Healing From MCAS And Sensitivities

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

For the. Welcome back to this episode of the Reversing Marcel Activation and Histamine Intolerance Summit. And I'm your host, Beth O'Hara for Marcel 360. I'm so excited today to have my friend and mentor and said, I really admire and respect. Share this interview with you with Doctor Neil. Nathan gonna tell you a little bit about him. So Neil Nathan is an MD. He's been practicing medicine for 50 years and is board certified in family practice and pain management. He was one of the founding diplomats of Isaiah.

He's written several books, including Healing as Possible on Hope and healing, Mold and Mycotoxins, Current Evaluation and Treatment, which was just published toxic. His newest book was Energetic Diagnosis, and there's another one in the works called why Am I So Sensitive that I highly recommend that you check out and Doctor Neil Nathan has a, mentorship program that he does with Doctor Jill Christa, who's a natural Catholic doctor. We're going to be talking about mass activation syndrome, root causes, sensitivities.

I think this is going to be an incredible interview. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us and being here. Thanks, Beth, for having me. Can you just first tell some about I know you started in traditional medicine and you've become you probably don't know this, but I sometimes call you the Yoda of functional Edison. Yes. Well, remember that there is doing and there is not doing. So we have this, big transition into being one of the thought leaders worldwide in sensitive committees and mast cell activation and mold toxicity and Lyme.

That's a big shift. How did that come about for you? Very gradually. The short version of this, which could take a whole hour, is, I was running an inpatient hospital based pain unit as a pain specialist, and this is back in the early 80s, and I started seeing a new creature, which people had brain fog, fatigue and joint pains that moved all over their body. And the name we had for it in those days was fibrous situs. You all know it now as fibromyalgia. And when it first emerged, it was. We didn't understand what we were looking at.

The first thought when people have this many symptoms is always, oh, this is in your head. So the psychiatric profession got hold of it and went, this is clearly a psychiatric process, but no amount of psychotherapy or anti-anxiety or antidepressant medications made much difference. So looking at that objectively, I'm going, that's not where this is coming from. I don't understand where this is coming from, but this is very real. This is not in anybody's head. We just don't understand it yet.

How Neil Nathan Entered Functional Medicine 3:08

And over years, we began in the early 90s to begin to understand that, magnesium deficiency, adrenal deficiency, thyroid imbalance, sex hormone deficiency, and were the first pieces of the puzzle where people who are diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia started getting much better looking at those things and treating it. In a sense, this is the beginning of functional medicine, really entering the medical arena as a valid tool to help people who are not getting helped in the conventional medical realm.

Around 95, I began working, more closely with Jacob, titled bound, who, was seeing the same thing that I was. And so a number of us were starting to realize, oh, there's a whole lot of biochemical, structural issues going on here that are causing this. And if we identify them properly and treat them, by gosh and by golly, these people get well. So this is great. Jacob was the first to write, peer reviewed papers on this particular subject, showing that this actually was true. And given that we were on the forefront, people began to refer all their more difficult patients to me so that people had learned from us how to do these evaluations.

And sometimes that wasn't enough. These patients weren't getting better. Then we learned about Lyme disease and then co-infections of Lyme disease by mid 2005. Richard Shoemaker pushed the concept of mold toxicity on the map for us. And so Lyme disease co-infections and mold toxicity turned out to be a huge player in the evolution of our understanding. And we still had all of these patients who were becoming slowly and inexorably more and more sensitive, more and more reactive. And we were really trying to figure that out.

And again, piece of the puzzle by piece of the puzzle, with Laurence Ephron's, fabulous book. Never bet against Ockham. I think that was one 2016. He put Marcel on the map for us. That was when we got that one. Another piece of the puzzle. Before that, we began to realize that patients who had developed these sensitivities and Marcel activation, many, if not most, had limbic dysfunction and vagal nerve dysfunction. And so we were adding that to the mix. So at this stage, we know even more at this stage we're still learning by leaps and bounds.

But we really can help the majority of the people that we are seeing by looking at as many of the pieces of the puzzle as we can uncover. And that's really the basis of what I have been doing clinically, what I've been teaching, and very gratifying work. And people who have become so reactive and so sensitive that they are bedridden are now living absolutely healthy, productive, vital lives. And of course, that's fabulous when we when we see that and that's and that's my own story and that's this work has been incredibly important for my own life.

