Find & Fix The Underlying Causes Of Fibromyalgia

Neil Nathan, MD

2009.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Okay.

Neil Nathan, MD

And unfortunately, that book’s not in print anymore.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Well I got a copy, too.

Neil Nathan, MD

But and that’s great. But there was a follow up book. It was picked up by a larger publishing company and is now called Healing is Possible.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Healing as well. I saw that in your book in a bio on you. Yeah.

Neil Nathan, MD

So that one is called On Open Healing. This one’s called Healing is Possible. And so if any of your listeners want to get hold of that book, it is still available.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, great. And then the other book that I fell in love with couple of years ago right when it came out, is Toxic. Heal your body. And this is anybody, whether you’re a medical misfit, what we’ll talk about today or you’re a physician, the treatment of misfits. This is a booking agent in your library. Well, Neal, Dr. Nathan, delighted to have you here. Let’s talk about my favorite subject, fibromyalgia. So in your book, she talk about really this was your gig for five decades or for a number of years is really looking at people who are kind of designated medical misfits. These are people kind of been everywhere, tried numerous things and just kind of fell through the cracks. They just didn’t get the attention or the care that they needed and deserved. Tell us a little bit more about that journey.

Neil Nathan, MD

Well, sure. I first started encountering what we now call fibromyalgia back in the eighties. It was called fibrosis. Yeah. And at the time, I was running an inpatient pain clinic in Minnesota, and we began to see this epidemic of really sick people that nobody could put a handle on. They had fatigue and joint pain and cognitive impairment and irritable bowel and a whole bunch of other things and what the medical profession often does is if we’ve not seen it before, it’s psychogenic until proven otherwise. Yeah. So all those poor patients were told, Oh, you need to be on SSRI or anti-anxiety medication and it’s kind of in your head now, but because we don’t understand it. But it became really clear to me very quickly that psychological treatments didn’t do anything. So it became really clear this is not a psychological illness. 

This is a medical illness, which we don’t understand yet. And very slowly in the early nineties myself, I worked very closely with Jacob Teitelbaum, who I know you’ve worked with as well. Jacob and I shared an understanding that there were a whole bunch of physiological imbalances which caused it. And if you could identify those imbalances, you could successfully treat it now. So the medical profession didn’t really accept fibromyalgia as a legitimate diagnosis until shock of shocks and medication came out. Lyrica, which treated not well, but treated fibromyalgia. And then, okay, now we have a drug for it. Now we can put a label on it. Now we will accept this as a legitimate diagnosis. But the drug could help some people, but it didn’t cure it, like figuring out the imbalances. So I’m sure we’re going to get into Rodger is what are those imbalances? Because that’s where the hope is that anyone who has fibromyalgia, the vast majority of you can get well if you can identify the causes and treat them.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

You know, it’s sad to think that here we are some 40 years later and we still have physicians that still think that those are fibromyalgia, hypochondriacs, that the illness is not real. We that other physician, the majority of physicians are, you know, in the conventional world anyway and not Stephanie my star is really but the majority of physicians really don’t understand fibromyalgia and oftentimes this kind of dismiss it and so patients wind up on a medical merry go round. They see one doctor after the next. And that doctor, he or she puts them on a medication because that’s what they normally do when they see that particular complaint. And so as people wind up on half a dozen or a dozen drugs and unfortunately, you can’t drug your way out of fibromyalgia. 

And so it really was a breath of fresh air for me to find functional medicine and realized that fibromyalgia patients that I was seeing in the early mid nineties, 2012 spend late in 1990s, over 20 years, there was a process that if you could figure out what were the triggers, the underlying triggers of the symptoms, you stood a chance of being able to help this person get healthy and then get well rather than focusing on a symptom and even in even I was guilty even then doing more integrative medicine where Tom had an immediate reaction physicians and we used very judicious use of prescription medications and naturals, but oftentimes we were doing we’re using natural things to to cover up a symptom instead of really looking at those root causes. So it’s sad that we’re still at that place. We got the community right now at large, really fibromyalgia, community leaders being told you just have to learn to live with it. A sad, very sad. There are so.

Neil Nathan, MD

You get better. That is a travesty.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

It is.

