The Animal Approach to Lyme

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Thank you, Robby. It’s such a pleasure to be here, and I’m super-honored that you included the fur world into your series.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Oh my God, everything on the planet started there anyway, and we have so much to learn. That’s why I love talking with you in our friendship, relationship, colleague, back and forth because we’re always sharing the latest hacks and the latest innovations, protocols, and seeing how they, what’s, I see that I, you know, I was getting good results, and you say the same for you, and it’s just nice to share that. One thing that you guys all need to know about Marlene, besides she’s like an amazing speaker, she’s an author. 

She has this really state-of-the-art animal hospital and clinic in the Tampa area. She’ll tell you a little bit more about it, and she started this whole natural food line, and I mean, I’ve gone out to dinner with Marlene multiple times, and she will walk that extra 10 miles to make sure that whatever she’s being served on her plate is organic and the healthiest food you can take in, so I love the fact that you carry your own life pursuit into your applications and your passion with your clinic and so forth. It really shows, so-

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Thank you. Gotta walk the talk.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Marlene, well, you’re so right about that. You know, I see you have a slide up, and you prepared a few things that you’d like to talk about, so I’m actually gonna turn the mic over to you to walk us through some of the things that you’d like to, how you’d like to educate us and the kind of tips that you like to offer, but before that, can you just spend a minute and give us a small, little backdrop as to kinda like how you got passionate in the area that you’re in now?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Oh, I’d be honored to, so like most of us, something happens in our life that knocks us out of our little comfy zone and makes us push into a bigger, better version of who we are, so for me, I’d already been practicing veterinary medicine about 20 years when my daughter was riding one of our show horses, and they were in an accident, and the horse literally saved her life, and it was in my quest to make the horse better that it took me into alternative medicine because when I had equine veterinarians come out to look at the horse, they told me they really weren’t sure what was wrong with her, but they said she would never be safe to be ridden or shown again, and my options were to put her out to a pasture for the rest of her life.

She was seven years old, which is very young, in the peak of her career, or I could put her down, and that was just an unacceptable answer for me. I knew that there had to be something more out there. It just wasn’t in our traditional training, and that’s what took me into alternative medicine to begin with, and in that journey, what I really learned was the biology of the body. 

That’s not how we were taught in veterinary school. We were taught to name it, then we can blame it, and then we can come up with a pharmaceutical or a treatment or a chemo or whatever, but we weren’t really taught to understand the biology of the body. How does it actually work? And it’s the most miraculous thing you could ever imagine, and it has all these built-in pathways and systems and checks and balances, but we throw it off, so when we learn how to live in cooperation with the body and the mechanisms that it already has, and we quit messing it up, we can see miraculous changes, and so that’s been my journey for the past 20 years, and I’m rounding almost 40 years in clinical practice.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, what a quest, and if you ever visited Marlene’s facility, and we’re gonna post like how you can get in touch with her, she’s got a pretty cool website. It’s drmarlenesiegel, spelled S-I-E-G-E-L, .com, and there, when you get on there, you have two choices. You can either look at her food line and that whole channel, or you can go to the hospital site, and any way, whichever direction you go, you’ll be able to get ahold of her, and she’s really someone you need to know, so show us what you got here.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

All right, so let’s talk about Lyme’s in our pet families. We know Lyme’s is transmitted by ticks, and the tick that is most incriminated is the deer tick. It’s also called the bear tick or a black-legged tick, so not all ticks transmit Lyme’s disease, and it’s not the tick itself that is causing the Lyme’s disease. It’s the Borrelia that is transmitted through the tick bite. 

All stages of the tick can transmit disease, so there’s a larva stage, a nymph stage, and the adult phase, and in all of those, when they bite, they transmit this organism, but it does take one to two days to actually transmit and cause disease, so just because the tick jumps, or they don’t jump; they crawl on you, so just because the tick crawls on you or your pet doesn’t mean that you’re going to get Lyme’s disease. It does have to have a transmission time. We know that some of the risk factors are location, location, location, and all states do have reports of Lyme’s disease, but the states that are worst are the Northeast, especially the New England states, Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Coast, but we also see Lyme’s in Europe and Asia. 

The time of the year that it’s worse is the spring, summer, and fall where these guys are breeding and hatching, and it’s most seen when you’re going through tall grasses, thick brush, marshes, and woods because what happens is when you or an animal is walking through that area, you brush against where the tick is hanging out, and then they just crawl right onto you as you brush past them. Now, cats are not infected as often as dogs are, but when they are infected, they have very similar symptoms as a dog, but there are cases where dogs and cats can be infected with Lyme’s, be positive, but show no symptoms. 

