Cognitive Decline in Complex Chronic Illness

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Thank you for having us, yeah.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So you guys just hosted the Mycotoxin Summit, which I was so privileged to be a small part of. And I’m curious what you learned. Were there big things that stood out after you got to host a bunch of experts yourselves?

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

I guess, the most important thing I learned was how much there is to learn. I just was surprised at every aspect of medicine. I mean, I spoke to some folks who really had been taking a deep dive into diet. I mean, I thought I’d been working with diets, I thought for 40 years, and I didn’t realize, but when I talked to someone who’s really make it their main focus. Just the observations that, I think one of the interesting things that was brought up, it was Dr. Pompa, is that it’d been my clinical experience that when people change their diets, they really improve. Okay? But it doesn’t always last. 

And his point was, is that, you keep, if you really wanna build diversity in your gut, if you stay on the same mono diet, even if it’s a healthy one, you will eventually lose diversity. And so again, just a little pearl. I mean, something I’ve seen clinically, ’cause we often see that almost every diet that’s clean and healthy will shift people. But if they wanna stay well for long, they have to, they don’t do well. 

Like people who do macrobiotics, I mean, back in the 70s and 80s, that was the big thing. And for three months it was a great diet, maybe six months, but for a lifetime, they didn’t do so well. So anyway, that was just one of those little pearls at the microbiome, that great teacher of how much there is to learn in medicine. ‘Cause the diversity of the microbiome is so important for our health. And so that was one of many pieces I’ll throw in. What’s one of your highlights?

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

One of my highlights was speaking to Dr. Alireza Panahpour, a systemic biological dentist and oral surgeon. And I loved the diagrams he brought up of the nervous system and how it relates to dental health. And we’ve been sending our patients for iCats, which is a CT scan of the jaw to look for subclinical infections in the jaw that are often present under root canals and under where wisdom teeth have been pulled, And we send people to have their mercury amalgams removed using the Huggins protocol so that it’s safe not only for our health, but for the earth as well. 

But to really take a look at the diagram of the nervous system and how that’s connected to these subclinical infections was really wonderful because it took it from looking at it from just a symptomatic point of view, what I knew by seeing my patients and how they turned a corner after having dental surgeries when appropriate, but to look at it anatomically was really wonderful.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

And what I like, talk a little bit about, ’cause I think that what’s so important is something that Nafysa spends a lot of time with is how the sinuses and the health of the teeth and the sinuses can affect the brain. Is that something that we have? Just for a little background, we work with dementia, but we really got there by working with people with chronic illness who almost always present with, quote-unquote, brain fog, which is, I like to say a temporary dementia state where, I mean, your ability for executive functioning is limited sometimes.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

And if you’re lucky it’s a temporary dementia state, right? For a lot of people who start to notice that they have been told so many times by well-meaning neurologists that there’s not a lot that we can do if you’re losing your memory or if you don’t have that executive function. So they hide it, or they cope, or they find strategies to work around it. And if they are lucky, they end up in the hands of doctors like you guys, where you have real solutions. 

So the society spends billions of dollars looking for Alzheimer’s, and you guys have kind of stumbled on what, not really. I mean, you’ve worked very hard to figure out what helps with complex chronic disease, but you didn’t come there from the perspective of trying to beta amyloid plaque formations and what the drug is for that. But you came at at it from this perspective, and you guys are just such a great compliment to each other, with the naturopathic background, and then decades of the medical MD background, and kind of merging those two in this really beautiful way, and that you are seeing what can happen when you support health. And so, yeah, Dr. Nafysa, I’d love to hear just some of the patients that you’ve seen, how they typically present, and yes, dive into the sinuses. ‘Cause these infections are so important when it comes to cognitive health.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Absolutely. So most of our patients come in after they’ve seen many other doctors. A lot of them have been to John Hopkins. They’ve been to Stanford. They’ve been to many local doctors, and doctors far away, and they’ve had thorough workups and great treatments, but they’re still in a difficult place with regards to their health. And they needed a deeper dive. So they present after having been to many doctors and with their symptoms still dominant. And so of course, brain fog is a major one. 

People might say, I just, I feel like I’m just forgetting everything. I’m forgetting why I went to the store. I’m forgetting what I went to pick up. I’m forgetting where I put my keys. I’m forgetting the names of someone I met yesterday at a party. And now that we’ve opened up a little bit more in COVID, right, but people are forgetting things. They come in with body aches and pains, and they come in with their neurological system in a little bit of a disarray. They might have neuropathies, or tremors, or a lot of headaches, migraines. And inevitably they have a lot of sinus infections. So, and they come in feeling stuffy very often. So this is our typical patient, but they also have a lot of GI issues. 

