Doing Everything Right but Still Not Feeling Better?

Introduction: Chronic Symptoms and Root Causes 0:00

Today's conversation is for every woman who's ever thought, why am I doing everything right and still not feeling better? I know that you've cleaned up your diet. You're taking the supplements. You're working on your gut. You're here listening to this. You tried detox protocols, but you're still struggling with low energy, brain fog, anxiety, inflammation. You don't feel like yourself. Well, what if the missing piece isn't another supplement or another protocol? What if your body has been stuck in survival mode all along?

My guest today is Doctor Jaban Moore. He's one of the leading voices in root cause medicine for chronic illness. And after overcoming his own battle with Lyme disease, he dedicated his career to helping people uncover the hidden drivers behind chronic symptoms things like mold and chronic infections, parasites, toxic burden, gut dysfunction, nervous system dysregulation. And today, we're going to explore why menopause can become the tipping point that exposes these deeper imbalances, and why the nervous system plays such a critical role in healing, and what women can do to finally move their bodies out of survival mode to recovery.

Welcome, Jabin. So glad to have you here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the intro there. And the topic is is the passion point. I mean, every single day I work with clients, whether it's virtual or in office and woman after a woman woman I mean, 92% of my social media falling is women. Because this topic that you're talking about today is wreaking havoc on so many. And if we can get the truth out there, I think a lot of women are going to have the opportunity to be able to overcome this, because 40 doesn't have to feel like the end of the line, 50 doesn't have to feel like you're not yourself anymore.

Like, those are not statements that you hear from people that can get this dialed in. And I'm so glad you're here to talk about it. I mean, I know your work very well. Your personal friend, you would be somebody that I would go to for advice around a complex chronic illness client. And, you know, the audience that's listening here, they are doing the things they're taking supplements and detoxes and likely exploring hormone therapy. They've done elimination diets. They've done all kinds of things.

So what do you think is the thing or what do you believe is the thing that most healing protocols are missing? Well, let me just cut deep a little bit for a few people listening. Look, you've done all the diets, you've changed the food, you've done elimination, you've done vegan, carnivore, Cibo and everything in between. What I say, my practice all the time is diet is the floor. You got to eat good enough to be. Well, that's probably not going to change the game for you long term. You've tried the dam, the calcium, the pregnenolone.

You've tried HRT, testosterone, estrogen and progesterone. And although you feel better. You're still listening. You're still here today, right now. Which means that realistically, that wasn't enough. You've tried to sleep more. You woke up and stared at the sun and looked at the sun before you went to bed. For circadian rhythm. You're still here. And so many people that I see have done all of those things, and they're all great. You've done the sauna, you've stopped using plastic. Yeah, all of those are good things.

The reality is, is a lot of people are still dealing with a habit that they developed as a child.

What Healing Protocols Miss 3:25

They're really driven. They want the house to be very clean. They want the family dinner to be perfect. They desire for everything to look pretty. And I love that. That's good things. Maybe they call themselves attack, which hey, my Co of my business is always telling me she's a type and she's a great employee. But does that serve you and your nervous system to allow for your hormones to balance, or do you live in a multi house? Do you have a parasite looking deeper inside the body for things that are either your nervous system, a toxin or an infection is usually what's behind why a woman is not actually able to feel well, why their hormones are actually dysregulated.

Because the reality is that the people, the women that are listening right now, they're already doing what I call the easy stuff, which is not necessarily easy for everyone. But if you're putting the effort out right now to listen, you're probably doing easy stuff. So when I get on a call with people, I'm like, what's your food like? Great guy, clean water. Okay. Yeah, well, actually, about half of them that I talked to have radioactive elements in their water. Radium, uranium and radon are three big topics that I run into.

But these are some of the things that that we can dive into today. We can tease out each one so that women know, hey, this might be something that I'm dealing with, which is why all the normal stuff doesn't work. So so we're talking about how people are getting stuck doing all the right things, but there's some deeper things, right? So there's you're talking about you said that food is the floor, right. Like that's that's an absolute given. You got to clean up your diet, drink clean water, breathe clean air, these types of things.

