Allergy vs Mycotoxin response and the place of Low dose Immunotherapy

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Hello good afternoon welcome to another episode of mycotoxins in chronic illness today, we’re gonna have a great conversation with Ty Vincent. Ty is a Doctor of Osteopathy who graduated in 2005 and since 2014, he’s been doing some really exciting work with allergies and something he has developed called LDI. I’m gonna let him talk to you about it, but I can tell you it is a technique that has revolutionized my practice and I find it very, very helpful. And Ty yeah, so tell us what is LDI.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

LDI stands for Low Dose Immunotherapy, which is an adaptation of a couple of previous therapies systems the first being EPD or Enzyme Potentially Desensitization developed by Lynn McEwen in London, back in the 1960 timeframe, and then adapted in America to what was called LDA or low dose allergy therapy by Dr. Bush Schrader 1990s. I learned LDA from Dr. Schrader in 2008 and used it for allergies and they had a narrow number of auto-immune conditions they had antigens for at that time as well. So after I learned that, I thought that there was a much broader application for the treatment conceptually and I started finding other conditions and things I could treat by adapting new antigens, developing new antigens for new conditions, drawing correlations between well known and described autoimmune syndromes or chronic inflammatory conditions and the antigen that seemed to underlie the immune response to them. 

And over the years, since then, about 2009, I started first developing my own antigens. I have about a hundred different things now for a wide array of autoimmune and inflammatory problems and allergies. I made my own allergy mixtures since then in the last few years for environmental, chemical, foods, essential oils, artificial colors, just a whole host of things, pretty much anything a person reacts to in a negative way that causes symptoms. If I get a sample of that thing, we can potentially desensitize them or restore immune tolerance for the thing. And the exciting area is in the area of internal organisms that live within our microbiome that end up setting off autoimmune syndromes or chronic inflammatory problems that are becoming increasingly common. And then anything else in the outside world, that’s an allergen that people react to. You can presumably restore tolerance to anything that exhibits a kind of reaction pattern.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, first of all, I just wanna thank you so much for the work you did. I consider streamlining LDA because I used to use LDA, but not often because I’m just not that kind of person who’s gonna tell people to live such a restricted life even for three days. So I quickly was being playing fast and loose with it but what you have done is taken concepts that people were there was a doctor from New Zealand who was doing some work with injections and extracts and things like this back in the eighties and nineties, but it was so complicated that unless you made it, your life’s work, you couldn’t do it. And what you have done is given us in the field, this tool to use in such a delightful, easy manner. I mean, you’ve taken away a lot of the bells and whistles I’d say, that don’t seem to be necessary and made LDA a much more LDI, a much more user-friendly tool.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

That’s true I found that LDA carried with it a lot of dogma that had been brought down from the EPD decades with Dr.Maques And some beliefs and dogmatic feelings he had about things that I challenged one by one by breaking the rules and seeing if you still got the same results. So if you still get the same results without following the diet and the lifestyle avoidance and using the beta glucuronidase enzyme and all those things, if you get the same results without all that, then those things don’t matter. And you said that the LDA and EPD protocols were so restrictive and so draconian, I used to follow them myself with some of my children to treat their allergies and we all hated it. I did it with them out of solidarity. 

And I was really glad when some of my patients began breaking the rules and telling me that they didn’t follow the diet and it worked for it anyway and I was like, oh God thank you that’s overrating Further and further away from it and I proceeded from there to challenge every one of the rules that the dogma that had been handed down on LDA. And really the only thing in the world of LDA that holds true is that if you overdose someone have a negative response, or if you have the correct dose that you found, you have to wait seven weeks to reset the immune response and give that dose again, or give a weaker dose again, that seven week rule is pretty much the only thing that I still find valid from all of the dogman.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Good, thank you for that, I was gonna ask you that question because I’ve played fast and loose with all these things. And I was just the other day I was wondering, hmm, that seven week rule of, if you get the right response, do you really have to wait since you’ve made it? So, we were feeling very comfortable if there’s no response going, moving on within a week or two.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Right away, correct ’cause it didn’t react.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

It did right.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

If the dose has no effect, it didn’t count like literally mathematically was irrelevant, so why wait? You don’t have to wait, but if you have a response and you do affect the immune system, then the seven week concept comes into play. However, now we’re getting way ahead of the discussion but if somebody has a positive response that is short, like it only lasts a month instead of the full seven weeks, you can give them a proportionally, smaller fractional booster dose I call it within the seven week timeframe and you can get away with that, but you can’t usually give them the whole dose again early because it will be additive. Any doses you give within a seven week timeframe are cumulative. They are mathematically additive to one another. And that’s a concept that I developed because like the old LDA dogma was, you have to just wait. 

