Energetics & Alzheimer’s

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Dr. Sandison. And I will call you Heather and feel free to call me, Eric.

Heather Sandison, ND

Please do. Yeah, I just have so much respect for you.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Thank you. Great to meet you. I think you have done an amazing job at just getting the word out and helping people understand. This manner with people that we see these illnesses as though they are a thing and really understand all the contributing factors that finally result in someone having a quote-unquote illness. We like to give things names.

Heather Sandison, ND

Right. This diagnosis and many people who are struggling with memory loss, whether we call it Alzheimer’s or dementia or whatever we want to call it. They have gotten they are taking different pathways if you will. And I know that you and I are in alignment in sort of this conceptual framework of how we arrive at these ICD-10 codes or these diagnostic criteria and what that might mean. But I want to hear it in your own words, I always learn so much and find different ways to communicate with patients. When I have a doctor in front of me who I respect and who has similar ideas. We all see it slightly differently. And I would love to hear from you. What do you see as the common denominator of the multiple risk factors that cause dementia?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Well, I kind of bring it down to chronic inflammation, but that in itself I think does not mean much to people. Okay. Chronic inflammation, but we have to understand that inflammation is how our body has learned to defend itself and self-defense is how the system works. That is what it is about. And the ways that we defend ourselves are things that are evolutionarily defined. I mean, we are here today because our ancestors at least survived long enough to have one offspring. So how the body survived past insults and it is, and now we are having to deal with that genetics in the modern world. So I think that one of the basic issues in why we are seeing so many of these chronic illnesses is that we have gotten very good at treating acute diseases. We really, if you have an acute trauma, we are amazing. Have a car accident, god forbid, a bullet wound and I mean, bad things.

Heather Sandison, ND

Lead me straight to the emergency room.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Right. Pneumonia, or heart attacks. I mean, we do a very good job at that but take any of those things. The healing that has to happen afterward is where our own biochemical and genetic individuality takes over and that is where we get into trouble because it is easy for doctors to go down the rabbit hole of finding something that correlates with the disease process. Okay. And then we chase that correlation.

Heather Sandison, ND

And if that is an example, particularly when it comes to Alzheimer’s.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Well, I think maybe, I feel like we might have wasted the past 20 years but not wasted but spent billions of dollars on chasing the idea that beta-amyloid or tau protein was the problem. But these are the ways, these are signs of chronic inflammation in the brain. They are not necessarily the cause but if you have chronic inflammation in the brain depending on your genetics you might wind up with a lot of amyloids. But it is finally coming to, people are beginning to notice that lots of people who do not have Alzheimer’s or dementia have plenty of amyloid in their brain So obviously it is not insufficient cause there is got to be a lot of other things going. And if we look underneath the hood we see that the beta-amyloid, the tau protein, and even the alpha-synuclein are all things that happen depending on your genetics which one shows up when you have chronic inflammation. Okay. And chronic inflammation is how your body protects itself. And the thing about inflammation is it should be transient. Okay. And one of the things we will talk more about, I think will stick in later is one of my favorite topics is something that Dr. Naviaux has called the cell danger response or now he is calling just the healing cycle because it is a cycle that has a start and a middle phase and an end. And chronic illness develops when your body gets stuck in any one of those phases. So you have an acute injury or an acute infection so some cells are dying and your immune system comes in and has to deal with whether it is an infection, and we will talk a lot about infection later on. But you have an infection so your immune system starts to kill the infected cells. 

Now, then the cells have to recover from that and you have to replace them. So that first phase is what he referred to, Dr. Nabeel refers to as CDR one is when the cells that are infected either have to kill the invader inside the cell or the immune system comes in recognizes because of signals that the infected cell puts on the cell membrane, this is an infected cell and the white blood cells come and will kill it. Okay, but then you have to, that is the first step but the second step is you have to rebuild those cells. Okay. And during that first time, the mitochondria during that first step in this cell danger response, the mitochondria are browny now. They are not using as much energy. They are not using as much oxygen and that is a protective mechanism. In the second step, you are rebuilding but the mitochondria still are not back to normal. And then in the third step, those cells that have been either recovered from the insult themselves or the new stem cells are coming in and growing. They have to learn to communicate with each other.

