It’s Not Just Lyme

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Welcome back. I have an amazing interview ahead of us today. I’m talking to Dr. Nafysa Parpia, and she’s quite amazing, has an amazing background and she focuses on everything that is important for every Lyme patient listening to this interview, what they need to know. She has an extensive background. She works in a cool clinic. I had an opportunity to meet one of her partners, Dr. Eric Gordon. They’re doing some amazing things in the Marin County area and we’ll talk more about that as we get into the interview a little bit later. But, I wanna welcome Dr. Parpia to the Lyme, Healing from Lyme Summit naturally. Welcome today. Thank you for carving out some time for us to just educate us, elevate our awareness as to the things that you see in your clinic and your experience with Lyme Disease.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Thank you so much for having me. It is such an honor to be here today.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow, that’s cool. Hey, Dr. Parpia, can you do me a favor and just give us a little background, just take kind of a step back, you know, how you kinda got interested in Lyme Disease? There are lots of different infectious diseases out there, and it could very well be just the demographic, or what you saw in the flow of the clinic, or maybe you have a life experience with Lyme Disease that you’d like to share. But, let’s take a little back step and then kinda walk us forward to sorta the things you look at and the things you see today in your clinic.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Absolutely. So, when I graduated from medical school, naturopathic medical school, 10 years ago, I knew that I wanted to work with people on a very, very deep level. I knew that I wanted to do more than treat the common cold or just a toenail fungus or just a urinary tract infection. I wanted to go very deep. And so, I searched for mentors and I found some amazing mentors. And one of them was Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. So, I graduated from Bastyr and actually, the year before I graduated, taken a lot of courses from him through the Klinghardt Academy. I wanted to learn more about Lyme, but it was actually more him that I was interested in learning from, because he’s a healer, he’s a teacher. He understood this deep disease from many different layers and levels. 

That’s what I wanted to learn. So, after taking many of his classes I wound up working in his clinic. So, I shadowed him for a year and I shadowed Dr. Katie Dahlgren there for a year and also I worked in the IV room. It was there that I knew that this is the patient population I would work with. It was serendipitous. And so, I had the honor of being there for a year, and then I was mentored by Dr. Isaac Eliaz, who’s a very well known integrative oncology doctor, and he taught me the deeper levels of detoxification therapies. So then, I merged those two worlds together and created my own, my own ways of practicing. Now I practice at Gordon Medical in the San Francisco Bay area just over the Golden Gate Bridge. We have people come from all over the country to work with us for Lyme Disease and other medical mysteries.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

How really interesting. Dr. Klinghardt, I know Dr. Klinghardt is part of the academy that Dr. Lee Cowden has assembled. And so, I often see him, well, we used to when we had more formal conferences, but since COVID we’re not doing that all that much these days. But, we’ve been following him, we know him and if you didn’t know this, the co-host of this Lyme Summit is Dr. Christine Schaffner who used to be partners with Dr. Klinghardt for many years.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

I know, it’s very exciting.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

So, it’s kinda cool. Everybody’s getting to know her. She’s really well read and just an amazing dynamic personality, all heart, just fantastic. So, it’s kind of interesting again, back to serendipity, how we get to know and how we get involved. So, you got exposed to Lyme. Dr. Klinghardt’s practice is basically mostly Lyme and cancer. And so, you got a chance to see a lotta different things and from that you just made a personal choice, this is the road that you wanna go down. 

And you know, it’s interesting to me that you even bring that up, because Lyme isn’t an easy one. It’s so complex and the body is so complex. And so, it’s interesting to me that you would take on that challenge, right. So, wow, really amazing. Well, I just wanna, let’s dive in a little bit and kinda talk about the backdrop. So, Lyme is often misdiagnosed. And there’s always this big question, you know, as the Lyme patient, you can have two people in the same room and one person, they’re both exposed to Lyme however, maybe got bit by a tick or there’s different ways you can get exposed to the Lyme and/or the co-infections. One will become symptomatic and one won’t. And then, the person that gets symptomatic, they’re always saying, why me, right?

