Lyme – Using All The Tools – Cowden Lyme Protocol

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And welcome back to another amazing guest and interview with one of, I consider the greatest practitioners in Lyme disease and line research from the beginning. To me, this is Dr. Lee Cowden I’m talking about. And Dr. Lee Cowden, I was thinking about some words that would describe him because we have had a friendship many years ago, maybe as much as 10 years ago. I was fortunate to have met Dr. Cowden through another friend, and he allowed me to present in front of his academy and he asked me to join and be part of his team or his group, and which I would feel so honored for. And I’m really honored that you took the time Lee to come today to join us. 

So I was thinking of words to describe you. And the first thing that came to mind, the first word was, unwavering. And so when I think of that word, it’s like the dedication of somebody that will leave his family, leave his home, go to the Amazon, roll up his pants, sleeves and boats, put on these boats, walk among the snakes, just to extract certain earth elements or plant related foreign plants to the US, so that you could get the vibrational energies and then bring back to the US and or to the world, certain the medicinal aspects of the plant kingdom and their frequencies that are around that. The other word that came to mind was educator. 

To me, certainly you were my mentor, but you’ve mentored so many people in your career and in your life. You’re a family man, you’re a man of faith and deep spirituality. And I think that you need a lot of those kinds of qualities, just in general, to be a complete person as we are in what I call earth camp these days. You practice, even though you’re qualified. And I’d like to have you tell us a little bit about the backdrop, a little bit about your education and/or at least the things you focused on in your medical career. But even though you are certified and qualified as a cardiologist, you really took a little turn on that and started what I think was one of the few guys in the beginning by definition was really alternative, integrated, and functional in terms of medicine and your applications. And I’d love for you to just spend a few minutes after we talk about your backdrop, or your background, just to hear what your definition of functional or integrative medicine is, you know, from your mouth. 

You’re my friend. And certainly, in terms of Lyme disease, one of the greatest guys in Lyme. You’ve written and coauthored dozens of books on the topic and related topics. And to me, you’re almost synonymous with Lyme disease. So there is the Cowden Protocol, when my daughter was contracted Lyme disease about 25 plus years ago, that was the only protocol that when we were researching, that was the only one that we could find. I mean, that’s how far back it goes. And I’m sure maybe it even was earlier than that. So with that, Dr. Lee Cowden, please welcome to Healing From Lyme Naturally Summit. Thank you for joining us and taking out the time today.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yes. Thank you, Robby, for that introduction. I took a turn from allopathic medicine fairly early in my career. I lived in arid west, Texas when I was growing up and I got accepted to medical school in Houston, and I never lived in a hot humid environment. And so, we moved to Houston. And very soon after I moved there, I experienced all of the grass and the weeds and the trees and the mold and the fungus and everything else that’s in that humid environment. And I developed allergic rhinitis, and then I developed allergic sinusitis, and then I developed infective sinusitis, and then I developed bronchitis, and then I developed pneumonia. 

And all this time, I’m following the direction of the chairman of three different medical school departments, the Chairman of ear nose and throat, the Chairman of allergy and immunology, the Chairman of pulmonary medicine, following their instructions explicitly, taking the drugs that they recommended and getting progressively worse. And so, thank goodness, my wife’s grandmother came to visit us in Houston. Now she was a school teacher and a self-taught nutritionist, not a doctor. And she saw what I was going through and she had pity on me. 

So she took me down to the local health food store and got me on some vitamins minerals and herbs. And I got well completely in about a month. And I thought, my goodness, I need to learn what this woman knows. And I need to take with a grain of salt, everything that I learned in the training institution after this. So that was in the first two months or three months of medical school. And so after that, you know, I went finished medical school. Then I went off to St. Louis to do internship residency in internal medicine. And then I did two fellowships, one in critical care medicine one in cardiology. 

I actually did it as a conjoined fellowship, first one in the United States. And then after that, I practiced for a year doing allopathic medicine. And it was an exciting year. You know, the fellow that I went through the training program with, joined me in a partnership practice. And we were on staff at seven hospitals. And we rounded in 11 intensive care units twice a day, every day. And we were on call every other week night and every other weekend, between the two of us. And if you were on call, you had a 50% chance of spending the entire night in an intensive care unit somewhere. And at the end of that year, I figured out two or three things. 

I figured out that if I continued that I would die prematurely . I would lose my marriage and my relationship with my children. And I would eventually, you know, burn out if I didn’t die and I would be miserable. And I thought, you know, I don’t really enjoy this. I want to do something else. So that’s when I switched to taking the approach of integrative medicine. Now, integrative medicine uses of the best it can find anywhere on the planet. It doesn’t have to come from an allopathic university hospital in the United States for it to be valid. What I tell patients is that, you know, a good allopathic doctor hops through life on one foot, and a good alternative medicine doctor hops through life on the other foot, but a good integrative doctor walks through life on both feet and runs if he has to . ‘Cause a lot of times there’s tigers chasing.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, we all know about those.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Those tigers are usually the FDA, the FTC and the licensing boards.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

The agencies that are supposed to be protecting us, right?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Right, yeah, yeah. They were designed for that purpose, but they’ve become captured agencies, unfortunately.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah it is.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yep. So anyway, I didn’t know anything at all about Lyme disease until 2002. And I was hosting an international cancer conference in Fort Worth, and a naturopathic doctor that I knew came to the conference and met me in the exhibit hall with her grandson. And her grandson was 17 years old. She said he was an A student and an avid athlete. And he, we later learned, developed Lyme disease, you know, contracted Lyme disease. And his grades went down to Ds and Fs, and he couldn’t even get out of bed, much less participate in sports. So we took him to the Lyme literate physician, an allopathic doctor, who put him on a bunch of antibiotics, and he got progressively worse rather than better. And so I’m coming to you to see if you have any other ideas. And I happened to be standing by the Nutrimetics booth, and they had this Peruvian cat’s claw. 

That’s a very well-known herbal anti-microbial. Mainly used in the Peruvian jungle for 100s of years. And I saw, I said, well, let’s muscle test this on him. And so we did it muscle test, really great. And his grandmother knew how to do muscle testing. She tested, she found the same thing. I said, well, I think y’all to do is go talk to his Lyme literate physician and, you know, get permission to stop all the pharmaceutical drugs and start, you know, this herbal and microbial and whatever other natural things you think would benefit and see how he does. 