So where I’m going with this is that we know there’s a strong connection between the gut and the brain. Of course, we know that toxins can travel from the gut by the vagus nerve up to the brain. And toxins, meaning biotoxins, or mycotoxins from fungus’s, and inflammation can travel up that way, cross the blood-brain barrier. But I’m tying it into the sinuses because I think that the sinuses are often forgotten about. The gut, the microbiome has been the sexy thing to look at in functional medicine, right? And I treat the senses much like I’ll treat the gut. So in the gut, we have beneficial bacteria. We have bacteria that are pathogenic, and inflammation from those pathogenic bacteria, and most functional medicine doctors know how to treat the gut really well. 

So the sinuses, I believe, are overlooked. So going back to Dr. Alireza Panahpour’s diagram of the nervous system in the head, in the face. It’s pretty amazing. I think more people should look at that diagram. I wish I had it here with me, but I’ll refer people back to that talk at my summit so that they can see what I’m talking about. But there’s the olfactory nerve in our face behind our sinuses, and it travels right up to the brain. And so infections, mycotoxins, inflammatory cytokines, they have access to the brain by the olfactory nerve, just like all those same things have access to the brain via the vagus nerve. And so now we have at least two places simultaneously affecting the brain. One of the places very often overlooked with regards to treatment, the sinus is another place commonly looked at now, the gut. So treating the sinuses is important.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

I’d love to hear how you test for a sinus, what’s going on in the sinuses. How do you know?

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah, I like to use the test by, what are they called? They call it diagnostic solutions.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

No, micro-

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Micro.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Microbiology

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Thank, you, Eric.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Diagnostics.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah, microbiology diagnostics. And it’s a sinus swab. It feels a lot like a COVID test. No fun. But so we can look at different bacteria on there, funguses, biofilm. So it’s a great test.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, it gives us an idea who to treat more aggressively, or because some it’s, for a long time, our world was obsessed with the staph, the MARCoNS, the resistant staph infection. And we’ve learned that that doesn’t always tell us who to treat. I mean, it, and this lab gives us also a measurement of the biofilm. And then I think increases the likelihood that treating those people are gonna help, but I think the way Dr. Parpia handles things. Yeah, Nafysa, that’s always funny calling you Dr. Parpia. 

Being formal for the moment. Is realizing how much also the clinical presentation. Is that if somebody has, so many people don’t realize that a stuffy nose is not a normal thing, and it’s not like, oh, they just have, and we also looking of course for allergies and things of that sort. But when you kind of subtract that out, that chronic stuffy nose is not normal, and that often means that there’s chronic inflammation. See, the medical world thinks in terms of infection, okay? And what people have to understand that infection is when your system is overwhelmed, but in chronic inflammation, the bug is living there, and you’re not overwhelmed. 

You’re in a little bit of a symbiotic relationship, but your immune system isn’t acting well enough to keep the bug like really quiet, or the bug is just aggravating your immune system enough, and that’s the problem. It’s not that the bug is causing damage often. Okay, most of the time, it’s just the inflammation that that bug is triggering, that low level that’s then causing problems in your brain. Because I mean, at the end of the day, I think, well, the neurologists still don’t agree, but I think those of us in the field believe that inflammation is the cause of dementia on all levels. I mean, like the end state is inflammation. 

You get there by many different pathways, but that end stage of inflammation. And what Nafysa has has done is, by treating people more aggressively and persistently with natural things often, we’re able to change this. Because again, we started off, I mean, this is like that dance of the MD and the natural path dance is that, I mean, I said the MD training is to be an expert in what I call band-aid medicine. 

We go in and we fix something quick. And we depend on this black box of healing, the body to come in and take over. And when that doesn’t work, we’re kind of left looking at it, and we just get more and more band-aids. And that’s why all the treatment of autoimmune diseases and even dementias are all about band-aids. They’re trying to fix the damage. They’re not trying to figure out what’s caused the damage.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

And so anyway, and so what Nafysa’s doing is working to lower the inflammation without causing too much disruption. ‘Cause we originally went in there with lots of antibiotics, which sometimes we still need to do, but most of the time we can do it with more natural, more natural approaches that allow the system to lower the inflammation and heal. And I think that’s-

Heather Sandison, N.D.