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

So, you may have some experience with this and I think it’s one of the big questions that everybody always asks. Why me? What is that about? Could you kinda unpack that a little bit for us and kind of explain how it is that some people do get symptomatic, either right away or never get symptomatic? You know, and then there’s some degrees of that where it may take years before they become symptomatic. So, however you feel comfortable talking to that question, I’d love to hear your answer.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

What you’re saying is absolutely true. I see people who get bit by a tick. I give them the right antibiotic, they’ve just been bit by the tick, in the past couple weeks or past month, they get acute Lyme treatment. They do just wonderfully. It was just a blip on the radar. Life goes on, they forget about it. Then I see people who had that same treatment and it just didn’t work and now they’ve seen five, 10, sometimes 20 doctors before they come to me. Now they’ve been sick for years. I’ve seen some people who’ve been sick for years, you give them the right antibiotic and they recover. 

That’s few and far between. It’s very, vary rare, particularly in my practice. Most people I see, they’ve been sick and they’ve been on antibiotics for a long time already. I didn’t put them on them, they’re coming to me from other doctors having been on antibiotics a long time. It didn’t work or it backfired. And then, no matter what killing modalities are used, just didn’t work. So they say, why me? Exactly that, Robby. Why me, why is it that the person next to me got healed and I didn’t? Well, first of all I say, don’t take this personally. It’s not about you as a being. 

A lot of times people will come in and think, what did I do wrong? I’ve done everything right. I’ve eaten organic diet. I’m a kind person. Why do I deserve this? The why me question on a deep level needs a lot of internal healing work. That question often has to do with deep internal trauma. A lot of my patients have had that before, so we do work on that, work on de-personalizing that because it’s not, as much as it might feel like it is, it’s not your fault, not at all.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Now you’re addressing kinda the emotional constitution or part of it and I don’t really truly believe you can fully heal and recover unless you address the emotional, whether. People think like I’ve got emotional trauma. I’ve got PTSD. There’s all these letters associated with things, but on the street level people say you’re getting emotional if you’re not crying, screaming, yelling and jumping up and down, then we’re talking about a different emotion. We’re talking about almost the emotional DNA, like what is inside of us and I believe that that is another one of those stressors and unless you understand going in that aside from all the physical stuff and the chemical, biochemical changing your body’s blood chemistry, all that, to go after the underlying cause, you need to address the emotional side hands down.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

It’s a big piece because it’s a trauma to be so sick for so long. So, that’s definitely one of the pieces. And then, I say, okay, you know, we’re gonna be addressing you as a being, your mind, your spirit, your emotions, and let’s talk about what made you susceptible to this. And that’s how I like to reframe the why me. Well, why was your body susceptible to this? Well, there’s a few reasons. And they have to do with much more than Lyme, or much more than tick born disease. It’s about the terrain of the person’s system, the terrain causing immune dysregulation. So, our immune system is designed to protect us. It’s armed, but if it gets the wrong information it can hurt us, not just the bugs, not just the infections. 

So, usually my patients have many primary issues going on, not just tick born disease, but they have many more infections that are overlooked. A lotta times they don’t even have a diagnosis of Lyme Disease. I’ll make that diagnosis and then I’m gonna diagnose other infections. So, of course, other tick born diseases, I’m gonna look for parasites, mold, bacteria, viruses. Usually these patients who suffer from chronic Lyme, they have a combination of all of these different infections throughout their system, in their gut, in their sinuses, dental infections underneath root canals or old, or where wisdom teeth have been pulled. 