So they left the conference and I later learned that the young man was taken home by his grandmother, and he didn’t tell his grandmother what his was gonna do, and he didn’t tell his parents what he was gonna do, but he stopped all the pharmaceutical drugs on his own and started this herbal extract from the Nutrimetics company. And in two months time, he was completely well. And his grandmother was shocked. She didn’t expect that rapid recovery since he had been ill for many months. So, she went back to the Lyme literate physician. She said, “I’m pretty sure it’s this samento stuff “that got him well.” And the Lyme literate doctors said, “No, there’s no way in the world. “You know, nothing as strong “as the pharmaceutical antibiotics I’ve already given him. “That was just a miraculous, spontaneous remission”

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay, there must be some great acronyms for that. We’ll have to figure that one out later. Okay, so.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah. So she said, “No, I’m pretty sure it was this the samento “that was the biggest key in him getting well, “cause that’s, he wasn’t doing hardly anything else.” And the doc said, “Well, I’ll prove it to you. “I’ll send you some of the patients “that are not responding well to pharmaceutical therapy, “and you can put them on your stupid herb “and see whether it works or not.” So he sent her about 50 patients that were failing his pharmaceutical treatment, and she put all of them on the samento and a few other drainage remedies and whatnot. And over the next two to three months, there was about a 50% improvement in every patient, 50% symptom improvement in every patient, not just some of them, all of them had about a 50% improvement. And so she went back to the Lyme literate physicians. She said, “No, I’m pretty sure it was this samento”. And she said, “Would you refer us some more patients “that have failed antibiotic therapy, “so we can put some patients on this “in a controlled fashion. 

“Have some controls, “have some patients that are under treatment “so we can possibly eventually write this up.” And he said, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” So he referred her 14 pairs of patients, you know, 28 patients. And they were paired by, you know, degree of illness by, you know, smoking history, by age, by, you know, blood top bought a lot of things. And so, it was a random thing. Half of them came into the treatment group, the other half continued to follow his care, whatever you wanted to give him, we said, just treat them the best you can. We’ll figure out later what works, but treat them the best you can. And so we did, you know, some laboratory testing and some muscle testing and some dark field microscopy on the treatment group. And we found that they just had swarms of bugs in their blood, on the dark field microscopy on the first visit. And so we started to samento to solve a lot of them got really severe Hertz reactions. So we gave him drainage remedies. And then, you know, once they got over the drainage room, they resumed the samento. And then after two weeks we re redid their dark-field microscopy, and there was a whole lot less bugs, just in two weeks time. I thought, Ooh, I didn’t expect that, I thought it would take longer. So anyway, so I’m back at two weeks after that very few bugs. 

And two weeks after that, no bugs on the serum. You know, all the bugs were gone. But we did, used a paperclip to rub across the cover slip to basically rupture red blood cells under the microscope, and looked again, and we saw all kinds of bugs coming out of these ruptured red cells. So it killed the old bugs in the serum, but not in inside of the red cells. So two weeks after that, we ruptured the red cells and saw a few bugs coming out. And two weeks after that, we ruptured the red cells and couldn’t find any bugs coming out. So in 10 weeks time, it went from massive mounts of bugs to no bugs in the serum or in the inside of the red blood cells. 

But they, you know, they were still having some symptoms. So I said, well, it probably takes longer than that to get rid of the bugs inside the brain, inside the joints and some of the other places. So we just kept it up. And at the end of 18 weeks, there was a 90% average improvement in our treatment group and a 5% improvement in the control group. So we said, I don’t think we need to do statistical analysis on this, . But then I got caught off in another project and, you know, didn’t have time to do a write-up and a publication. So naturopath, you know, did her best to just write up what we observed. And she sent that to the company that had provided the product free for the patients. And they said, they called her back and said, can we publish this on our website down in or, can the people that sell our product down in Peru, no down in Ecuador put this on their website. She said, yeah, I don’t think that’ll get me in trouble if you do that. So they did that. They published, you know, they allowed the distributor of the product in the Ecuador who was, you know, different company, different individual to do that. And within a week, my phone was ringing off the hook, because my name was in the paper that she submitted.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Oh, I see, okay.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

And so I started getting referrals from all over the globe for people with chronic Lyme disease, wanting to come get treated. And so, I got a lot of experience there in the next couple of years, treating Lyme disease and refined the protocol and got it better and better. And then in 2006, Dr. Richard Horwitz contacted me from New York State. And he said, “I’ve got 5,000 Lyme patients in my practice. “And 500 are doing poorly. “Do you have any ideas what I can do for those 500?” I said, as a matter of fact, I think I might, because I’ve refined the program quite a lot by then. And so I sent him the written protocol and he purchased the products, some of them from Nutrimetics, some of them from other companies. But most of them from Nutrimetics. And he put those patients on those products and called me after six months and said, “Oh, you know, “70% of the patients got markedly better. “All of them are somewhat better. “But 70% got markedly better.” 

I’d say, well, that’s good. I said, but what about the 30%? What are you gonna do about them? He said, “What do you suggest?” I said, well, if you’ll gather about a dozen of them together, I’ll come to your office and evaluate those energetically, and see if we can come up with something else that’ll help them. So when I went to his office, I found that those that were struggling still, were eating lots of sugar, you know, drinking soda and coffee and calling that hydration. They were, most of them had mercury amalgams in their teeth. Most of them had mold or fungus in the air of their house that they were breathing. And, you know, there was a lot of environmental stuff, basically. So I said, well, you know, there’s a few resistant bugs here. 

Maybe we can come up with some different herbal to deal with those. So I went back to the drawing board and redefine the program and sent him the modified program. And he put another 100 patients on that program. And they had 80% of the patients markedly improved in that. So it was still 20%, which was not great, but not too bad for an empiric program. So, you know, after that, you know, the word got out that he had done that, because he presented that information at the International Lyman Associated Disease Conference. And so then there was all kinds of doctors from all over the globe, starting to order the products from Nutrimetics. And again, the Nutrimetics company asked the person in Ecuador, if they, you know, were interested in having the written protocol on there. So they did that. And, you know, so you can still find the written protocol down there on nutrimetics.ec. That’s the bionetics website. Anyway, it’s the way I learned most of integrative medicine, which was called the University of OJT on the job training.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You know, actually let me stop you for one second, but don’t lose your train of thought.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

That was one of the things that I wanted to bring out that I completely admire you for. And it’s in all of the greats of the greats that I’ve ever known or come in contact seem to have the same quality, which is, you hear in some long distance message, somehow probably a smoke signal. That’s how distant it is, there is someone doing something unusual in a practice that’s getting a result with some exotic disease or symptom. And then you pick yourself up. 

