Detoxify Heavy Metals for a Smooth Menopause

Kashif Khan

All right, everyone, we are going to be talking to Nafysa Parpia and it’s going to be a really cool conversation. First of all, thank you for joining us.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Thank you for having me. Thank you for doing this summit. It’s going to be great.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, it’s going to be awesome. Your piece in this massive puzzle is really important because we’ve been talking about a lot of the big topics like fasting, menopause, fibromyalgia, etc.. But we’re going into a little bit more nuanced with you today because there’s a very specific problem that women are experiencing. They get lost because it’s so specific. Within the world of menopause, that time in your life where you are entering a new phase of your life, there seems to be this challenge with heavy metal toxicity and it’s a different challenge than the early stage and other times of your life. We need to understand it in that context. That’s what you’ve done such a good job and we’re happy that you’re here to share with us. Thank you again.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it is a big deal. Menopause and metals especially lead. So we all know that women in menopause lose bone. But when you’re when your bones turn over, you release stored metals in your body, especially lead and silt. This is why it’s such a big piece for women in menopause.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. That’s where, like, the context is different. It’s not like, what am I exposed to? You’re making them like it’s coming, it’s internal. So let’s dive into that a little bit more. How was the metal threat during this time different than the everyday teenage metal threat.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I want to talk a little bit about about exposure, because it all starts the same the every day teenage metal threat or even baby metal threat. It actually grows into something bigger as everybody ages and we start to lose our bone. So I want to get a little background on lead exposure in the U.S., where we get it from to begin with. The major source of lead in the U.S. environmental has been from leaded gas. Now, that was phased out of use in 1973 and then banned in 1995. Then we can get deteriorating lead based paint from weathered surfaces. They produce highly concentrated lead debris and dust. Then we can have a combination of corrosive water and lead pipes and that can get led into the distribution system of cities and in individual homes. 

That can create localized zones of high lead in the water. The other thing about lead is it doesn’t degrade in the environment. It’s not organic matter so then it’s transferred continuously, transported through the air, the water, the soil just by natural means. Then we’re still getting recycled lead in the environment. We’re still getting exposed, even though it’s now banned from use. It’s so toxic and it doesn’t degrade, we still get exposed to it. I love the way you brought in teenage metals and in older people’s mouths, it’s a really important point because everybody gets exposed. But then what happens is that the lead once it’s been in the blood, it has a half life. 

So the half life of lead is only about a month. When somebody gets an acute exposure of lead, that exposure ends and the blood levels start to drop and within 30 days that level was cut in half, 30 more days, it’s cut in half again. Then by around three months, about 90% of that lead is removed from their bloodstream. So where does most that blood lead go? 90% of it goes to the bones. Those babies that are being exposed, those teenagers that are being exposed, it goes into their bones. We think it’s fine there for now. Well, actually, cadmium gets stored in the bones and it can cause toxicity to the bones. But lead is the big one, that the big repository. So lead is going to sit there is going to be okay. But then when there’s bone loss around osteoporosis, so about around menopause, women tend to osteoporosis. That’s when women can become our own risk of lead exposure due to the bones starting to turn over.

Kashif Khan

This is interesting. What you’re saying is that there’s this 30 day cycle our body goes through to protect us and eliminate lead. But it’s not like other toxins that we’re peeing it out or pooping it out. We’re storing it. So the protective measure is, let’s put this somewhere, get it out of the blood. And 90% ever get stored?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah, 90% gets stored in our bones of lead. So the other metals get stored in the cells of our organs, our thyroid, our kidneys, our liver, and then other environmental toxins like pesticides, mycotoxins, insecticides, microplastics, they get stored in our fat cells. So there’s so much here. So we’ll poop, pee, sweat out metals and other toxins. But some people are going to hang onto them more. 