Okay. That is the third step of restoring communication, becoming part of the whole again because it is very much like what happens when you get sick on the macro level. Okay. When you get sick you withdraw from the community and then at the end when you recover you start interacting again. So if you get stuck, either in that first stage of having inflammation so your white blood cells are constantly trying to kill something. And when you are in that stage, you are making a lot of inflammatory signals. In the second stage, you are still not making normally, your mitochondria are not working normally, and the whole cell is not working normally yet, and it is making proteins and some of those things can turn on the processes that will start increasing the beta-amyloid or tau protein or even alpha-synuclein. I mean, because these are all proteins that have been identified as having to do with various different types of dementias because anything we are calling things Alzheimer’s but really I’m talking about there are multiple types of dementias.

Heather Sandison, ND

Right. Right. And so it sounds like, if I understand what you are saying is the causation, inflammation is part of that. But really what we need to go back to if we are going to address the causation are the manifestations of causation including this cell danger response, including beta-amyloid plaques and alpha-synuclein and tau proteins and protein misfolding. But if we take that one step back and say, what triggered the inflammation, that is when we actually get to causation. And it is when these inflammatory cycles get stuck in the iron position that we end up with a problem. Do I understand that? Right.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yes. And the thing that makes this so difficult is because we are so different. Okay. I mean genetically we are different and environmentally are exposures. Who we are as an individual is like kind of, we start off with genetics but then we have our environment. And that can be your parents, which are always an interesting stressor on the environment, and just the chemical exposures that you had, the environment, all the environmental toxins, your diet, and any of your lifetime exposures add up but how they affect you is what is individual. Because of the, I think one of the great examples was when we did a study with Dr. Naviaux, like I said, Dr. Naviaux is somebody who, for me helped me understand what I was seeing. Okay. Let me just take a little detour and I will come back to the main point in a second. I was so confused because I said when I started treating chronic fatigue in the early nineties that was like my thing. I did not understand. Everybody thought of this as or like any of the chronic illnesses, just hypertension, for instance. Why in some people lowering using antioxidants and using mitochondrial support things like CoQ10 and carnitine and D-Ribose help some people a whole lot. And a lot of people did not do much of anything. And especially as I saw people who were sicker longer and longer, and they come in with the shopping bag sign or a whole box of supplements and were not moving them. And I just did not understand that because the model that was popular at that in the nineties and early 2000s was that if you gave people enough antioxidants you were going to help them but it was clear that was not working. 

And what Dr. Naviaux’s model explained was that they are not working because we were doing things that on some level were there to support the mitochondria. And so we had this idea that the mitochondria were broken, okay, we are injured but in reality, most of it is a normal response. It is just a normal response that did not stop so that is where the CDR, the cell danger response is a three-phase process. If you are stuck, if you have cells that are stuck in any one phase of that and do not go through the cycle. Okay. So you have both, for instance, now, I mean, COVID is the flavor of the month, unfortunately, or the decade. You have an issue where you have in some people, they have persistent inflammation that lines up with this long COVID thing. And it produces a lot of brain fog in a lot of people. So if the body is still trying to deal with either a persistent virus or perhaps the spike protein is not digested completely and gotten rid of. It is still said signaling inflammation and the mitochondria in that cell will not be producing energy. So all the CoQ10 in the world is not going to get that mitochondrion to turn its electron transport chain fully back on. Okay. And that is how you make-

Heather Sandison, ND

How do you get out if you are stuck in some part of this CDR and some part of this cell danger response? What do you do to kind of kickstart it to get past that stuckness?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Well, that is where it gets interesting. Okay. Because so we go to chronic inflammation, for instance, or a chronic infection. Okay. Let us say people have a tick-borne disease, whether it be Lyme, Bartonella, or Babesia, these are illnesses that in most people are acute illnesses. We get them and we recover. If you have not recovered it is because your immune system has not been able to deal completely with the infection whether you have it, whether the right whether the bug kind of is fully your immune system, or whether your immune system has just become weakened. And so you have to go back. See, this is where it gets confusing. If everything is working fairly well, well, you can treat people with an antibiotic or an anti-parasitic medicine and they recover. But if there is toxicity because there has been difficulty in how your body metabolizes some of these toxins. And that is where the genes come in because one of the things that we have noticed is not the amount, the gross amount of a toxin that is the problem. Because most of us when we measure toxic loads we often find that many sick people do not have a whole lot more than healthy people. Just like cigarette smoking. It is not good for you. It is definitely a toxic load but most people who smoke do not develop lung cancer or do not develop emphysema, or bronchitis, chronic bronchitis. But some people do because. So it is your genetics. It is how your body has evolved to deal with stressors that are failing you. Okay. Because you we are not designed for that problem.