I love it. You guys do such a good job at asking that question like, this is the important question. It’s not the diagnosis, this fancy word that’s really important to come up with, but it’s the why. Why dementia? Why inflammation? How did we get there? And so unraveling that is where it kinda gets a little messy sometimes, and particularly in the realm of infections, right? Because some people interpret one lab one way. Other people interpret other labs another way. Sometimes the labs are, just really aren’t that great yet with infections. We really have to ask the question, does this patient have strep? Does this patient have MARCoNS? Does this patient have Borrelia? So you have to have an idea in mind about what infection might be there. So how do you navigate all of this when you have a complex patient in front of you?

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

History.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

And lots of labs, both.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Both, but I guess the thing we have to remember is that we all love labs because we’re all looking for a clear answer, and occasionally we’re lucky we get clear, clean answers. But again, with chronic illness, we’re dealing with the body’s response to the infection, not the infection. I think that’s the big differential in why medicine in general has done such a poor job. Because what, as a medical doctor, when I think of infection, we think of like a pneumonia, or bronchitis, or a strep throat. 

When there’s a clear cut bug we can find and a clear response, we treat and it goes away. Okay, but when you’ve done that, and the person only recovers like 70%, you kind of, like we’re trained. Well, the bug is no longer clearly there. You don’t wanna keep treating. And so we just let people go on. But getting back to that point is that now, it’s about how your immune system is able to either totally eradicate the bug or realize that it succeeded. Because many times it’s the immune system remains upregulated or dysregulated, and creating inflammatory chemicals. And that can go on for years. 

We forget the body can reach a new balance point, where it now accepts that there’s a level of inflammation because it thinks it still needs to contain an infection, or some of those old proteins are there. Or like with the viruses, many, many people are, the Epstein BARR, and the HH-6, and cytomegalovirus. these are viruses that actually become part of our B cells. I mean, that’s the problem is that they’re herpes family viruses, and they can get in, and they stay with us, but our immune system keeps them suppressed. 

But every once in a while, you’ll express a little bit of it. And we’ve learned this in the chronic fatigue world back in the early 2000s, that about 30% of people with chronic fatigue actually do respond to antiviral drugs, but that’s only 30%. So that gets ignored in medicine, and it doesn’t. So I don’t wanna belabor this point, but this is what makes it so important is using the judgment to looking at the tests, looking at the patients. And sometimes, now that we have some new testing that uses like T-cell markers, so we can get a little better idea, is this an active infection? In the past, we were limited to immune globulin markers, these IgGs, and IGAs, and IgMs. And these are, especially the IgGs, with some of these infections, are gonna last a lifetime. 

So they don’t tell us whether this is going on now. And I hope these new T-cell tests are better able to tell us whether it’s active and whether treatment is useful. But that’s just, I said, for the viral component. And for Lyme and the tick-borne diseases, it’s the same mess. Okay? And so again, it’s symptoms, and that’s where it helps that people treated this for a long time. Because if you have it, I say one man’s. People are often looking online for lists of symptoms, and those are helpful, but again, those symptoms are often not from the bug, but from how your body responds to the bug.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Actually, I wanna jump in here because what I’ve noticed is that a lot of these illnesses, a lot of these different diagnoses, when someone’s had them for a long time, the symptoms are gonna start to mimic each other. So someone walks in, they’ve had Lyme, Bartonella, Babesia, mold illness, mycotoxin illness, and a high environmental toxicant load. That could mean they have high glyphosate, or high metals in their system, or high other chemicals in their system. And they say, well, which one is it? Well, first of all, it’s the combination of everything, but the second thing is that when someone’s been sick for a while, it’s not so much about the inciting event or, oh, did just the Lyme cause this, or did just the Babesia, or just the Bartonella cause this? It’s that the body, the body starts to create inflammation, as Dr. Gordon was saying here, and it starts to create its own pathway of how that’s gonna represent in each individual based on their weak links that they already have. 

And so it’s not so much about the bug anymore as it is about the person and how their body’s handling that inflammation. So we can remove the arrows, as Eric likes to say, right? Remove the arrows, and we can pull the different bugs, that we’re gonna kill them. And of course, we’re gonna do that. We kill those infections, and we’re gonna detoxify them. We’re gonna pull out the chemicals. And sometimes the person, not sometimes, very often, 80% of the time in our patients who have complex chronic illness, they’re still gonna feel sick. 