Underneath those sites there can be festering sub clinical infections that are causing inflammatory cytokines to cross through the, via the olfactory nerve up to the brain, or issues in the gut. Dysbiosis, parasites, different bacteria, they can be autoimmune triggers. They’re creating inflammatory cytokines that cross the blood brain barrier via the vagus nerve. So, it’s not just the Lyme that’s causing brain fog, but it’s infections, maybe in the sinuses, the gut, in the mouth, that are also causing inflammation in the body. Usually these patients have a mold issue as well. I find that these go hand-in-hand.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I really go deeper into this, but I will tell you categorically, and we’re so fortunate we have one of the top biological dentists, Dr. Stuart Nunnally, that he’s going to opine on that very issue about dental health, oral health, and so forth. And you talk about the other thing about mold. We’ve seen this in our clinic that many people that are functioning Lyme patients that are doing great and then all of a sudden they get exposed to mold. There’s many molds out there. There’s thousands of molds species, but the ones that are problematic for the body, and when mold and Lyme or mold and the co-infections, Babesia, Bartonella hook up, oh my God. They go from completely functional to almost bedridden overnight and they don’t know where it came from.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Absolutely.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Big, big problem and it’s one that I’m hoping we’ll really dive into deeply, if not on our interview particularly, but just to raise awareness to understand that it’s really, A, it’s not your fault, and secondly, this is our environment. But, before we leave this topic, because I hear the word, terrain, a lot and we did do an interview with Dr. Gabriel Cousins and his whole topic, his whole discussion had a lot to do with the terrain. So, how do you define the terrain? I mean, give us, you know, it’s a word, but we need to understand what that means. It’s very complicated, so just spend some time and just give us a little feel for what your definition of terrain, what that means.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Absolutely. So, I’m looking for the different biochemical imbalances in the body in the different areas of the body. So, I’m looking at the gut. So, I’m looking for parasites, bacteria, viruses, inflammatory markers, dysbiosis in general. And we know that the gut creates about 80% of our immune system and a large amount of our brain chemistry. So, I’m looking at the gut as to how it connects to the rest of the body. So, that’s a part of our terrain. I’m looking at the sinuses. I think a major overlooked piece is the sinuses in our microbiome in our sinuses. So you know, the gut is the big sexy term in functional medicine, right, but sinuses, there can be dysbiosis there and there is, hands down, in almost every one of my patients I’m seeing funguses or mark ons in the sinuses and I treat it just like I’ll treat the gut. 

Think of how close it is to the brain, right. So, that’s a part of our terrain. So, I’m also thinking about, as I said again, the dental piece. Lots of infections in there that people might not understand. I’m thinking about environmental toxicants. This is a huge one, often a very overlooked one. And so, micro toxins, which are the toxins from mold. You can test for them. They’re actually easier to treat than people might think. And I’m thinking about other environmental toxicants as well, heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, aluminum. I’ve seen these in higher levels in people in California since the fires in California.

I always did see them, I’m talking about unprovoked right now, just in the blood. Just go to Lab Corp, get your blood drawn, I’m finding mercury and aluminum, arsenic in almost every one of my patients. And so, I’ll also test it as it’s bio accumulated in the cells as well, with a provoked test with EDTA and DMPS medications which will draw the metals out of the cells. The patient collects the urine and we get a sense of what their bioaccumulation is of these metals. I’m seeing glyphosate high in the body.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

That’s a big one.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah, yeah, glyphosate. I’m seeing other pesticides, solvents, industrial chemicals, things like perchlorate. So, when I see these very, very high in the body I know that there’s immune dysregulation. There’s research out there that shows that these environmental toxicants, I’m not talking about poisoning. So poisoning is say you have a thermometer in your mouth and it broke and you swallowed the mercury, you’d be in the hospital right now, dizzy, vomiting. 

It’s not that, but it’s low levels that are chronic and insidious, slowly building up in the body causing immune dysregulation. So the research shows that the immune dysregulations that’s caused can be hyperactive immune system or a damp in the immune system, and that goes on simultaneously in my patients. So, on one hand the immune system is hyperactive. They’ve mass cell activation syndrome, auto immunity, and a hyper sensitivity to light and sound, which could also be nervous system dysregulation. 

The same time they don’t have, they can’t mount an appropriate immune response to kill off the infections that we’ve lived side-by-side with for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And so, I think a lot of the immune dysregulation leads right back down to environmental toxicants.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Very interesting. So, just to sort of compress that, I know I asked you to unpack it, but now I’m gonna pack it back up, for people that just tuned in now. The terrain is really a combination of the biochemical environment inside of you and the relationship of your chemistry to the microbial organisms that live in harmony in your body. And there’s this term called epigenetics, which are the foods and the choices that we make, our environmental influences, and then how that affects our DNA, which is also part of our chemistry, our blood chemistry. It’s really warehouses all of our healing properties and that’s carried in every blood cell, so it gives the body an amazing opportunity to bounce back and to heal. 

But, if that DNA is altered because of the environment, now we’ve got a change there. And so, when we’re tryin’ to heal we may not heal as fast. And also, those epigenetics, or the choices and the environmental influences on our body can turn on and off certain genetics that, recessive traits that we had that may never have surfaced, but because of our world and our environment these days, now they’re coming to the surface. And how that translates is something, it could be you know, the soaring trends of chronic illness that aren’t coming down no matter how hard we try. 