Heather Sandison, ND

I mean, do you think that there is something about the sort of layering things? So it is like childhood trauma plus genetic predisposition plus toxic exposure, plus repeated traumas or stressors plus an infection. And all of a sudden now somebody has this burden, this overwhelming burden that is going to manifest as disease or this dark or perpetuating process of inflammation. Is that part of how you synapse?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Absolutely. Because when you think about it. I mean just, I have just been looking at lately into ALS, and when you look at something like ALS, which is, a progressive neurologic disease that often can have dementia is part of it. But so and some of the same genes that will lead to ALS can lead to frontotemporal dementia in a different person.

Heather Sandison, ND

Right.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

And so the genes are only about one, only about 1% of people with ALS have a gene that causes ALS. The other 99% have a conglomeration of issues that lead them to the same outcome. Okay. So it just depends on how your body deals with stress. And that is what gets, that is why people are so frustrated and why medicine, in general, does such a poor job because medicine is aimed at what happens in 90% of people, 99% of people. And so that is why they keep failing because they are only looking for solutions that work for large groups of people. And that is appropriate if you are going to use a toxic drug. But from your work and Dr. Bredesen’s work we clearly see that for most people, if you just work on toxin load, diet stress, and support you can make big changes because as you remove the toxins. Then this cell danger response process can work normally because usually there is an, I should not say usually, but often there is underlying toxicity, underlying stress that has not that that is too much for that system like you can measure efficiency. People look at glutathione and you can see that people who are, who stay sick have very low levels of reduced glutathione. The part of glutathione that you need to help fight a viral infection or to help deal with oxidative stress. So there is something that is sucking it down, or there could be a gene that is not allowing it to be made as effective as it can be. But what makes chronic disease different than acute disease is that if you have pneumonia and we see the bacteria that you have, we give you the right antibiotic that kills that bacteria. And 99% of people would depending on how old they are and how depressed, but people get better. Rather straightforwardly but in a chronic illness, it really becomes a game of individual pick-up sticks, plus pin the tail on the donkey.

Heather Sandison, ND

Right. Right. In this kind of simple model there is one pill for that one infection and you just kill that bug and it is over and done, like with strep throat or sometimes with pneumonia that model works. But when it comes to dementia, we need a more sophisticated, more complex intervention to meet the complexity of this disease. While I have you here, I think of you as one of the preeminent Lyme experts and Lyme and Lyme co-infections we know are associated, particularly the Lyme SPEIER very similar to syphilis. There is a neuro manifestation of Lyme, these are both spirochetes. They affect the brain directly and we see the beta-amyloid plaques sometimes contain pain. In fact, more often than not, from my understanding, the literature contains records in them. And so it is as if these beta-amyloid plaques are potentially being created, as you said, in response, it is an inflammatory and appropriate immune response in the brain to this chronic infection. And as you mentioned already, I agree with you. I tend to think of Lyme and the Lyme co-infections as relatively opportunistic. Many people are exposed to them and a few people succumb to them. They actually create these overwhelming symptoms that can be debilitating and in some cases trigger, I think, dementia and Alzheimer’s. So if someone thinks that this might be part of their process, part of their pathway of arriving at dementia, what do you recommend doing about it?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Oh, well, again, this is the same circle. Okay. if you are robust, and healthy physically, and the infection was relatively recent. Then the antibiotics or herbs do work. I mean, the main difference between the two is the herbs take a lot longer, but they are often effective. But if there are a lot of neurologic effects, then I tend to think people do best with intravenous antibiotics. And what is frustrating is that they require prolonged therapy. And that is something that the Infectious Disease Society of America has decided is not necessary but I think they are misguided. But the big problem here is that by the time people have developed something that we would consider dementia. I mean, more than just brain fog, but really are having things that we can see. The hippocampus has truly shrunk. There are really problems there. Then usually we have to deal with the toxic load and the chronic inflammation before we can deal directly with the infection. It is, but again, that is what I’m always concerned about is a population bias. Because I tend to see people who are chronically ill. And I wonder if we treat it, if people who otherwise were fairly healthy and the only symptom that was appearing later in life was dementia. Those people might do very well with just direct treatment. Okay? And by removing that inflammatory trigger in their brains might really help a lot. Now they will still need support because this should not have happened. So they have excess inflammation. But if we remove the trigger and then support them with I mean, and this is where a whole other slew of therapies come in, this is where the peptides which help resolve inflammation. This has been not new, but relatively new and it is the popularity of using these small molecules, these small amino acids. There are things your body produces as you are resolving inflammation. And if we give them, we are kind of giving the body the signal to help resolve the chronic inflammation.