This is where your great work comes in. When we think of people’s genes of detoxification, when I’m looking at people’s genes of detoxification and I’m looking side by side at their heavy metals. I see some people hoard metals or they hoard chemicals, and they’re doing that for a number of reasons. One of them could be that they have SNPs in their genes of detoxification and they don’t have optimal detox capacity or they don’t have adequate nutritional status. They don’t have enough amino acids or minerals or B vitamins. Those are the cofactors for detoxification or they’re under a lot of stress. They’ve got a lot of immune dysregulation. So they’re going to hang onto their metals more.

Kashif Khan

I don’t think anyone will deny that light is bad news. But if you ask the average person why, they probably don’t know. So what’s the problem? You have this lead being released from your bone during menopause. What’s the exposure going to cause?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Lead is going to cause a lot of, I just want to make a distinction between acute poisoning and chronic low levels of these metals. Also, I just want to say, we’re not talking only about lead. We’re talking about mercury and cadmium as well. Those also get stored in the bones, but lead is the one because storing the bones the most. But just say we have an acute high level versus a chronic low level exposure. The acute high level that’s going to put somebody in the hospital. It’s going to make someone dizzy and nauseous and vomit and acutely ill. 

That’s not what I deal with in my patients. What I’m talking about is chronic low level exposures overtime that build up in the body. So the presence of metals doesn’t equal poisoning. Almost everyone has metals in their blood or their urine just by virtue of being on the planet. So it’s my job to figure out the heavy metal burden is contributing to their illness or not But lead is going to cause a lot of immune dysregulation. It causes memory issues, cognitive issues, very particularly at these chronic low level exposures.

Kashif Khan

So then when somebody is reaching that age, is this like a given that it’s just going to happen because you happen to live in the United States and you’re exposed or there’s testing they should do?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I think definitely there’s testing they should do. There’s lots of testing that we should do. So actually, it’s important to test their acute exposures as well. I do like to test their body burden. So in acute regarding acute exposures, the agency of Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, that’s a sub agency of the CDC, they formulated a registry on environmental toxins. It’s called the NHANES data. This list is really important. It’s a combination of how toxic the substance is, how frequently it’s found in the Superfund sites and in people, and how many people are exposed. So it’s a scoring system. It’s looking at the top environmental toxins, blood in urine is a percentile in the US population.

Kashif Khan

Oh wow. So they can access that.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah. When we get to 75th percentile, I’m testing my patient’s blood and urine just straight up from the standard lab, just lab core. I’m then comparing that data to the reference data from the CDC, not the reference data from the labs that represent on the labs is based on OSHA scores. I really care about this database that the CDC put together, because that’s what’s telling us what a toxic level is. So when we get to 75th percentile, it’s assumed that we start to have, at the very least, health effects from that toxic exposure. Between 75th to 95th percentile, we need to consider an acute exposure and an acute high exposure, like maybe water or food.

Kashif Khan

So are there’s very specific sort of functional tests or things that are or is a standard, I go to my doctor and ask for testing, good or no?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yes and no. So the standard I go to my doctor, I’m going to ask for testing. Now, hopefully they’ll do it. The doctor definitely needs to be trained in these things, trained in environmental medicine and trained in heavy metals. They can, though. I mean, any doctor can run this test from LabCorp looking at Mercury in the blood, in the urine, lead in the blood, in the urine, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum. 

All of these ones actually are available on LabCorp, even Quest. That’s just looking at an acute exposure. If it is high, then we could do another test. That’s where we provoke the metals in the body, provoke the metals out of the bones, using chelation therapy and looking at what the body burden is. We want to compare the data from the CDC with data from the body burden. If it’s higher, if it’s around five times higher then it could be justification, depending on the patient on an chelation therapy is appropriate or not.

Kashif Khan

Okay. Yeah. Chelation can be a messy thing. Meaning that I find some people going through it. Obviously it is a great answer, but the process can be problematic sometimes. We have to be prepared for what you’re about to go through.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Absolutely. It can be such a messy process and it needs to be the doctor needs to be trained very, very specifically and to have certification in it. As we get deeper this conversation, I definitely want to talk a little bit more about the detoxification processes, because it’s so important. As you said, it can be so messy and it can be done wrong and it’s better to just not do it at all if somebody is not trained in it.