The symptoms that we typically see are lameness, swollen joints, swollen lymph nodes, fever, shock, anorexia, which means they’re not eating, being lethargic, they don’t wanna get up and move around, and sometimes we have a history that there’s been exposure to ticks, but just like in people, oftentimes, no one ever sees the tick. When we do standard blood test, they may not show any abnormalities. The kidneys are what are most affected in Lyme’s disease for our animals. Nerves can also be affected. Sometimes we’ll see seizures, and the heart can be infected as well, but it’s not as common. 

In some experiences, we can have chronic lifelong joint pain that is caused by the damage of the bacteria, and just like in people, you have the acute phase and then you have the chronic phase. The best treatment is actually prevention. If you can, avoid the areas that are infested, but that’s not always possible. You want to inspect your animals every day. They make these special little flea combs, and they have really fine teeth, and you wanna go through their coat every day if you are in an area where you have ticks, and look between the toes, look around the lips, around the eyes, around the ears and inside the ears, around the rectal area, and especially under the tail. 

Now, I, as a holistic veterinarian, an integrated veterinarian, I try to minimize the amount of toxins that we’re exposed to, but I think that if you are in a high-risk area for fleas, ticks, that you have to weigh your pros and your cons. You have to pick your lesser of the evils, and this is where I think using some of the veterinary-approved flea and tick preparations are really valuable and worth it because I’d rather deal with a little bit of the insecticide and prevent Lyme’s disease, which is way worse. 

Now, a lot of people don’t know how to take a tick off once they find one on their pet, and you don’t wanna grab them with your finger. You wanna take a pair of tweezers, and you wanna grasp the head. There’s reports on the Internet about using heat, and if you can without burning your pet, be able to do that, that’s fine, but you don’t wanna risk getting them lit on fire either. We like to spray them with alcohol, which will cause the tick to release the bite, and then grasp with a pair of tweezers and remove them. I am not a fan of the vaccine. There is a vaccine out there, so I wanted to mention it, but I’m not a fan of it. 

If you are in an area where Lyme’s is really prevalent, talk to your veterinarian, do your homework, and decide if that’s right for you. Let’s go ahead and look at an actual case presentation. This is Smudge. He is a seven-year-old male neutered Chihuahua mix, and before I advance to the next slide, I want you to look over to the right picture, and you’ll see the back of his head is shaved. It’s because he had a spinal tap when he was first brought to the veterinarian up north where they were from. The history and presenting complaints of Smudge was that on Christmas Day in 2020, he became acutely painful in his neck, and I’m talking screaming bloody murder kind of pain. Now, these guys are very often coming down with degenerative disc disease, and so at first, I’m sure the presenting veterinarian thought maybe that’s what they were dealing with, but everything they did to Smudge, he was not getting better, so they did blood work, X-rays. 

They did test for Lyme’s, and they did a spinal tap. His white blood cell count in January was 91,000. Normal is between 4.9 and 17, and usually is more around the five to 8,000 range. 91,000, it’s extraordinarily high, so they treated him with antibiotics and with steroids, and he did get better, and his pain started to subside, and he started to go back to eating again, and in February, the owner started to decrease the steroids, and he had a sudden relapse, and that’s where I came in, so we began our treatments, and then this is the blood work after two weeks of treatment. His white blood cell count was down to 29.9. 

Still had a lot of neutrophils, which are the primary line of defense. This was his blood chemistries. His liver enzymes were elevated and had been elevated for some time. The alkaline phosphatase is an enzyme that comes from the bile ducts that are within the liver, and they were elevated as well, probably from the steroids. We had done a heavy metals panel on him, and we found that he had a lot of heavy metals. In fact, he showed positive for all five heavy metals that we test for. Antimony was the highest. The next was cobalt, and cobalt is actually B12, so I’m not sure where the B12 was coming from, but that was not a bad thing, but of course, we were seeing strontium, mercury, lead, and arsenic, and then, as far as nutrients go, he was really high in copper. 

Again, I don’t know if that was coming from the pipes where they were at and he was drinking tap water. He was extremely low in zinc and was also low in lithium. We did a vitamin-mineral panel on him and found that he was vitamin D deficient. He was eating a processed food diet, had been his whole life, so not surprising that his vitamin D was deficient, but his B12 and magnesium were within normal ranges. This is the test that I think is really important and has so much clinical information. It’s called a VDI panel, and the TK1 is a test that looks for, what we use it for cancer markers, but it also will pick up dysregulation of DNA, so we’ll see that in either cancer cases or in a Lyme’s case where the organism is invading a cell and using that cell to replicate, and then it kills the cell, and that will cause the TK1 to go up as well, and then the CRP down here on the bottom is the C-reactive protein, and that’s an inflammatory test to let us know if there’s a lot of inflammation. 