But I know for so many people that are listening to this interview, and I think hearing that progression is very helpful to also know why we still have these huge gaps in understanding and knowledge in health care, because so many people still go from provider, provider, provider and they're told they're crazy. They told them malingering, they told it's psychosomatic, which I hate that misuse of that word for that. That's not really what's going on there. All these understood root pieces and this Marcel piece is a big one.

So you started talking about some of these common causes with Marcel Activation syndrome. But can we go deeper into that because we know the masses themselves aren't the problem. It's what's triggering this overactive oversensitivity. Yeah, exactly. And and I really want to emphasize this in the way not only I'm thinking about it, but in a way I'm hoping other people are thinking about it. Also, the the whole Marcel process is, at its heart, a protective mechanism. It's a cellular defense mechanism that we've had for millennia to scrutinize infectious and toxic components of our environment and protect us.

And so you can immediately see how that would mesh with the limbic system and the vagal nerve system, which are two separate parts of the brain that work very, very closely together. Again, with the overall overriding concept of protection and monitoring our environment for safety, because if the mast cell system, if the limbic system of the vagus nerve system don't feel that you are safe, then they're going to shut you down and not let you do things that might otherwise be helpful for you until they are convinced this is not psychological.

None of this. This is all physiological and neurological. And so what I want to emphasize is that we always have to be thinking of the mast cell process in the same context that we're looking at it neurologically from the limbic and vagal system. So somewhat a long winded way of starting addressing your question. And we also have to look at what is making our bodies unsafe. I mean like what's doing that. It doesn't come out of the blue. Nothing comes out of the blue. And over the years, the pieces that have lit up for me more than anything else have been mold toxicity and Lyme disease with this co-infections.

And I want to add more recently I'm seeing E.M.S. as a major trigger component by itself. And so regardless of what the stimulus is, whether it's a toxin in the form of mold, whether it is an infection in the form of Lyme disease. And by the way, other things can do that as well. Chronic viral infections, chlamydia, pneumonia, Mycoplasma pneumonia, or a number of other infectious agents can trigger this feeling of lack of safety, and they probably don't have time to get into it today. But all of this falls under the rubric of Doctor Robert Navios model.

The so dangerous ponce which has its heart is, on a cellular level, the mitochondria of the body,

Mast Cell Activation, Root Causes, and the Cell Danger Response 10:20

which are the organelles inside every cell that is sensing these, the possibility of danger when they pick up toxins, infections or stress, then they trigger this and protective reaction. The issue is for all of our patients with a wide variety of chronic illnesses, and we're talking chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, neurodegenerative illnesses like Alzheimer's, M.S., Parkinson's disease, autism spectrum, and more. At the root is an inflammatory process that was essentially protective, that is gone off the rails.

And so if that is our perspective, when we're looking at a patient who we believe has mast cell activation, our first question has to be what triggered it. So yes, we immediately jump into let's make it better. That's a standard medical approach to all issues like we name an illness. I am treatments for that. All is perfect. All of those treatments will help and help for some people profoundly. But if we don't get at the root cause, we may not get it cured. And one of my messages has always been, let's look for the root cause and cure it.

Because I, from my personal experience with hundreds of people with mast cell activation, it can be cured in the vast majority if we treat the mold toxicity properly, if we discover and treat Lyme and co-infections, and maybe an underlying viral infection, we treat it. That patient does not need to take all those supplements for the rest of their earthly life. They can be. Well, that's one of my most important take home messages. That's such a huge message, because we often hear that mass activation syndrome is going to be degenerative, it's going to be progressive.

And I think that is the case if we're not addressing these underlying major triggers that are keeping the mast cells on hyper alert, on defense in the first place. And I wanted to go back and just highlight this mast cell nervous system connection that you started with. I find it so fascinating that there mass cells that every nerve ending and their mast cells in the limbic system, the nerve, the vagal nerve is such a huge nerve complex, a significant amount of mast cells around those vagal nerve endings.