Even if the dose didn’t do anything you have to wait a whole seven weeks. And that’s just not true, it’s more of a calculus based. They viewed it as a single point in time event that was a high amplitude and close. But really what you’re dealing with is antigen, immune response patterns that are cumulative and incremental and they follow more of a calculus-based area under the curve concept and a certain rate of attrition and a certain rate of accumulation. And I’m a big math nerd so it makes total sense to me, other people find it difficult to conceptualize, but I’m like, look, they all add up both ways within a seven framework. 

So as long as you think about it that way you can incrementally add to what you’re doing and you could conceivably, this is where a lot of people ask what’s the difference between LDI and homeopathy. It’s a very common question ’cause we’re clearly in the homeopathic range with our dilutions, but the rules of engagement, the way I use this therapy is just totally different from homeopathy. If you found the perfect dose for someone that lasted 50 days, each time they took it with a hundred percent response, you could give them one 50th of that dose every single day and maintain that achieve the same level of response. You would hit a steady state as you would accomplish the same thing. So traditional homeopathy is like a daily or multiple times a day dosing and whatnot and you could conceivably use it that way if you want it, but why would take something every day if you can take it once every 50 days?

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yeah well, I think I realized that I just had a wonderful time, but for our listeners out there, we’ll go back and try to fill in the details of how we got here. So how do you use LDI for chronic illnesses? I mean, especially the chronic, basically the chronic illnesses line, but it’s gonna focus on mold and differentiating between the mycotoxins and the mold allergies and we’ll spin from there.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Well again, like we talked about at the beginning, LDI only works for things that are immunologically immediate. So mold is a complicated topic because some of the mold related illnesses people deal with chronically are toxic. It’s a toxin mediated effect, not necessarily immune mediated. And then a lot of those people have both and it’s confusing for the patient and the practitioner to try to figure out which one they’re dealing with, especially when the person has both. So what I tell people is, the toxin mediated part of their illness should be fairly static. Like their symptoms should be fairly consistent, day-to-day they don’t change based on where you go. 

Like, if you go on vacation to the beach for a week, you should still feel like hell the same as you did when you were at home pretty much, it doesn’t tend to fluctuate a lot based on that day’s exposure, right? Whereas the mold allergy part, the mold immune reaction part will change dramatically based on exposure. So those people get out if their home is where they’re being exposed to mold or their workplace, if they just leave that place for a week, they’ll feel markedly better. They might not feel normal ’cause there may be more than one thing going on, but then when they get re-exposed back in that same environment or a new mold exposure, like they go to a bar, thrift store is one of my favorite mold exposure.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Or old book stores.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Oh yeah I’m like, I don’t wanna find mold to go to a thrift store. There’s like old couches and clothing and books and any kind of textile and material that mold will grow on is in there and it’s a cornucopia of mold species in all cases. So when you go into a place like that and you rapidly experience symptoms, so the timescale is really the clue. You feel symptoms come on within minutes of entry, and then you leave and your symptoms dissipate over the next hour or two, but that day, then that’s an immune mediated response reaction not a toxic so I have to guide people through that. I’m like, there’s your baseline I feel terrible all the time stuff, which may or may not respond that may require long-term mycotoxin elimination to get rid of that part, right. And then there’s the amplitude, up and down off and on, based on the exposure part that is clearly immune driven. And that’s the part we can get rid of with low dose immunotherapy.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Right, what makes me what’s interesting is that dance, that can be there between the classical IDE mediated immune response to mold and the fact that, when we used to do skin testing, we would see mold pathogens often react in day two and three rather than a day one.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

It’s not an IGE.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yeah so it’s not IGE.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

No mold is kinda unique that way. So you can, and I have to explain this to a lot of people when they’ve had skin testing done, like you said, skin prick testing, and they say well, I didn’t react to mold. I said, is there any chance that you remember the day after your test or the second day after your test, those spots got red and itchy then, and they’re not even back in the office then and the doctor doesn’t catch it, right. And they go, yeah I did. I had some of those that got itchy later, like mold classically will exhibit a delayed type hypersensitivity response, like tuberculosis, TB tests you read 48 hours later because it’s a micro bacteria. It has that fungal type of cell wall molecule that causes delayed type hypersensitivity responses, same thing. And so that’s pretty common and that makes it a little tricky to identify some of your mold allergic patients, because they don’t have symptoms within minutes of exposure. 