What was so significant about this number, first of all, it’s off the charts, but this dog was still on steroids, and despite the fact that he already, and still had steroids on board, the inflammation was off the charts, so that was my focus. I knew I wanted to get that inflammation down and get this dog feeling better, so the first thing we did is we used a machine that we have called a magnesphere. They actually make this machine for home use as well, and our goal was to first get him into a parasympathetic state. 

There are two branches of our autonomic nervous system. There’s our sympathetic and our parasympathetic, and our sympathetic is the side where if there is danger, you kick in your sympathetic side so you can run really hard or you can fight really hard, and that’s your short-term survival mechanism, so if danger is about to kill you, you need your sympathetic side to kick in so you can try to save yourself, but the parasympathetic side is where we heal, where we do rest, repair, digestion, and detoxification. These guys live on a teeter-totter from each other, so imagine if they’re imbalanced, they’re right about here, but if you’re in high sympathetic tone because you’re in a lot of pain or you’re very stressed, then your sympathetic side is gonna go up, and your parasympathetic side is going to get turned off. Well, we needed to get this dog into a parasympathetic state so his body had the opportunity to heal. 

We also used ozone. We used our TherAir machine because we wanted to get structured water inside this dog so that he could absorb as much oxygen as possible. We did infrared therapy on him using the Therasage healing pad. This was a daily occurrence, and then, after he was oxygenated with the infrared and the ozone, he went into the hyperbaric chamber, and then we did chiropractic work on him. We used laser to do photohemotherapy. It’s a special technique to release nitric oxide and to improve oxygenation was also used to reduce pain in his body. We did acupuncture, something called assisted lymphatic therapy. 

We know that the liver and the lymph are the two most important organs of detoxification, and this dog was stuck in everything, so we wanted to do lymphatic therapy to not only boost his immune system but also to help remove toxin, and then he went into our ion foot bath, which not only helped him to get relaxed, but it also helped to pull toxins out of his feet. He also shared our salt room so that we could detoxify his lungs and upper respiratory system. We did coffee enemas. We changed him to a raw diet. We supplemented him with vitamin D. We were cleaning the liver using liver sauce and a binder, and of course, the coffee enemas helped with that as well, and then, the silver hydrosol was our natural antibiotic. 

Then we used homotoxicology. We did parent essential oils, which are the fatty acids that make up our cell membrane ’cause I knew this dog was gonna be deficient, and we had him on a vitamin-mineral supplement. After four weeks of therapy, his C-reactive protein was literally normal. We reduced the inflammation, but if you remember what the TK1 was, the TK1 went higher, and that was because the organism was still replicating in cells, causing cell destruction, so I’m sure that’s why the TK1 was going up. This is a long-term disease. This dog was already a chronic Lyme’s victim, and, interestingly enough, the owner also has chronic Lyme’s. Not a surprise. Well, on the left is how Smudge presented to us. 

We were doing a laser treatment on him on the left-hand picture, but you can appreciate that his head is down. He’s depressed. He doesn’t feel good. He was painful. He didn’t want to eat. He had a fever, and then, after just a few weeks of treatment, on the right-hand side, you can see this is a happy dog again. The owner said that even after the first 24 hours of our therapy, they could also see a huge change in his behavior. He started moving. Throughout the next couple of weeks, he started playing with his toys, something he hadn’t done in a long time, so he is not going to be free of this disease for a long time. He’s going to need some chronic therapy. 

We encouraged the owners to buy an infrared pad, to buy a hyperbaric machine for home. They can rent one, or they can buy one, and they are actually rather affordable now, so that was our case presentation, and I hope that was valuable to you guys. This is how you can contact me. The drmarlenesiegel.com site is where it is the hub of all the things that I do, and then Pasco Veterinary Medical Center is our hospital. If you would like a free e-book that goes through the six steps of healing that I do with every one of my cases, whether they’re healthy and we wanna keep them healthy or they’re challenged and we want to get them back to being thriving and healthy. 

It’s the holistichealingvet.com, and you can download the free e-book, and what I’m super-excited about and Robby is gonna be a part of this, is our S’Paws Family Wellness Centers, and these are detox centers for people and their pets, so all the things that we did for Smudge, you, as a pet owner, will be able to go and enjoy these therapies with your pet, so we’re super-excited about them launching at the end of 2021, and last, but not least, is diet and nutrition. It is so important. We are what we eat and never more so important than to our pets, and we know that eating processed foods are bad for us, and it is certainly bad for our pets, so sadly, most veterinarians are not trained in nutrition or to understand what good nutrition is. 