Can we talk more about this role of the the vagal system, the limbic system monitoring for safety and triggering these mast cells? We know that there Marcel receptors for the neurotransmitters. And there's this constant feedback loop between those mast cells and the nerves. Yeah, exactly. I don't know how detailed you want me to get, but you're absolutely correct. There is a direct connection of the mast cells to the vagal nerve endings, so that we're talking about a communication system. The body has long utilized to, again, work on safety.

So the vagus nerve is a 10th cranial nerve. And it has a number of functions that are really important to understand. One of the biggest is that it has a tremendous regulatory effect on the autonomic nervous system. So many of our patients are told that they have autonomic dysfunction, which is being delivered to them in the same way of, oh, here's your label, but it's not a label, it's just a description of what's happening to the vast majority of our patients. And that means that many of our patients will developed, parts will develop, a, an increased sympathetic drive because their parasympathetic system is not functioning properly.

And to talk about that for a second, the autonomic system is often broken into two families sympathetic parasympathetic. The sympathetic system is thought of as the fight or flight response in which something scary is happening, or you have a worry or a fear, and you start making adrenaline and you start preparing to get out of dodge. Parasympathetic system is a balancing component to that. Often thought of more in terms of relaxation. So now most of our patients are already worried. Worried to the point that it's all consuming sometimes meaning they're already in sympathetic overdrive.

And if we then take out the vagal pace of the parasympathetic system, that makes it even harder for them. So understanding that they really need to work on the vagus nerve early on is important. Another big piece here is that the vagus nerve controls the motility of the gastrointestinal system, which means that almost all of our patients have intestinal issues gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, indigestion. And the vagus nerve plays a huge role in that. So those are ways to begin specifically understanding how the mast cell and the vagus system interact in a very profound way.

I can certainly relate to that at my worst. I learned to meditate at 19, and I've done an extensive amount of yoga and these types of activities. But when the mode toxicity got really intense, and the issues from the lime and the Bartonella and the Bethesda, I couldn't even sit down to meditate. It was just excruciating to be in that heightened anxiety, that hyper alert. I would jump at everything. I know a lot of people experience that. There's some really targeted modalities, and I found that I couldn't meditate my way out of it, that I had to retrain that limbic system and retrain that vagal signaling and use some favorite modalities there.

Can you talk about those? Sure. And I mean, a you're absolutely correct. And I want to emphasize that if someone has both vagal and, limbic, hyper reactivity, hyper vigilance going on. If you treat one system, you don't treat the other, you're going to still stay hyper vigilant. That's true for both. So it's key for patients to understand that you have to work on both the limbic system and the vagal system in order to make progress. And the word for it I use is called rebooting. So on the limbic system side, the two systems that I work with the most are the Annie Hopper, the and our program.

And that stands for Dynamic Neural Retraining Systems or the Ashok Gupta Amygdala Retraining program. And both of them are excellent. I have used those systems with some between 500 and 1000 patients each and with tremendous benefit. So when someone has Olympic issue, those are the things I first recommend to my patients to get started with. And it's a true rebooting. Thank you for emphasizing. It's not the same as meditating. Meditating helps. Huge fan do it myself. It isn't as specific for rebooting the vagus nerve and the limbic system as the types of things that we're going to talk about right now.

Shifting to the vagus nerve. The the things that I recommend are, number one, there are some exercises that were developed by a fellow named Stanley Rosenberg, who wrote a book called Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve. And in the back of that book are five very simple exercises. Takes five minutes a day that begin the process of quieting the vagus and the eight and the other cranial nerves that are directly connected to the vagus. When we say vagus nerve, that's an oversimplification.

Other cranial nerves are profoundly affected in that process. So just wanted to emphasize that the fellow who wrote that book was the Danish cranial sacral therapist. And so, cranial therapy is one of my absolute favorite ways of helping to treat the vagus nerve and and settle it down. My bias is that the osteopathic model of treating the cranial nerve is by far the most profound one available. And within that model, the biodynamic model developed by Doctor James Jealous, is the most profound. So if you if you for people who are interested, you can go to either the website of biodynamic osteopathy, or you could go to one that is called the Cranial Academy, which is a branch of the osteopathic profession that is solely devoted to cranial therapy and there are lists of practitioners on both.