But what things that bother me the most, what we see in clinic and certainly with all the collaborative efforts and sharing information from doctor to doctor in our network, is that the ages of the people that are getting affected by the environment and by their genetics and by their symptoms that are expressing, are coming down. So, we’re seeing women, you know, 14 and 15 that show signs of infertility. And we have guys that are showing up younger than 20 that have low testosterone. This is not a genetic challenge. This is something that is coming from all of those combinations. And so, I love that you address the terrain, because now you’re addressing the whole person, not just breaking out one little part or saying Lyme or the co-infections are the enemy. It’s really just creating a healthy primal platform for healing so then, the body will do all the rest of the heavy lifting. Wouldn’t you agree?

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Exactly. I wanna go back to the genetic piece actually. Dr. Robert Miller did some excellent research on people who have chronic Lyme, and SNPs, SNPs are, just for the audience who may not know, single-nucleotide polymorphism, is a fancy way of saying a genetic mutation. They have more SNPs in there genes of detoxification than people who don’t suffer from chronic Lyme. 

And so, I test their environmental toxicants and very often I’m testing their genes. I’m looking at their genes just to see if they do have SNPs in their genes of detoxification. It’s gonna give me a bigger hint as to how I’m gonna treat them. And I’m confirming what we already know. Inevitably, people who suffer from chronic Lyme very, very often I’m seeing that they have problems with detoxification genetically that have been, as you said, triggered from outside from other influences.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

The big one that everybody references is the MTH of ART.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Right, right, right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

This guy can get turned off for whatever reason and we can turn those switches back on again.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Right.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

That’s the important thing for people to know. And for anybody out there that might be a little bit under the weather or you know, sorta depressed because they’ve been trying and they’re not moving forward, the body has an incredible innate way to heal. It’s meant to heal. And we have multiple systems that help with healing. So, it’s not just one or the other. But, I wanna touch back on something you just said in passing before, and it really kind of bothered me a little bit because I’ve been, you know, I’m on the east coast in South Florida. You’re actually kind of almost on the other side of the country from where we are. And so, I was watching all of the forest fires and the stuff that hit California, devastations, that really saddened me because of how many lives were affected. 

But then, I was kinda thinking about the environment, and when you talked earlier about what the blood testing and the various different higher levels of certain toxicants that are appearing in the blood these days, it occurred to me that you know when you have a fire and it’s burning a house, that house is filled with stuff, and whenever you use a high temperature on stuff, it releases what’s called a VOC, which is a volatile chemical that’s going up into the air. It’s smoke. It’s incredibly toxic. I mean, you know, the firemen, the front liners that are out there, they really are, it’s not just the fire. When they breathe these elements in and you know part of it we see from what happened at 9/11 in New York City. Many of the first responders, they all were getting cancer and many of the chronic diseases now because they were exposed to these toxicants that came into the body. We didn’t properly detox them. And so, now their bodies are now showing those signs years later. 

Same situation in California I believe. You’re seeing it on the micro level, but essentially, this is our environment. And so, you mentioned glyphosate, that’s a big one. That’s in our air, water, and food now. But, even the local ones that happened from the fires, you know, detox is a big issue and I’m hoping that we have time today to kinda touch on that a little bit and some of the solutions that you have come up with to talk about that. But, you know, you think about the fire and you think, well, I’ll go ahead and just get out. I’m not sure if I’m gonna save any, you know, save a life or my animals and I can get them, that’s the important things, the stuff, you know, the material stuff. I mean, some can’t be replaced and that saddens me that you may lose some of those memories, but you’re still saving your life. Now, we have to deal with the cleanup, not just the mess, but what’s the mess that’s going on inside the body, right.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

That’s big, it’s huge. Thank you for bringing that up. It’s definitely something I wanna talk about as well today, the environmental toxicants. So, I’m seeing loads, higher and higher, not only of metals, but of VOCs, all kinds of chemicals. They were always there in my patients, but now there’s fire season and every time there’s fire season a few months later I’m getting more and more people that are sick, more and more people who have, are suddenly in chronic Lyme. They had no idea they had Lyme or Bartonella or some tick born disease. And I really believe it’s about those environmental toxin loads that are causing immune dysregulation and now suddenly, the person isn’t able to handle Lyme that they’ve been able to handle for 20, 30 years. 

But, the toxicants are causing the immune dysregulation that’s now giving Lyme a chance to have its heyday in the body. And so, I measure the toxicants in the body and I look at the genes of detoxification and then I begin detoxing people, of course. So, usually even before I start to kill Lyme or any other infections, my patients have many, many infections. I’m not just killing Lyme. 