I keep it really simple. I try to mimic what they would eat in the wild if we were not intervening. Dogs and cats are carnivores. In the wild, they will kill another animal and eat it in the state that they killed it in, so not to go into that rabbit hole, pun intended, but if you would like more information on species-appropriate diet, I would love to have a deeper conversation with you, and that’s my presentation.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, amazing. Marlene, that was really cool. You know, first off, I appreciate all the things… You know, you guys out there, I just took some notes, and it filled up more than one page from things that you were saying, but many of the modalities and the hacks that you used to help your pet… All right, you switched back, is the things that people… First off, let’s start with the testing. You test the animals just like we’re being tested, blood testing, and all the different ways that you analyze it, and I just love how you intuitively went to the whole piece about inflammation because you saw Lyme and the coinfections not so much as the enemy, but just as an agent in the body that’s creating a full chain of reactions by which it’s creating the disease that the chronic Lyme patient, you guys out there are experiencing, and you see that all through the lens, through the lens of a veterinary, the veterinary lens, and I just think it’s amazing. 

In the beginning, you were talking about how your patient was presenting themselves and about the chronic pain and the anguish the dog was going through, and I know there’s gotta be at least 50% of the Lyme people that are watching today that can sort of relate to the body pain and the movement, but here is this animal that can’t really articulate it like we can, but then again, then we’ve got the Lyme patients. When you try to articulate it to your doctor, they say, “You’re crazy. All your tests seem okay. “Go see a psychiatrist,” so the point being is you’re not-

Marlene Siegel, DVM

That’s what the original veterinarians. Robby, that’s what the original veterinarian said: “Oh, we tested for Lyme’s, and it was negative.” We actually found the Lyme signature on our bioenergetic scan, so we knew it was there. We knew this dog had exposure. Plus, they live in a state where it’s really prevalent. The owner has chronic Lyme’s disease. I mean, how many times do you have to hear hoofbeats to think of horses, not zebras? And in this dog’s case, he was spot on.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, that brought up a question, which we’ll cover in Q and A again, but for those people watching, I’ve always wondered can a pet, like your dog or your cat, transfer if it has Lyme and you don’t, can it actually transfer Lyme to you? Do you have a view on that?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

It is not possible. There is lots of literature out there that supports that. It has to be transmitted through a vector-borne disease process, and it’s not always ticks. There are other transmissions, but ticks are what we usually see in the animal world.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, okay, that’s .

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Yeah-

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Just my heart stopped for one second, but how about this scenario? And I’m not gonna go into a lot of them, but what about like your dog is out foresting, and you took it for a walk, whatever, and it happened to pick up a tick, and now it comes into your home, and now you’re cuddling with it at night and all that stuff. Like, once the tick, I guess if the tick has already sort of implanted into the dog, that’s the new host, and it’s not likely to leave that host and transfer it to you, but if the dog, if it was just on their hair or coat, and they didn’t have a, it didn’t implant, in a sense, right?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

It could easily just hop off your pet onto you, per se, or something like that, right? I mean, that’s-

Marlene Siegel, DVM

absolutely.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

That’s possible, correct?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Absolutely.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, all right, so it’s not 100%, so you still have to, you have to proceed with caution, and I loved how you went into the zones in the country that are prevalent. It’s everywhere. Trust me. It’s everywhere, but there are places that are more concentrated, and that’s where you have to be smart about it, right?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Absolutely, and when we were out riding, we would come back in in the evening, and we scoured ourselves ’cause you know you’re riding out in the brush, and we would have long sleeves on and try to do things to protect ourselves, but there… And it’s gross. Ugh, when you get a tick on you and you find it, it is really disgusting, but remember, as long as you take them off before they become embedded ’cause they have to be there for two days, and that’s why these flea and tick products that you can use on your pet, when the tick embeds, they’re drinking in that toxin, and it’s killing them before, theoretically, they have a chance to actually transmit disease, and the reason you don’t, as a human, want to try to grab them with your fingers is because if you have microcuts on your fingers, and you burst their body, you can get transmission that way as well.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I see. Wow, that makes sense. I’ve always known. Earlier, you were just talking about like using alcohol and the way to, the safest way to get a tick off. My dad was in the Army. This is old school, and he used to tell me that they would take cigarettes, and they’d bring it up close, not to burn their skin, but warm enough to like sort of warm the bun of the backside of the tick, and then the ticks, the head of the tick is almost like an arrow, and so when it goes in, it becomes kind of a bob, and that’s why, when you pull on the tick, you can pull, sever the head from the body, and now you’re letting loose all of these pathogens and different bacterias and so forth, you know? So now, if you take the cigarette, you warm up the butt, and then they close the head up, and then they, ’cause they’re not comfortable, and they sort of back out, that’s when you can grab ’em, right?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Yes.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And I always remember that. I mean, I know it’s probably a household Army thing, but I thought that that was pretty cool. You covered so many modalities that you use in your clinic, but I loved how you segue into the autonomic nervous system and making sure people know because many Lyme patients, they suffer from high anxiety. There’s an emotional crossover, and maybe you probably see it in the vet world also, so by calming the body down, as we’re talking, we can talk about breathing techniques. 