So hopefully there'll be someone near you doing that. I'm also extremely fond of a modality called frequency specific microcurrent, which is a very gentle electrical process which has two different frequencies coming into the body simultaneously, called channel A and channel B, and channel A. We use different physiological responses and a channel B we can target the specific body part to use those responses on a very profound, very flexible tool. And we can treat the vagus nerve. We can treat people who have had a concussion, injuries, PTSD.

There are specific frequencies to help remove toxins from the body.

Vagus Nerve and Limbic System Rebooting 20:38

So fabulous tool for people to start using to, again, help with the vagus nerve. A couple of more modalities that I'm very fond of when it's called Brain Tap. Developed by, Doctor Patrick Porter. It's a medical device that looks a bit like a virtual reality headset with earplugs, and it delivers different frequencies of light and sound through the eyes and ears simultaneously to quiet the inflamed parts of the brain. There's another way to do it with sound alone. Doctor Stephen Porges, who is the researcher who put our understanding of the vagus nerve on the map, develops a technology called Safe and Sound, which uses different I we'll call them musical programs that are specifically designed to quiet the vagus nerve.

A lot of our patients find that very, very helpful. So that's, kind of an overview of my favorites. That's a great list. And for people that are trying to capture all that, we have a resources page for the summit. And it's at mast cell three 60.com/summit. And we'll have links to all of these modalities. So you can go look at them. After this interview let's talk about mold molds a huge trigger of mast cell activation syndrome. And I think it's I know that getting a lot more conversation now, there's more recognition.

But I still think it's highly under-recognized. Just like mast cell activation syndrome itself is. But the extent of how bad mold is. And I know just in the years I've been working that I'm seeing people be more ill, more complex, more sensitive. You've been working in this area of decades longer than I have. And have you seen that the case people are getting more sensitive, more complex. What's going on with with mold itself becoming more frequent and and then as a trigger for mass activation syndrome.

Okay. So there's a whole bunch of answers to that question. The first is that although mold toxicity is described in the Bible, in the Old Testament and Leviticus, it's not like we don't never heard of it before. Largely, the medical profession has looked at mold primarily from an allergy perspective. If people had mold allergy Allergists had methods of making that diagnosis using skin tests and blood tests and then giving them, a variety of antigens that they injected, they did their allergy shots on a regular basis, and that helped.

It's only recently that the medical profession has begun to understand that there's a whole different creature out there called mold toxicity, which is way more severe than allergy. And that's what is beginning to be known. Given what I know about it and how much I've treated it. It's astonishing that most physicians have never heard of it before and are prone to say, well, if this was important, it would have been taught to me in medical school. I'm thinking, God, I graduated from medical school in 1971.

I didn't know about it until 2005. I don't think I was going to learn about this in medical school, so forgive me if this is, a nonsensical response that I get from a lot of physicians, which is, if this was important, you would have already taught me this. But I find that bizarre. But that is the response you're going to see a lot. I don't think we even started to see this until 1979 when the oil crisis changed building. So we started to make airtight buildings with tons of insulation and no air flow inside a building, which allowed mold to be trapped in buildings to emerge as a major, pathogen.

When in the past, if you had air flow going through a building, it wasn't much of a problem. But now, when a water damaged building, you have different toxic mold species growing unopposed inside the building, no air flow, and it just grows. So that is setting the stage for. And the rest is my speculation. But I think a lot of people in the field agree with me. I believe that the increasing toxicity of the world that we live in is the primary issue in increasing all of what we're seeing. So we are seeing epidemics that did not exist when I started my medical training.

We're seeing epidemics of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, autism spectrum exploding in ways we've never seen it before. Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, ALS, all of these are examples of a cancer of illnesses that are exploding in their frequency. We haven't seen before. And I don't think it takes an all out scientific genius to look at the world we're living and going, okay, what's different about the world we live in? Well, there are 80,000 chemicals in the world we live in now that didn't exist 50 years ago.

The vast majority of them have never been tested for their safety in humans. EMF, electromagnetic frequencies. People blow it off. They say, oh, this is great 5G, this is fabulous. 5G isn't just one number above 4G. It is a thousand fold increase in intensity. And we're seeing a profound increase in patients who are, becoming electromagnetically sensitive. They can't sit at their computers anymore without having brain fog or getting a headache or having extreme fatigue and cognitive impairment. And it was very rare in the past.