So it can be a challenging area. And whenever we’re in doubt, one of the nice things about LDI is we can give you all the antigens in the world that you don’t react to and nothing happens. It gets completely safe to give you something you don’t need which is different from pharmaceuticals, right? You give somebody a bunch of drugs they don’t need, you have problems to contend with from that. But without it, you’re just giving somebody a signal to reveal a restored tolerance to the immune system and if you already tolerate that thing, it’s a net zero response. So there’s no harm in trying it, if you wonder if it’s there.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yeah that is one of the great positives of LDI is that so many other times, when we in the idea or trial of therapy the trial can have untoward side effects, but the nice thing with LDI. Yeah, I mean I always try to explain that to people ’cause some of them, especially when we use the lime con, the lot they go, oh my God, I’m gonna blow up. Then I said well only if this is your issue, they’re afraid to take the five antigen mix.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Right and then if you do have a negative response, you just learned something critically important. Like that is your antigen, so that if people do have a negative response, it’s sort of like doing the prick test in the allergist office, we’re gonna prick you in the skin and if it swells up and gets red and itchy, that’s the one that you need, that’s the one you react to. In this case, though, the negative reaction is a systemic inflammatory response that is unpleasant. So, those of us who use LDI, we try to get where we think the patient might respond in terms of dilution range on start somewhere weaker than that titrate towards it. So you try not to overdose people early on, but when people are mysteries, like I have a number of chronically ill people with a lot of the typical symptoms that you could check off boxes on either of the mycotoxins the mold list or the line list to the fibromyalgia questionnaire, three toxins There’s a hundred things that could be a lot of times now I just give them a strong concentrated LDI dose of like five things at a time, just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And see if any of them make you worse, right. It’s sort of like doing that prick test on the back. And when people get a little tired of everything taking so long to figure out sometimes that’s the appealing course to take.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yes now, I think that’s really useful because it’s, yeah. If we do things one at a time when we have 20 choices, it will take a very long time. So where do you use LDI for obviously allergies, but what makes you so interesting is how you’ve applied this to chronic inflammatory illnesses of all sorts and types and what was just a little background on it. I mean, what were the first illnesses that you played with.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

The first thing So the first mixture of organisms I put together myself was yeast candida, because I saw person after person, after person. And the majority of them were middle-aged women. Like a lot of people who developed some kind of yeast problem it sounds like right. All these indicators so I get vaginitis if I eat sugar. Every time I take antibiotics, I get all these symptoms I get thrush. They have irritable bowel symptoms, they have fibromyalgia symptoms, just everything from head to toe, you can imagine that’s inflammatory. And then I would give them fluconazole and nystatin, antifungals and their symptoms might go away entirely or go away 80%. And they would stay on the antifungals for weeks and then stop them. And their symptoms would just come right back, generally within 48 to 72 hours, almost without fail, their symptoms would be back in full force and in the world of integrative medicine and alternative medicine, the dogma there, the belief is that, oh, well the yeast is just hiding and waiting for an opportunity to re-emerge. 

We have this kind of anthropomorphization thing we do with microorganisms and I don’t think it’s valid. I think those are fairy tales. So based on all of my experience working with allergy, my thought process was well what’s happening is we’re suppressing the antigen exposure. And then when we allow the antigen to regain its prior numbers and you get antigen re-exposure you get a return of symptoms because it happens so fast. And so then I thought well, then that’s an immune response. All these people who are dealing with these chronic symptoms that seem to be used are associated. And so I purchased some candida organisms and put them together and made my own serial dilution and that’s the first one I tried using it. Every one of those people who fit that pattern, I described responders. 

They stopped getting all their chronic symptoms. I no longer had to give them antifungals either. So it wasn’t that they had these overgrowth or infection, it was that they had a yeast sensitivity. And if you think about it, it doesn’t take very much for the body to develop that sensitivity pattern because yeast lives inside all of us all the time. And this is very similar to mold, right? Everyone’s exposed to mold all the time, no matter what you try to do, it’s everywhere. It’s ubiquitous, indoor and outdoor environments. So those kinds of things that are fungal in nature, they don’t have a place in the human biome. It’s pretty easy to develop hypersensitivity patterns. And yeast is an internal organism that is also a pathogen like if you become immunosuppressed, you get horrible use of aids patients. Yeah they all have to take chronic antifungal suppression, or they will die from yeast. 

So we have a very tenuous relationship with yeast in our body. And I find that still to this day, 12 years later, that is the most common microorganism LDI that people have problems with. So that was the first and then from there, I started playing with some of my… I had some inflammatory bowel patients, and I got a mycobacterium mixture that started was working for a portion of those people with Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis research shows there’s a connection with mycobacteria in the gut, and then some of them would respond to yeast also. So the next thing that I stepped into then was what I call autologous LDI, this was probably 2010. And inflammatory bowel people were the first people I tried that in because clearly they’re reacting to something that lives in their own GI tract. 