Kashif Khan

There’s so many protocols. Where do you even start? You’ll go to Google, Dr. Google, and you’ll feel here ten different ways that it needs to be done.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I strongly recommend getting training from Dr. Paul Anderson and Dr. Virginia Osborne. They have a chelation therapy class and certification. And I strongly recommend getting environmental medicine training from Dr. Lyn Patrick. That’s also a certification. So if someone has an issue, an autoimmune condition, they go to the rheumatologist, someone has a bone issue, they go to an osteopath. It’s a science and it needs to be treated like that. I think that people treat environmental medicine like this, just a casual thing to be done. But you need to go to specific doctors. We’re trained because things can go sideways, backwards, wrong. If it’s done casually, it’s a medical thing.

Kashif Khan

Yeah. You start releasing heavy metals and toxins back into the blood and if you don’t have experience or who knows what that could happen.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Exactly, it’s just best not to do if you don’t have the training or the experience doing it.

Kashif Khan

We’re going to talk a little bit about your experience in detoxing, but I think before we get there, some people might ask, well, do I have to just wait for resolving it or can I prevent it? What can I do to just not go there and be healthy?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Before we get into it, let’s talk about who’s more susceptible because that’s also ties into prevention. So any levels of these are they’re not good for us but with the wrong genetics, this is where your work comes in. We need to use your lab and we look at people’s genes of detoxification. So if they’ve got the wrong genetics or if they have, when I say wrong genetics, I mean if they have a lot of SNIPs in their genes of detoxification, if their genes of detoxification are not optimal, they’re going to have higher loads of metals. So those people are going to be more susceptible if they don’t have enough minerals, and amino acids, and B vitamins. If they’re eating the standard American diet you’re not going to have the means to detoxify very well because amino acids, minerals, the vitamins, they’re the cofactors for our detoxification processes. So a doctor could be trying to pull metals or toxins out of a person till the cows come home, but that there’s not enough nutrient support, cofactor support. Those metals are just going to get recirculated. Also want to make sure the patient isn’t under a lot of oxidative stress. I can look at someone’s glutathione on it. If it’s an oxidized state, that’s not a good time to detox as well. 

So people who are more susceptible have these issues. It’s about exposure, genes, stress, oxidative stress, cellular stress, nutritional adequacy. They all play an important role in determining who’s at risk. Now more about prevention. This such caution to doctors, if you have a postmenopausal female and she has bone loss or a man who has bone loss and you’re trying to do chelation therapy or detoxification, you better make sure that you treat that bone loss or else you’ll be detoxing forever. We want to make sure that bone loss, one way is to make sure that bone loss is prevented. For patients themselves, avoidance is key. Eating organic foods, using green household products, green personal products, being aware of where you live. A lot of my patients live near vineyards or or golf courses or they live freeways. They’re going to be exposed more. So we want to include just daily detox processes for patients like that and for patients to prevent bone loss, weight bearing exercises and hormonal support. 

Kashif Khan

Yeah, that all. I mean, when I listen to you, it goes back to like we have to have functional thinking because you go out and say, okay, heavy metal, scary, I’m going to support my liver, I’m going to detox protocol going. But if you don’t understand that it’s not a singular process, it’s the baton passed between all these things going on. If you don’t understand the full cascade A to Z, you don’t really know if what you’re doing is supporting, because there may be another pass of the baton where that part is failing. Like you speak about genetics. So, people look at their methylation genes and they say, okay, phase two, detox going well, not going so well, but then there’s Comt, which is the tail end of it. If you’re not doing all the cont, okay, I’m methylated and everything, bring it to the door. But the door closed. Where does it go?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I’ve seen people, they haven’t supported their Comt and then they get they get angry, they get aggressive because the methylation pathways connected to the Comt pathway, you turn the methylation and suddenly they’re going to start producing a lot of adrenaline and they’re going bananas, they’re irritable. 