Neil Nathan, MD

And I, I often find myself apologizing for my profession that you’re not being treated with the respect that you’re should be. And it’s really unfortunate that your physicians, not one but many, don’t understand the underpinning of this illness so that you can treat it. Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

And so really I don’t think, you know, conventional medicine has much for this illness. Unfortunately, it’s just not set up to be that helpful for five or in fact, a lot of times I think it can be something that impedes the person from really getting the help that they need. You mentioned Lyric, I’m not a fan of Lyrica at all because of the potential side effects, and I think the studies show that it works in about 30% of people who take it and 50% of those 30% can’t take it because they have so many side effects. In your experience dealing with fibromyalgia in particular, what are some of the things you believe are the triggers that kind of bring this illness?

Neil Nathan, MD

One Well, in my first book, the one that got you going here, what I talked about where the big six and the little six. Yeah, I was trying to write that book for consumers to understand. What kinds of things should you be looking at? Yeah. Jacob eventually identified, I think 180 different biochemical pieces of the puzzle that we could look at, some of them being fairly rare. Yeah, but so the big things in my experience at that time and I’m going to change that list now were magnesium deficiency, thyroid deficiency, intestinal dysbiosis, food allergy and sex hormone deficiency. So if we measure those things in patients and fix them, a huge percentage of people got well, yeah, that little six, some of which are now the big six at that time were mold, toxicity, Lyme disease, a variety of dental issues, hypoglycemia, heavy metal toxicity, other environmental toxicities. So again, those things also could be looked at when people weren’t responding to the basics. Yeah, however, that shifted. 

What I am now finding and have for many years is that Lyme disease is way more common in fibromyalgia patients than is anticipated. And more recently we’ve learned that mold toxicity is a huge thing in fibromyalgia. Yes, one of my colleagues, Joe Brewer, who’s an infectious disease specialist in Kansas City, wrote a paper in 2013 in which he took 112 people with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and measured urine mycotoxins. And shockingly, 92% of those patients not only had mycotoxins in their urine, meaning they had mold toxicity, but they responded beautifully to treatment for that. So I think that the newer information is that if you have looked at some of the basics and you haven’t looked at Lyme disease, you haven’t looked at mold toxicity, those are really, really important areas to be evaluated and treated because the my take home message has always been this is treatable. We just have to look hard enough to figure out what’s causing it.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. So Jacob and I have a lot of similarities in our protocol, and I’m guilty of stealing everybody’s protocol that I know that works. You know, I would. I would go steal shaman’s routine if I knew it was going to help these folks. But I think the low hanging fruit is still part of the equation for sure. So deep restorative sleep, magnesium deficiency, nutritional deficiencies, adrenal fatigue. I found that 70% of our patients have a problem with their thyroid. It’s never been properly diagnosed or not being properly treated. But you’re so you know, I said this the other day, too. Somebody said, you know, I’ve been doing this 22 years. And I think instead of getting easier, it’s gotten harder. I think the patients and maybe it’s just the universe is I think this is how it works. The universe can send you anything that you can’t handle. And it seems like over the last few years I’m getting more. 

The more normal relations have always been complicated, but they’re even more complicated. But you’re so right. The two things that I see now more than I’ve ever seen, more toxins, you know, bio toxins, neurotoxins, and then lab and any. And when I was testing for them a few years ago, I was and I really was testing for from all that I’ve been testing from they’ve come back negative and I would and I would dismiss it. But now when I was just about to give up on testing for Lance, I’m getting a slew of folks that have in fibro. The reason why I’m finding more is I’m finally testing for it. And that was partly due to your book introducing me to Richie Shoemaker, you know, a few years ago. But yeah, what has changed? Why do you think we’re seeing so many people now with Lyme? Is it just because it’s more infectious than we ever thought?