They’re still gonna have those symptoms, even though the inciting events have been pulled out. And that’s what he’s talking about, that why? So the first piece of our treatment is detoxifying the patient, modulating their immune system, killing infections. The second portion is about regenerative medicine and how we’re going to heal the systems that have been insulted by the infections, and the toxins, and the stress, and the diet.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, I just wanna reemphasize your point, which I think is so crucial, is that in my earlier career we focused on killing the bugs, okay? And again, I call that going through the front door. But if you have chronic illness, that’s usually not the best way to go, okay? That’s where Nafysa and the natural pathic approach of detoxing first. Because then off times we need to use little or sometimes no antibiotics or drugs. Because the body, again, most people have these infections and do fine and are able to clear them on their own. 

It’s this persistent toxicity that we have seen, and what, there’s so many possibilities. Because unfortunately, the world has changed so much in the last 40 years, between, we have the chemical levels that are huge, including the herbicides and the pesticides, and in the last 20 years now, the glyphosate. The EMF has gone through the roof, and the vaccines. Not that I say, gotten my vaccine. It’s not that we’re against vaccines, but giving children 30 or 40 so close together is too much information for the immune system. That’s what makes me so sad. I won’t go into the vaccine world, but I think we’re unable to discuss the pros and cons. It’s not, they are really powerful. They are life-saving. They’re not bad.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

We need the vaccines.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

It’s just modulating. But anyway, but that’s, but unfortunately we’ve lost that opportunity. We’ve now become, there’s no conversation that’s allowed. So it’s frustrating. But anyway, but the point is, I don’t know which one of these areas are affecting immune function, but something is because I can tell you, and many doctors and people are writing about it, but those of us who’ve been in practice for as long as I have, we have seen the difference, okay? We just didn’t see this number of young, sick people. They weren’t out there. You didn’t have the level, besides it’s allergies, all the Hashimoto’s, all the thyroid disease in young people. It was just-

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

And the brain fog in young people.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Oh, God, yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

It’s huge.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, we just didn’t see these things. So something is contributing. It’s very hard. I mean, epidemiology, like looking for populations and changes in environment, you really can’t get a one-to-one correlation, but we can say something has changed. And what we can see is that when we detox people, and we help their bodies work better, a lot of symptoms improve dramatically. And I’m sure working with more, with people with dementia, you see that day in and day out, is that the detox is really the key.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So validating to have this conversation, because I see exactly the same thing that you guys are seeing and in the dementia space, but also in the mold space and in the chronic complex disease space that people come in, they’ve been sick forever, they haven’t been detoxified, or there’s something else standing in the way. And Eric, this is what you had said is that it’s not necessarily the infection because these infections are relatively ubiquitous. A lot of people are exposed, but only some people get symptoms. And COVID has been this absolutely like very impressive illustration of this, right? That some people have zero symptoms. 

Other people die. Other people end up with the long haul COVID. And what’s the difference, right? What’s the difference between those people? And maybe if we can identify that, we can understand a little bit more about how to be in the category of people that doesn’t have persistent symptoms. And you guys have been doing that for decades. So that was my question, and I think Nafysa, you started to answer it, is, okay, what’s standing in the way? Toxicity, for sure. I’m curious if you guys have also noticed. I see a pattern of early childhood trauma being really affect how sensitive people are to these infections and exposures. What else stands in the way? And when you see it, what do you do about it?

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

I’m just gonna throw in one thing. It’s a little bit of an aside. I’ll try to do this quickly. I think early childhood trauma is very important, but it’s really the person more than the. I mean, people don’t like to hear this, but there’s, when Dr. Naviaux, I think he’s published this, looked at post-traumatic stress disorders in Marines and Navy military that were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. He could see that, by the Metabolomics before and after they were deployed, the metabolomics before they were deployed, could determine about the 10% of people who were at high risk for PTSD, okay? 

So we intersensitized, and then the traumatic event will set us off, okay? But this is, ’cause I’ve been, my whole life I’ve always been, I’ve been interested in the Holocaust and in like what makes people survive? And you can see people from war torn areas, I mean, the terror and the horrors that peoples go through and that many come out fairly okay, and some people come out not. And it has a lot to do with our biochemistry and how we, how our immune system, because it is our immune system. 

Fear is, every emotion, like you’ve got serotonin receptors, and dopamine receptors, and all these receptors for mood states on all your immune cells, okay? There’s no difference. So it’s how the body modulates that response, whether it’s to a bug or to an abusive situation, okay? And it tends to go together. And so we have to learn to support that. I mean, it’s just another trigger that we have to realize that the more we can support the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects, because we’re all, it makes a huge difference. So you are right that that early childhood trauma is a great driver, but it’s a driver because it causes persistent inflammation, because it causes fear. Fear, and that causes self protection. 