And now it's becoming, common. Some people speculate that there's a connection between this. Some people speculate that 5G is so annoying to mold that it is making toxins in response to that to protect itself. So its ecological niche. To my knowledge, that hasn't been proven. On the other hand, could wellbeing make sense? Heavy metal toxicity has increased profoundly in the world. Plastic exposure increased profoundly in this world. So we are looking at a massive increase in toxicity without recognizing that we are exposing ourselves and our children and our grandchildren to all of these things.

So the people that we are seeing, we all think of as the canaries in the coal mine, they the more sensitive folks, no fault of their own, who are more sensitive to these toxins and exposures, and they are the ones that are manifesting these illnesses. And if we don't do something about it soon, we're all going to be in that particular boat. And this information will apply to all of us. So sorry for the scary descriptor of why I think this is increasing, but I hate living leaving people on a negative note because I'm an optimist, which is bottom line is all of these things are treatable.

So that's the take home message. And that's that's a huge take home message for people who are struggling. And I think also an important message for people who are the only ones in their family that are sick and nobody else is being affected. And then there's they're told that, well, you can't this obviously isn't something in your environment because everybody's not sick. But that's not true. Not everybody has the same detox capacity. Women tend to be more affected. Children who are smaller pets.

I worry about the pets. I know we're not even really talking about the pets, but I worry about that. So mold in particular is quite triggering for mast cells, and so is Lyme. And these tick borne infections. Why those in particular? The precise answer I don't know that I can give you. The general answer is that although mold is a toxin and although Lyme disease is an infection that both stimulate the immune system in a very, very similar way

Mold Toxicity, Lyme, and Environmental Triggers 29:28

to make the same inflammatory cytokines to protect the body from the toxin or from the infection. Now those inflammatory cytokines are what's doing the triggering. So the thread that carries through both of them is that they're both create an inflammatory process that the body can't quiet down. And so and there's this more intense inflammatory process than you get with things like Epstein-Barr, which a lot of people worry about Epstein-Barr. But to me that seems like a secondary viral issue that piles on top of these, you know, junk.

Epstein-Barr has a very good PR agent, and people think it is hugely important. If you think about it for a minute, in terms of the symptoms of having Epstein-Barr versus the symptoms having mold or Lyme, which are similar, Epstein-Barr would cause fatigue, as you would with mono, because I've seen Barr as a viral infection of model look cause fatigue, maybe a little bit of cognitive impairment, not a whole lot else. Mold and and Lyme on the other hand, would cause fatigue and cognitive impairment and respiratory difficulty.

Shortness of breath, and peripheral neuropathy, headaches, joint pain, muscle pain, intestinal issues of every type whatsoever. I just have to think of the body areas because it relates to it. It is a profoundly greater illness. So when someone comes in with a multitude of organ systems that are involved in their symptoms, I don't think Epstein-Barr, maybe they have it. That doesn't mean they don't happen. But by far the mold or the line will become more important. And again, in the, I don't know, the thousands of people I've treated with both mold and Lyme, many of them, I would estimate that 70% of people with mold, maybe 50% of people with Lyme, will develop mast cell activation.

If they go long enough, they don't start with it. It comes in later. And so what you described a little bit earlier about people slowly getting worse and worse and worse and more reactive. Yes. If you're not treating the mold or the line, which are the causes, as a general rule, you'll get worse even if you're treating it correctly, because you're not making any inroads into us triggering it in the first place. So in my world, anyone with mast cell activation, I'm looking for mold and I'm looking for Lyme because it's just so common and they're both treatable.

And a lot of people start with the Lyme. But I know you take a different approach. I take a different approach. We talk about this order of operation and just some of these tips in terms of people who are dealing with massive activation. They're sensitive, they've often tried a lot of Lyme treatments and they can't do them, or they've tried some pretty intense micro toxin treatments and they're not tolerating those. And then they think that they can't get any help. But that's not true. We just know we have to come at it differently.

Exactly. They're coming at it the wrong way. Once someone has become sensitized and they often do when they get treated correctly. For Lyme, if the person doing the treatment doesn't understand working with sensitive patients, they will often use too strong an approach to aggressive approach, and that will not only make them worse, but it will trigger the limbic and vagus system to go on trying to protect you here, and you are taking these things that are making it worse. That's what you're doing is way too much.