Heather Sandison, ND

I would love to know what your favorite peptides are here. Are you thinking TA1 or LO 37? Well, I used to repress them.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yes, but I prefer I mean I think those are important when we are trying to kill it. But when someone has dementia at or in that soft area before there is real maybe what we call just cognitive decline or the early things it is slowing the inflammation is often helpful. And that is where things like the KBP and TD for Frag and the BPC. These are or, even yeah these are things that lower inflammation and I think are really helpful because the bug can be just a slow process. Like it is sort of like having the fire alarm going and if we can just turn off the fire alarm sometimes that can let everybody relax because the fire is not that bad. This is what is frustrating to patients. It has to be frustrating to patients. It is frustrating to me as a clinician is knowing in which order to do these things. And that is what we have learned over the years. When I first started treating, I did not really start treating Lyme itself until about 91. I mean, in 2001. When I started treating chronic fatigue, I was hesitant to treat Lyme.

And I think people should understand that. What makes many doctors hesitant to treat Lyme disease and these other tickborne infections is that the testing, though improving, is still not great. And back in the late nineties and early 2000, it was really kind of crude. And the idea that you were going to use heavy-duty antibiotics for long periods of time was not something we wanted to do. It is only when you start seeing the results that you get brave enough to keep going because antibiotics do not do good things for our microbiome, and that I’m sure, and you are I’m sure you have to go to cover a whole lot about the microbiome. And so we hate to disrupt it. And unfortunately, when we are treating Lyme and we are using antibiotics. We disrupt the microbiome rather significantly. So it is not something to be done lightly.

Heather Sandison, ND

As a means to an end. And yet if we do not have testing that we can rely on, that makes it a much riskier intervention. Right. We do not even know what we are treating. And I beg to actually discuss this right. Why is the testing so so hard to do? Right. A lot of it is because the lifecycles of these bugs are very complex and so it is easy to miss. Plus, similar to HIV or AIDS, they directly reduce immune function and if what we are testing is an immune response, it can be basically you can get false negatives where we are told that there is nothing there when it is just a result of the bug being there, that the immune system is suppressed and they can not mount a response. Do I understand that? Right.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Well, that is a big part of it. Now, the good news is that the testing has gotten better. So as I say, I was hesitant in the nineties to treat this because also in the early nineties, I was in upstate New York, and how foolish we were back then. The infectious disease doctors told us that in North Mountain Catskill there was no Lyme. And I was in northern New York, and so there was no Lyme. That is what they told me, and something about being in medical school, it is a great brainwashing machine. And it is, I have depended on naturopaths to keep teaching me that the stories I learned were stories. And anyway, so in early 2001 or so, Doctor Anderson, who was a naturopath, joined my practice and he had been treating Lyme based on clinical symptoms because he happened to be in an area with a very high number of lot of cases of Lyme disease. And he was in constant contact with Dr. Boris Schiano. 

I have called Dr. Boris Schiano, kind of the godfather of Lyme. He is somebody who had been treating it since the late eighties and really, really had a deep understanding of it and felt comfortable with the clinical diagnosis. And when you start seeing people recover based on clinical diagnosis, you start getting much more brave. But what is happened over the last few years is our diagnostic abilities have gotten better and better. We are testing with more antigens, which is like more pieces of different Lyme subspecies, so we have a better chance of really finding the Lyme. And also they have developed better things for calling the immunoblot, which are better ways to find the immune evidence. Because as you said, many people with chronic Lyme, the reason they have chronic Lyme is because it can confuse your immune system. It can actually lower the cytokines that would allow the body to effectively kill it.

Heather Sandison, ND

And there is also RNA tagging and imaging that is now available through Doctor Bob Mulvaney is doing. Are you using much of this?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yup, yup. We are using the T lab that started this test but also we use the infected lab which uses a T cell test because the T cells and the nice part about the T cell testing is that they are only positive when they are seeing the bug. When we do, most of the tests that we have done have been based on immunoglobulins or what we call, these are produced by part of this the immune cells are called B cells in the body and they depend on them they can be positive for long periods of time. So many times we have seen a family where the mom has Lyme and is symptomatic or the mom in like the second or third kid when they go through puberty, start getting symptoms but the dad is asymptomatic. But when we tested him, they had high IgG antibodies. But we do not know, do we need to treat them or did they take care of it. And what really confused the matter, even more, is that most of the time, yeah, I think a large number of people who have active Lyme have recurrently positive AGM antibodies, and the infectious disease doctors have decided and this is the thing about medicine, it is not always based on truth, but it is based on the opinion that AGM is only present in the first, 6 to 12 weeks of infection. And because it is not a very specific antibody, as your immune system sees the bug more and learns you make it, you did what they call class switching. You start making IgG antibodies, which are more specific. 