You used TherAir breathing technology, used ozone and hyperbaric. These are all oxygen therapy technologies, biotech, and so because the coinfections and the Lyme is anaerobic, they don’t like oxygen, so that’s a really great remedy to jumpstart the immune system, so I’ve just, you’ve just walked us through acupuncture, essential oils. I mean, heavy metal concentration. These are things that everybody out there can relate to, and it’s really inspiring to know that you can do in clinic to the pet like just in the veterinary world, the animal kingdom, what we’re hoping to try to achieve with us, and you give us a lot of inspiration because all the things you talked about are all the things that we all can do. 

We have control over that, and I believe that you can do it efficiently, inexpensively, and tapping into you, and they can get to you by drmarlenesiegel.com, and then go through your web links and your switchboard and so forth, but you can give everybody out there helpful hints as to do this, and the new clinic, the spa clinic that you’re bringing out, I mean, the very idea that I’m on one side taking care, you’re taking care of me, and my pet is on the other side, and you’re taking care of them, and then we exit the tunnel together happy. It’s an amazing concept, and I know everybody out there wishes you the best of luck with it, so that’s great, Marlene.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

I think that detoxification, it really is going to be the conversation of the future. We have never experienced the level of toxins that we are experiencing today in our civilization, and this is worldwide. We have to start paying more attention to how much pollution we’re causing on our bodies, in our bodies, in the environment, and we also have to be nurturing that biome that lives within us. Here we are talking about kill the parasite and kill the bacteria and kill the virus. Well, actually, we derive more of our functional genes, the genes that actually tell our biochemical pathways what to do from these organisms, so it’s not that the organisms are necessarily bad. It’s that we, as a host, have made our host planet very inhospitable as an environment to have everybody live in harmony. 

When you start getting out of harmony, then we have shifts in who’s going to start taking over the mothership because the mothership is failing. If we start taking care of our planet, our bodies, our pets’ bodies in a sustainable manner and learning how to be empowered to do that, we’re gonna see a massive shift in the entire world, so I kinda like the time right now because I think we needed something to stir things up. We needed something to wake us up, a slap upside of the head that said, “Hey, this is not sustainable “and you can’t keep going in this pathway. “What can you do differently?” And isn’t it amazing that every technology that I showed on there, on that screen, can be purchased for home use, including hyperbaric oxygen, and it’s so affordable now. 

We can get hyperbaric machines for home, super-safe, that are under $7,000. Now, somebody might go, “Wow, $7,000 a lot of money.” Well, not when you think about how much you pay to go someplace and do a few dives ’cause hyperbaric, in particular, you have to do at least 10 dives, and in the case of a Lyme’s patient, oh, probably 30, 40, 50, and an ongoing basis. This is not something that’s gonna go away with 10 treatments and you’re done, so a lot of our chronic inflammation cases, they need a daily routine of getting into a parasympathetic state and then oxygenating their body and then being able to push that oxygen out into the tissue and help the body to work in its best capacity, and isn’t it amazing that instead of buying a lot of clothes or spending money on frivolous things, that yeah, they may be fun, but what’s more important than your health? ‘Cause you’re not gonna have fun when you don’t feel good.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Totally. You know, the whole home hyperbaric thing always intrigued me, and 15 or 20 years ago, when we looked into it, the units for home were much more expensive, almost three times the money that it is now, and they’ve actually made them pretty cool where they’re kinda like sleeping bags, and what’s nice about the home units is that it’s a little bit longer. Like, they don’t dial up the atmospheres, the number, the amount of air pressure as much as the clinical grade, which could be 24 atmospheres. 

The home units are more like four to eight, so people, you have to use them for a longer period of time to get the same effect, but the fact is that you’re home, and you can read while you’re in there, and you can rest while you’re in there, and so many Lyme patients that I know that can afford that therapy, they find, for cognitive improvement, that’s an amazing, oxygen therapy is an amazing therapy, and also, I love the stack that you talked about, about nitric oxide and oxygen. 