I’m going after lots of bugs. But, even before I do that, I’m wanting to detoxify them first, because when we kill off infections there’s by-products of dying bugs, of dying cells. There’s inflammatory cytokines released. So, if the toxic load is already high and I start killing infections I’m increasing the toxin load. I’m increasing the inflammation in a system that’s already inflamed, that’s already dysregulated. So typically, one of the first steps I’m gonna do is detoxify the patient.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

That is so important. And I often say this, even in my own clinic, that the order that you do your protocol and the way you dose your protocol makes all the difference. And that’s really what you’re talking about now. And I so appreciate you saying this, because often times Lyme patients think being a Lyme literate doctor, the doctor puts them on a protocol. The doctor, sadly, they often times they say to the patient, well, I’m gonna put you on this antibiotic or whatever and you’re gonna feel horrible before you start feeling better. Now, that’s a detox response, feeling horrible, people know that sometimes they want, it’s a little bit more extreme as a Herxheimer or Herx reaction. 

So, to me you could avoid all of that feeling horrible and potentially getting a Herx, which is really just your body saying, I’ve got too much toxins and now you add more toxins to the load or the burden, kinda like throwing kerosene on a flaming fire, right. And it just seems logical to me that if you just take a step back or you take the first step to be, lower the toxic burden on the body, then whatever protocol you do, yeah, if it’s good it’s gonna go after the source, right. But, you’re also creating another toxic event in an already inflamed toxic environment. So, lower the toxic load and burden on the body. 

Wow, make the ride easier for the patient. They’re already probably chronic by the time they see you. And so, you know, I just say, hey, you got toxic over time. Sometimes people’s bodies respond quicker, but sometimes it takes 10, 20 years before they become symptomatic, right. So, you’re putting in these toxins and then there seems to be a tipping point, which really brings me to two things that you just mentioned for the topic we’re on now. Earlier we talked about why me. Now I wanna talk about why now? Why am I becoming toxic or symptomatic now? So, I think this is all about what we’re talking about now and certainly the solution or solutions are valid, the order in which we do things to kinda unravel or come out of that rabbit hole. So, let’s talk about why now?

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Right, so that definitely has to do with our environmental toxicant load. So, we’re all walking around with these low levels of toxins in our system. I measure them every day in my patients. I know that. So, we’re walking around like this and our immune system knows how to regulate that to some degree. Our body does know how to detoxify, but we didn’t evolve to detoxify with such a high level of toxicants. We didn’t evolve to live side-by-side or live on a planet that is this toxic. This is the first time in maybe 15 or 20 years that the planet has been this toxic. But, our bodies did not evolve that fast to be able to handle this. 

This is why I believe there is a why now in general for why we’re suddenly seeing people with these mystery illnesses that were not there over the past 15 to 20 years. So, people have a high environmental toxicant load. Trauma is a huge one. Right now we’re in a global trauma with the pandemic. I’m seeing people who are so sick for so many other reasons, not just COVID. That I’m seeing also, of course. But, people are coming in now, they’re more sick from Lyme. They’re more sick from mold. Why? They have way more stress in their lives with this pandemic and politics and everything. We’ve always had stress in our lives, but I believe this is one of the times where there’s more stress in human history, at least in recent human history, I’ll say.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Well, we know the stress of the virus and politics, but there’s also the separation anxiety. Just before the holidays I was asking all my friends and people that I’d see locally that we just interact with, so, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? And they would say, ah, I usually go to my Aunt Sadie’s house, but this year, because half of us believe one way and half the other, we’re divided. I’m not invited this year and I’m really sad. I’m just gonna be by myself or just with a friend. I mean, it’s emotional, but it’s also another stress.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

It certainly is. And then, there’s research that shows that stress causes immune dysregulation. All of this, I believe, points back to immune dysregulation, the why now, because we’ve got things in our world now that we didn’t have before that are causing a certain level of immune dysregulation that wasn’t seen in the past. So, that’s the why now in a general sense. Society says. But, a patient could walk through my door and say, I was fine and all, I was fine all my life, I was healthy, and now over the past two years I’m really, really sick. I just don’t wanna get out of bed in the morning. I’m in pain. Why now? And then, I go back, I take a thorough history. Very often the why now for them is wow, you live in a house with mold. You were exposed to mold. 