Kashif Khan

You have to understand the functional nature. A single gene doesn’t do a single job, like you said. It’s methylation, it’s neurochemicals. It’s also hormones. You play with your Comt, your hormones are going to change.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Exactly. I remember back in 2014 methylation was the sexy word. The work in functional medicine and sometimes patients still today might say, I don’t methylate very well and I say that’s really important to know. Thank you for telling me. Let’s look at the biochemical pathway, what your methylation is doing. We need to look at all of your genes of detoxification because it’s not just one gene. These genes of the different systems of your body, interact with one another. They work in concert together, and that’s what we need to look at and understand and then marry that with the biochemistry of what’s happening in your body.

Kashif Khan

So is this why you talk about before getting into detox what you call pretox has to happen. Is that what you’re talking about?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

That’s what I’m talking about. Absolutely. So people may have seen my my pretox ebook. I talk a lot about pretox because I’ve noticed that a lot of patients have come to me, they’ve done a detox and they feel terrible in the middle of the detox they had to stop or they felt worse after the detox, or they gained a lot of weight after the detox and they don’t understand why. There’s a lot there’s a lot of factors we need to consider before we actually detox. I’ve talked about some of them, like taking care of bone turnover, making sure that there’s adequate minerals and vitamins and amino acids because those are the cofactors for our detoxification pathway. I’ve talked about looking at our genes of detoxification, even the genes of inflammation, looking at our hormones, all of this. But nobody does a detox with me unless I assess these things and optimize them first. Also want to look at the organs of elimination.

Kashif Khan

So detox isn’t like it’s a smaller detox before the detox is preparing the body to be able to benefit from the detox.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Right because a lot of people, their bodies are not ready. So I want to I’m really actually doing a scan of the organs of elimination. I’m doing this through the labs. I’m doing this through taking a clear history. So, for example, the gut, if a patient is constipated and we start to pull toxins out of their system, those toxins are not going to get released from their body. They’re just going to build up. They’re going to recirculate. Regarding the gut, if the patient has diarrhea, a lot of patients do or irritable bowel syndrome, then their guts inflamed. It’s not a good time to flush the toxins, do they can’t handle it. What if the patient has leaky gut? Almost everyone has leaky gut. At least my patients do. If someone has leaky gut and I pull toxins through, what’s going to happen? The inflammation from the toxins or the toxins themselves can circulate through to the rest of the system through the compromised gut internal lining, the kidneys, recurrent urinary tract infections. Women in menopause tend to get those due to lack of hormones. So what if that’s happening and I try to detox and they’ve got recurrent UTIs, that’s not a good time. Or some people have interstitial cystitis, which is inflammation in the kidneys for a multitude of reasons. I think toxins could be one of them. I certainly don’t want to detox them or some of my patients have a low filtration rate. 

If the kidneys are infiltrating rapidly enough and I start to pull toxins out, what’s going to happen? They’re just going to recirculate again. Or liver enzymes, liver enzymes could be elevated if someone drinks a lot of alcohol or they’ve had a lot of antibiotic use over time and they’re sensitive to these things. That’s a good hint that the liver is having a hard time or the thyroid. So I want to correct all these things as best as I can. The thyroid is very, very sensitive to inflammation. I mean, the number of people with Hashimoto’s is on the rise. I think that’s due to environmental toxins, a combination of toxins and infection. Yes, but I want to deal with that first as best as I can before I start the detox. So as you can see, I’m scanning the whole system to make sure the entire system is ready for detox.