They hadn’t responded to the yeast or the mycobacteria mixture. So I would just take a sample of their own stool and dilute it and sterilize it with a Millipore filter. It’s a pretty simple procedure. And then give them an LDI dilution of their, and this is what I started to call it LDI I think or I called it an autologous LDA then proprietary term. So then they had some early cases with Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis that responded miraculously to desensitization using their own stool. Oh, I’ve really hit on something and it actually was still 2009 ’cause in 2009, I started lecturing about this concept for the environmental medicine academy. And after I spoke about it for the first time, people were just completely blown away just at the idea, the concept, no one would try it. Yeah, it’s amazing and anyone can do it. And it’s really simple and cheap and yes, there’s a whole world of possibility here with chronically ill people.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

You mean with a 10 dollar machine that’s all.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Yeah right you just don’t need anything, but bottles of water and syringes, it’s super easy. And so I was really just dumbfounded why more people wanted to pick this up and so I had to develop a lot of these things by my own over the ensuing years. And then now I have just dozens and dozens and dozens of antigens, and some of them to this day have shown no applicability for anything but that’s what you do. You try it and see and a lot of the chronically ill people that you see a lot of our colleagues see that are mysterious and you throw 20 therapies at them And none of them work I get those people too. And we just try groups of antigens at a time and see if any of them have a response and many of them they’d still don’t. So there’s still antigens to be discovered out there.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, there are still, it’s sometimes maybe there’s something else that has the foot on the accelerator of the immune system that’s making it so irritable. I mean, who knows? I mean, ’cause basically what I say is most of our patients have problems with modulating, their immune responses, scope can come from different things. So you kinda answered it but I guess when we think about who would be your ideal candidate for LDI.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

LDI, the ideal candidate is somebody who knows exactly what they react to. So I don’t have to figure it out, right. I get a lot of corn allergy people. So corn allergy is becoming extremely prevalent and people who become reactive to corn, have a very, very difficult time avoiding it because they begin to cross-react with all kinds of other food items that have corn residues in them, corn derivatives and processed with chemicals, chemicals that are made from corn products. And so I have a lot of new corn allergy people because somebody on the corn allergy support groups online posted our videos so I get them a lot. They’re my favorite people to work with because we know exactly what they react to, they respond beautifully, So, but if somebody is allergic to cats, it’s just as easy, right? I have other things like chronic, some chronic immune mediated things where the antigen is very obvious are super fun and easy to like, sarcoidosis responds to mycobacteria, psoriasis responds to skin fungi, a fixture that I developed several years ago. 

Some of these things there’s almost a one-to-one correlation between the disease entity and the antigen osteoarthritis is actually one of my favorite things because I developed a college in mixture that works for that. So when it’s a discreet, very well-described condition, and I know that there’s a likely antigen or just a few of them to choose from, those are the most fun, super fun. I don’t have to think about it anymore because I already know what’s gonna play out. And then there are the people that have complicated chronic illness problems with all these symptoms and it’s just completely unclear what’s going on. And we don’t even know if they have an immune mediated cause, right. 

They could have mold toxicity, they could have… They could have heavy metals toxicity. They could have kinds of hormonal abnormalities, which I no longer manage for people. And then those cases nowadays, I’m like look, I don’t wanna waste a lot of your time and money on this if we really wanna find out if LDI is even gonna work for you, we just throw collections of things at them in larger clusters and I have this more efficient manner now where I deal with those people, ’cause I would take literally three years with those patients to try to rule out all the antigens we had available one by one from a safe dilution point. And now my… Because I’ve worked with so many of them and the success rate I have is about 50% with that crowd, your fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue—

Eric Gordon, M.D.

I think 50% In my book is, I mean, very respectable. One of the things I have a lot of trouble with is all the people who sometimes I’ve spoken to and I meet who, think they do 80, 90% with this crowd and I don’t believe it. You just don’t, yeah. Is that what it is that maybe you screen really well, so you get the ones who fit your paradigm anyway ’cause these are difficult, they are easy to solve, they wouldn’t be showing up. But so that’s—

Ty Vincent, M.D.

A lot of them come with a lot of mind, body damage that is caused by the chronic illness. And there’s so many layers to that that are in the way of their healing process and that’s not something that’s easy to deal with at all. And I get some of those people that you just wonder like, ah, this really seems like it should work and some of them are resistant to trying the doses the way I want them to. And they insist that their dose has made them worse and they have to try a weaker dose. And I really don’t think the dose made them worse based on the data we have, but we go along with it and then they just think everything makes them worse because they’re so sick at baseline, right. And they have this intense fear of their illness getting worse and they have a history of 20 other therapies failing them. So they have no optimism whatsoever and it’s a setup for failure. And with a lot of those people, I’m left wondering if LDI might have worked for them, if I would have been able to do it my way.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