Well, there's maybe some people here are doing some more advanced things. Binders. Maybe they're doing detoxes. Maybe they're but they're just not getting better. And so could you focus a little bit on that kind of that other problem that's occurring. You started to touch on it, but creating safety in the body. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So if you look at like the thought process that I come from, yes, you have to be safe in your environment food, air, water, hygiene and plants. You have to be safe in the environment.

You've got to make sure those things are not keeping you sick. But how many people have done that? How many people have gone like, I got the mold out of my house, I retested, I know it's gone, I eat food, it's clean, but I still worry about it. I have changed my water over. But is it the right water? Right? Like these thoughts come into your mind. So do you actually feel safe in your environment? Is that safety you created actually translating to feeling safe? And so many of us, you know, if you think about the let's talk about like, say, somebody that went to war and they come back and they hear a firework go off, and when that firework goes off, they drop and cover.

Why they don't feel safe with that noise. They're trained in their nervous system. That noise is danger. Even though they know they're in a safe place, they know that they're around fireworks. Right? Like it could be the 4th of July. So a lot of us live like that every single day. And the story I have is a woman I worked with. She had been abused. And so anytime anyone would touch her the backside of her, she couldn't see it coming. It would just send shivers down her spine and she would just have this massive cortisol spike.

And she knew she was safe in in certain environments. So if you're someone that's not getting well and you're doing all the right things well, one, do you believe that you're doing the right things? Like do you do you own that? Do you know that deeply in your nervous system? Because if you don't, if you're still if you're sitting here right now hearing me say some of these things and you've got your shoulders lifting up, or if you like, lean in or you're just like, got that pit and your stomach, then that's where we have to start talking about your nervous system, your fight flight freeze response, how that affects cortisol in your body, which is a hormone that can block all the other hormones.

So one thing that there's some theory on is the cortisol steel where when stress happens, it steals all the precursors for all the hormones you want to use that make you feel happy and healthy. People tell us what a precursor is for people who don't know what you mean there.

Safety, Trauma, and the Nervous System 7:50

So a precursor would be like you're pregnant alone. So this is a early onset precursor hormone builder that you make all of your hormones out of progesterone, all of your estrogens and your androgens, which is your testosterone, all come out of pregnenolone. Then they split over and you have data which is going to turn into your estrogens and your testosterone. And then you have over into progesterone, you have where that is broke down into. So if you don't have enough pregnenolone, which is the same thing that stress hormones like cortisol use, you can only make so much of one or the other.

So if you're not feeling safe and you use all your pregnant alone to make cortisol, you're left empty. The gas tank is empty to make your other sex hormones. And so this whole concept of creating safety in the body, I mean, this is something that I see frequently in my own community where I can give somebody the absolute best protocol, you know, based on their lab results. We can see this and this is going on and and by all, for all intents and purposes, these are the supplements that should help.

These should support. But every once in a while there's someone who just doesn't get better. They just can't get better, even with the perfect written protocol. And for me, what it typically comes down to is stress and trauma being in a heightened sympathetic overdrive state in the nervous system and the body not being able to actually receive these wonderful nutrients and, you know, botanicals and herbs that should be supporting the body. Can you elaborate on that? Because I think this is where a lot of this occurs in the menopause and perimenopause phase, where it all just seems to be heightened.

Right? That's just it was always there underlying. But now that the body is in this transition phase and you're going through these hormone shifts and shifts in the body, now all of this kind of comes up, bubbles up to the surface, and people have a hard time getting well. Yeah. I mean, as you go through the change of life there, your physical body starts to change. Some women may gain weight, which is stressful, some may get more irritable depending upon the way hormones move within their bodies.

Some don't have as much energy. So there's a lot of different parts that happen as you're going through everything, and that just makes people feel uneasy. So that stress is going on. When you have stress in your body and you start triggering cortisol to happen. Well, cortisol being the stress hormone, is also going to create a situation where not only is it stealing sex hormones precursors, it's also triggering a deeper stress response in the body that deeper stress response goes to. You can see it in labs.