Well, let’s check your tick born disease panel as well, because you’re showing symptoms of that. Okay look, there’s tick born disease. Look at that and that you have a mold allergy response. Look, you have a mold micro toxins. Okay, let’s look at the metals, that’s there. Are you hyper flexible? A lot of my patients are hyper flexible. They might have Elhlers-Danlos syndrome or they might have craniocervical instability or other structural issues. So, all of these pieces come together and sometimes the body can handle it, the immune system can handle it until there’s one event, could be a big stress, could be a big exposure, might be COVID causing COVID long haul. But, one single event on top of a system that’s barely holding it together and then, boom, the whole system flares and the person becomes sick.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I was very intrigued with that. I call it a tipping point. It just, you get to a point where it just sorta tips over, right?

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Exactly.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And sometimes you actually know what that is, right. Most of the times you don’t. Because it is, like you described, an accumulation of days, years, weeks, months of building up. Now, what’s interesting to me and I love this young doctor, Dr. Jaban Moore because he actually addressed this on one of his live, Instagram Live or Facebook Live sessions. And you think that okay, if you even know what the straw was that broke the camel’s back, and then you could go, well, let me just take that back, let me just take that straw off the back and now I’ll be okay like I was the day before or the week before. It doesn’t work like that.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Absolutely not.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, and that’s really kinda frustrating in general and people don’t realize that you get to a point, it’s almost like critical mass, where your body has just, it’s because we’re so complex inside and there’s so many systems that are at play, that when you tip over it’s not just pulling that one straw back, but you really need to address the body as a whole. Look at it and create a healing platform from a wholistic point of view, the whole body, all the systems, and understand, and this is the hardest part with people that are chronic because for the most part they’re pretty sick of being sick. 

They’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, right. So, they’re very anxious, right there to try to get their lives back in order. And you know, we spend a lotta time just saying, hey, it may have taken years or months for you to get here. It’s not gonna be fixed with one little magic pill or just overnight. This is gonna be a process. We get them on a plan and we just are diligent and methodical about it. And so, that’s really the way back. You have to almost claw yourself back. So, I think that that’s really a great thing or bit of a little snippet for people to understand, really super important.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

I agree. You know, such an important point just removing the trigger and thinking that we’re gonna heal right away and that in functional naturopathic medical school we’re taught treat the cause and everything will heal. But, that works well if the system just needs some rebalancing. If the person just has some issues we can remove the cause, but in complex chronic illness we can remove the inciting event, but the system is already stuck in the loop of healing and that loop of healing could be, or that loop that they could be stuck in is a loop of inflammation. 

So, inflammation’s such an important part of the healing cycle. It’s the beginning of the healing cycle. But, our patients, they got stuck in this loop of never ending inflammation. You pull out the inciting event and they’re still inflamed. And then, they think oh, I just need to keep treating the Lyme. No, there’s no more Lyme. Your body’s in that reactive mode still, so we have to calm that down.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah, you’ve mentioned a few times already about detox, and you’ve also mentioned inflammation, and for us, we understand that inflammation and toxicity, or toxicity and inflammation, they kinda travel on the same road together. So, if we can lower toxicity we can lower inflammation. And if we can do that, now we’re talking about that overhaul, getting the body’s systems back in order, turned on. Often times when I talk about this I fashion our bodies as if we were a fast driving car like a Lamborghini or a Maserati, right, and we’re just out of tune. Maybe we’re only firing up eight cylinders or six cylinders. How do we get the other 12 cylinders turned on so that we’re able to win the race, right? 

That’s your job as a practitioner, you know, to try to guide us, understand what cylinders need to be tuned up and then create that order in which to do that that is you know slow and conservative, but gets the body turned on. It’s really important. Let’s spend a few minutes on toxicity. And so, you mentioned heavy metals and we talked about VOCs and how in testing and rebalancing the terrain we notice that there’s high levels of, or imbalances of certain toxicities. Can you explain to me just some of the steps that you would recommend or what you would do to address lowering somebody’s toxic burden?

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Absolutely. So, there’s some steps people can just do at home. The first one is to avoid toxic burden as much as you can. Of course, eat organic. Your personal products and beauty products, for those to be organic and green. That’s the first step. The second step is remove yourself from the environment. If you happen to live in mold that’s a tall order, but do that. We can talk about that another day. That’s a big topic, moving houses. But, avoid first but then, there’s the cleanup piece, and this part is big. So, there are some parts you can do at home. I love saunas. Sauna therapy is one of the most important I find. 