You, first of all, you make the call. Ken I’ve heard you’ve done this. Is this true? Yes. Can I talk with you a little bit? Can I come over and visit? Can I come over and camp out in your living room and spend days and weeks on end, just to gleam some information that you can bring back and add to your sorta toolbox, right? Of methods. So it’s not quite the school of hard knocks. It’s part of what I said earlier, about unwavering being zero focused and determined to get to the bottom of something, or come up with what you feel would be the best application to improve health and wellness. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that as a quality and in someone. So, now back to your story.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, thank you for saying that. Anyway, Lyme disease is an epidemic worldwide. You know, we’re talking about pandemics, but, you know, Lyme disease, I’m convinced kills a lot more people than this pandemic that the government’s labeled presently. So, you know, a lot of people think that Lyme disease only exists in Lyme Connecticut, you know, but it didn’t. So, you know, we find it in every state of the United States and we find it in essentially every country except possibly Antarctica. And, you know, if people that were in Antarctica were in another country before they go to Antarctica, it’s in Antarctic too. And if they have lice in Antarctica, then they’re transmitting it from one person to another, be it via lice bites. 

A lot of people think that Lyme disease is transmitted only by tick bites, but it just isn’t so. That’s where it was initially discovered by Dr. Burgdorfer. But we know that in the Southern United States is transmitted much commonly by mosquito bites than it is by tick bites. But it can also be transmitted by fleas and lice and mites and scabies and other biting creatures. And also by a sexual intercourse and by a French kissing and by a transplacental transfer from the mom through the placenta into the baby. So the baby’s born with it. So it’s a big problem. We know that there’s at least 3 or 400,000 new cases in the United States every year. That’s a bunch. There’s at least a 100 to 200,000 new cases in Germany every year. You know, so we’re talking about-

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah billions and millions of people. Because this has been going on for decades. And you’ve coined it. I mean, I knew that it mimicked neurological challenges like MS and PD and things like that. Particularly if the spirochete migrates into your brain. But you’ve said that it mimics or can be misdiagnosed for more than 400 different kinds of conditions out there.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Exactly, yeah-

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Really amazing.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, for anybody that’s interested in seeing what those 425 conditions are. They can go to nutrimetics.ec. And on the top bar on the first page, it says 425 conditions. So they click on that. It takes them to a page where it’s got the different conditions listed alphabetically. And if you click on any one of those, it takes you to the website where you can read the article where that finding occurred. You know we know that Lyme disease is the second great imitator. The first grade imitator was treponema pallidum or syphilis. But, you know, they’re both spar cuboidal shaped bacteria, spiral shaped bacteria. And, you know, if you know that borreliosis can mimic almost anything that you can imagine, you know, neurological diseases, psychiatric diseases, arthritic diseases, cardiovascular diseases, you know, gastrointestinal diseases and so on. You name it, it can cause it. It can be a mimic or of it or cause of it, so.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You don’t have to live in ground zero, like Lyme Connecticut or the tri-state area around that part of the Northeast. It just seemed to be where, you know, you mentioned earlier, the practitioner had discovered it and then they felt that was the Genesis. And for the longest time, by the way, I was thinking while you were talking, we should change the name of these Lyme literate doctors, particularly ones that aren’t open to other views as Lyme illiterate, because they seem to not be open to some of the other possibilities that are available to actually help the patient, which I believe that is why they are there. 

Not that they’re not trying. sometimes they’re confined just by their credential, right? ‘Cause certain credentials only allow them to do certain things. But you’ve taken that more integrated, more functional, more broad approach, which really seems to be more appropriate. Because Lyme is complex and the body is complex, and the answers and the tools that you need are very individualistic, because everybody expresses their symptoms differently at different times. So that’s what makes this whole discussion so important. And for people to understand, because the Lyme patient, you know, first off, why me, right? You know, and then you and I can be in the same room and I might become symptomatic and you’re not. And why me and then why now, right? So all of this stuff, it gets pretty complicated. Plus there’s a whole emotional component besides the physical component, that oftentimes is forgotten. And I don’t really believe that you can heal completely, unless you deal with all parts of that.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, that’s what I found also that the body tends to hold onto unresolved emotions in specific locations. For example, the emotion of anger, frustration, bitterness, resentment, rage, held itself in the liver and the gallbladder and the bile ducks. And if you don’t resolve the emotion of anger and its related nomenclature, then you’re gonna end up with physical toxins accumulating in the liver. And then after enough physical toxins accumulate there, then microbes accumulate there. And after microbes accumulate there, white cells accumulate there, and they release cytokines and cytokines cause inflammation, inflammation causes symptoms. 

So, you know, most doctors are looking at the very far end of that, you know, sequence. They’re looking at the symptoms. And in most cases, unfortunately, a lot of doctors just try to find a drug that will cover up that symptom. They don’t try to find out what the cause is. And, you know, that’s, I think a main distinguishing factor and good integrative medicine and allopathic medicine we’re always looking for the cause the root cause.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

They were defective. And wanna actually carve it out and just say, that’s the enemy and, you know, go after that, when there’s really a complete story going on, and they’re just looking at one small piece of the puzzle.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Exactly, yeah. But you know, if you think about the fact that Lyme disease can mimic at least 425 different conditions, most allopathic doctors are treating those conditions as if those are the conditions and that the Lyme disease had anything to do with it. And they’ve never done a test for Lyme disease. So they don’t have a clue that they’re actually treating the patient that has Lyme disease as if they have something else. So that’s a big problem. So a lot of patients go undiagnosed and untreated properly for decades, not just years but decades. And then when they finally do figure out, oh, you got Lyme disease I’m probably have to treat that. 

Then they give them one month of antibiotic therapy and call them well. Because the Infectious Disease Society of America wrote an article that said, you should be well after four weeks of antibiotic therapy. And it’s just not true. You know, I’ve got articles, you know, from 1989, up to 2012, and there’s probably other since then showing how Borrelia can be cultured from the body of mice, rats, rhesus monkeys, et cetera, after they’ve had the same treatment pharmaceutical antibiotic treatment that’s recommended by the Infectious Disease Society of America. So how in the world can IDSA continue to promote that lie? The attorney general for the state of Connecticut, who’s now actually a Senator in Washington DC, Blumenthal I think is his name. Brought legal action against the IDSA for promoting that lie in their peer reviewed article. And in court, he won, you know, the attorney general won and the IDSA lost the case. And the judge said to the IDSA, you must go repeat the research and republish a corrected article. And that was five years ago, and they still haven’t, okay? So they’re above the law.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah. We could spend 10 interviews on that topic. Yeah, it’s really a problem. And it’s endemic. But, you know, you did bring up a point. Because if Lyme mimics 425 that we know about, so then, you know, normal allopathic doctor they’ll see a patient, they come in, and they’re symptomatic, they go through their checklist and you present as you have MS or something, or maybe Parkinson’s disease. They immediately give you that diagnosis. They’re not even thinking about anything else on the list, maybe they’re not even Lyme literate. So it’s not even in their universe to think that it couldn’t be Lyme. So now the patient is labeled with MS. And that chart, that patient chart goes from doctor to doctor. ‘Cause as many viewers here, many Lyme patients, they see multiple doctors. 