That combination, I think, is really amazing because if you can get more oxygen in your blood, that’s gonna be an effective therapy against combating Lyme and building and supporting your own natural immune system, and the best way to get your blood to hold onto oxygen is by the transient gas nitric oxide, so if you supplement with nitric oxide, and you give yourself some ozone or hyperbaric, so that’s the marriage right there, you’re elevating your blood oxygenation level, and you’re helping your body, and you’re hurting that, or creating, I wanna say you’re hurting the enemy, but it’s not really that. You’re actually creating a better balance in your body and your microbiome in all these, the harmony of all the organisms that are going on that somehow got out of whack, that starts to come back into sort of, I guess, homeostasis, in a way, or harmony, like I said.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Yeah, absolutely.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

So when you mentioned about can you get, when we talked about can you get Lyme’s and/or any of the coinfections from your animal transmitted that way, you answered very succinctly. You didn’t even think about it. No, you can’t, but I’m always wondering about carriers, like how you get it ’cause anything, basically, like we talk about vector, but anything blood-borne, I’m always wondering how about a mosquito? If a mosquito was carrying the bacteria and bit somebody and then came over that had it and then came over and bit me, there’s a transfer of fluids. Is it possible? 

And I think it rolls back to what you talked about about inflammation and toxicity and just supporting your immune system because in my view, people have Epstein-Barr. They’ve got pneumonia. They have streptococcus. They’ve got all these different organisms in them, so it’s really about the imbalance when there’s either a suppression of your immune system or some reason there becomes that overgrowth of one side, and then that’s the opportunity for the antagonist to really take advantage, right?

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Absolutely. You know, the first step in my healing program ’cause I have a six-step program, and I hope everybody takes advantage and downloads the program ’cause it’s really awesome. The first step is stop polluting the body. Now, that sounds simple, but one, you have to look at food. Are you eating a species-appropriate diet? And a species-appropriate diet would not include processed foods, high-fructose corn syrup, and for our pets, they weren’t eating kibble, and they weren’t eating canned food that was loaded with all kinds of hormones, chemicals, and pesticides, so we have to look at food, number one, and then water, number two. 

Most of the water that people are drinking today is dead water, and it’s loaded with all kinds of hormones, chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals, glyphosate, and if they are drinking better water themselves, they’re not thinking about that when they put that water down for their pet, and so often, people go, “Oh, I didn’t think about that,” right? But they’re thinking about it for themselves, and PS, water from your refrigerator is not structured water, so you need to get some great filtration system. 

I love the one that you have when I travel because now I have a way to take something with me and still have structured water. Now, I will give you a little biohack. For you guys who don’t have structured water in your house, you can take some organic fruits or vegetables and put them into your water, and the water that’s in that organic fruit and vegetable will actually share its structured water with the water around it, so that’s a good little hack, but you also wanna drink water that is highly filtered, that has minerals, that’s living water, and that’s so, so important ’cause we’re made up of 70% water, as is our pets, so this is Echo, everybody. Say hello, and so that would be number two is make sure that the water that you’re drinking and showering in and cooking in is a very high-quality water. The next area we talk about is the environment-

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me stop, let me stop you for one second.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Okay.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

It’s really interesting. You flipped it because, generally speaking, people will spend a billion dollars on their pets to give them all the best foods, to do all that stuff, the best water, the best everything, and meanwhile, they’re like running off to McDonald’s or just like, not that there’s anything wrong with McDonald’s.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

There is.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

They’re just, but I’m not, I’m not coming from a place of judgment here. The point I’m making is they, it’s like they, their brain gets like almost like there’s no cohesion between the left and the right side. They’ll treat their pets with loving care, but yet they don’t think about the same things for themselves, which makes no sense to me. You went the other way: that I’m drinking bad water, and now I’m gonna feed my pet that bad water, which really makes way sense because now you’re treating your pet the same way when you don’t realize that that water really affects the pet. The food that you’re giving, they’re not designed to eat, let’s say, high-processed food that people eat, which we’re not designed for anyway, but certainly, for a pet that’s used to, like you said earlier, they would kill a fresh prey in the wild, and they eat it right away. That’s a whole natural process that we seem to forget about because we’re so intellectual or we’re so domesticated, so-

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Well, let me clarify ’cause you brought up a great point. People will do things for their pets that they won’t do for themselves, absolutely. The only reason why pet owners feed processed foods or feed tap water is because no one’s told them any different, right? So it’s really just out of lack of education. I find the two areas that people fail in the most, number one is education. You know what you know, and you don’t know what you don’t know. We pride ourselves on making sure that we educate people so that they at least can make an educated decision. The second problem, if you will, is implementation, so I have a three-hour online consultation that people can purchase. 