Kashif Khan

Somebody that was sitting there with their detox bottle in their desk saying, I’m all right now, they hear all this and it’s like, Oh, man, overwhelming. I didn’t know I had to do all this stuff. But it sounds like there’s this complexity, but it really comes back to a simplicity because what you’re saying is not that all of this has to happen, but you’re just going to focus on the exact thing that needs to happen so that what they thought they were going to fix actually works.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I’m so glad you said that because I realized that what I could be saying here could sound overwhelming to people. Because there’s so many different pieces and not everybody has issues in every single one of these systems. My patients do, because I focus on patients who have complex, chronic illness. The mystery illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome, post infectious diseases, Lyme disease, long haul COVID syndrome, autoimmune conditions, fibromyalgia, things like that. So that patient population in every single system, we’re going to find some kind of imbalance right now in people who it’s not so bad, they’re just a little bit inflamed. They’ve got low grade inflammation. This is a much simpler process. I still strongly recommend that their whole system gets thoroughly evaluated by the doctor, including the genes. The toxins looking at them on the labs and then going from there. But it’ll be a lot a lot more simple with somebody when it’s just low grade inflammation, that’s for sure.

Kashif Khan

I’m sorry, then you get to this place where you know exactly what to do. You’ve tested, you know what the threat is or the multiple threats with possible some of the more complex people you’re dealing with. Then you take all of that and put it in the context of menopause. So that’s what we were talking about. A very specific time, very specific person. So outside the consideration of the bone loss and bringing toxins back in, are there other things to think about in that time that are unique instances?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah. Thank you. So absolutely. So due to lack of hormones, women in menopause are already prone to inflammation. Now these metals cause immune dysregulation they cause endocrine disruption. Women in menopause are already going through these things. So due to insufficient hormones and menopause, every system of a woman’s body is affected. We’ll get hot flashes, night sweats, volatility, lowered mood, that optimism, depression, cardiovascular disease, stress, incontinence, insomnia, headaches, all of this due to not enough hormones. Now, arsenic is the number one toxin on the CDC list. Arsenic causes immune dysregulation, it causes endocrine disruption it’s a carcinogen extraordinaire. To somebody who already has a lot of inflammation and inflammation in every system of their body because not enough hormones. I’m talking about menopause. We’re going to have some more problems and add the metals from bone loss due to osteoporosis on top of that. We can get even more inflammation. But I really want to make sure that I bring this really talked about. I want to bring it back. But who’s susceptible? It’s not everybody. Again, it’s the genes. It’s what you’re eating. It’s the amount of oxidative stress your body’s under, the amount of inflammation you’re already under. Some people it’s a lot. Some people not so much.

Kashif Khan

Then some people also get into, so when you go down this journey of I want to do something and be healthy and get better, usually there’s some element of weight loss. And then you’re releasing other forms of toxins that are arsenic and even estrogens and things that are in your fat that complicates things further. But how do you prioritize like it’s metals, it’s mycotoxins. It’s more like it’s everything.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

It’s everything. That’s why I test everything in my patients. So the people who will test everything are usually in two camps. The people who are really in the longevity health world, they’re looking to and they’re looking for anti-aging and a lot of them are, they’re biohackers. That’s everything. The other people look at everything are people with complex chronic illness that will be patients. People who don’t fall into those two categories, they don’t tend to look at everything they don’t want to know. Doesn’t matter, I think that’s okay. When I’m helping my patients, I am looking at everything. I’m looking at their mycotoxins. I’m looking at their environmental toxins, which includes the pesticides, industrial solvents, other chemicals, looking at glyphosate. I’m looking at metals, the acute exposure. Then I might, if it’s indicated for that person, do a body burden exposure where I’m testing the metals that they have stored using chelation therapy. So where do we start? It’s a long question. I start by modulating their immune system first because once they can modulate their immune system, then I can start to detoxify them, then I can start to kill the infections that they have. Because when we detox, we create more inflammation that just comes with the territory. So I use a lot of peptide therapies actually to modulate the immune system first and then I can move into detox. I’m often figuring out which toxin they have the most of. I might start there and then I might rotate between the two. Between when I say the two, I mean between metal detox and detox of other chemicals. The way we detox other chemicals is very similar to the way we detox Mycotoxins. It’s very specific ways, but I’m rotating and looking at the labs and just it’s a long process.