Our daughter with our experience, we saw more than 25 different Lyme doctors and in a span of time. So that diagnosis is carried from doctor to doctor or patient to patient carries that file. And so, the next doctor, if they’re lazy, they go, well, I’m not gonna do my own diagnosis. I already got one here. So I’m gonna treat you, but I’m gonna do a little different protocol, right? So now you got the worst combination, because they’re treating you for something you don’t have, and they’re not treating you for something you do have. So it’s just like mind boggling the recombinants of how that affects the Lyme patient, the family is surrounding families. It’s just, it goes on and on and on.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah. I think that there’s a silver lining. You know, when a allopathic doctor doesn’t recognize that Lyme disease is likely there, and therefore doesn’t give the patient a month’s worth of antibiotics. At least the patient’s gut flora is preserved.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, you really good on silver lining. So I appreciate that. Okay. ‘Cause of course the antibiotic will destroy that balance in your gut, which is so important to maintain a strong immune system, which will be your natural way to fight off any kind of invader Lyme co-infections the whole list, right? So.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

In 2011, I think it was 2010 or 2011. I read an article. It was written by Dr. Paulo’s Zamboni from Italy. And the story is that Zamboni was an imaging physician in one of the hospitals there in Italy, and his wife developed MS. So he being an imaging physician, started doing imaging procedures on her. And when he did the venography of her neck vessels, he found that she had a really tight narrowing, a tight stenosis in her jugular vein. I can’t remember it was one side or both sides, but anyway, he thought, well, that could not be normal. So he got out specialized balloon catheter and threaded that up into that narrowed area and blew up the balloon, it dilated the vein and her MS went away and never came back. And so, the next 65 patients that came in with MS, he talked into doing a venography and all of them had a stenosis of the jugular vein or there azygos vein, draining blood out of their head. 

Now, doctors Zamboni did balloon angioplasty on some of some of those additional 65, but even if they got improvement, initially all of them had recurrence of symptoms after a few weeks or months. So he got frustrated and moved on to other things. But what I discovered and what Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt discovered was that, that these patients that have these stenosis have energetic evidence of Borrelia and other Lyme co-infections in the trigger veins. So what I decided we should do is, to do a little study, an unofficial, you know, kind of a pilot study in Dallas. 

So we did that. Also patients that had very early MS like symptoms. And so, we proved with the ultrasound Doppler duplex imaging that Dr. Zamboni had developed, that they had all indeed had narrowed jugular veins. And we also came up with the idea of doing infrared imaging phonography, which showed a bright red jugular veins, which means they were severely inflamed. And so, we put the patients on enzymes, proteolytic enzymes, fibrinolytic enzymes, 30 minutes before food, two or three times a day. And we gave them herbal antimicrobials in tincture form, a couple of times a day. 

And after four months, we re-evaluated them. The symptoms were gone. The red streak on their neck was gone. The abnormal ultrasound Doppler duplex imaging was now normal. And so, we proved that you can reverse at least the less severe MS patients just with enzymes and herbals. So anyway, it’s a shame that a lot of these things are not known by the multiple sclerosis community, because, you know, they could get treated probably, and a lot of them get markedly improved with very little expense or no invasiveness.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And discomfort. And extended challenges and financial disaster stories, as we all know, I mean the impact.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, yeah. And so, we did a little digging and found that there was a German pathologist who figured this out in 1863.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow. I guess it never made it to the newspapers and mainstream, right?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Nope, It didn’t make it to mainstream. But anyway, he proved that the veins that broke in the brain of patients that died with MS, the hemorrhages were immediately around clusters of veins in the brain, okay? So they have an increased pressure in the venous system because of the back pressure from the narrowed jugular vein. Anyway, all pretty interesting stuff. Dr. Ella McDonald did some very interesting research with MS patients also. He got samples of brain tissue from a patient that had died of MS, and got samples of their cerebral spinal fluid. And when he examined their brains, he could find worms in their brains, little tiny roundworms in their brains, but only when he examined at least 100 slices of brain. 

So that was very meticulous. But he found the little roundworms in the cerebral spinal fluid in 100% of the samples, okay? 10 out of 10 samples had little roundworms in them. And so, when he dissected did microdissection of these little worms, he found inside the bodies of the worms, Borrelia, Bartonella, and a lot of other Lyme related creatures. And so, what he concluded was that, patients that have multiple sclerosis have the primary cause is the little round worms, which held the Lyme related creatures. And you’re not gonna get rid of the Lyme related creatures, no matter how many antibiotics or herbals or anything else you give, until you get rid of the little round worms. So I tested out that hypothesis and he was right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

It became kind of like a bullet train or a transport system to bring the co-infections and/or even the Lyme into past the brain barrier, and then it was warehousing there. I heard, or I saw read some similar about Alzheimer’s the forensic work in Alzheimer’s, they’re suggesting that many of those patients a really high number. I think it was greater than 90% are also exhibiting when they did the cross sections that they had actually the confections and/or Lyme in their brain. And so, you know, they’re drawing that connection between these neurological expressions and the impact that Lyme has. And that’s part back to our initial discussion about how many diseases that Lyme mimics, and really how it travels so pervasively throughout the body.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yup, yup. Alan McDonald actually was one of the doctors that made that discovery about the spirochete in the brain. And it was also confirmed by Dr. Judith McCloskey in Switzerland, and she published an article about that. But, you know, if McDonald’s right. Oh, and by the way, when McDonald’s did his study of the autopsies, five of the autopsies that he received were patients that died with Alzheimer’s dementia. And he found little roundworms in five out of five cerebral spinal fluids of patients with Alzheimer’s dementia. And he found little roundworms in five out of five carebral spinal fluids of patients with Alzheimer’s dementia. So how many chronic neurodegenerative diseases are actually caused by the combination of the little roundworms and the spirochetes and the other co-infections. 