Neil Nathan, MD

I think there are two components to what you’re seeing. So first of all, since I’ve specialized in treating fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue for many, many years, I began to get the referrals from my colleagues who weren’t figuring out what was wrong with their patients. So I began to get a kind of a skewed population of the sickest of the sick. The people who had not responded to what other people were doing. But this is very important. I also think we’re seeing more and more and more of it. And people are sicker and sicker because the world we live in is sick, meaning we live in a very toxic world which has not just owned up to how toxic it is. There are 80,000 chemicals in our environment which didn’t exist, 50 years ago that have never been tested for their safety in human beings. And I think our patients with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue are the canaries in the coal mine. They’re the ones who are a little more sensitive and they’re being affected by those toxins sooner than the rest of us. But if we don’t do something about our environment, we’re going to see a even more of an epidemic than we already have. Yeah. So the CDC slowly began to admit that Lyme was an epidemic back in 2013 and admitted that there were 300,000 new cases of Lyme every year in 2018, it admitted that there were 400,000 every year. We think it’s higher than that now. And with mold, it is estimated that there are 10 million people in this country who have some aspect of mold toxicity and most of them have no idea that they have it. So, you know, I’m a little tired. My brain’s not working quite so well. I’m a little more anxious than I ought to be. It’s a very, very underdiagnosed condition.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So this is my thing and I can’t remember. I think this is my fifth fibro summit. So the first three there wasn’t much talk about mold, but the last two or three there’s been a lot of talk about about mold. I think it’s a very important topic to be discussing on this on this venue. And I think, you know, mold, the more toxins really lend themselves. And I think long as well to these it’s kind of the perfect storm because this individual is going to life. They’re building up these toxins, they’re accumulating them in their cells. And also and they start having symptoms. They don’t know why. And then these symptoms start to multiply, start getting more conditions, more symptoms and mold. This just a trigger that eventually you get so run down. Now it really starts to give you trouble. Could be Lyme, it could be, you know, could be a bug, whatever it is. These things are opportunistic. They’re they’re they’re your body is able to deal with them. But at some point you just get so run down, so toxic that every you start to react to everything.

Neil Nathan, MD

Kind of very true. Yeah the there there’s several ways you can get mold toxicity. One is number the easiest the most common is you’re exposed to mold in any water damaged building. There is the risk that mold will start to grow in that building and it will make you sick. So the common thing we see is someone is their home is moldy, their office building is moldy, their car is moldy, or they spend a lot of time at a parent’s home or a friend’s home that has mold in it. And fairly quickly, you will get mold toxicity from that. Now, there’s another manifestation in which you could have been exposed to mold and not gotten sick from it. But the mold began to grow inside your body typically. And the scientists have got areas then and this is what you’re alluding to, if you take a hint of stress, an infection, COVID something will impair your immune system so that it loses containment. And then we’re off to the races. And once the immune system loses containment, one of the essences of both Lyme and mold is weakening the immune system so that it is now more vulnerable. And in fact, the essence of healing Lyman Mold is getting rid of the toxin, getting rid of the infection so that immune system can rebuild itself and take over its typically fabulous job of keeping all of those infectious bugs that we’re exposed to from affecting us now.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

And this kind of goes right into the whole cell danger theory where the by the survive or Isaac lie as you talk about the survival paradox and very very similar but the whole cell danger theory where the body thinks it’s it’s is survival is threatened and it overreacts. And you have this overcompensation of inflammation and other things that are happening when you come in contact with some of these toxins and you’re already kind of run down your body can overreact to them and set up a whole cascade of things that kind of build on them. So it’s hard to get out of that.

Neil Nathan, MD

I don’t think I call it an overreaction. I would describe it and I think I can speak for Dr. Neville who developed that model. Yeah, that it is not that the body thinks that it’s under threat, it knows it’s under threat. The mitochondria which are the organelles inside our cells that generate energy that are absolutely critical to our life or our survival has a dual function. It’s also a monitoring system, and the mitochondria monitor the body for safety by what it perceives as an electrical drop inside the cell. What can cause that? Electrical, drought, infections, toxins and stress. So those three things can trigger in the mitochondria area not just the perception but the reality of, Oh, I’ve got something going on here that I’ve got to deal with. The mitochondria of them begin a biochemical dance which has been with us for millennia, since we were ever on the planet. That is our bodies way of fighting that infection. I’m not going to call it an overreaction because it’s so.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

It’s really normal. It’s really a normal reaction.

Neil Nathan, MD

Isn’t exactly. It’s the body’s way of handling that threat. So let’s take a viral infection, for example. The body perceives that threat as a threat and then it shuts down certain components of chemistry to deal with it. So, for example, a virus can’t replicate, can’t grow unless it uses methylation, but viruses can’t methylated. So what they do is they hijack our ability to regulate so that they can replicate. So what does the body do? It shuts down methylation so that the virus can’t do that. So in all of our very sick people, we tell them, you’re not methylated very well. And my response to that is, well, duh, that’s how the body is dealing with that. It isn’t a disease. I remember. I can’t count the number of people that have been referred to me by physicians who oh, you can’t methylation. So we’re going to work on that.