Kashif Khan

We’ve had a lot of discussions about fasting, but mostly in the context of overall health. Just as a habit. But you’re looking at it as a therapeutic tool in part of those detox protocols. So how do those things integrate together?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I’m looking at intermittent fasting because I want to help increase autophagy for my patients. I have a lot of patients with long haul COVID, and it appears that they might have high levels of spike protein. So we think that autophagy increases helps increase the removal of spike protein. So detoxing from spike protein is very different process than the typical detoxification therapy. So autophagy is one way to help with detoxing from spike protein so that we increase autophagy by intermittent fasting. A lot of my patients are too sick to do a full on one to three day water fasts. So we do intermittent fasting and if people feel worse doing intermittent fasting, I think that that’s a hint that the we haven’t done enough pretox or that the patient hasn’t done enough pretox because when we lose the fat cells and you alluded to this earlier when we lose weight, so when we lose weight, the fat cells shrink and then we get released stored chemicals, not metal so much because metals don’t bio accumulate in the fats as much. But the other chemicals do that microplastics, the glyphosate, the mycotoxins. So when we fast and the fat cells shrink and we release these toxins we can feel worse. So it to me this goes back to to pretox so for my patients before I’m having them do any intermittent fasting, I’m making sure that all the pretox support that I discussed earlier is set.

Kashif Khan

Amazing. So you’re it’s like there’s multi benefit because your someone’s coming to you saying I feel this and the feeling this is like the outcome of them being toxic. But you can’t help them feel this until you get their body kind of homeostatic and perfect. It’s not only like fixing this, but a new version themselves. At the end of the year, you’re unveiling this like, look at you. 

Nafysa Parpia, ND

It’s true. What’s very interesting is I talked earlier about people in the longevity world. They’re the people who might follow Ben Greenfield and the biomarkers and all that awesome work they’re doing. What’s very interesting is the work that we do at our clinic for patients with complex chronic illness is the exact same work very often that the Biohackers are doing. What we do is biohacking for complex chronic illness. Then once we get them into a new homeostasis into say 70 or 80% of normal, we bring on more tools, could be exosomes, could be different peptides. As we do that, they become a longevity patient.

Kashif Khan

You’re literally taking them to the promised land that they didn’t even know they could get to, which is like, you’re came here for a cure, but not only cure, I’m going to get you better than where you started.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

It’s true. It happens.

Kashif Khan

That’s so cool.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

It’s so cool because we have all this. All this great medicine at our fingertips. We’re so lucky.

Kashif Khan

So you talk about some regenerative stuff like exosomes and peptides I know is a little bit off topic, but where do we get to the point where it’s peptides and exosomes are turned off and somebody needs stem cells.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

So the stem cells in our patient population isn’t usually the best thing for them because our patients have low grade chronic infections or they have infections that are recurrent. What we’ve seen is that when patients have had stem cells, but they’ve had chronic infections, things have gone backwards or just not worked at all, whereas Exosomes are just the growth factors from the stem cells. When people are sick, we can just give them just the growth factors they seem to be able to handle that better. So we don’t give stem cells to our patients actually.

Kashif Khan

Would be the outcome. They just would. What would they feel.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

A lot of them have just felt worse or a lot of them have felt nothing. Some of my patients have gone to a stem cell clinic after I’ve got them to 70% after the infections have been killed off, after I’ve detoxed them. They’ve really improved actually. But prior to the advent of peptides, I might say, okay, you go off to a stem cell test, if you want to go to the stem cell clinic, you can go off and try that. If we’ve gone to 70% and we’re just not moving the needle after that, I’m talking about sick people, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome patients. But with the advent of peptides, I can get them faster, way better than 70%. Now. So a lot of times people don’t even need to go to a stem cell clinic, which is pretty amazing.