The AGM is like noticing that it is a car and the IgG notices that it is a Tesla. It really can be specific and the Lyme has a way of evading your immune system where you were. In some people, they do not make a lot of IgG, but they make a lot of AGM or they keep seeing Lyme again because lying can get quiescent. I mean, that is why you do not have persistent symptoms where you can have symptoms, you can have Lyme in your brain that is stimulating inflammation and maybe leading to dementia. But yes, you are not having, swollen joints or inflamed joints or a lot of other symptoms because it is quiet but it is not gone. And while it is quiet, it is still stimulating your immune system. This is just like we are seeing with EBV, with EBV and MS. And I’m sure EBV with dementia. I mean, it is the same thing. You have persistent, low-level inflammatory drive because some cells are chronically infected and are chronically almost colonized. They are there and the bug is not making a lot of noise but is making enough that that cell every once in a while signals to the immune system that it is infected. And then you start getting the cytokines to calm the chemical messengers to come to the area, and then in your brain you have these, your microglia get excited and start producing inflammation, and then you are going to wind up with a lot of, tau protein and beta-amyloid around.

Heather Sandison, ND

So this similar process happens with sinus infections and dental infections are colonization as well. Do you refer patients to biological dentists? Do you have a process for treating sinus issues?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Oh, well, both the now I will do it in the order of which we have been, the jaw infection has been something that we have been dealing with for at least 20 years now. I mean, it turned out to be just when people were not getting better that is often underneath. And that can be from old wisdom teeth sites, any kind of dead crown teeth, especially root canals where the tooth is basically dead. And you had the root canal done because it was infected. And it is very hard to clear that infection completely. Again, with an intact immune system and good blood flow, things do well. But the chronic dental infection is a huge issue for people. And it can be can from multiple reasons can just be because your immune system does not work so well, but often it is because there is a lot of tension. We live in a culture we do not move enough. We spend far too much time looking at screens and even before looking at screens just working at our desks.

So there is a lot of tension in these muscles and that reduces blood flow, reduces lymph drainage. People forget about how important structure is because once again it is the individual. There are people who can have terrible structure really like bad backs in all kinds of identifying. And there are other people who just have a little bit off and do terrible look. It is how we are built. You know, the people. One of the big things we are dealing with these days is connective tissue issues. Okay? Because of chronic inflammation and ligaments, ligaments get a little lax when there is chronic inflammation. If you already started life with a lax of ligaments, if you love yoga because you could do the postures. Well, be careful because if you are really, really good at it, you probably have lax ligaments and you get chronic low-level inflammation. You can have more movement. And if that excess movement is especially in the upper neck, you can really start affecting your brainstem and your vagus nerve and be stuck in one of these chronic inflammatory loops and turn on your mast cells, which is another world.

Heather Sandison, ND

But I just talked to Kelly McCann right before we got on this call. And so he is heading over to Dr. McCann’s talk. If you are curious about mast cells and how they can trigger chronic inflammation and this cell danger response.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

I mean, it is because that is the thing that we are such complex beings. Okay. And at the end of what, I was going to start writing the beginning. I go back to a point that going to make right in the beginning that I skipped over is when we did a research project on chronic fatigue with Dr. Naviaux one of the amazing things we found was that we were looking at about 4 to 500 chemicals in the blood, something called metabolomics. Just kind of looking at a mass of them. We do not know what all those chemicals mean, unfortunately, but what we could see is that people shared only about 25, like when we looked at chronic fatigue people out of the other 40 chemicals that seemed to define chronic illness. Okay, only about 25% of those were shared by everybody. Okay. But 80% of the abnormal chemicals were individual. So that is how that is why this is so hard when we are trying to find the smoking gun for chronic illness, there usually isn’t. It just depends on your body. And that is what makes it so frustrating to the patient and expensive because it is not like, we can do one test. People get very frustrated when they come to see doctors like us and they do a lot of tests. And why all these tests? And it is because we do not know which ones are going to be abnormal. Now, clinical, you have been doing this for a while. You can also narrow it down. But not that not as much as we would like.