I can see that if you've been in stress for a long period of time, if you've been traumatized, if you have, you work too much. If you work out too much, I can run a hair tissue mineral tests. I can see sodium. I can see potassium depleted. So you're burning through your minerals, so you end up losing out on minerals in your body that then, as you deplete, takes away your energy. Get tired. I've seen wear on that same hair tissue mineral test. Elevated stress for a long period of time can trigger genetics epigenetic markers to turn on one of them.

We don't process B12 or folate as well. So we see in your blood work homocysteine going up. We see in your hair cobalt going down. So now we're becoming vitamin deficient B vitamin deficiency leads to a fatigued state again. It leads to ability to process the stress and sex hormones less. So your liver gets backed up. We may become estrogen dominant. And then when you're not methylated, making energy in your mitochondria becomes a bigger problem because you're not using the nutrients to build might or might ATP.

You're you're not building nutrients to make ATP. So as you go through a stress response, it's like step by step by step, you start losing out of minerals, using them up too fast. You trigger genetics where you don't actually pull them in, and then the cortisol itself actually can become toxic to you when it's been around too long. So when you're stressed for too long, you actually get a toxic response to cortisol. I was doing some research on this where I was looking at the brain response to long term cortisol use, and long term cortisol in the body leads to a toxic response that tells your body your toxic like you're like you have mold toxicity, similar response that then leads to the body getting more stressed and releasing more cortisol.

And then you're stuck in this toxic response. So you just touched on something else that I wanted to ask you about, which was that you teach in your clinic and your programs and with your clients and patients.

Cortisol, Hormones, and Stress Overload 12:40

You teach about trauma and toxins triggering the exact same brain pathways. So I think we could segue into those brain pathways and what's happening there, because you just you just started to mention it. Yeah. So everybody listening probably has heard black mold bad right at this point. Anybody listening to you or me. Parasite bad. Well why why is parasite and mold bad. Well, they both release toxicities into your body that cause damage and inflammation. As that damage and inflammation starts irritating your body, you release a cortisol response to increase your body's physiological response.

So you increase the immune system. You increase nutrient usage. You increase recovery for a period of time. Your body revs up. Just like if you drive your car too fast for a long time, it revs up. You burn through gasoline. Well, when you start to run out of the gasoline, that's when that toxic cortisol response starts to continue and perpetuate. And that leads us into the okay, I am stressed. So therefore I create stress hormones. So therefore I create more stress and more stress hormones. And that just that path just keeps going.

Well, the same thing happens with trauma when you get traumatized for whatever reason and trauma and stress or not that far apart. If I work out too hard, if I went through something horrible, if I got a divorce and it was really bad, that stress response revs you up so you can deal with it for a while. But what happens when you're stressed out? For too long? People will say stomach aches. They're going to say headaches. They're going to say burnout, depression. Well, that's because your brain and body are being flooded with cortisol, which is using up your nutrients.

That takes you back to that same pathway I mentioned a moment ago. Too much stress, more cortisol, which then stress keeps going. More cortisol, more cortisol at some point becomes toxic, which creates a toxic stress response that creates more horizontal. Sounds like you can't get out of it, so you can't get out of it. Exactly. Unless you do something about that specifically. And that's where good. And that's where my practice when someone comes in, that's like, I'm stuck. I'm not getting better from doing all these right things.

I'm like, okay, well, I asked them, what all have you done? Have you done? Have you checked your house, your air, your food, your water? A lot of times since today, we're thinking, yeah, a lot of these people have done that. Like, okay, well, have you done nervous system work? Have you actually done physical therapy for your brain? Because people know I find that it's the one thing people don't want to do. They want they'll buy a gadget, they'll do a bio hack, they'll take another supplement regimen.

Give me another protocol, give me a tincture. Give me a homeopathy. Give me a red light. Give me a sauna, give me a something. But as soon as we want people to start working on their brain like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not going to do that. Yeah, yeah. I was just talking to a lady yesterday. Who? Sweet woman. Just, you know, I feel so much for. She's chronically ill. She's got a lot of brain fog, a lot of depression and anxiety. So that motivation factor and that understanding factor for her is just it's very hard.