Kashif Khan

You said for peptides and you said things like fibromyalgia, fix and etc.. So is your cocktail around the innate hormone issue or is it specifically like the fibromyalgia itself? Or how do you put things together?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Okay. So say a patient comes in with fibromyalgia that I think we think of that as just a wastebasket term. Like that means the medical establishment doesn’t know why you have so many so much pain in your body. We don’t know why you have all these symptoms. So we’re just going to give you this tag on you. Let’s call it fibromyalgia. It’s a wastebasket term. So what we do at our clinic is we investigate the reasons why. I’m looking for chronic infections or recurrent infections. I’m looking for immune dysregulation. I’m looking for environmental toxins, looking for hormonal dysregulation. When I’m talking about chronic infections, they can be anywhere and they usually are everywhere. It’s never just one infection. These patients often have parasites. They have funguses in their gut. The microbiome is a mess. They often have sinus infections that can cause brain fog. They might have tick borne disease or their post lyme treatment, and they’re still sick. 

So I’m searching for all of these things, but all of these things together are causing immune dysregulation in these patients that immune dysregulation can cause secondary illnesses. The secondary illnesses are issues of the immune system. Like massive activation syndrome or something like fibromyalgia or autoimmune conditions. Those are primary illnesses. Those are secondary because inflammation caused them to happen. But what caused the inflammation? In my patients, it’s usually a combination of infections, toxins, stress, structural integrity issues. So I’m looking all of these things and it’s very much a dance and then I’m layering them. All of the different diagnoses that lead up to this diagnosis of, say, fibromyalgia. Typically I’m starting my patients off with peptides. First to modulate the immune system. My patients have a hyperactive immune system and a weak immune system at the same time. So hyperactive meaning they have immune conditions, they have the nasal activation syndrome. That’s an immune system that’s overactive just in the wrong direction. Then their immune system is weak, on the other hand, because they can’t mount the appropriate immune response to kill off infections, they should. So they have a hyperactive immune system, they have a weak immune system all at the same time. I’m using peptides to aline that confused immune system. Then it makes killing infections. It makes detoxification easier because the cytokine cascade that comes with killing off infections that comes with detox. When the immune system is regulated with the peptides, they can handle that better.

Kashif Khan

Wow. This is the last few minutes like this is what medicine should be.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I love practicing this way. I think that there’s an acute care medicine, acute care model of medicine, and it works for broken bones. It works for heart attacks. It works when our bodies are all at the same, our bodies are going to act the same in certain instances when it becomes chronic, it’s not A goes to B anymore because it’s A goes to H goes to Y goes back to B. That’s what we have to follow and do our best to understand in each patient. Because chronic illness is not supported by the acute model of care.

Kashif Khan

This is amazing. I feel like flying down to San Francisco right now to work with you. I’m not even sure.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

You should come and visit us. Seriously, you will have so much fun.

Kashif Khan

It sounds like a dream vacation. Peptides and looking over the bay.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Come anytime.

Kashif Khan

This is it. I mean, like, truly amazing conversation because I think this is exactly what’s needed.. You’ve identified a very specific problem that’s outside of most people’s awareness, there’s a certain age where your body changes and there’s a certain threat that we don’t think about. It’s very specific to that time. You’re to lose bone density and you’re going to release toxins that you’ve been storing that have been sort of tucked away in our closet. The hibernation is going to end and raise new threat. Then you blame it on the menopause and it gets blamed on hormones and your mood and your know there was actually a new toxic threat that caused new problems you didn’t actually didn’t have. So eye opening, I think, very important. We have and I haven’t heard this anywhere. So it’s really thankful, I should say that you’re opening our eyes is.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Thank you so much for having me. I think it’s so not enough spoken about topic that’s for sure. Not enough training out there, which is too bad. But I’ve given not just list, I’ve given you resources of where to get the training. It’s phenomenal people to help people this way.

Kashif Khan

If anybody wants to work with you, how do they reach you?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

So we’re at Gordon Medical in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have patients come from all over the country, even other parts of the world to come and work with us. And such an honor.

Kashif Khan

Are you able to work virtually or is it all in person?

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah, I do work virtually all the time. I just need to make sure that my patients in other states have primary care doctors that they can work with over there who can write their prescriptions for medications. Because my license is in California, so for people in California, I can write the prescriptions in other states, just have a doctor and they all do. It works out easily.

Kashif Khan

Amazing. Thank you so much. This is awesome.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Thank you so much.