Maybe most of them, we don’t know. We’re still early in the evaluation process. But that’s one of the projects that I’ve been interested in recently, and, you know, trying to encourage other doctors that are still active in practice to pursue that. I found a pathologist in Scottsdale Arizona, who’s willing to examine the cerebral spinal fluid of patients that have MS or Alzheimer’s for the little around worms, if somebody is willing to send it to him, Dr. Amin, A-M-I-N from a parasitetesting.com. And he didn’t tell his staff that he was gonna do that. So if you call the staff, they’ll say, I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. So you actually have to communicate directly with the pathologist to get it to happen. But I hope some of the people that watch this training or this interview, will take that task on, you know, to try to get some cerebral spinal fluids from patients with MS and patients with Alzheimer’s dementia and patients with other neurodegenerative diseases. Energetically it’s present in a lot of patients with ALS, the little roundworms are showing up energetically.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You know, earlier you made a mention, just sort of touched on it about testing. And that’s always been a challenge. I mean, way back when 25, 30 years ago, when we were, the only test that was available was the IGeneX test. And now we’ve come out with, or there’s been many other testing services. And there is that challenge between the acute phase and the chronic phase. And when there’s a transfer of the spirochete or the co-infections from the ceremonial blood into the actual cell or your tissue. So can you just spend a minute or two and talk to us in the community about what you think are some of the better testing ways and you know, more modern approaches to the testing and diagnosis part?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah. The best test that I’ve found recently is from Vibrant Wellness. And it’s a combination of IgG IgM, and PCR for a variety of different species of Borrelia. And a lot of people think that they only need to look for Borrelia burgdorferi, but there’s over 30 species of Borrelia that are pathological in humans, four of them very strongly, so. And so if you’re just looking for Borrelia burgdorferi alone you’re gonna miss a significant number of people that are affected by Borrelia species. And then also tests for IgG and IgM and MPCR for several of the Babesia and Bartonella species, as well as Anaplasma and Coxsackie virus, Mycoplasma. 

It’s a very comprehensive test. And if I’m not mistaken, it’s just about $700, you know, so for what it does, it’s actually a much better test than the IGeneX test. And the other test that I’ve used is the one from Dr. Hal Huggins developed at dnaconnexions.com. DNA C-O-N-N-E-X-I-O-N-S, dnaconnexions.com in Colorado Springs. So I’ve used that test in patients that wanted to know, you know, whether they had lung related creatures present or not. And they can do that with a urine sample. So that’s a handy thing the Vibrant Wellness has to have a blood sample. But the other lab that’s on the horizon that I think maybe better than either one of those is Genetics First, which is a lab out in Phoenix valley area that was developed by my friend, Dino Prieto. And he’s a naturopathic practitioner out there, has a big clinic and also a big custom compounding pharmacy. And I think that, you know, I’ve had one test through there just as a part of their testing validation process. And, you know, it found quite a few things that I didn’t know I had. So I think it’s gonna be a good test as well.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You know, my son is an organic farmer in Michigan, and I think it was the middle of last year during the summer. He came down to Florida to visit. And he announced during dinner that last week he pulled a tick off of his body, you know? And so being out in the farm in the field, and my wife and I Melody, you know, we kind of looked at each other, you know, our hearts went right to our stomachs or somewhere else. It definitely left our chest. And I said, okay. So the first thought that came to my mind was, are there any good ticks out there anymore? You know, I always hear and you may have heard, ’cause you’ve seen 1000s of Lyme patients, but like, they all say, well, I’m gonna grab if they’re lucky enough to find the tick, if they’re lucky enough to get a bullseye rash, and they’re cognizant that that those are signs, you know, ways that you can see that your body’s reacted, well great. 

But you know, ticks, they find the warm places they go into your scalp or under your armpit or your crotch or all different areas, right? Oftentimes they don’t get it. So my son said, well, I’m just gonna grab a graft of tag tick, I’m gonna put it inside of a little Ziploc bags send it off to a lab to be tested, you know? And so I’m just kind of circling back on the whole testing process, because you have a small window of time when I think you can use some antibiotic kind of regimen and actually address the Lyme and, or the co-infections like out of the gate. By the time, even as the conventional tests, Western blot or all the ones that people are aware of. By the time it shows up that you’re positively testing, you’ve already shifted from the acute stage when you can address it with an antibiotic to the chronic stage. So some of the tests that you are pointing us to, are they gonna catch it a little earlier, maybe in the first week or two of when you think you might have been exposed?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, yeah. I think that when you’re testing IgM and IgG both, IgM is an acute antibody for the bug that you’re testing and the PCR sometimes will be elevated early on as well. Sometimes it takes a few weeks for the IgG to become positive. So you don’t wanna rely as much on that, but that’s the nice thing about the Vibrant Wellness. It has the IgG IgM and PCR, all three for several different species of Borrelia and several other species of co-infections. Well, I think it was about 10 years ago now, I was asked by a group down in Australia to come give a talk down there about Lyme disease. And so, I said, oh yeah, I’ll be glad to. 

It’d been a while since I’ve been in Australia. So I flew down there to, it was Sydney. And just before I left to come down there, they said, we want you to come and we want you to talk, but you can’t talk about Lyme disease. I said, okay, now you want me to talk, but you don’t want me to talk about Lyme disease. Why don’t you want me to talk about Lyme disease? They said, well, we have an entomologist here in Australia who’s analyzed the 5,000 ticks and he didn’t find Borrelia in any of those. So we don’t have Lyme disease down here. Oh, okay. So you say that nobody in your country ever goes to the United States or any other countries where Lyme is endemic. Yes. So you have Lyme disease in Australia. So I thought about for a bit, I thought, well, actually, this is a great opportunity. So I decided to go give a talk about multi-system multi microbial inflammation, okay? I didn’t talk about Lyme at all. I said, you know, Borrelia and Bartonella, and some of these other things that we find in the United States as co-infections for Lyme disease are all capable of causing multi-symptom multimodal microbial inflammation. But it might not be those at all, might be, you know, something else. It might be you see now, it might be some other creature, leptospirosis, whatever. And so, they said, yeah, that’d be fine. So that’s the first that I gave that talk. And I thought, I really should be giving this talk exclusively instead of talking about Lyme disease. Because very often when you talk about Lyme disease, the doctor goes down a rabbit hole, you know, doing testing sometimes, which the test is negative and tells the patient that they don’t have Lyme disease when they actually do have Lyme disease. 