Heather Sandison, ND

You know, I will just add to that. I learned my lesson the hard way doing that, thinking that I could take a history. And if somebody told me, I have never been exposed to mold. They do not need to do a mold test or I have no exposure to Mercury, I do not need to do a mercury test. And then to get 12 months into treatment, hoping to see a miracle happen, hoping to see dementia resolve or at least turn around, and then feeling the frustration of waiting. Because we are trying to save a few hundred dollars, waiting to run that test, only to find that it is egregiously abnormal and have to then start treatment when we could have started it a year earlier. And so now I just ask patients, if you can, I know that financially it is not always feasible, but do as much as possible right out of the gate so that we have as much data as possible to make the best decisions and prioritize interventions in a way that is really well-informed. It is just too easy to miss something. If we do not, we are not able to do all the labs. And, there are a lot of labs that are new and not everybody knows how to interpret them. And there is a lot of nuance to it. But I, really as a clinician value that data and getting it early on.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yeah, I, I second that because I, I started out treating farmers, and I was doing what I call regular medicine in the eighties and, they did not want to spend a nickel. And so that traumatized me. So the first I have been like to this day, I still make can still make that mistake of thinking okay we are not going to spend that much money. And I and, and it is like that with the tick-borne diseases, you get the history and you go, aha, I’m pretty sure, this is either Lyme or Bartonella. And so we are going to only spend because these tests, unfortunately, are expensive. And you are right, you often miss because the body has only so many ways of making noise. And, I tell patients, especially our patients if they are on the Internet and they and they have seen the list. Okay. I know I have this or I know I have mold toxicity because look, I have all these symptoms, right? And that is great. But you still can have Lyme underneath that, because you do not usually in my worldview, do not usually develop mold toxicity when you are 50 or 40, unless you had something else that played games with your immune system, especially Lyme. 

Because I said Lyme is good at suppressing your AO 10 which will really let you not deal with mold.  Well, so it is this you have to look everywhere because those, just put what you think you have if it is chronic it got there for lots of reasons and we do not know which one is going to make a bigger difference in your body. So so getting underneath is important. Yeah, I just can not emphasize that enough. Do not try. This is it. Especially when, as you have gotten older, you have had exposure to all these things. Yeah. and when you, when your body is it still has a lot more reserve. I mean, one of the things is when you are 30, 40, and even 50, you have I always tell it you can get away with almost anything. It is after 50 that most people start running into trouble because we have lost our reservation. You know that or that resilience. That resilience. Yeah. You know, we lose function but the body is so amazing, and we do it well.

Heather Sandison, ND

Dr. Gordon, I want to know, what are your secrets to stay in young?

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Oh, God, I, unfortunately, think one of the main ones is one that you can not, that you are just like born with just an optimistic attitude and a curiosity to keep exploring. And that is the most unfair thing about life, is that a lot of what people think as they are doing something is really who they are. Like when I listen, I was ever since COVID, I started listening to a lot of podcasts and I listen to all these really incredible people and, but especially in the live longer field and they are athletes and for them, if they do not work out an hour or two a day, they have not done. But some of us are born that way, might, we do not we are so it is you have to find the hook that gives you joy. I think that is what it is. In this culture, people are taught to work hard and struggle. And I think the secret to really a healthy life is to find joy because it goes back to this cell danger response thing again. Is that what turns off in chronic inflammation or what turns off inflammation when the body gets the safety signal and the safety signals really come from the brain? Now, local inflammation will always trump this, because local inflammation is kind of screaming, but you can turn down local inflammation. But until it really gets the all-clear signal from the brain, it does not go away completely. You know, and feeling safe is what does that.