Well, you’re trying to circumvent the body’s defense, not the right thing to do at that time. You have to either find the stress, the infection or the toxin or some combination of that and treat that until you do the body knows that it’s under threat and can’t actually respond to the kinds of things that it otherwise respond to. So forgive me for going into a little detail. It’s kind of complicated, but Dr. Nadia’s model is a fabulous way to understand any chronic illness, because we can understand that these biochemical shifts that the body is going through were protective. And unfortunately, until we can convince that body that, Oh, no, no, you’re safe now, Lyme is gone, mold is gone, the stress is gone. We’re cool. Then the body can go out of business. So staying sick isn’t intended to make us suffer or or being harmful to us. It’s to get our attention going. You’re under threat, buddy. You’ve got something serious going on. Please identify it so I can get well.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, it’s like the engine light coming out of your dashboard. You know, it comes on. It’s a warning. That’s all it as a symptom. As a warning. Something’s not right. Well, people may or may not have heard of the term methylation. It’s gotten a lot more press over the last few years. Tell us, can you talk a bit more about methylation since you brought up the importance of it and what it is?

Neil Nathan, MD

Well, methylation is a very simple biochemical process, but if you’re not biochemically oriented, this would be gibberish. However, there are hundreds of biochemical reactions in the body that require this process called methylation. For example, we make melatonin out of serotonin by a one step methylation process. So in other words, the body methylation, there’s what we call a methyl group, which is simply a carbon atom surrounded by three hydrogens. That’s called a methyl group. And if we take that methyl group and we stick it on any other molecule, that’s methylation. So we require that for detoxification, for energy, for healing our DNA when it becomes damaged. There’s hundreds of super important biochemical processes that require it and so when we’re not methylated, that has a profound effect on our body. In terms of chronic fatigue, you may or may not know that I did some work with rich funk and Wittenberg. Oh, God, 15 years ago, where we did a very, very elaborate study showing that chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia patients were able to methylation. And by fixing methylation, if we were also fixing mold environment, everything else helped all of them to get better. Yeah. So, so it’s a, it’s a commonality to anyone with fibromyalgia that you’re not vacillating. Well.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. Is that always picked up in testing do you, do you feel like it’s can you have a problem methylation and not show up in testing. Genetic testing.

Neil Nathan, MD

Well, genetic testing doesn’t show it. It only shows genetic tendencies. Predisposition, right? Right. We don’t know on meth, on genetics. So a number of people in the medical world have gotten enamored of genetic testing and it doesn’t help very much for methylation. It can tell you what you’re predisposed to, doesn’t tell you what you’re doing. Yeah, there’s a great test. There’s an actual blood test that will very, very clearly show you how well you methylated. It’s by Health Diagnostics Lab in New Jersey and they will measure 11 different parameters of methylation. So you can tell exactly which part of methylation is stuck and exactly what supplements to use to get it back on track. So from our perspective, that’s what we did in our study about 15 years ago, showing that our patients had an unusually low glutathione, which is the end product of methylation, and that by taking certain very specific substances, particularly five methyl, tetrahydrate, folate and hydroxy cobalamin, you could reverse it in literally every single patient. Yeah, but you couldn’t do it until you got the mold and heavy metals and lime treated. So I mean so yes it works, but it only works when the body perceives itself to be safe enough that it can respond.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. What do you feel like are some of the other things that you see in fiber? MANJI You what’s where do you where do you place serotonin? The role serotonin plays in fibromyalgia that occur.

Neil Nathan, MD

So I’ll answer it. But it’s interesting, a complicated question. I’m sorting out biology.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

I saw your wheels spinning. That’s why that’s why I’ve. Scott throw you a lifeline.

Neil Nathan, MD

I don’t know that I needed a lifeline. So a large percentage of people with fibromyalgia will have, as we referred to, sleep issues which are profoundly affected by serotonin. Many of them will become anxious or depressed. Again, this can be a serotonin deficiency. But my trying to answer your question, yes, they will have a serotonin deficiency. But simply taking serotonin or its precursor five HTP or tryptophan is rarely sufficient to fix it because it’s more complicated than that. Yeah. And when I’m going like this, I’m thinking, how do I talk about it’s more complicated than that. Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Now, so I mean, I find that to be five hydroxy tryptophan with the right synergistic B vitamins, magnesium, vitamin C to me is incredibly helpful for my patients with serotonin deficiency. But you’re right, then the next step is what sabotaged that whole process, right?