But the test was just negative, falsely, negative or they find the Lyme disease by blood test. And then they put them on antibiotics, which doesn’t kill the Lyme disease. ‘Cause they already had the Lyme disease for several months or years. And the antibiotics don’t usually work when they’ve had the disease for months or years. And they end up causing, as we said before, a severe disruption of their gut flora and messing up their immune system, it makes it harder and harder to get rid of the Lyme disease anyway. So what I said after that trip to Australia, I said two doctors, I strongly urge you not to look for Lyme disease. Don’t look for Lyme disease. If they have all these symptoms, then give them a natural empiric program. And if the symptoms go away, you say they had multi-symptom multi microbial inflammation. And you don’t have to know what the label was. And so, a lot of doctors started doing that. And interestingly, they didn’t continue to come under attack from their licensing boards, because they weren’t using antibiotics for a year or two years or three years like a lot of them were. And so, they were actually saving their license and saving the patients at the same time. So it was a win-win situation.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Great. Interesting, right? A blessing and curse. You know, you introduced me through your academy, a doctor named Dr. Steven Heinz, who was also in hospital Texas, not too far from you. We had discussions and not too long ago. And he said, you know, oftentimes even before he does the normal organized testing like you suggested, that sometimes he offers like samento or a national homemade path or a tincture, and it’ll start low dosing and then increasing dosing over the first week or so. And then basically, if you get a die off or a herpes reaction, or just some sign that signals symptom, that there is actually that, that remedy is actually creating a reaction in your body. Then that might be the first simple, inexpensive way for you to even know before all the exhausting testing that you really might have a challenge. And when he said that to me, I said, oh, this is a page out of Dr. Cowden’s book. And I’m . So, yeah.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

I call that the empiric testing, okay? So you’re not doing an actual test, you’re doing a trial. You know, oftentimes allopathic doctors have a patient come into their office that’s coughing out the green flam, and they say, oh, you’ve got a bronchitis. Here, take this antibiotic. And if it goes away, they will know that you had bacterial bronchitis. And so that’s an empiric test. They didn’t get a sample of the sputum, send it off to the laboratory, cultural sensitivity testing for different types of antibiotics. They just gave him an empiric treatment. And, you know, why don’t we do that for Lyme disease as well? 

You know, don’t have to label it, Lyme disease, label it multi-symptom multi microbial inflammation and, you know, give them some anti-inflammatory herbals and if they get a Herxheimer reaction initially, and then they take some of the remedies that are good to get rid of that. And then they, you know, continue to get better and better and better as time goes on. And you say, well, yep, they probably had a multi microbial inflammation.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Which actually gets the patient better and completely sidesteps all the politics involved in the diagnosis, the labeling and everybody is right. The world is right again, right? Through all that, very interesting.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, I think practitioners would be wise to try to avoid that. The politics of making a diagnosis and treating with standard pharmaceutical antibiotics.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

So there’s some theory that, basically most people are symptomatic because they’ve got high levels of toxicity and high levels of inflammation that follow that. Or they traveled together on the same highway, so to speak. So, do you think that it makes sense to just do a sort of a general detox protocol, maybe use binders just to clean up some of the muckety-muck that’s in your serum before you actually go and start a protocol that might be going after the root cause, just to kind of lower their toxic burden and maybe lower inflammation, maybe actually abate some of the symptoms that the patient is expressing. So the patient, particularly if they’re chronic, they get a little bit of their life back, and it buys a lot of time for the practitioner in the process. Because everybody’s so anxious, most people that are chronic, they’re so sick of being sick. They’re so sick and tired of being sick and tired, right? In that once they get something that starts to work, they start to overdo it a little bit. Do you think that, that might be a preempting type of a way to look at this whole equation in a sense?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of benefit, I think in detoxifying, you know, when you have a suspected chronic infectious process, because we know that the toxins create the environment that makes it easy for the bugs to grow and hide from the white cells to be able to combat the bugs. You know, Dr. Antwan Beauchamp, who was a contemporary said, “The terrain is everything.”, okay? He said, you know, the internal terrain of the body, how toxic you are, will determine whether you’re gonna get sick from a bug or whether you’re not gonna get sick from a bug. And a Pesto said, no, the bugs are everything. The terrain has nothing to do with it. But on the Pesto’s deathbed, he finally said, the terrain say, too. He wanted to exonerate himself. You know, that yes, Beauchamp was right I was wrong. But, you know, by that time all Pesto’s stuff had been put into the medical text of the time, and in the training institutions and so on. So it was way too far down stream for that boat to turn back.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Great. And we’re still pasteurizing everything. So, basically taking all of the potential of the beauty of nature we’re killing that, yes, we’re drinking milk and dairy products and whatever if you do that. But really, the elements of that drink or that food source, most of the ones that really are important for our life source have been removed due to the process, so.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, if you get your milk from a cow who is raised in grassland that’s not sprayed with pesticides or herbicides, and they don’t take in any grains as part of their feed, that milk won’t have any pathological microbes in it, it’ll only have beneficial microbes in it. And so, there’s where the problem arises is, you’re not paying attention to environment of the cow that’s producing the milk that you’re gonna drink.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Well, they’d this question of anybody but you, which basically is, it’s a, what do they call that? It’s a, some kind of question. Like the one that you can’t answer right away. But is there a place on earth now these days in our earth and our planet, that there is such an animal, there is such a cow that hasn’t, and I’m sure that there is, and assurance that whatever it is, you’ll know that place. Because you’ve probably been there. But in most modern, you know, cities and urban dwelling-

Lee Cowden, M.D.

No. It doesn’t exist in the United States anywhere that I’m aware of. You know, we know that last year there was more than 1 billion pounds of Roundup sprayed in the United States. And we know statistically speaking, if it rained, there was a 70% chance there was Roundup in the rain. So any place in the United States is getting doused with Roundup. You know, if you’re out in the Brazilian or, you know, Peruvian jungle, you probably can find such a place, but you know, where you don’t have the pesticides and herbicides, and you know, all the other pollutants that man is added to the planet. But there aren’t very many places. So the rest of the people, the rest of us just need to detoxify regularly .