What cell, anxiety is a way to protect yourself. Worrying about what’s around you is what you do to protect yourself. Now, like most reactions in the body, when it keeps going, it no longer serves, okay? You die of COVID usually because your immune system overstepped his bounds. It’s not the bug. The virus doesn’t kill you. It’s your immune response that kills most people, okay? And it’s the same thing. Anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder is just, you’re trying to protect yourself.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

I love this conversation. This is amazing. And totally mind blowing for me because I haven’t thought about it in that way before. And so this kind of chicken and egg conversation of like, so where did it start? And how do we unravel these things so that people can live their optimal potential?

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, we support everything you can support. If you are a person who tends to anxiety or OCD, you have to spend more time, hopefully before you get ill, practicing whatever works, whether it’s exercise, meditate, hopefully combination of things, meditation, breathing. You have to learn how to soothe your body better.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

A lot of times, these people need support from healers, people who are healers and body workers, from indigenous wisdom, from their own family, family line of spirituality. We find that that really helps people. And some people, they might not have that. So they meditate, and they just put their feet in the earth, and they ground themselves. So different people have different ways, different points of access to that place, I think.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Connection to the earth. I mean, you just did that. That is it. No matter how sick you are, if you can get some time to actually sit on the ground, I mean if you’re able to, and be in the sun, or hold a tree, sit in it, I mean, these are the simplest things to do, but they can be life changing. And I know it’s hard for people to believe that when you’re lying in bed, or you can’t think straight, or you’re in pain. These all sound like platitudes, okay? But they’re not. They physically change your body. And then your emotions change. It’s a state changes. It works.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

It’s more powerful. And when we’re talking to someone who’s highly sensitive, that’s something they can do, right? Many people who I work with, I’m sure who you work with, are so sensitive that the thought of taking a supplement or changing their food because it’s already so limited, these are just not options. And so when we can start to talk about these lifestyle things like getting your feet in the sand, or the water, or in the grass, there’s a window. There’s an opening there for an opportunity to heal.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

And that’s where all those limbic retraining programs work. There are many of them out there now. The Gupta, Annie Hopper. Then there’s several others, I forget now that people. ‘Cause people have to look for ones that resonate with them.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Because to be honest, I’m the kind of personality that some of those require too much intensity and focus to do well. But luckily, many of the people who tend to more OCD have that so they can do those programs. But they will work. They begin to lower the charge. Because the story that we tell ourselves controls our immune response. I mean, this is what people have to understand is that for years they were insulted by doctors who told them that it was all in their head, okay? And so understandably that’s insulting when you’re really sick. 

But on the other hand, our head, our brain does control a lot. And when we get that power, we can begin to settle down the immune system. And as our immune system gets happier, we can maybe quiet down in our gut. So our food choices can become more generalized. And then we get more information. Our microbiome gets better. It feeds back to our little brain, and we begin to move. 

But again, many times it has to be with sitting outside, getting some sun, getting some walking if you can, if you have enough energy walking. I mean, rhythmic motion. As Nafysa was saying, that ancient cultures before hierarchy, just really had the way, but we’ve lost it because our cultures are more about keeping hierarchy than they are about finding your joy. Okay, finding your own joy is not something that is really honored. We honor sacrifice, and sacrifice should be there for the other, but we should also find our own joy. So we’re really offering something. Not offering our pain, but offering our joy and being willing to work hard for the other. Anyway.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

When people are, a lot of them find it very hard to find joy. And so it’s important to help them find ways because it’s there. It’s inside each person. It resides deep in our heart, but a lot of times people who are sick, find it hard to access that because they’re full of symptoms, physical symptoms, mental, emotional symptoms. And sometimes they need somebody to guide them to find that place. We do work with our patients that way, and we have healers as well that we’ll have our patients work with. I just want to acknowledge that because-

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Oh, well, we just, I mean, just from my own life, I can see how easy I can go into a story of suffering. We just, I mean, it’s two things. Self-righteousness and suffering are two things that the mind seems to really enjoy. I’m right and you’re wrong is one of my favorite places. And then, oh my God, I have wronged you, and And I can do that really, really well. And it’s a loop. So it, and I’m pretty healthy, and I can sometimes have trouble getting out of that loop, but if I listen to any of the teachers, breathe, exercise, laugh, you can move out of that. And meditate, work with a healer. But it’s still, our natural, so I just want to be really gentle here with people, no, that like, this is not easy. And once you’re ill, again, that it can be, finding joy sounds like another platitude.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