But the immune system is that the brain controls the immune system and the limbic system kinda controls the brain. It’s hard to get that higher level of awareness to being in control. The reptilian brain wins most of the time and takes a lot of practice to be able to suffer and still learn something new. You really, not many of us can learn how to swim when we’re drowning. So that’s what chronic illness often does to people; it leaves them in that state of panic. And it’s just hard I mean, my heart goes out because especially in this day and age, if you don’t have a diagnosis so many times your family begins to doubt that you’re even ill. If you don’t have one, that’s so hard.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

That’s part of the psychological, mind, body, layers that are, people don’t have a good support system socially and at home. And it’s just the people that are in those situations are their success rate, my success rate with them is substantially less than 50%. And then you get people that are just super troopers who no matter how horrible everything’s been for them, they’re like yeah, let’s try it. I know the right thing will be around the corner if this doesn’t work, I’ll find something else, and that’s a winning attitude. It doesn’t, still doesn’t always work, but at least their mindset isn’t one of the barriers.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, but I always like to digress too far from the LDI, but I always want to remind people that so much of this is bread in your bones. I mean, because like people who are, athletes and warriors by nature tend to think that they are special and they are special, but they didn’t get there because they did it to themselves. It’s sort of like rich kids who start successful businesses. If you start with the first million dollars, it’s not so hard. And that is the thing that people have to understand is that their optimistic mood, that optimistic stance in life is something that is probably about 80%, nature and you can nurture it, but it’s yeah. So just, I always cause the people who are really depressed, sometimes they take it on and it’s the cards you were dealt now there’s still that place to shift, but it’s a lot harder than for those of us who come in with an optimistic attitude, it’s so just remember that when you’re doing well it’s not all you.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Exactly now I am with LDI, unlike any other therapy I’ve ever used, honestly, and I’ve used all kinds of things inoculating hyperbaric oxygen. I learned acupuncture actually a Reiki master level, but particularly all kinds of things I’ve done in medicine. With LDI it depends, the success depends so much on the patient and their understanding of what’s going on and their ability to evaluate any possible change and symptoms and communicate it back to me effectively. And that’s a big deal. So all of us, it’s hard. All the decisions I make are based completely on the information I get from the patient. 

And I don’t have laboratory data or objective things to go by in most cases, sometimes we treat Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, you can follow a TPO antibody. You don’t even have to ask the patient how they’re feeling there are occasional things like that. But in most cases I rely on the patient and they need to have a functioning brain. And a lot of our patients have so much brain fog and distortion and everything that they just don’t even know if something changed or not. And it makes it very hard. But the relationship I have to have with people and their involvement in this therapy makes it very different from everything we’ve used before and the success is highly dependent on the patient. It’s not all about me or me figuring things out or giving them the right thing. It’s a relationship for sure it’s very different.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, now and the details. I know I would be a bad LDI patient ‘ cause yeah, I’m one of those folks that would be like, how did you feel yesterday? Yeah it’s gone.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Yeah well, as they write it down, I have type one diabetes and I’ve been trying for seven years to find an antigen that works for my auto-immune disease syndrome. I have my type one diabetes is not an immune disorder. I have a GAD 65 antibody. I’ve tried the GAD 65 protein itself and that hasn’t worked, nothing’s worked consistently, so I’ve tried and failed with my own auto-immune disease for years now. And I have total compassion for people when we try everything we have and it hasn’t worked. I’m like, yeah I get it. You just have to keep coming up with new things.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

With new ideas, yeah. So just wanna get back to a few things around mold and mycotoxicosis but the thyroid issue, Hashimoto’s is so ubiquitous these days. I mean, like it’s, to be honest, I sometimes don’t even think of, other than treating, making sure your hormone levels are good and they’re not eating too much wheat, the obvious things. But honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it, so what’s in your Hashimoto’s LDI?

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Well, we don’t have one labeled specifically for that. What I’ve found the antigen that most commonly works is Yersinia. So the gut bacteria Yersinia, and I don’t know why, but there’s the molecular mimicry there I guess I would say that that has only worked 40 to 50% of the time. And then I’ve had some people who have responded it seems like to a broader collection of gut bacteria. I’ve tried H pylori, maybe a couple of people on at H pylori. Now we’ve put Yersinia, H pylori and a bunch of Campylobacter plustadia about a dozen different genera of gut bacteria. We’ve put it together into one compilation we just called GI. And so now we just use that. So I don’t know which one it is. It’s a lot more efficient. And then gluten, you have to wonder if gluten is the answer for some of those people. 