And that's what a lot of people coming in that have menopause, menopause going on because hormones have just been wrecked. So it's harder to just have that get up and go. So when I ask them like, hey, can you put in 30 minutes a day learning about your brain and then implementing the strategies to do the physical therapy to your brain? Just I mean, when I say physical therapy to your brain, people are like, well, what does that even mean? Because they're thinking, well, this nervous system retraining thing, it just it goes over top of people's heads.

A lot of times if I just say, go rewire your nervous system, go retrain your nervous system. So after a while, I just said it's physical therapy. Like you need to do literal movements. Put your thumb in front of your face. Look up, look down, look up, look down. Pulling in your body's ability to go far and close helps to rewire the brain. Doing certain breathwork movements. Rewire your brain. Canceling repetitive negative thoughts. Rewiring your brain out of this is okay to do. Instead of thinking, man, I need to get all these things done and sitting there and staring at your TV or your cell phone all day.

The first time you think of doing something, actually force yourself to get up and go. Make it a habit to move. Rewire your brain to be able to be in control. Take control of. Okay, I have my heart palpitations going on. What do I do about this? What's going to kill me next? What's the trauma fear response that comes up versus with the woman I was talking about? I just got done wearing a Holter monitor.

Brain Retraining and Parasympathetic Healing 17:25

My cardiologist signed off on me. I've had an EKG. I know that this has been happening for six months, and it's nothing that's going to harm me because my cardiologist has signed off on it saying, okay, this is a symptom. I'm working on getting through this. Let's calm my body down, I am safe, I am okay. So like actually doing these types of physical therapy, it's exercises for your brain to bring you back down. Doing that in alignment with being safe is how you connect those two things that stop this cortisol toxic loop that we get stuck in.

Absolutely. I've seen it time and again in my own practice, where you start doing these types of eye movements and breathing and stimulating of the vagus nerve with humming or, you know, any of the. I even did an experiment and did it with my husband to see how quick he'd react with either a yawn or or a sigh. Sometimes it's just a big sigh that the body gives when it starts to get into that safety mode. And it works. I did have a woman yesterday, Jabin, who told me it took her three months of doing it consistently to be able to yawn. Wow.

She was consistent. She trusted and she believed it would help her. And she knew that she was in this sympathetic overdrive, and she knew that she needed to create new neural pathways in her brain. So she stuck with it for three months, and she finally was doing some of the things and yawned and that so, so for everybody listening right now, that yawn were just taking a big, deep sigh of a deep breath and releasing involuntarily. That's a sign that you're dropping into a parasympathetic healing mode.

And safety is being created in the brain. So that's what you're looking for is that kind of letdown of the body. And three months. But she stuck with it. So something that I want to have you shed light on. And, you know, I'm noticing this with a bunch of the people I'm interviewing and also in this conversation that we're having and something that catches my attention with everybody I speak to, is that menopause is often a tipping point and not the root cause of what's going on. Right. So, so a lot of these underlying issues that you've alluded to, like mold and lime and chronic infections, toxic burden, they didn't just show up in menopause.

They've been there kind of accumulating festering. And for many of our women watching, they've had Lyme since their 20s or teens or and now all of a sudden, menopause is the tipping point. So can you help us understand why? Why is menopause a tipping point there in a woman's life? Well, I mentioned a few of the things. There's some stress that some women have had around that topic. So there's just cultural stress. There's I'll say sometimes it's family stress. Right. So you've got maybe kids that are in high school that could be stressful.

You've got a family unit, you've got a career and a job. So there's that piece going on. You just I'll give you another one. So this is happening in my age group. So I'm 53 and we've got parents that are aging and need our help. I've recently started taking over all of my dad's finances and everything because he can't do it anymore. And then we also have kids in college and they still need us. As you know, even though they're little adults, they still need their parents. So we're in this, stuck in this.