It is incredible amount of information, and when they get done, I always do a 15-minute Q and A with them, make sure they don’t have any questions, but the real value is I help them with implementation, so number one is lack of knowledge, and the number two is getting so much information that you’re overwhelmed, and you don’t know where to start, so you don’t do anything. You just continue with what you were doing.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, yeah, it’s…

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Too many failures.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You’re just a deer, deer frozen in the headlight, and that covers so many areas, like even when you’re not feeling well, but you don’t know what it is, and then you try to go on the Internet, and you kinda zoom around with the symptoms or whatever approach that you’re looking for, and then, bam, you’re just like pages and pages, and then it’s just like you get overwhelmed with information, and that’s really one of the kind of rudimentary reasons for why we’re putting on this whole program for the month of May is to bring people on like you, really talented all-stars that have experienced Lyme in their practice or in their lives and can share with all of us the little tips that you, and the steps that you went through in order for you to find out what the challenge was, get onboard, understand what are the good things and the bad things that you need to adjust in your current life so that you can move back towards that optimal health place again.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Absolutely.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

We all want to be there, but it’s almost like our bodies have lost the GPS, and we’re just out of whack. We don’t know our way home, and that’s why stuff like things that you talk about are so important.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Well, what’s, I think, the main problem is that we’ve gotten so far away from understanding the body’s biology, so I’ll give you an example. We all know vitamin D is critically important, and I had somebody say to me today, “But my dog is out in the sun all the time. “How could he be vitamin D deficient?” Well, vitamin D, in a herbivore, a grass-eating animal, they synthesize vitamin D from sunlight, so if you’re eating a cow or any other animal that has been in a feedlot, hasn’t really seen sunshine, that animal is gonna be vitamin D deficient because they don’t have the ability to process vitamin D and make it in their tissue because they haven’t been in sunlight. 

An omnivore, you and I, we can do both. We can synthesize vitamin D from the sun. We can also absorb vitamin D from our food source. A carnivore can only get their vitamin D from their food source, so if they’re eating an animal that is vitamin D deficient, by the description we just described, then they’re gonna be vitamin D deficient. They have no other way of getting it, so that’s just one example of how it’s so important to understand the biology of these biological systems and be able to look at our lifestyle. Are we supporting or are we hurting those biological processes? And for the most part, we have become a very non-sustainable lifestyle. I was going through the list of things, our home environment, so many people use toxic cleaners, and they use toxic candles and air fresheners that are all full of pollutants and the byproducts of the petroleum industry, and they don’t realize that not only are they being exposed to it, but so are their pets. 

Laundry detergents. If they’re washing their clothes in these xenoestrogen, these estrogen-mimicking compounds, their pets, though they may not be wearing clothing, they’re jumping on your lap, they’re laying on your bed, so they are absorbing all those things. Then EMF, right? Are we overexposing ourselves to electromagnetic frequencies? Routers, smart homes, 5G now, and these poor animals, they just were never designed to be within that, and we’re talking, for people that leave their routers on, we’re talking 24/7. They’re never away from it, right?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Now, my cat is laying right now next to my computer, but I’m hardwired, so he’s not getting the degree of EMF that he would have if I was on Wi-Fi, so I remember years ago when we were building this house, we spent, oh my gosh, so much money going Wi-Fi ’cause at the time, that was the cool thing, right? You can get Internet upstairs and downstairs and on your phone, and all this cellular was the big rage. No one appreciated how damaging that was going to be, so now, I wasted all that money again to go back to being hardwired.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right, right, right. Well, we always knew you were hardwired, Marlene, but now we really know that you’re talking about computers, and-

Marlene Siegel, DVM

But there’s one more tip before we get done with the pollution part, if I may, and that’s the ants that live in our brain, and the ants are the automatic negative thoughts. Your animals don’t have them. We do, as the humans, and when you are in a state of high stress, a lot of negativity, and you are angry, frustrated, bitter, shame, whatever that low vibrating emotion is, the animals are in training to those emotions. It’s almost like they say, “Hey, I’ll take some of that burden off of you “so you can feel better.” For any pet owner, they know what I’m talking about. You’re really sad, and you’re all stressed out, and who comes over and lays on your lap or puts their head underneath your hand so you can pet them? And even unconsciously, we start to pet our animals, and we start to feel better. 