Neil Nathan, MD

Correct. So again, you’re going to find I keep coming back to root cause, which is a serotonin deficiency is a downstream effect of those root causes. So you will help some people if they’re ready for drugs by supplying those treatments. But I my caution is always look for the root cause or you won’t really fix the problem.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think is incredibly important for these folks is to reestablish deep restorative sleep. I think if you don’t get that right, I mean, usually make sense, right? It is you wake, you going to be tired, you’re going to be brain fog. You going to have I mean.

Neil Nathan, MD

I’m going to put that in the root cause, category two, which is if you have mold toxicity, which affects the limbic system and the vagal system, they trigger mast cell activation. You won’t be able to sleep because your nervous system is wired. If you have Lyme disease or Bartonella, it’s enflaming your nervous system. You won’t be able to sleep. So again, non restorative sleep is a consequence of those things. And again, forgive me, I’m a broken record. We’ve got to get back to records.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

No, I think it’s important that we have that conversation and we keep on we keep drilling at home because I think, unfortunately for most with fibromyalgia, they have already kind of done all these things that these therapies that really are all about just treating the symptom and they realize they didn’t get them very, very far. So really do have to have the conversation and keep and keep driving it home. Almost in every interview is with functional medicine. The whole premise is to find and fix the, you know, the root these root causes.

Neil Nathan, MD

Yeah, right. Right. So in the time we have remaining, I want to emphasize how to look for Lyme and how to look for mole toxicity, because I want listeners to this program to understand that these are not easy to do. And you want to be sure you get the right tests done properly. Your doctor may never have heard of these tests. Find someone who has, in other words, for mold toxicity, which I think is even bigger than Lyme. In this particular arena, you want to get what we call a urine mycotoxin test. A urine mycotoxin test is very simple. You collect first morning urine, you send it in the lab to analyze. It’s a bit more accurate if you can improve the body’s detoxification before you collect the earth. So if you can do a sauna or hot bath the night before you collect your urine, it’s more accurate if you can. If you can tolerate and take a little bit of glutathione on before you do the test. Also more accurate, again, you just see what the results are. And if there are mycotoxins in your urine, it’s coming out of your body. You have it? Yeah, well, there are a number of labs doing the tests. Some of them are more accurate than others. Now, I have no affiliation or connection to any of these labs so that I can speak comfortably about which labs I think do the best job. 

From my perspective, currently, the real time laboratory does the most accurate job not only for testing but for follow up. You can get okay testing from Great Plains, from vibrant. But in our experience and I pull I have a mentorship program for over 150 physicians. We pool our knowledge base and the vast majority of us have found that real time is the most accurate. So if you’re going to do it, do it from the best lab we have access to. Now, in the Lyme world, there are many conventional doctors will do what’s called a simple antibody test. They call it a screening test. It is fairly close to worthless. But a physician will take a negative result. Say, Yup, I tested you for Lyme and you don’t have it. That’s not adequate, but you want to get the best lab in the country. From the perspective of most Lyme experts is I Gen-X, but they have what’s called an immunoblot igg and I am for Lyme, which is probably the most accurate. 

There’s also a pretty accurate lab called in fact a lab in Minneapolis which uses a somewhat different technology, but also pretty accurate. There are a lot of other labs out there and they’re nowhere near as good, so you want to be sure you’re getting properly tested, understanding that no lab is perfect and it is intrinsically difficult to get a positive test for Lyme because it’s an immune test and the immune system in line patients is already compromised. So some Lyme patients aren’t able to make antibodies that they need to. They’ll come up with a negative test. Now, even the CDC recognizes. But the diagnosis of Lyme disease is a clinical diagnosis. So that means if you have all of the symptoms of Lyme disease, perhaps exposure to a tick bite, perhaps you had a bull’s eye rest, then even if the test is negative, you need to be treated. So for someone to test you and say you don’t have it, let’s move on may not be sufficient.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. What are some of the signs or clues that you have? Lyme disease because it’s the symptoms can be really broad. It’s sometimes hard to know. Okay. Well, that’s just fibromyalgia. Of course, fibromyalgia is just a name. You know, we’re looking for these underlying root causes. But with Lyme, there’s it’s so broad that sometimes people can get lost in that. What are some of the things that when you hear these symptoms being mentioned, you go, ah, that’s probably wrong.