Everybody needs me on top of it. My hormones are changing and reducing and all the things. So there's another one for you. Yeah. And add into that you're the volleyball coach, the PTA coordinator, the church group leader. Because by the time you get to 50 ish, you've built up a reputation within your community and you have responsibilities. So I think that's part of it. Another part of it is, as you're going through the change of life and hormones are shifting, your body is starting to make a lot of different hormone decisions.

Reproduction may not be the top priority anymore. No. So you start shifting away from how you're making hormones. So those hormones go from maybe being made more so in the ovary. Sex hormone, what we think of as sex hormone builders and we move into adrenals. So when we start making some more hormones, other adrenals, which is also where cortisol is made, also where stress happens. So now versus the male counterpart, you're still making all your testosterone from testicles. If your life is stressed and you don't have to pull from the adrenals bucket anymore, then that's a piece of the puzzle.

The toxic accumulation on your life that's stressing your liver is accumulating the decline in mitochondrial function to even be able to clear toxicity and make energy and regulate hormones declines a little bit every year, naturally. So it's all just compounding on you right now. It's the perfect storm of all of those things. And that's why when women come in and I mean, gosh, I have women at 34 and five, I'm in perimenopause and I'm like, so yes, your symptoms and yes, your hormones are. It shouldn't be.

Let's do some work. Or the 45 year old woman that comes into me who's already gone through menopause, and she gets really mad at me when I tell her that shouldn't happen yet. We detox and then it comes back. I've had that happen a few times, comes back, period comes back. I just want to say right now, as a woman who has gone through menopause, Jabin, I would have kept my period forever

Why Menopause Becomes the Tipping Point 22:45

if it meant I could have peak estrogen levels for the rest of my life. So I just want to say that women, it's a good thing that your period comes back and you're having it. I would do anything to have it back so I could have my estrogen back, because I would know that would be a marker that my estrogens up. So it's a good thing from the provider level. Yes. For you. You got it. She walked into me and she was 53 or 54 by the time I think that she came back in and she was just like, I have a bone to pick with you.

And I was like, oh, boy, what I do. She's like, I started my period again, and I just kind of looked at her like, congratulations. Congratulations. That shows your youth. Yes. It's so good. That's what I'm saying. Like. Like I'd give anything to have it back. Well, she was messing with me, thank goodness. She's like, I know I just had to give you crap. I even went to my OBGYN to make sure it was okay. And she said kind of the same thing after she checked me out. And I was like, okay, so congratulations, Damon.

Good job. So that's why when you're working with women, with all of these things, like everything I've said today, like you have to consider all of it and you have to figure out why this individuals body is not operating the way it's supposed to and try and figure out what's holding them back and how you can tweak it. And it's not usually one little thing. It's not. You only have Borrelia Lyme, and that's why you're sick. No, it's all of these pieces of the puzzle that come together that that cause a woman's body to technically, you know, if you're not supposed to go through menstruation yet, then it feels like it's older than it is.

So I have one final question for you, for the woman listening today who feels discouraged because she's tried all the things and she maybe is feeling a little like she's lost hope, I want you to. I want you to give her a message. I want you to leave her with something. What have you seen happen when someone finally addresses both the nervous system and the deeper causes, like Lyme mold parasites? So this is what you're known for is helping. Helping people unpack those root causes and regulate the nervous system so that they can feel what, again?

What is what is the hope you have to give people? I'll just say this. I'm oftentimes the 10th, the 20th doctor. I often times I've seen people that have done all the things the hyperbaric, the IV clinics, the collation already done a parasite cleanse. So they're coming to me and they've put in work dedicated. Oftentimes the thought that goes through my mind is one, what have they not done? Let's figure that out, because I have to figure out all the things they have done, because they've done a lot.

And I have to figure out what they haven't done so that I can cross-reference those. And then of the things they haven't looked at, what could hold back all these other things from being effective. Right. Like, were you living in a moldy house while you went to Lyme, Mexico and Switzerland and went to the Ivy clinic and did the antibiotics and did the antifungals? This woman was in my practice this week. She was still living in a multi home, even though she was doing all those things. She had asked for Joe's pinnacle at 37,000.