The world isn’t quite as bad as it was a moment ago, and so they entrain to those energies. They actually absorb some of that heaviness so that we can lighten up, and that’s not to say that we’re doing anything harmful to them. It’s just that’s the nature. We could be around positive people, and it raises us up. We can be around energy vampires, and they suck the whole living life out of you, right? We’ve all experienced that, and so it’s super-important that people start to pay attention to what their thoughts are, and I have my clients write it down. When something comes out of your mouth that’s a negative word or it’s self-limiting or it’s something that just puts yourself down, pay attention to that because words are very powerful, and that is expressing a thought that you have about yourself. Even if you think you’re kidding, you’re not kidding, and you wanna change that. You wanna reprogram those beliefs to be those empowering beliefs.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, it’s so important, what you just said, and that whole emotional piece in the total healing process, you really can’t get completely well unless you manage on the emotional side.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Absolutely.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And it’s that, it’s that quiet talk, the noise and the chatter that’s in your brain, or it could be, and I often see this when we’re coaching at Therasage, that you’re around it, you’re surrounded in your family by people that are sorta toxic and always negative, and you’re trying to get yourself up and inspired, and they’re just kinda beating you up with whatever, and so now we’re living, you dial that up even more because of the restrictions with COVID and they experience and the fears that everybody’s having these days. It really does create kind of a perfect storm for negative behavior or to perpetuate a chronic ailment, and so it’s extra hard, and for that reason, we’re extra passionate and patient with people, with understanding people’s needs these days. 

I really love, I love the, you know, I always kinda looked at it kind of in a different way about how my animal would come over and comfort me or how, mostly, I guess, internalizing it, saying, I feel so much better when my, when Jasmine will come over and hang out with me because she’s probably feeling my anxiety from the day, and she just wants to share her love with me, which is what I’m taking selfishly, not realizing I’m giving her some of my negative energy, but it does, it definitely does feel better, and it’s that unconditional love that it just keeps going on and on that’s amazing. We covered so much today in our presentation, Marlene. I don’t even know if there’s anything more about other things that are important like EMF and managing exogenous frequencies. 

Like you say, our bodies aren’t ready for our toxic environment, and people don’t think that e-smog or electric exogenous frequencies, EMF, ELF, RF, all these frequencies, those are all not natural either, and biologically, as animals, the whole planet is trying to get a reset or readjust to these new wavelengths: 5G, seven. I’ve heard some of the military are using 10G already, so it affects us as an organism on the most primal level, and we don’t really know. We may not know for 20 or 30 years what this all means, but we do know that you can do things to try to get centered, like touching the earth, getting grounded, using a lot of technology that you mentioned already are all ways to reconnect back to nature, and I think that that’s so important for true healing.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Well, one of the easiest ways to connect back to nature is grow something, in the ground or in a pot, and it’s so simple, but when you go out into your yard or into a raised bed or into a pot, whatever you have, wherever you are, when you’re growing something from the earth, there’s a connection and a communication that truly you can’t describe in any other way. We were meant to be connected like that, so I have a food forest around my house literally is a food forest. 

Now, I’m in the city, just like most normal people, and I had to put a fence around my property because we had people complaining, but you can go out in my yard at any time of the year and eat in my yard, so I’m out often. At the end of the day if I get home before dark, I walk out, and I literally touch my plants, and I thank them. Gratitude. Oh my gosh. Here we are just missing some of the most important things in our life, and they’re free, and they’re right in front of us, but if you get distracted by all of the negative things, then you’re not able to focus on what the positives are, and I promise you no matter what you’re experiencing, no matter how bad it seems, if you can find one blessing in all of that, that will be your salvation, and you focus on that blessing. 

It’s not fun to be sick, absolutely not, and I’m not minimizing the pain and the anguish and the frustration and all the things that go along with that, but I think everything really happens for a reason, and it gives us an opportunity to experience something in a way that we can grow from it, that we can heal from it, and we can share and help other people heal from it. At the end of the day, everything is going to be transmuted back into love, and what if we could start doing that on the planet before we transition? If we can start transmuting any dark energy and finding the blessings and finding the light in it, it would be amazing.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah. Great. Wow. So inspirational. Marlene, again, thank you so much for sharing your day and your time and your wisdom. Yeah, I love this, and I love your approach, and thank you so much for spending some time with us today. I know how precious time is for you. Dr. Marlene Siegel. You’re amazing. You’re a superstar. Thank you for joining the Lyme show that we’re putting on, this whole symposium. You really are a great contribution, and thank you again. Have an awesome day.

Marlene Siegel, DVM

Bye, everybody.

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.