Neil Nathan, MD

Okay, so I’ll separate Lyme and mold, which have slightly different symptoms, but there’s a huge overlap to them. So in Lyme disease, joint pain, gosh, that looks like fibromyalgia, fatigue, cognitive impairment, issues with sleep, all of that looks like fibromyalgia. You can understand why someone would miss the diagnosis of Lyme disease, but Lyme disease can also cause some cardiac effects. It can also cause neurological symptoms that fibromyalgia doesn’t typically have, like paresthesia, which are numbness and tingling in different parts of the body. It can cause actual neuropathies like a Bell’s Palsy so that there are other symptoms more severe than fibromyalgia itself that would push you in that direction. Now, with more toxicity, we will see what we call icepick type pains, electrical pains, a perception of vibration in the body where you feel it but you can’t see it physically. 

Those are classical for it, which aren’t really typical for for I call it baseline fibromyalgia because I believe that most toxicity and Lyme disease are being misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia because that’s the thing that people know that is the closest to that group of symptoms and mold toxicity. There’s a huge incidence of extreme anxiety and depression, even severe things like depersonalization or the realization, which is a sense that you don’t feel like this is your body, you don’t feel like you’re even living in your own body. So when someone presents with a heavy psychological overload, it’s not a psychological illness. The toxin itself can do that. And by the way, the Coinfection of Lyme Bartonella can do that as well. Yeah. So you want to be sure you’re working with a practitioner who is functionally trained to know about Lyme and mold so that because if they don’t, you will not get the right diagnosis and you’re going to spend months or years and decades working on the wrong thing, that’s not letting you get well. 

So my comment to you all is if you have fibromyalgia, absolutely early on, get tested for Lyme and mold because the odds of you having it are fairly high missing. It is a travesty. Now, while we had time to bring up one more subject, okay, there’s another kind of fibromyalgia that a lot of people don’t know about called cervical trauma. Fibromyalgia. Now it’s it looks like fibromyalgia, but it is the result of an injury to the head or neck, which leaves a residual inflammation in the spinal cord, which manifests as a fibromyalgia type picture or reason. I want to mention it. So anyone who has developed fibromyalgia even years later from an injury to the head or neck, particularly a whiplash type motor vehicle accidents, common. Now be aware that that is a very real thing and it’s treatable by a technology called frequency specific microcurrent. So again, it’s a subcategory of fibromyalgia, which a lot of people haven’t heard of.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, I think the estimates are some. So around 15% of the people who haven’t motor vehicle accident, a whiplash type of acceleration injury go on to develop fibromyalgia.

Neil Nathan, MD

Well, there are developing cervical trauma, fibromyalgia, which is and here’s the good news. It’s treatable, super treatable with frequency specific microcurrent. If you make the diagnosis and the tip off to the diagnosis is and again, in these days of telemedicine, people don’t do it very often. But to check reflexes, the reflexes of the lower extremities in this condition are much brisker than the upper extremity. So the jerk jumps out and if you tap, the arms barely moves. So that’s a tipoff that you may have developed this condition. And again, the reason I mentioned this, because it’s so treatable now.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

What do you feel like is one of the most important things someone could do who has fibromyalgia that would change the tragic story of their illness. And that’s kind of an open, hidden good question. What could they do on their own? We want them to seek out a functional medicine practitioner. Get testing without testing. You’re just guessing. You know, you’re just going to be in a maze you never can get out of. Well, what are one or two things that you think are, you know, did you’ve seen over the years you encourage your patients to do at home? That has been helpful.

Neil Nathan, MD

This is a very complicated area, to be very honest. I think that more people have hurt themselves by trying to figure it out on their own, by finding someone who really understands this. So my my absolute number one recommendation is find someone who understands this is functionally trained and has experience in it so that you can get the right testing for you. And then with that, correct treatment, based on understanding the pieces of the puzzle that apply to you, then you’ll get the right treatment. I’ve had a lot of people flounder trying to it out on their own, so I honestly, I don’t recommend that.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, well, they get lost. They lose sight of the forest for the trees, wherever that is. They get, you know, they go down the rabbit holes, they hear something and they do this therapy for a while. Most individuals, fibromyalgia, have a cupboard that’s overflowing with supplements and pill bottles. And it’s you know, they can really get frustrated and lose all hope. And I think really, you’re right. I mean, really the way that you solve that is find somebody that understands the illness and can help you figure out where you’re broken down. Yeah.