It should not be above 200 particles in her home. So to that woman that you're talking about right now that we're talking to, if you feel like you've tried everything and you're not there yet, somebody missed something and you just have to finally get to someone who's going to take a deep dive, look at you individually so they can figure out what it is. And that's what we see every single day. And I'm looking for the missing link. And sometimes, unfortunately, no one wants to hear this part. Sometimes, once I find the missing link that kept you from getting well, I have to then turn around and go back through the things you've already done right?

Because those things are still valid things, but they wouldn't work while you were still living in mold here. And I got one more question. So telling people the same thing

Finding the Missing Link and Testing for Mold 26:45

until I'm blue in the face, I think there's mold in your house. I think it's not making sense that you're, you know, we're testing your levels and they're still high. You're doing all the things to remove the mold. How do you get people to finally test for mold in their house? They don't want to do it. They don't want to find it. They don't want to deal with it. They don't want to. So how do you get people to finally do it? Run an organic acid test. Find them. Find Aspergillus colonizing or colonizing.

Maybe those are the only two colonizing strains of mold you can find there. Then go look at do they have oxalates? Mitochondrial dysfunction, toxic exposure, B2 deficiency, B5 toxicity, all those markers. Somebody go run a urine mycotoxin test. But then you have to make sure that their AST and Alt for their liver markers are correct. Their creatinine is elevated enough in a urine panel that it's applicable. Maybe you run a heritage mineral test showing sodium and potassium and cobalt elevated, which are markers to tell me whether or not your cells opening and closing, allowing toxins out.

Then you can run a urine toxin test to see if mold is actually coming out of the body. And I'm giving you all the different markers that don't have to run all of these for everyone, but making sure they have the capacity to show you in a urine test that whatever's in them can come out because you got to do that before you run the urine toxin test. Run the urine toxin test to find out if the problem is actually there. Then you run an Army test to screen the home to see if the home actually has mold in it. Because when I have that stack of evidence, I don't get as much pushback anymore.

But it's because I can articulate why you should be doing this versus why I don't think it's a problem. And when you can look at their physiological response, even, for instance, a CMP, if their their carbon dioxide is on the lower side and they're no carbon dioxide high and chlorine low, you can see that there's a pattern for potential mold or monocytes elevated above ten potential mold. So it's like I put together a lot of data points and say, hey, look, I think this is a problem even if you can't afford to get out of it, I at least need to know that you're in it so that I can help you to identify.

Do you need a filter? Do you need to fog? Are we going to be on a binder for a long time? Do I need to be on an antifungal to help support you? All of this data just gives you power to make better decisions, even if you can't necessarily move out or remediate. Now, what I'm hearing is you make it undeniable that you've got to test the house, because look at all of this evidence pointing towards. And what you don't need is another hyperbaric treatment or another sauna or another. You've got to, like get to the source.

So thank you for unpacking that. Clearly everybody listening. This is one smart guy. So so Doctor Jabin where can our audience find you if they're dying to know. And you, you know, you're so fun on Instagram. You've always done such a good job there. I've loved watching you for years,

Hope for Women and Where to Find Dr. Moore 29:35

but you also have a clinic where people can come and get help. So how do they get Ahold of you? Yeah, we work virtually and in person. So you come shake my hand and see me the first time and then be virtual. The rest? I got people in my own city that do that in Kansas City. But you don't have to come in. You can do it all. Virtual. Look me up, doctor Jabin, Mooresville, J.B. and more. More on basically any platform at this point and you'll find us. Oh, I'm so glad. Javon, thank you so much. I mean, I've known you for years, respected your work for years, and I just it's really fun to see the fruits of your labor, to see so many people getting well and feeling better, especially women in menopause, when they feel like, gosh, there's just no hope because I've tried at all.

Like you said, sometimes your people's 10th 20th doctor, right? But you're the last doctor they see. That's the goal every time. So good. Until next time. Everybody take good care. Bye now.