I got to shut you down. You can't do this. It doesn't mean you're on the wrong treatment. But this does mean you kind of have to come at it differently, way more gently. And for many of our more sensitive patients, the order of treatment is limbic and vagus together and mast cells first. Then if you're quieting them down adequately then we could treat mold. Then we could treat Lyme. Now, specifically to your question, I believe that the reason a lot of people come to it from Lyme first is because that's how we learned about it.

Meaning a lot of my colleagues started in the Lyme world, I did. So I know what that's like. I started working on it at that way. But what I found is that if I try to treat the Lyme before I treated the mold, many of those people couldn't handle it. It was too hard. In other words, we're dealing with exponential inflammation caused by each. So if we could quiet the mold inflammation first, then we treat the line infinitely easier. Short, of course, of treatment way more effective to try to treat the Lyme.

And you haven't addressed the mold. You're like swimming upstream in an inflamed system. My perspective, it doesn't really work. So originally, again as my starting point. And for a lot of physicians, I think we work with what we are most familiar with. I know that I work with Lyme for a long time. I don't know so much about mold, so I'll do that later. Maybe for whatever reason, in the way my own learning process evolved, I realized that mold needed to be treated first. In the vast, vast majority of cases.

One reason is the diagnosis of mold is clearer, more straightforward, and easier than the diagnosis of Lyme. Our testing for Lyme is notoriously inaccurate. We have a lot of tests which are vague. Now, if it's that old joke, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So if and I don't want to be mean about it, but if people come in with this vast array of symptoms and your tool is Lyme disease and you have tests, that's questionable, maybe not so great. It's Lyme disease until proven otherwise.

I don't come at it that way, but I come at it from a stepping back, which is what are all of the things that could cause this? What is the most likely thing to go on? So if we take this layer of inflammation that mold causes, first of all, it's easier and less harsh on the body, especially in a sensitive patient. To treat the mold, it's common to take the mold out, and all of a sudden all of those symptoms that look like Lyme are gone, meaning it wasn't a particularly accurate test. You never had Lyme and it's a harsh treatment.

So if you're getting treated for Lyme and you don't really have it, you really have mold. You're not going anywhere. Sorry about that. So I think the answer to your question lies in that discussion about that makes a lot of sense that I think about it too, in terms of I mean, both are going to be producing toxins. My my own thinking is that viruses and bacteria want to they weaken us, but molds produce all of these enzymes is digestive juices. They release is hydrolysis and proteases nursing breaking tissue down if they're growing inside of us, if they've colonized, which a good percent of people who are really sick have that mold growing inside of them, and then that disrupts this whole immune balance.

And you can't fight off these things like the lime. And is that also why some people get bitten by ticks? And there so this is the question. Some people get bitten by ticks in their Lyme ridden ticks. They have tick borne infections. They never developed symptoms. They show it in their bloodstream, never makes them sick. They keep it at bay. Other people get bitten one time and then they're bedridden. So the question better than that is to, you know, I think about mold is likely one of the big underlying components here for these differences.

I just always wonder, you know, what what's going on, these different kinds of presentations. But I think you're alluding to different genetic, biochemical, structural individuality that we all have. So I mean, you're right. People can be bitten by a tick, ostensibly be exposed to Lyme and live their whole life without having Lyme disease. Does that happen? Yes it does. So what that means it's not different from any other infection. You might have. If you name the infection viral bacterial. That doesn't matter if you have a strong immune system, you get that infection, your immune system can deal with it and hold it at bay.

That's what our immune system's supposed to do. The same is true of mold, by the way. For many people with an intact immune system, you can be exposed to mold toxin and not be affected by it, which goes to your point that you made earlier, which is many people, live in a household, say, four people in the house, one is sick and the other three are not. And so that psychologically the thought is, well, what's wrong with you? We're fine. That's completely unfair, because genetically we know that certain people are far more incapable of processing mold toxin.

