acts more like a hormone, there’s hundreds of physiological events that vitamin D stimulates. But, today’s research way early, like four in the morning for me, was about that we are all light beings. We get energized by the sunlight. 

When we’re stuck at home and we’re not getting fresh air and fresh sunlight, and it’s wintertime and we’re not getting sunlight, just like other animals in the animal kingdom, our bodies go into hibernation. Things start to slow down in many ways. Keeping that vitamin D level I think it’s supposed to be in the 80s although the FDA says 45-ish is about right. Most of the Lyme patients that we coach and talk to, they start off in the teens like 15, 12, something like that. So, having a goal to get your vitamin D level up will support that terrain that you talk about and then a lot of other things will come into alignment. So, wow. We’ve said so many things. I should have mentioned this in the beginning, but if you wanna get a hold of Dr. Michelle Perro, there are a couple of ways to do it. 

You can get to her directly at her email, which is info, [email protected]. Or you can go to her new website, doctor, D-Rmichelleperro spelled P-E-R-R-O.com. And she’s also creating a membership sort of program it’s affordable to get in. If you can’t afford it, there’s situations you can work out with her where you can really be part of her collective and her community where she was gonna bring in a lot of the thought leaders, there’ll be a lot of sharing, and certainly she’ll have an open forum where, because you’ve sign in and you’ve joined the group, there’s a lot more freedoms of information that’s being passed back and forth. So, she’s just the most valuable person on the planet. Certainly on the west coast in information on many topics. She’s a force to be reckoned with. Dr. Perro, I know we’ve covered a bunch of topics today and you’ve given us some amazing things. We’re coming to a close and I’m wondering if there’s a few things that we’ve left off that you need to say, or if there’s any closing comments that you wanna make to us.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Yeah. Robby, you did a great summary. And thank you for your kind words. The last thing I would leave with people is that, there is a cost of convenience and there is no shortcut in working with and treating Lyme. Treating Lyme with a family member will make the whole family healthier by the way. And that there is an internal and external, you have to heal the internal with clean water, clean food, but your external environment has to be clean too, whatever that looks like for you and decrease that toxic load. Unfortunately, something has happened to children during COVID, which is Zoom learning. The EMFs from being on computer all day has created a sea of anxiety. EMFs are not good for children’s brains, electric magnetic fields. And that is a whole conversation in itself. And I have reason to believe that for many people with Lyme, it makes it worse. 

So if you have a child or yourself with Lyme, and you have felt an exacerbation during COVID, while it could be stress induced, it could be your food, it could be your computer. So, shut off the devices as much as you can. And as kids go back to school, if we can get them outside playing. Again, it’s about balance. So we clean the internal, we clean up the external environment, and if you don’t do that, you can still get better, but you may relapse. There’s a more long lasting health effect if you can decrease the toxic load and we live in a very toxic world. So, it takes effort. Lastly, what I tell all my patients, this is a marathon, not a sprint we’re in this together for the long haul and change will happen slowly. And sometimes it happens really quick based on your kid’s growth spurt, their stress level, season. I was so glad you mentioned season because winter we hibernate, summer’s a great time to heal. I like treating kids over summer. They’re out of school, no stress, sunlight, woo-hoo. They’re at the beach, grounding, bring them into the parks. Even if you live in New York city, go to Central Park, keep them off pesticides-sprayed lawns, please. 

You see, there is a seasonality to treating and I do love treating children over the summer. As soon as I see school ending up, I say, “Get them in. Now’s the time.” And I’ll start going after things in the summer. So that matters. Those are the arts of the practice by the way and I don’t wanna end on a new topic, Robby, but I just say stay positive, network, community matters, and you will subconsciously generate that to your kids, your family, the dog, when you stay grounded, this is not a death sentence, Lyme is an infection, it’s not a death sentence. 

And for most of our patients, they will do well. And that’s our goal. And that’s what we’re trying to do. You cannot control this. There are sometimes there are bad outcomes, sometimes there are great outcomes. And we can’t control the outcome. We just do the best we can. And, we forgive ourselves. Robby, we don’t know it all as a parent of a Lyme patient, as a practitioner, I don’t know it all, I don’t have all the answers, we do the best we can and there’s forgiveness of ourselves when we don’t do it perfectly. Because sometimes things don’t work out as we planned.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

And we have to find ways to deal with that as well. I thank you for inviting me today and sharing some of my thoughts on this, I think life-affirmative challenge.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You’re amazing Dr. Michelle. Everybody out there, again, info.gmoscience@gmail or drmichelleperro.com. You’re amazing, can’t wait to hook up with you again in the very near future I hope. And also have you back if you’ve got the time and care to share more and join your community. I can’t wait till you launch that new program. It’s gonna be amazing, like everything else that you do. Thank you.

Michelle Perro, MD, DHOM

Thank you, Robby. Anytime.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Hey everybody, it’s Robby Besner thanks so much for joining us today. Please share this content with anyone that you think might benefit from it. And we’re looking forward to having you with us tomorrow for another great interview.