Heather Sandison, ND

And feeling valued, I think as well. What you are speaking to, there is some good science around Becca Levy. I have mentioned this in several other episodes because I’m just so impressed that inspired and empowered by her work. She is a researcher at Yale and a Ph.D. researcher at Yale. And some people have heard of the seven and a half years that you live longer if you have a positive association with a gene. She is the one who published that research. And she also published some research showing that if you have the if you are positive for EPO, E4 if you have the genetics associated with Alzheimer’s, you can completely eliminate that risk by living in a society that reveres the aged among them. And so having this repository for the wisdom and experience that we have gained, having another generation behind us to donate that to give that to it, gives us a sense of purpose. It also gives us that will to live kind of what you are describing, this joy and that sense of safety and being valued as we age. And so I love what you are saying and it is absolutely validated by the research and so empowering because what I imagine is always Betty White. I have just channeled Betty White. It just keeps getting better. If we keep aspiring to have relationships, if we keep engaging. And as we get older, we provide like services as a mentor. If we help others that are coming behind us by sharing our wisdom and experience, then that is helpful. It is almost a selfish thing to do, right? It is helpful for us. And yet it also gives to society in a very impactful way.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yeah. So and that is what happened in this culture that we started out. I do not know about 50, 67, just like making old people separate and just this idea of retirement which is, yes, I mean, like retirement, if you are doing something with heavy physical labor. Yeah, but the joy, no matter what you do, if we can teach people once again his skill set. Everybody who has lived develops skills. And I know when you are young, it is hard to believe that there is so much to be gained from old people or older people. But I remember, I mean, like my mentors when I started off in medicine. I mean, those are the people that inspired me, and beyond the young bright ones who had good new ideas. But the new, I guess, new good ideas and old age. And there is a, it is just that the wisdom of being around a long time, of seeing patterns, of seeing cycles, it is so helpful because when you are young, you think that you can change the world. I mean, when I started, everybody talked about, the kind of medicine that you and I do was going to be the dominant form within 20, 30 years and it is now 45 years later. And no, we are, it is better we are not totally sidelined anymore, but still not the dominant form because things take a long time to change and it takes a lot of enthusiasm. 

But we are seeing that we are seeing a lot of I think a lot of physicians who are in our fields are continuing to work. The people who are stuck in the unfortunate world of conventional medicine Which is causing burnout in doctors, and hopelessness in doctors because they are being confronted by chronic illness and they are being confronted by chronic illness with the tools that were designed for acute illness. And that is a thing, acute illness is a model that works really well for things that have a cause and effect, that are fairly linear and obvious. But chronic illness requires a creative mind, and just,  just the work that you have been doing where you bring together lots of people with different ideas until the individual gets enough. And you need, you really need a symphony of support. I mean, I was going to say treatments but treatments, again, when we treat Lyme, yes, we are doing treatments. But the thing that makes Lyme therapy successful is when we are also doing this symphony of support that you have been talking about. I mean, I’m sure throughout your whole series, I mean, because that is, to be fair, that is the work that those in this field of alternative medicine functional that whatever the names happen to be is we are looking at the whole environment of the human being. And because this is not a single cause disease for 90, maybe 99%, I do not know. But at least 90% of people, there are a lot of different things.

Heather Sandison, ND

It is not going to be as simple as one pill or even two weeks of one pill or one I.V. And it is going to take this I love that image of this symphony of support and its balance. Right, that there is kind of just going back to this concept of the wisdom of our elders, and yet they can get kind of ingrained. Right. We wanted that intergenerational wisdom transfer where they are getting that inspiration of new things and new ideas and that that sort of liberal and ideological youthfulness married with the grounding of wisdom and experience and that that I can only imagine a Lyme patient, walking into a clinic where you see both of those and you get the benefit of both of those perspectives. And a dementia patient getting the benefit of both of those perspectives. You can just see the value of this rippling across industries, across society, and certainly throughout medicine.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

And you know one of the most important things about being around a while is you understand that things do not change overnight.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yeah. Patience.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

And that is what is so important in the treatment of when people say, chronic Lyme or just, it is chronic because your immune system has not dealt with it. And that is and just like, dementia, you are there because you have got a lot of things that have to get back to a more balanced response. And so it takes time. And so the thought, the quality of youth is to think that you are going to change the world overnight. And unfortunately, we have to remember that most of the things the people who try to change the world overnight do not do such a good job.

Heather Sandison, ND

Because it can be a bit destructive.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yeah. I mean, I’m sorry. I would not go there. I always go to like Pol Pot in Cambodia but that is an old thing. Nobody probably even knows what I’m talking about anymore. But there was a man who started out with he really wanted to change society but he was absolutely causing such pain, destruction, and so much death. But it started with good intentions. And the desire to do things quickly.

Heather Sandison, ND

That usually does so relatively recent history that was just in the nineties.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

But so and that is about the healing. The healing is that people come in and they want quick and again sometimes that works. It is not that you should not try but just understand that the illnesses of aging need to be approached with a little bit of compassion, time, and being willing to experiment. Because it seems that there is not one size fits all. And we do make mistakes, as we are doing. But if we go slow, we can keep rectifying and keep changing the path. And, it is there is no royal road to health when it when you have got old even when you are young. And just one last, I always want to make this point that the reason I got into treating chronic illness is because I was really interested in optimal health. When I was before I went to medical school, I really wanted to learn how to help people with nutrition and help people with structure and their bodies, and very quickly was demoralized because there were so many different diets. 