But all the magic in the world, right, is in that awareness because it gives you the space to choose. And so learning how to become more aware, whether it’s through Gupta or Annie Hopper, or meditation, or your spiritual path, that’s where so much of the stuckness can become unstuck and open up to that possibility of healing. You guys mentioned kind of phase one is finding the culprits, right? What’s keeping you from getting up and over the infection, or what’s keeping you inflamed? And then phase two is rebuilding this regenerative state. So I wanna understand a little bit more what you mean by that.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah, so we would use mitochondrial support at that time. A lot of times people come to me when they’re really, really sick and they say, support my mitochondria now. And well, I can give them mitochondria support till the cows come home, but they’re still highly infected, and they’re still highly, have a high toxin load. Those are big insults to the mitochondria. So I’ll do mitochondria support in the next phase, after I’ve killed off the infections. Peptide therapies work really well before we start to kill off infections, during the time of infection killing and detoxification, and even after biological allografts. Using regenerative medicine techniques can work as well. Things like exosomes, they have to be given at the right time. And typically the right time is after as well. So, and we’ve seen those help with cognitive decline also.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Me too.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah, typically with our patients, it is in that, the patients who are sick with complex chronic illness, it is in that second phase of treatment, which I called the regenerative medicine phase, that their memories really start to come back. Now in my, I have a bunch of patients as well who were from Silicon Valley, and they’re sharp. And they’re at the top of their game in every way, but they come to me when they’re in their mid 40s. And they say, I’m starting to get tired, and I’m beginning to lose my memory. 

I’m a little bit worried about myself. It’s not so bad. I can hide it. Just a few people might notice it. What do I do here, right? And so in giving them early phase treatment, because they’re not sick, kill off some bugs. I find those. Find some toxins, pull them out. Treat their sinuses. Inevitably, they’ve got issues in their sinuses, and they’re done. They’re done really quickly. Quickly means three to six months. It could be their gut as well. But so a lot of times, very, very sharp people will come into our clinic ’cause we’re in the Bay area. So we’ll attract those people. So they’ll come and they’re worried about themselves when they’re not so sick using the same techniques that we use-

Heather Sandison, N.D.

What a luxury, right? To be working on prevention, to be optimizing, not having to reverse a really complex, chronic, challenging disease where you do have multiple phases and months and months, if not years of treatment. I wish and I hope that these conversations will inspire people to start earlier when it’s less expensive, it’s less time-consuming, it’s less complex to address these issues.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Exactly.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, what’s been so interesting is that when Dr. Bredesen’s book came out. I mean, like, it was just like, I just went, huh? I mean, like, this is what we’ve been doing. I mean, for 30 years, this is what we’ve been doing. And, but he put it together beautifully. And it was amazing to see like, oh, okay. ‘Cause I, and the expertise that we developed from treating people who’ve been really, really sick, we realized that it is really what mildly ill or people who are just beginning to have functional issues, they all need. Because again, the thing that made these chronically ill people chronically ill was their body’s accommodation to inflammation and chronic inflection.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Actually, this goes back to Heather’s first, not first question, but earlier question about what stands in the way, right? How does somebody get long haul COVID, for instance, when they’ve been well up until they got COVID, or why are they beginning to feel the cognitive decline at a young age, and it’s minor? What’s underneath that? So it’s often their hormones are beginning to change, and we need to tweak that. They have a high stress response, but very often there’s a subclinical infection.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Again, the toxicity.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

The toxicity.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Because is that the, the thing that our bodies mostly work really well. I mean, it’s just amazing considering how much we have to deal with. and that’s where the, looking at genetics. I find that genetic testing, I mean, is still in its infancy. There are several labs. I mean, I use Intelex DNA, I think does a good job because they, what I call, curate the data. Because the data, I mean, this is something we were just chatting about before we went live is data. We all love data, but the problem we’re facing in cutting edge medicine, I guess we’ll call it, is that we’ve got between the microbiome, the genomics, the transcriptomics. 

We have all these omics, which gives us huge amounts of data, but we don’t yet know what to do with it. And people are now looking at AI for helping, and which is great, but the difficulty is using medical literature since literally, I mean, 20% of medical literature is just wrong. I mean, this is. I mean, actually there was just an article in, I think it was Lancet or the British Medical Journal, that British medicine that just one of the heads of the Cochrane Reviews. He just said, 20% of the articles are bogus. They’re bad data. They’re false. Anyways, I don’t wanna go over that. But the point is, is that it’s hard to use AI for really treating people, but it’s, hopefully AI will help us begin to discriminate people, get a little bit more help. But getting back to that, but we do need. But the genomics has become a little more helpful in the last few years because there’s more and more data. The problems are, if you’re Jewish, or Chinese, or white Anglo Saxon,, you got a pretty good shot because we’ve got a lot of information on the genetics. 