We can get rid of heavy metals that way, especially with the infrared saunas. I like your sauna. And so, saunas, it’s very, very important. So, I’m thinking about the organs of detoxification. The skin, the largest organ that we have, that’s why I bring up sauna. The next is the kidneys, the liver, the gut. So, the toxins are released through all of these systems, so all of these systems need to be supported, right. So, we talked about the skin and then the liver and the kidneys, I use herbs to support them. So, I’m using herbs to tonify these organs, but also to get them to detoxify more, to rev them up a little bit more. So, I’m supporting every single organ of detoxification I mentioned with herbs or sauna. And a lymphatic massage is also very, very important to get that lymphatic flow going. 

So I’m supporting the organs of elimination and I’m using binders. So, binders will bind the toxins. So now, if you have binders with food it’s gonna bind the nutrients in your food, or with other medications it’ll bind that. So it’s important the binders are on an empty stomach. And now, some people though, they can’t, they’re not ready for detox yet. Even detoxification therapy is gonna be hard on their system. They’re gonna reject that. They’re gonna reject the herbs or they can’t mobilize enough toxins through the system yet. 

So then I have to come in with immune modulatory treatments before they’re even ready to detox. A lot of patients, detox is the first thing I do because they’re ready for that. Other times, I have to prepare their system for it. One thing I forgot to say is, I also like to use IV therapies for detoxification. So, I like to have an oral route, and intravenous route, depending on how high the load is. So if the load is very, very high I’m using PhosphatidylCholine IVs, glutathione IVs, possibly chelation therapy. 

So, PhosphatidylCholine makes the cells flexible to let nutrients in, toxins out. Glutathione is also you know, a huge detoxifyer, the liver makes it. So, people come to our clinic for those therapies as well. That’s the big guns in detoxification therapy, but the detox therapies have to be personalized. Some people are ready for it. Some people are not. Some people need deep, deep detoxification therapy right away, some people cannot tolerate that. So, it’s really getting to know the patient first and what their genes of detoxification are and how they’re gonna respond to therapies. Do they have co-factors for detox? Amino acids, minerals. A lot of times people aren’t ready for PhosphatidlyCholine and glutathione IV yet because their mineral status, their amino acid status isn’t appropriate. They’re just gonna keep recycling toxins if I try to pull them out of the system, but they don’t have the co-factors yet. So, detox is very, very detailed and highly personalized.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

You’ve said so much, that’s amazing. IV therapy, which even though it’s invasive, because you’re, you might be sitting in a chair for four to six hours. You’ve got some cocktail that’s dripping down slowly and it’s going directly into your blood stream. But, it is super effective because it does mainline. You’re not going through liver or you’re not going through your GI tract to get a supplement in or some biochemical change that’s happening through your digestive tract. You’re going right into your blood stream. And again, as the clinician, based on the symptoms and the history that you assemble on the patient you make the determination which is the best route. But, understanding to lowering the toxic burden before you get started and then starting those systems back up so that they’re standing on their own two feet, as they want to.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Exactly.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Then, it really gives you, the practitioner, a lotta time to go after the root cause before you even start going after the root cause, you just lower the burden. And what does it do for the patient? They get their lives back. They get much better sleep, which is another challenge. They may find that they’re getting less brain fog, for instance, or chemical or food sensitivities start to sorta subtly go away. So, I just loved what you said about taking care of like your house, get your house in order. And one of the things I wanted to add was that there’s a stressor out there that people are now becoming more aware of that’s called electromagnetic fields, EMF, and it’s another one, but it’s a silent one because you can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t taste it, you know. 

So, you don’t really know like the impact. But, we do see a lot nowadays when you are chemical sensitive or food sensitive, now most of your sensitivities are really dialed up. We have patients that tell us, well, I just walked into a room and instantly I got a headache and they couldn’t see what was going on, they couldn’t smell anything. But yet, their body responded from the electromagnetic fields. So, that’s another more modern stressor, but it is in our lives and now we’ve got 5G Networks. The government in the military they’re using seven and 10G, so even those micro towers you think it’s just 4 or 3, 4, and 5G for cell phones. No. Our government is using the same cell towers to generate frequencies that are even dialed in higher than 5G and that’s affecting all of us.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Absolutely.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

And I think it was Dr. Klinghardt that did a blood study that he actually tested people in the urban areas of Pacific Northwest, kind of where you are, and the urban and the rural areas and the measurement of the micro toxins, the by-product or the poop, from these micro organisms from mold and the anaerobes, you know, like Lyme, parasites, Babesia bacterias, they were highly elevated in the blood from the city areas and much lower, like almost 80 times less in the rural areas. And really, if they’re all drinking the same water and eating the same food, breathing the same air generally, because they’re in the same area, the big difference is the concentration of cell towers in the cities is so much higher. 