I mean, forget about medical school as useless, but I was really interested in all the things that were in health food stores in the sixties and seventies. The mucosal diet, the wheat-free diet, the macrobiotic diet, and the Atkins diet. And they all seem to help some people. And that is the thing is that when you are young, what your body needs is harder to figure out. But as you get older, as you begin to fall apart, you can then begin to actually figure out what your body needs. Okay. It is unfortunate that we have to wait for that. Sometimes I think our test again, this is where I think our testing is improving our ability to look at the metabolic things, at, the balance of the hormones and blood sugar and insulin and all and the gremlins and all these things that we only had hints of years ago. I think we can probably help young people more than we could, at least for sure. We could always help them by knowing, do not eat garbage.

Heather Sandison, ND

But I think some things that help everyone. Right.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

And help make progress. Right. But, even in even choosing between all the basic Whole Foods diets, it can be not that easy to decide when you are 20.

Heather Sandison, ND

Right.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

But it often takes a while until you can see where your body starts to be having a little glitch that you go, oh, for that person, all those vegetable oils might not be such a good idea or for that one, carbs for some people are great diets. For other people, not so good. So figuring all that out because that is part of health and it goes back to infections. If we do not have that figured out and you have had the infection for a bunch of years, we are going to probably make you feel bad while we are trying to treat you. And that is not useful.

Heather Sandison, ND

Never the goal. Never got to make you feel worst.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

It is not it is usually not going to help it. But so just getting back to chronic infections and what we have to remember is that things like even Lyme probably, but especially things like Epstein-Barr virus and H six, these are these we call the DNA viruses, the herpes family of viruses, which I think there is probably even better evidence for them having a lot to do with chronic inflammation in the brain. But remember, these guys co-evolved with us. They are not things that we necessarily have to get rid of. But we and it is very difficult to do because they kind of live inside of our cells and they actually probably help us a little bit if we keep them in the right balance. So that comes back to it is not so much about killing everything as about restoring immune the balance in your immune system so you can keep it in check without causing too much inflammation because that is the secret. And so that often means you have to remove the other irritants. It is not so much just killing the bug because I think we get lost there sometimes.

Heather Sandison, ND

You know, that is a put it into the context of that individual that is like kind of precision medicine, functional medicine perspective.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

As best as we can do it as well. And luckily, as I said, the tests are getting better and better. And I’m really hopeful that some of the research and the money that is pouring, well maybe not pouring in, but going into researching long COVID is going to bear fruit. I mean, again, for us, unfortunately for the people with long COVID, by the time they get anything to do, they better not wait for the centers of excellence to help them. They are going to have to go see their local naturopath and functional medicine doctors who will try these things long before.

Heather Sandison, ND

They are available at Mayo Clinic.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Exactly right. Mayo’s a great place or, yeah, again, if there is a clear smoking gun they are great.

Heather Sandison, ND

Don’t expect too much in terms of treatment. No, it is just a referral to psych. Unfortunately.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Yes, yes, yes. That is usually part of the package, and it is a shame because many of those doctors are excellent, excellent, excellent but their hands are tied and they do not get to be free to try things anymore. And I think people have to understand there is a big difference in trying in medicine where if we are wrong, there is a, 20% chance that you are going to have something terrible happened to you and trying something where there is a negligible, less than 1% chance that it is going to give you anything. And, unfortunately, the FDA does not seem to be able to discriminate between the two. They are asking for the same level of proof for things that would not hurt you, for the things that could possibly kill you and that is a failure of the system. And unfortunately, because of the economics today in the fact that the pharmaceutical industry basically has too much say at the FDA, that is not going to change.

Heather Sandison, ND

Right. There are quite a few failures in the system, unfortunately. But that is right because we are working outside of it in our own system that works well, that supports the human system and the human body and the nuances, and has a bit of reverence for pieces we do not know. Dr. Gordon, it is such a pleasure having you. I always learn so much from you, I just have so much respect. I look up to you so much, especially in the space of. Of Lyme disease and chronic illness and fatigue and I just could not be more grateful for your time and participation in the Reverse Alzheimer’s Summit.

Eric D. Gordon, MD

Thank you. Thank you for those very, very kind words, Heather. And I appreciate your work and getting I mean, just helping the world learn more that there is hope. I think that the biggest thing is hope is what allows us to heal. So thank you.

Heather Sandison, ND

Thank you. Thank you so much.