Unfortunately, if you’re African-American, black, the data sets aren’t that good yet. It’s just all about population groups, but we’re beginning to get somewhat useful data that, again, having the gene doesn’t do anything. You need, except for maybe a few hundred genes. There’s a few hundred that, yeah, you got it, you got a problem. But anything that we’re talking about, usually you need like 50 or 100 genes to be blinking.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

I really appreciate what Dr. Sharon Hausman-Cohen has done. And she is also, if you are listening to this and interested in the genetics and how that might relate to your dementia or your loved one’s dementia, please have head over to her talk and get the download on how important genetics can be in this scenario. I think you bring up such a great point, Eric, and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well, Nafysa. Is a natural path, right, it’s like common sense. but uncommon practice. 

We throw so much money at making things more and more complex when the foundations are so critical. And as a society, we’re just not doing it, right? We’re not getting healthy food. We’re not getting enough sleep. We’re not getting enough exercise. We’re not taking, we’re not managing our stressors. We’re totally burdened by toxins. We’re not, a lot of people aren’t pooping enough, or drinking enough water, or sweating enough to be getting them out, even though we’re inundated with them. And so kind of going back to those foundational pieces, which you guys have talked about, in the context of like a medical crisis, we can also do that just each and every one of us to help promote health.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Absolutely. For our patients who are quite sick, those are such important foundations. Diet, lifestyle, stress, water, organic food, grounding on the earth. What they do is set the stage for the therapies that we give them to work. So we give people a lot of IV therapies. It might be IV antibiotics if they have tick-borne illness. It might be IV detoxification therapies, or IV oxidative therapies to help kill off infections, including viruses. 

But if those foundations aren’t set, then all the cool therapies we’re gonna give them are just gonna fall through the cracks. So for our patients, that piece has to be set, our patients who, with complex chronic illness. For the patients who are here because they want to optimize, it’s very often that that is gonna make their treatment with us be three months long instead of six months long. So they can use food as medicine at that point.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

When they’re not too sick.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, but it’s again, I mean, the socioeconomic thing has been just driving me crazy. ‘Cause I started off treating farmers out in Northern New York, upstate New York. It’s just the availability of organic food makes such a difference. I mean, if you, when you travel, and you see the difference of how we get to eat here in Northern California, or you probably in San Diego, compared to what’s available just day in and day out, it’s just, it’s mind boggling how well people actually do considering how inflammatory diets they’re eating.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

It makes me just wanna pull my hair out, and kick and scream, and work harder, I guess. But when you see these drugs, like the aducanumab that came out recently with this $56,000 price tag for dementia, and you think like, what could we do with $56,000 per person with dementia? We could get them some really good food. We could get them some really great physical therapy or exercise, somebody to help them with exercise. We could get them a one-on-one caregiver, just like rub their hand and arms, and like give them some love. There’s so many things that we could do to invest.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

But you can’t do a double blind placebo controlled trial on these things. And therefore we can’t get any respect that these work, because we are stuck in that model. I mean, it’s a great model. If you’re gonna give a drug that’s gonna cost $50,000 a year, you’d like to have really robust data. So, okay, I’ll go with the double-blind placebo controlled trial. Or if the drug is gonna have a five or 10%, significant side effect rate that’s gonna get people really sick, yeah, we really wanna be sure. But if we’re gonna give people good food, and good love, and touch, I don’t think we need a double-blind placebo controlled trial. We can, let’s just do, let’s just treat a bunch of people because it’s, we have experience. It’s like we pretend that we don’t know anything.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Well, this model, this model of double-blinded placebo controlled trials, it’s almost like the inflammation, right? It’s kinda similar, the chronic inflammation. Like it doesn’t serve us anymore. Our issues are too complex. Our issues are too chronic, that this is a double-blinded placebo controlled kind of medical reductionism has gotten out of control to a point where at one point it did serve us perhaps, but now it doesn’t. We gotta get rid of it. I mean, or we need to use it in the, like inflammation. We need to use it in the ways that-

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Exactly. No, I mean like, we need to know that things, interventions that have significant downsides, I wanna do. Because we have seen myself over the last 20, I mean, in our world, there are so many therapies that come out. I call them the flavor of the month.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