And so, yes, there are people who can live in a moldy environment and not get sick. And unfortunately, there are about 10 million people. It's estimated in this country now that have some degree of mold toxin. We're not talking rare, we're not talking unusual. And most of them, unfortunately, are going undiagnosed. That's the travesty. So. And I don't know how much you want me to get into it, but mold toxicity weakens the immune system and predisposes to the emergence of Lyme. So that if you had a tick by years ago and your immune system is holding it back, you get mold toxin, all of a sudden you have mold and Lyme because you can no longer hold it at bay.

The opposite is true. Mold and Lyme both weaken the immune system and predisposed to each other, and that becomes a nasty cycle. It makes a lot of sense. One of the things we haven't touched on is the role of stress and trauma. And stressful work situations, stressful relationships. We think about just kind of coming back around to the conversation and sympathetic parasympathetic. And we can't both be in the fight or flight mode and sympathetic. And in this deep healing state, we need to turn down that cell danger response so that we can recover, so we can turn down the mast cell activation.

And everybody talks about stress and nobody thinks they're stressed or they being stressed, but or the other thing is that they know the stress. But it's it's like the fish in water says, you know what's water? It's the water that they're swimming in that, that we all are swimming in and we don't even recognize the impact. Can you touch on that some because I found this is huge and this is a message I work so hard to get out to people, probably because I've had to work so hard to learn it. Absolutely correct.

I had touched on when I talked about the cell danger response of the three primary components of triggering this reaction, and I talked about toxins and infections, and I said stress also. Now, keep in mind that the way our limbic and vagal systems operate, but system in utero before we're born and continuation those systems are developing with their sole job is to monitor our environment, internal and external, for safety. That's what they're doing. So depending on the kind of childhood you have, if there's any form of abuse, be it emotional abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, all of the above, injuries, surgeries, deaths of people that are, beloved of you parents, grandparents.

How your life evolves has stressors in it. None of us are immune for that, and none of us are ever going to be immune to that. Depending on what you've been exposed to and how you have processed it, you are limbic and vagal systems from the day you're born are developing this concept of how safe you are.

Stress, Trauma, and the Path to Recovery 42:58

So for many people, by the time they are teenagers or in their early 20s, their systems are already up and running. Now, you might objectively look at their life and go, I don't have any more stress than my three best friends do. Me and I have the same coursework at school. I have the same program athletics, and I'm exposed to all of this is very similar. Or I've graduated from college and I have this entry level job. And just like your entry level job, as you said, fish and water, this is my life.

How you handle it and how you respond to it is profoundly affected by everything that you've experienced in the in the early part of your life. If you then layer upon that stressors of other kinds again, childbirth surgeries, the death of a loved one, difficult relationship of any type whatsoever. Now we are setting the table there. If you are exposed to mold or Lyme or another infectious agent, your immune system is weaker and you are infinitely more likely to push that limbic and vagal system, which is just trying to protect you and to becoming even more high protective and hyper vigilant.

So I hope I'm painting a picture here. Best of of how again, I think we said in the beginning nothing just happens out of the blue. All of this is created within the value of our lives and I don't know, many of us don't really want to look at all of that stuff. But when you get sick, sometimes you have to you have to go look at, okay, how did I evolve into being who I am? What were the stimuli from the perspective of what can I do about it now? Okay, maybe I had some things that happened to me when I was a kid, and I was powerless to do anything about it.

My parents didn't do much to help me either. You know, I had to build a little walls around myself to protect myself and move on from there. But okay. But now I'm an adult. Now I get a chance if I own it, to take responsibility for this and go, okay, I'm not going to be a victim. I am going to look into this. I'm going to release whatever's been holding me back. I'm going to find the blockages that are preventing me from being the totality of who I am. And I'm going to be that. And that's the beauty.

That's our choice as adults. We can do that. And I think that's another huge message that we can unwind these things. We can heal from them. And we both wanted to make sure that we really gave people hope today and and let them know that people do fully recover. They do heal. I remember working with a woman who was she was housebound. She couldn't leave her house because of the smell sensitivity. She was too sick to drive. She couldn't take an Uber, a taxi because of the smells, and she was very limited in her foods.

And her big goal was to be able to go on vacation with her daughter and spend time with her, dance, dancing, her daughter and years because she'd been so sick and she couldn't even handle her daughter coming in. But it's too much stimulation. And it only took her about two years and she was on vacation with her daughter in New York and eating out, you know, all week long. She walked for about ten miles a whole week. They took taxis the whole week. So she got to have fun and got a, you know, her life back there.