So, like I was saying, you can check TPO antibodies, and I’ve had people with TPO antibodies greater than 600 and give them the gut bacteria and it drops down to like 400. and then we give them a 0.5 C stronger dilution drop to 200, and you just have to space them out about once a month or so and do labs 10 to 14 days after. And you can prove that it’s working, the catch though, is that some people have had Hashimoto’s for a long time. Their thyroid is damaged irreversibly, and they’re still dependent on thyroid hormone if you get rid of their autoimmune disease, right. So it’s not the most fun condition to treat, because it doesn’t, in most cases even if you’re successful, they’re not gonna be free of taking the thyroid hormone. 

No, I have to take thyroid hormone and I don’t have Hashimoto’s. So it’s one of those things that isn’t the most fun to treat, but if you get somebody early, right, they’ve only been diagnosed within the last couple of years, you can get them off of thyroid. Like, I have had a couple people in that scenario where we got the immune process to stop, and then they no longer need to take thyroid hormone. So it depends on where you catch them.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Right, so this is, I mean we can talk about all the applications for LDI. they’re just amazing. And so when you’re using it, but I mean, like in the mold world, you have the idea, at this point you don’t have the mycotoxin antigens to use, but you have a feeling that you can use just your mold package, so to speak. So tell me a little about the thought behind that.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Well like we were talking about prior to the recording, whether or not some of these people who have mycotoxin and related illness, whether the mechanism is not necessarily direct toxicity, whether it is immune response to the mycotoxicosis, because you can have an immune reaction to anything, right. And so to date, what we’ve had in our environmental mixture within the mold subset is just, I think I have about 50 or 60 different species of mold that are in there, and it’s the whole organism. So you purchase whole organism mold antigens, and theoretically, there are mycotoxins within that, right. They make them internally and release them into the air. And so there might be mycotoxins in there, but maybe they’re not in there at the right dilution or enough of a representation for it to work. 

So it’s theoretically possible that some of the people who don’t respond are having an immune reaction to a mycotoxin and then what you need to do to validate that theory is get a sample of mycotoxins and you know exactly how concentrated it is, and you can titrate it and use it for those people and see if some of them respond. And it will be really interesting to find that out if we get some mycotoxin samples, one of the ideas I’ve had for practitioners who suspect this is to maybe to just use the patient’s urine, because we harvest mycotoxins from human urine, whatever mycotoxins are in, you are probably coming out in your urine and maybe you just get a urine sample and dilute it, 2C, C3 ’cause it’s already pretty diluted and see if they respond to it, right. That would be, yeah, you could get a Theoretically that should work and that’s what I’ve other practitioners have asked me about this over the years. And I’m like, well just use urine because you know the mycotoxins are there you can measure them. And if you want it to be super anal about it, you could find the concentration of the mycotoxins in their urine and know exactly what your dilution factor is when you diluted further from there. But that’s not important, yeah.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

That makes me think that funny things come and go, but there was a period of time when we were doing a fair amount of urine homo toxicology, just like me injecting a CC of urine after you filtered it and threw a little ozone in there. And, every once in a while, people would have some major immune reactions. I Wonder why

Ty Vincent, M.D.

We get better or worse. There’s an old ethic technique where the people just put 10 drops of their own urine straight under their tongue. And, I’ve had some patients I’ve had have tried that and they go, oh my God, I got so sick I did that and I was sick for two weeks and couldn’t get out of bed and I’m like, oh, great. Then we should just take your urine and diluted 3C, try it from there and maybe it’ll reverse all of this. Because the thing about LDI is as long as you have the antigen, you can fix the problem, right? You don’t necessarily have to know what it is that was where my concept of autologous LDI came in. I was like, I don’t have to know which organism in your gut, flora is the problem. As long, I get a sample of your poop it’s presumably there. 

And what I’ve learned since then, why autologous LDI has a substantial failure rate is that if you have a really strong immune response to an organism it won’t be there your immune system kills it. And so you get a stool sample from the patient and the thing they reacted to all the way through their gut isn’t represented. And so what I’ve found is that using my standardized mixtures of all these things that I have, I do that first because if I have the right organism there, that’s gonna work. And sometimes using their own autologous sample won’t because they’ve annihilated the antigen.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

That’s good to hear since making an autologous stool LDI is something I try not to ask the staff if they are not happy.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

My wife won’t do it. Actually, what I should say is she can’t do it. She has tried to process people’s samples and ended up vomiting and bailing out. And then, I was on a vacation once and she tried really hard to do it because there was a colleague of mine from the environmental medicine academy who picked up some kind of gut bug in Peru that almost killed him. He was on IV replacement, having deep diarrhea, every 30 minutes 24 hours a day for weeks. And he was on death’s door and he responded when I got home and I diluted his stool and we sent it to him, he’s essentially cured, but he was gonna die from that. And my wife really, really tried to save him but she couldn’t do it.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yes, well gastroenterology won’t be her field, but so, basically, so your whole concept of immune modulation has really, I mean, how has this changed how you look at standard medicine?