And those energies are actually feeding the bugs that are now doing what they, they’re made to do. Replicate is their number one function. They poop in the process. And then, they use up your body resources in order for them to survive. And so, really back to the question about terrain and rebalancing the terrain, these organisms have lived in harmony in our bodies. 

We all have a little cancer, a little Epstein-Barr, a little streptococus. We all have a little bit of all these different kinds of organisms and they’ve lived in harmony for thousands of years, like you said earlier. Why now? Why me? These are the big questions. I love that we’re going here. But, we are kinda running a little bit out of time, so as we get closer to the end of our interview, I just wanted to offer or ask you, where do we start? We’ve talked a lot about a lotta great things. Could you offer me, I’m your Lyme patient now and I’m presenting kinda not really symptomatic. What would you suggest I do maybe tomorrow to inspire me to kinda get outta bed or to get on track or just something I can do as early as tomorrow that will really rock my world, really change my trajectory, as they say?

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Yeah, the first thing I would do is internal work, if you haven’t been already. If you haven’t been meditating, try that. If you haven’t been grounding your feet in the earth, try that. A lotta my patients, they already have been doing that, even before they come to me, and they’re still sick. So, that’s a piece that’s really, really important piece, but those techniques, those internal, the internal work, nobody else can do that for you. You don’t need to go to a clinic for that. It really sets the foundation for the biochemical pieces to work. So.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

It also doesn’t cost a lot, right? I mean, for me well, I know why your patients, ’cause you’re in California. Everybody in California kicks their shoes off and hugs Palm trees so they really touch the earth. Well, it is wintertime so maybe it’s a little harder for all of us to do that, but grounding, touching the earth and bringing nature under its charge into the body is super important. Dr. Zack Bush talks about getting out there and communing with nature so that we actually rebalance and reset our microbiome, that relationship of the external environment to our internal environment is super important. And you know, I just love the idea of the guided meditation or doing affirmations or doing prayer work. It’s not about religion. It’s about spirituality and making that connection and releasing a lotta the emotional stress and things that we hold on to.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Exactly, exactly.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

One more thing. Give me one more tip.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

One more tip. If you’re not getting enough sleep, and chances are you’re not, really talk to a functional medicine doctor about that. Maybe you need a sleep medication, but there are other ways. A good way to get sleep is the grounding, the earthing techniques for sure, the meditation techniques. There are a lot of herbs you can use. But, if you’re not sleeping then there’s not, you’re only gonna heal so much. Our body detoxifies when we sleep, our brain, our lymphatic system detoxifies when we sleep. So, definitely talk to your functional medicine doctor about sleep, if you’re not getting that.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I love that. Actually I have a dear friend, one of my mentors, Dr. Bob Marshall, who passed, but he was one of the top nutritionists in the country for sure, and he said, as good as I am, as great as the nutrition that we make here at Premier Research Labs, if you gave me a choice of great nutrition or a better night’s sleep, I would choose sleep every day of the week. That’s how important sleep is, amazing. Wow, wow, Dr. Parpia, today was really enchanting. I loved your soft spoken way and approach to healing and treating something that’s really serious, Lyme Disease.

Sometimes people don’t understand how deep and how serious it can go, not just that it affects the patient, but it affects every single person that comes in touch with that patient, their family members, their practitioners. It’s very frustrating. It’s often misunderstood and it’s somewhat complex. But what you gave us was real primal understandings of some of the mechanisms at play and simple ways and simple approaches to start getting your house in order. I really appreciate your time and the time that we spent together, getting to know you and certainly the information that you offered us today as we unfold this Healing from Lyme Naturally Summit. Thanks again for joining us.

Nafysa Parpia, N.D.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s such an honor.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Hey everybody, it’s Robby Besner. Thanks so much for joining us today. Please share this content with anyone that you think might benefit from it and we’re looking forward to having you with us tomorrow for another great interview.