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Does my cell phone worked by the way in that place you just described? I’m just curious.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

No, not unless you have a satellite phone.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Let’s talk about that just for one second, but we’re running really late and I know your time is amazingly, you know, so precious. Let’s just talk about exogenous frequencies, EMF, and how EMF, which I believe is another big stressor, modern stressor, how that might come into the equation with a Lyme patient. Because many of these Lyme patients, they’ve got these devices, they keep their cell phones next to their bed, they’ve got Bluetooth and wireless everything. They might be driving Tesla cars or battery operated cars, you know, devices, lifestyle joys. I mean, my wife bought us a coffee pot that is tied to my network in my house so that it can know exactly what time to brew my coffee in the morning, like really? I don’t know how to, I’m turning things off as quick as things that technology is being turned on. So how, in your opinion is EMF something that a Lyme patient needs to be concerned about?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Absolutely. Not just a little bit, but a lot. It’s my opinion that in the United States a greater number of damages to the cell occur as a result of EMF than from all the other manmade chemical toxins collectively.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Okay, it’s a huge thing. And we haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until they get the 5G fully rolled out. The FCC, the Federal Communications Commission has now approved 1000s and 1000s of satellites in the United States. Worldwide, there’ve been 441,000 satellites approved to be put into the low earth orbit. You know, as of a year or two ago, there was 2000 collectively in the orbit. All of the satellites collectively were only about 2000. And we’re talking about having 441,000. There’ll be more satellites in the sky at night when you look up than stars.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

So everybody’s concerned about just the telephone pole or the power pole that’s somewhere located in your area. And by the way, there is a zip code you can, or a website, you can plug your zip code, and it will tell you how many satellite towers or poles are somewhere within four miles of that zip code, which I found interesting. ‘Cause when I walk outside of my house, I can see four. But when I put in my zip code, there’s 43 towers within four miles of where I live. Normally when you look for a house you wouldn’t necessarily buy a house if you had a choice under, you know, telephone poles and big high wires, because of all of that electromagnetic fields and those energies. And now we’re talking about, these are the things we can see. What about the stuff in the sky? Like you’re talking about that you can’t see, this is just crazy.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

And tnisearch.com or.org is the one, is the site you’re talking about. And that’s a scary thing to go do that sometime. You know, there are so many other sources of EMF besides the cell towers. You know, a lot of people think nothing about leaving the wifi on all night, even though nobody’s using it. Why in the world would you leave your wifi on zapping yourself all night long when nobody’s using it? It’s not logical, okay? In my opinion, wifi ought to be turned off 100% of the time, except maybe when you’re gonna have a dinner party and people come over and they wanna show you something on their cell phone, and they have to hook up to the internet in order to show you. 

So you turn it on for the dinner party, period. You never turn it on any other time. You know, I don’t even have wifi capability in my house. I live 25 miles from town for a purpose so that I don’t have to deal with somebody else’s wifi. I don’t have to deal with somebody else’s electric smart meter, or somebody else’s radio frequency burglar alarm system. You know, all those things are zapping us and increasing the disruption of the blood brain barrier. So it makes it easier for chemical toxins that are in our blood stream to go across the blood brain barrier that’s now disrupted and straight into our brain and poison our brain. And we wonder why so many people are having brain fog in early dementia you know. And it’s also disrupting the gut barrier. So you have, you know, your gut leaking, you know, biotoxins and all kinds of stuff into your bloodstream, poisoning your system all the time.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And you talk that they haven’t even flipped the switch on on 5G completely, they’re still putting the towers in on the ground. And I’ve read that in the military and the government, even though those poles are 3, 4 and 5G, they are mounting 7 and 10G of frequency transmitters on the same cell tower for their purposes, so that they can actually have a frequency that’s above the other frequencies that people are using for their phones. It’s just endless without any limiting factor, because like you said, the FTC and the FCC are the ones that are in control of whatever there are, to determine how many and what kinds of frequencies are allowed. And from my studies, there aren’t any health minded people that are even on the committees of those agencies that are making these determinations. It’s remarkable.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Just about everybody that’s in one of the governmental agencies that regulates those electronic communications are from the communications industry, okay? So they previously were, you know, an employee of a big communications company and they’re gonna have completely unbiased open-minded attitude about what they should and shouldn’t do, right?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Right. Plus they’re not concerned, unless they were personally influenced like a family member that was sick. They’re just going sort of where the money is. I hate to be crude about it, but the money seems to be in faster surfing and faster gaming and wireless everything, because of the conveniences, without any look back at what might be harmful for the body. But like you say, the blessing, there’s now this whole new power industry called building biologists, that go out there and try to clean up the mess, or offer some education and awareness as the kinds of things you can do to try to protect yourself.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah. I believe that if you live in a big city is really, really, really, really, really hard to protect yourself from EMF. You know, maybe it can be done to a degree, but you know, you’re probably gonna have to stay inside your home and you’ll probably have to have all your walls painted with Y Shield paint, and you’re gonna have to have all your windows with, you know, EMS shielded film on them. Otherwise you’re gonna get zapped.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, and sleep in a Faraday cage. And I mean, you know, we’re talking about a bubble now. You know, this is before the big rage and this big push, when I think we were around 3Gs and that was probably maybe 10 years ago or more, but I was doing a lot more land traveling and going to the airports. And I kind of watched people. And I was noticing a shift from in my day that, you know, if you had a child or two, they were on a little trot, you had the little carrier or whatever you’re strolling along. And then that communicated to having some help when you go on holidays. 

So I’d see these young families they’d have like a L pair or someone to help the kids. And they would shudder along. And then all of a sudden those old pairs that help start to disappear. And these little kids, zero like one year old, two year old, they’re sitting in their little carriages. And they’re just surfing. They’re playing with these tablets, and using these devices. And I thought, you know, neurologically, until you would know the statistic better than me, but probably until your late teens and maybe early 20s, your neurological system, isn’t really truly, all those dots aren’t really connected yet. And now we’ve got these exogenous frequencies that are sending out signals, that electrically your body is responding to, including your brain. And so I always thought, well, maybe that’s another contributing factor why we see so many high rates of autism and neurological challenges, especially in the adolescent and the pediatric world. And so, this is really a big problem. Then another one that we have to be concerned about and particularly Lyme patients need to know about it, right?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

It’s a huge problem. And, you know, we’re basically poisoning ourselves, and we just need to do the best we can do with our circumstances. We live in an imperfect world and we just need to clean it up the best we can where we happen to be. You know, if you have a job in the city, it’s not gonna be terribly practical to live 50 miles away from the city and travel in and travel out every day, both directions. So, you know, you have to clean up your environment inside the city so that you can survive there. And it won’t be a thriving. I believe it’ll only be survival.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay, so we’re coming to an end. I really hate to go, because I love you. And I love everything that you’ve done to help people, throughout the world, particularly in the healthcare area. And certainly as it comes to Lyme disease. Could you offer maybe one or two tips that a Lyme patient that’s not feeling so good, or even a Lyme patient that feels good but wants to stay feeling good. Could you offer something that to us that maybe I could integrate into my life as quick as tomorrow that might make a shift or a change and get me on that positive.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, diet is huge. And, you know, if they have what we call fast foods, they call them fast foods ’cause they speak to you to your grave. So you wanna get rid of all the fast foods in your diet. You know, if you have limited resources, don’t buy organic everything, buy organic meats, if you’re gonna eat meats, because meats have five times the number of pesticides as non-organic vegetables, okay? So, you know, especially butter. Butter has 20 times the amount of pesticides, non organic butter has 20 times amount of pesticides as nonorganic vegetables. So, you know, if you’re gonna do butter at all, try to get it from a place that doesn’t use pesticides. We get our butter from Finland. But anyway, you know, you can use coconut oil or palm kernel oil to cook things with instead of butter, and reduce your pesticide intake quite a bit. You know, getting enough water every day, get the cleanest water you can. 