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Oh God, well I’m a family doctor from my basic training, And I learned endoscopy. I was credentialed to do colonoscopies NIDG and managed my own ICU patients. I delivered babies. I delivered my last four kids myself at home. I’ve done something, acupuncture. I’ve done everything in medicine. And there are a lot of conditions out there that we are just taught are idiopathic. If they’re being honest, they’ll say they’re idiopathic. We have no idea why these things happen. But there are a lot of things that are chronic conditions and we make up stories about them like osteoarthritis, osteoarthritis, mechanical wear and tear. Well, how come some people can run marathons until they’re 90 years old and their knees are still fine. And then other people need knee replacements at age 35. Like it’s not wear and tear. 

There are things like acne, which we are led to believe is just an infection in your face, but it’s a bacterium that everyone carries. It’s not an unusual organism. So we can get rid of acne in most cases, by desensitizing people to propionibacterium acnes , the bacteria that everybody carries, we can fix osteoarthritis by desensitizing you to type two collagen. So osteoarthritis is truly an auto-immune process because it is an inherent reaction to your own protein. Whereas almost every other autoimmune disease is not an autoimmune disease. It’s an immune reaction to a microorganism and I can prove that with many of them. 

So my use of this therapy over a decade now has completely changed the way I look at many chronic illnesses. And I try to explain my paradigm in my thought process to people and it’s really for it. Like you have worked with this yourself and understand it for your you’ve listened to me rant about things more than once so you get it. But a lot of, most of our colleagues that are raised in an allopathic world, they’re just completely happy with believing that these things just happen and we don’t know why, and you just manage it symptomatically or at worst, you derail the person’s immune system entirely. Like if you watch commercial TV every 20 minutes, there’s for some biologic, TNF or interleukin inhibitor, that’ll destroy your immune response and leave you like defense lists might clear up

Eric Gordon, M.D.

But, this is just, it’s the model, some immunologists and rheumatologists have been writing, for the last 12, 15 years now that autoimmune disease is secondary to infection, chronic infection, but they are a minority. And most people don’t listen to them because of all the pharmaceutical research and all the research money, people always want evidence based research. That’s the whole big thing. And I call it evidence bought research ’cause at this point in time, it’s so expensive only if you can afford it, can you do it? And if you’re not selling a drug, you can’t afford to do it in the desire to protect us. 

The FDA has made the requirements for testing things so expensive that you have to be a pharmaceutical company to afford to do it. And you can’t, they won’t let you test things in universities and small little settings if you don’t have an IND the investigational new drug, you can’t, they won’t even test the stuff. So anyway, but mark my words—

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Do you go through a hundred million dollar testing, research, development process? You have to sell your drug at $10,000 a month, or you’re not going to make a profit.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Oh yeah, you’re not gonna make the kind of profits that they wanna make but so again, so that is the revolutionary piece is what you’re doing is demonstrating what people are thinking. They’re theoretical concepts, that the bugs are triggering our immune system and it’s not this like failed ability to recognize cells. which I think is totally both them, 90% focus there might be a little bit to that.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

It feeds into the molecular mimicry concept here, the tie in, and the best example we have is rheumatic fever. Like if I talk to a doctor and they seem to think that I’m crazy for suggesting that an auto-immune disease could be caused by an immune response to a microorganism they’re like that doesn’t make sense. Have you heard of rheumatic fever? Like I know you have, so that’s streptococcus pyogenes in the throat. We know the m protein on the surface of the organism, which is called that for mimicry. And then you can get neurological symptoms, skin, joint, gastrointestinal inflammation, heart valve deformities, every tissue in the body is affected by that. And it’s an immune response to one organism in the throat and you know that, so why is it hard to believe that psoriasis could be a reaction to normal skin fungi living on the surface, and I can go on and on about examples and why, and then it’s baffling to me that they will still just choose not to believe anything I’m saying, okay.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Because I mean, that is human nature. if I know what I know, and don’t try to tell me something new because then I have to rearrange my mind and my mind is well ordered.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

The cognitive dissonance that it causes pain.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yes it is, so just before we go, what anything, I mean you got so many exciting things that you’re doing, but any new things that are really rocking your boat these days?

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Well, I have a new collection, a new antigen collection that I haven’t even told people that I have yet because I like to play with my own toys myself for a while before I share it with the other children. And I also wanna make sure it works with something right before I help people, hey this is worth using, I have a very broad collection of internal molecules. So they’re not microorganisms, but it’s, I call it the neuro-transmitter mixture, but things like dopamine and acetylcholine, orexin, all these like sleep and arousal proteins, things that control appetite and metabolism. So ghrelin and leptin, there are 37 different endogenous molecules in this mixture. I’m in the process of trying it with just all kinds of different things, to see if it does anything for anybody, insomnia, weight management, autism. And so I’ll just have to play with it for a while before I can tell people if it’s worth anything and what it does work for, but I’m hopeful and excited about that. And I so—

Eric Gordon, M.D.