And we've worked on cases together. I remember a young woman who was having seizures daily, and she was in a wheelchair, and she couldn't form sentences and she got seizures were gone. She got out of the wheelchair. She was going back to college. What other messages of hope can you leave? Our our listeners were, I, I don't mind reiterating, because it's so important, my own personal experiences that I've treated, 3 or 4000 people each with Lyme disease and mold toxicity and a lot of them had both, hundreds, if not thousands have had mast cell activation.

And so the vast majority of people I've treated have gotten well, I can't say that I've cured everyone. I'm still learning. The vast, vast majority of people can do better. That's my experience. That's not a pipe dream. It's not pie in the sky. It's not. I want to see it, and I'm ignoring it. I'm perfectly well aware of who I haven't helped. You know, many of us in the field. And I know Beth well enough that she's wired the way I am. I don't remember all the people I helped I because I helped them.

That was no issue. They're the people I still keep in consciousness. I still know their names are the people that I didn't help, the people who have forced me, that forced me, stimulated me to learn what I'm learning, and to constantly try to learn new information and get better at. This is the people where I didn't help them the way I wanted to. That's what drives us. That's what keeps us studying and sharing our knowledge together. And, bringing that listeners to your attention so you could learn what we've learned.

When I started working with sensitive people, with mast cells, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, I was going by the seat of my pants. I didn't know very much. Still helping people. Some nowhere near as many as I can help now. And that's the take home message we have learned so much that we really can help the vast majority of folks who, who will take the journey. Now, your part in the journey is to be patient and persistent. The people who I have seen not succeed are the ones who did it for a month or two.

And when this isn't working fast enough for me, I'm out of here. The people who've succeeded are the people who went. I'll take you at face value. Now you tell me you can help me. If I do what you do, I'll stick with it. The people who have stuck with it and then persistent are the ones who have succeeded. So understand that this journey that Beth and I are taking you all on is a group process. It's not me, it's not Beth. It's me and you and your family and your friends. Because we're in this together to work together to understand this and that.

That means with your faith, our knowledge, the vast majority of you can get well.

Hope, Patient Stories, and How to Find Neil Nathan 50:18

And that's my message, Beth. That's a wonderful message. And I'm so happy that we can share that with people. I know that you still do practitioner consultation. Can you tell people how they can find you? Sure. First of all, my website is simply Neil Nation, md.com, and a lot of the information is there. And then if you are interested in consulting with me and all of my consultations are with a health care provider, in other words, I don't I'm not going to be your doctor. I retired in April, but I'm still doing a ton of consultations with providers so that we can all be on the line at the same time, all on the same page to understand the process and how to do it.

If you have any interest in that, you can email me at Ask Doctor nathan@gmail.com and I want to make another plug for your books. You have some fantastic resources for people. Okay, but I'll mention three. Okay. First, I have just recently updated a book called Mold and Mycotoxins Current Evaluation and Treatment 2022. It's a 40 page e-book, which is a short book, very readable. Unmold toxicity. So it's about and a lot of people have found that helpful in terms of not wanting to plow through a large book or a lot of information to just help you understand mold toxicity for you.

Family, friends, loved ones. That's been helpful. The book that a lot of people refer to is my book called Toxic Heal Your Body from, mold toxicity, Lyme disease, multiple chemical sensitivity, and other environmental illness. That's a more comprehensive book. Definitely encourage you all to look at it. And if those of you who want a little bit something different, very different. My most recent book is called Energetic Diagnosis, and it's about using your intuition and a number of energy based diagnostic tools to help improve the ability to both diagnose and treat what you've got.

And then, as Beth mentioned, my newest book, which we're currently working on, Beth is going to be contributing to that as well, is called why am I so sensitive, which is a comprehensive overview of all of the medical conditions that can trigger sensitivity and that how we can treat it. So I'm excited about that. But I'm excited to, you know, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your time. Your message been a game changer for people who have these sensitivities. No, they're not crazy. And I know that there's hope.

So I just want to express my gratitude for you. You're very welcome and pleasure always hanging out with your best.