And I try them, if they’re not gonna hurt people. I’m a great believer because they might work in anywhere from 10 to 50% of people, and if I hit that right 10%, it’s wonderful, but they’re not toxic. Okay, I can do that. But I also know that if they were toxic, we really should do better trials of-

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

You mean of toxic potential.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Toxic potential to patients. And that is where we need to learn to get that. But the academic physicians are so stuck. I mean, I cannot tell you. I talk to these guys, and I work with them occasionally, and I respect them. But because one of their big points, which is very true, is the plural of anecdote is not data. Just because, and so we have to be careful, but we shouldn’t throw out. But when you have 1,000 anecdotes, I think you begin to get to the data level.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

And when the anecdotes connect with common sense.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

And we have to really respect that. Absolutely. And it it’s just that, but it’s a hard conversation because in the drug world, they’ve seen so many things that they thought worked that turned out that they don’t, but again, but they had significant side effects and costs. We’re talking about things that don’t, and we, I would, it’s hard to get this conversation going because it’s a little, again, too much black and white in the world, and people won’t accept the gradations. But just before we, I know I’m wrapping up, but I’m just thinking, what I just would like to emphasize for people is that we get to chronic inflammation probably on a fairly individual basis. 

‘Cause to my mind, chronic inflammation is what drives most of the dementias. That’s why trying to fix the tau, and the beta, and the amyloid proteins, isn’t gonna do much of anything, ’cause that’s the end stage. That’s just your immune response actually. And just like people with APOE-4 are all, but APOE-4 is a really good thing to have if you have a lot of parasites. APOE-4 is protective against a lot of infections. 

It’s just that when you don’t, when you don’t modulate, and you don’t detox, it becomes a real, but then it’s a real negative. So it’s just, I think, hold on, we’re learning a lot, and realized that going back to the basics of detox and working with doctors who know how to test you and not fall in love with the test, okay? Look at the patient. Just because you have a positive test, doesn’t mean you have to treat it, okay? You might, if the patient’s asymptomatic in that area, go a step down. Deal with what is maybe affecting the body’s ability to modulate its own response to that infection. And we’re going to do far better than just treating the bug.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Amazing.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

And the other thing I wanna say is that a lot of, the thing I love about a lot of what we call the oxidative therapies, the high dose vitamin Cs, and the ozone is that they’re nonspecific. It’s not so much that they kill stuff, but they modulate the immune response. And we do have data on that. I mean, that’s the point. There is really good data, and we. And it’s modulation. I can’t say it enough, because some people need to turn it up, and some people need to turn it down.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Because getting back that intelligence of the system and the harmony, that homeodynamic state. Yeah.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Flexibility. I mean, that’s really the ability to respond to your environment.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Resilience.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Is health.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

I love it. The ability to respond to your environment, that is the definition of health.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

I mean, we all respond to it, but it’s like being able to dance with it, not just fall down, or be too rigid.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

That’s, the fluidity is what. Body is motion. Energy, it’s all movement. And our brain likes to make things into black and white pieces ’cause we think better that way. As Dr. Naviaux, the doctor who really helped put together the concept of the cell danger response, he says, engineering thought is great in trauma, but it doesn’t, it can’t really understand the flexibility and dynamism of life. You have to like make things kind of into dead pieces, but that’s how our minds work.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah, gotta simplify them a little bit to make sense of them.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah, which is good up to a point.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

And then we have to get back to that reverence, right, for how complex, and incredible, and amazing it can be. Eric, Nafysa, it’s absolutely just such a privilege, such a joy to see you guys and to get to have this conversation, to dive deep into the complexity of medicine and health, and to hear some of the solutions that you are bringing to your very privileged patients. It’s just a pleasure. I wanna make sure everyone knows where they can find out more about you guys, and your practice, and also your summit.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Oh, yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Thank you. So you can find us at gordonmedical.com, and we’re in the San Francisco Bay area. We’re in Marin, just over the Golden Gate Bridge. And our summit is the Mycotoxin and Chronic Illness Summit where we’re so happy you spoke.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Thank you. It was such a pleasure to be there with you. Really, really fun. I love that we get to do this, and I can’t wait to see you guys in person at the next conference, the next deep dive into complex chronic illness and all of the solutions to it.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Exactly. Thank you so much for having us. It was such a privilege, such an honor.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

So much fun.

Eric D. Gordon, M.D.

Thank you. It really was fun. I hope we really gave people a sense of that, there’s a lot of possibility out there. I think that’s the main thing. Don’t think there’s only one answer. There’s lots of them.