That sounds very exciting ’cause it’s the audit I call it, not just the autonomic like I said the brain’s response to the environment is really what modulates that immune response. The reason your immune system is shooting off is because somewhere it’s thinking something is dangerous. It isn’t. It’s that dangerous signal that tells you that is what gets you to start reacting to stuff ’cause otherwise, we even wouldn’t react to anything or would react to everything. So a little like memory, you need a little cue to remind you to remember? And so, and danger is the best cue the body knows. I mean, it’s people with just how survival, self-defense. So this is very interesting, who knows what these chemicals will do and what they are provoking in us. Cause I mean, we’ve tried—

Ty Vincent, M.D.

It’s an immune response. Yeah if you have an immune tolerance to your own dopamine, you’re not gonna be able to think straight. You’re not gonna be able to regulate your happiness response. Then that could happen. I mean, I’ve used hormones as an LDI dilution for years. Some people respond dramatically to hormones with this immune reaction, you can actually measure anti-estrogen antibodies now. And so we know there’s an immune mechanism against hormones and neuropeptides are not appreciably different they could also be antigens. So hopefully within the next year I’ll be able to let people know that it works for some of the things that I have previously failed to treat successfully.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Well, that is exciting and I said, I’m hoping that we can get more people to try LDI for the mold as we tease out the allergic component. And also just the immune I still think there’s a significant immune reaction that’s happening that delayed hypersensitivity that I feel that LDI can settle down as well. So it’d be really interesting and hopefully we can enlist a few people and get you some antigens, so you can play a little bit and let us know if they work better.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Exactly it’s been one of those theoretical things that I’ve wondered about and haven’t had the tool to test it out just yet. And I’m also currently trying for my own, for my type one diabetes. My mission before I retire someday, is to solve type one diabetes. I kinda have to for myself and then make sure everyone in the world gets that. And I hope the same thing works for everybody that ends up working for me ’cause it’s a disorder that I really don’t think anyone should have to have, but I’m trying some pancreas itself right now, pig, you can purchase pancreas dried fridge dried pancreas from pigs, and cows. And so I’m trying that on myself right now and we’ll see if that works.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Just a 16 gauge needle and a good ultrasound, get a little of your own. But yeah that is a fascinating, another fascinating role. I’m just so glad that you’re using mind in such creative ways, ’cause I mean that’s, what’s missing in medicine is creativity these days, and it’s nice to see you doing it and giving us all a big help. And hopefully we’ll talk maybe in six months or a year and we’ll have something also on, some just to know if direct treatment of mycotoxin, if there is a big enough response, I’d be really excited to find out that there is and another tool is always nice.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

People you can, if you have a large population of these people in your practice you can acquire. If you can acquire the mycotoxin, you can make a dilution and try it there too coz—

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Well I’ll send it to you. Send it back to me that works better. Yeah, I just want to let people know that they can find you at Ty Vincent, is it just TyVincent.com or I forget what your.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Our office is called global immunotherapy. The website, it’s a mouthful but www.globalimmunotherapy.com and if you people’s search my name they’ll probably find it. Thank you to the internet and search engines that are out there today. We also for educational purposes for patients who wanna know more about LDI, if you go on YouTube and you put in type Ty Vincent LDI, we have 40 or so videos there that are all kind of on more discrete topics, one by one, in terms of diseases we can treat or broader concepts with low dose immunotherapy for people to educate themselves.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, that is great. Cause I mean, this is a leap for a lot of people to make, to think that this drop that they can barely see under their tongue is gonna do something. And I can tell you that it does, it’s one of my favorite therapies and ’cause when it works, it’s just beautifully dramatic and changes people’s lives.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

It is Yeah it’s worth a try. That’s what I tell them they’re like, well, is it work for me as I have no idea, I can’t tell you at the beginning and people want statistics, how likely is it to work? Well, if I say 90% likely, and you’re a pessimist, you may decide that 10% failure rate is too much for you. And if I say it’s 90% likely to fail and you’re an optimist, you go up, I’ll take 10% that’s better than Las Vegas odds, right? So statistics are useless. You just have to try it to see if it works and do it efficiently and expeditiously so it doesn’t waste a lot of time and money. That’s my attitude now.

Eric Gordon, M.D.

And that’s the other thing I wanna say is that you do offer it without wasting a lot of people’s time and money which is really special. So thank you again it’s been a pleasure Ty.

Ty Vincent, M.D.

Yeah, more than happy, thanks Eric.