The tap water unfortunately, is very polluted. It’s got not just chlorine and fluoride, which are intentionally added, but it has pesticides and herbicides and solvents. And, you know, a variety of pharmaceuticals. A study in 2008, showed that in the 40 largest cities in the United States, there was an average of 40 different pharmaceuticals in each water supply. And they were different in different cities. But, you know, usually the most commonly prescribed drugs are the ones that you’re gonna find in the water supply. They’re reclaiming the water and filtering the feces out of it and adding some chlorine and putting it back into the water supply. 

So that really makes you wanna drink a lot of tap water, right? And then, you know, try to do what you can about the EMF. Turn off the wifi at night, don’t charge the phone beside the bed, put the phone at least 20 feet away from the bed charging. Put it in airplane mode preferably. If you handle a smart meter, make sure that your bed is at least 30 feet away from it, or get the smart meter taken off your house and put on an analog meter. If you have a radio frequency burglar alarm system on the house then turn it off. If you can afford it, then put a hardwired burglar alarm system on your house, or get a big dog . Dogs are better alarm system than the electronic ones, anyway.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Get a little digital recorder with the voice of a big dog and have a big microphone or speaker next to the door activated by motion.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, no, no. If you have a big dog in the house and you have a 12 gauge shotgun, a pump-action shotgun, the dog barks, and then you’d go , nobody’s gonna come in that house, nobody.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I love that, really great. You know, years ago. Thank you for those tips, that’s amazing. So water, EMF, food, maybe some sunlight, good sunlight on your body to use vitamin D, get that up a little bit. These are all great ways.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, deep breathing, you know, do a stress reduction technique with deep breathing visualization before every meal, before every bedtime, that’s very beneficial. And, yeah. Simple things do those first, because they can make a big difference.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I like the meditation part and the emotional piece where you can also do, you know, say a prayer like many people do, or do guided meditation to kind of shift you from being stressed out and sympathetic dominance to that parasympathetic where you’re calmer, you have a better night’s sleep. Many Lyme patients can experience circadian rhythm shifts, and their clocks aren’t right. And they’re not getting good sleep, and that’s certainly not helping them restful sleep, right? So that’s helping them, you know, eat strong enough and, you know, gives the body the energy it needs to actually have a booster immune system. 

So all of these are, they’re really just everything that our grandparents and their grandparents knew, but we seem to have forgotten those stories, because we’re too busy surfing and doing a lot of the more modern things. And so, thank you for bringing us back. These are all words of great wisdom and Dr. Cowden. You know, Lee, we so enjoyed all of your references, but how do people, like, get ahold of you, or get in touch with some of the great work that you’ve done. In the academy that I mentioned earlier when we brought you on, it’s called the Academy of Comprehensive Integrative Medicine, which the acronym is ACIM. And you dedicated three years of your life, and you interviewed God, 100s of practitioners with different kinds of bodies of work. And you have all of that cataloged on your site, on this website, ACIM. And so, that’s one way. But where do you wanna direct people? Where do you wanna direct the love and the energy and all the efforts that you put into your work? How do people find you?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Well, yeah, I think the people would benefit most by going to acimconnect.com. And once they get to that site, you know, type into the search window, something that they’re interested in, and see if something comes up. You know, of course about the courses range anywhere from one 1 to 13 hours. So, you know, there’s short ones and long ones. But you know when you find something that you have interest in and it’s not terribly expensive, then, you know, purchase that course, review the information, apply that information in your life and see if it made a difference. If it made a difference, you say, I should probably go back there and look at another course.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, and tell a friend about it, right?

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yeah, exactly. And then we created an online wellness coach program. It’s 70 hours of training. And so, I think they still have that priced at around $1,000, which is a huge bargain. And, you know, once you go through that, you can actually help a lot of people. You know, put your on training the wellness coach and help a lot of people. And even if you only use it to help your family and your friends, it’s still beneficial. You know, as you said, we have the 300 hour, fellowship training that practitioners could use if they choose to. And the best way to go through that, my opinion is, one level at a time, each level is 30 hours. So you commit to 30 hours, you review that 30 hours. You make sure that you understand that, apply that in your life and in your practice. And if you get a benefit, you say, I need to go to the second level. And just work your way through those levels. So there’s different ways to go about, you know, getting benefit from the material that’s on the acmconnect.com website.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Well, you know, how, just, what is it? The journey of 1,000 miles starts with one step, and just one tip, just one of the things that you mentioned today on this interview can change that person’s life, which might affect the next generation below them. And so, it goes on and on and on. And so, we talked about the negative spiral and the challenges we’re having out here in the world and among ourselves with disease and our environment. 

The way to correct that could be simply as checking into the ACIM website, finding something that interests you, learning something, changing your life, and passing that on to your kids or to your friends and so on and so forth. And I know, I mean, you dedicate so much of your time in your life to this program and organizing it. The site is really comprehensive. There’s something there for everyone. Particularly, if you’re listening and you have Lyme disease, you need to know more about what Dr. Cowden has done. He’s dedicated his life to this, not just about the Cowden Protocol, that you can find online. But if you really wanna get inside the head of Dr. Lee Cowden, which is a full-time job. I suggest you check out ACIM. Learn more about what Lee Cowden has done and the collective people that he’s surrounded himself with that have really made a difference to many, many people out there.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yep, always pay it forward.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I really appreciate you carving out the time you did today to be with us and share these words and give us some guidance and direction. And you’re amazing, and we appreciate you and keep on keeping on. So thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you joining the summit and looking forward to being with you again in the future.

Lee Cowden, M.D.

Yep, I’m glad you’re putting this summit together. I think it’ll help a lot of people.

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.