Neil Nathan, MD

I don’t. It might be expensive a lot of people who work in this field that don’t take insurance, that’s unfortunate. Yeah, but to suffer endlessly with something that is treatable is, again, a travesty. So if you have it, find a way to get into the hands of someone who knows this and get the right kind of treatment because it exists. Yeah. The vast majority of patients that I have treated with fibromyalgia have gotten well.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So yeah, that’s why you’re on here. That’s what we’re both on here, you know?

Neil Nathan, MD

Well, yeah, I treated I don’t know. I probably treated 10,000 people with fibromyalgia over the years. So I come to the table with at least a little experience.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

You know, I’ve say that not to be braggadocious on myself either, but the fact that most physicians don’t understand it, you know, they even if they’re interested in of medicine, unless you’re in the trenches with these folks on a consistent basis, they really are in so many ways very different than than other patients.

Neil Nathan, MD

You know.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

You know, but you have with medical misfits, it’s really it’s that same kind of recipe. You’re continuing to focus on where they’re broken down and trying to fix that place or places where they’re broken down.

Neil Nathan, MD

Yeah. You know, I think we’re both seeing the same thing in our own in our own ways. I can’t I can’t emphasize that enough. This is treatable. Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So and well, it’s true that, you know, most of us had this type of illness and this type of practice really doesn’t lend itself to the insurance model. And it is out of pocket medicine. But when you put it in perspective, the estimates are similar and fibromyalgia is going to spend $2 million on health care over their lifetime, 600,000 out of pocket. And that’s going to physicians that don’t understand that, you know, they’re paying co-pays and deductibles, getting tests and doing these things, taking drugs that create other problems that have to be addressed and cost more money. So when you put it in that perspective, it really is a bargain to find somebody that finally help you pull this thing together and get out of this maze of poor health that you can get out of.

Neil Nathan, MD

And yeah, it’s worth it. It’s worth every cent. Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. Well, was it have you got any new projects? What do you hear? What do you do or rejects you’re working on? I don’t want to hear how I do.

Neil Nathan, MD

I’ve just finished with a whole team of people writing a new book called Why Tentatively Called May Not Wind Up being that called Why Is My Body So Sensitive and What to do about it? So what happens to a whole lot of people with fibromyalgia, whether it’s caused by mold or Lyme or a wide variety of other things over time the body becomes sensitized. And by sensitized I mean the senses light, sound, touch, chemicals. MF So many of our patients become very sensitive to the point that sometimes they can’t even take the medications and supplements we want to give them because they react to everything. And this is a can and increasing epidemic. So my new book is about our understanding of the sensitive patient and how to fix it. So it’s the basics, too. 

These conditions will trigger ultimately if they’re not treated, sensitization of the limbic system, the vagus nerve and mass cell activation. And those three things which interface with each other in a very complicated way have to be treated first before you get to the root cause because the body simply can’t handle it. So again, my new book is written with literally a team of experts in this area, and it’s just been completed. We’re just getting a publisher lined up. I would anticipate for Lucky should be out by late spring or summer. And I think it will be a very, very helpful to hundreds of thousands of people who’ve become supersensitive over the years and didn’t think there was a way out and there is.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

A way to get the book. Those are some of the most challenging patients that are faced are the ones that have these chemical sensitivity issues because, you know, oftentimes they can’t take any supplement, they can’t take anything. So, you know, you kind of feel like you’ve got your hands tied behind your back. Look forward to that. I want you to share what’s the best website for people to go learn about you and your work. I want people I really want encourage people to check out your resources that you have available.

Neil Nathan, MD

Sure not complicated is simply NeilNathanMD.com or and that’s there and on that website by the way is a list of practitioners that I have trained. I don’t certify anybody, but I’ve trained them and I’ve watched their abilities over the years and I know that they’re really good at this. So there’s literally physicians from all over the world on that list and hopefully there’s someone in your area that you could find that would be what we’re talking about, someone who really knows what they’re doing.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. Which oftentimes is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. So, so glad you have that resource for them. Dr. Nathan, this has been great. I loved it. Can’t wait to have you come back on a podcast or something that we could get together and talk some more in the future. Thank you so much for being part of this fibromyalgia summit.

Neil Nathan, MD

Thank you for having me.