Lyme & Bartonella In MCAS & Sensitivities

Introduction and Beth O'Hara's Expertise 0:00

Everyone. Dr. Tom Moorcroft, back here with you for this episode of The Healing from Lyme Disease Summit. And today, we're in for a really special treat. I'm joined by a really special guest, my great friend Beth O'Hara. Many of you may recognize her as the host of the Reversing Mask Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit that I helped co-host. And we just had such great conversations about how Lyme and Mold and Bartonella and all these other environmentally acquired illnesses really started to play a role in hyper reactive mast cells and just sensitivity in general.

And so I wanted to bring Beth on because her dearth of knowledge is incredible. She's one of these people that I think about when you're looking at completely being able to reclaim control over your health, reclaim control over your life. Not only does she know all the science and the specifics of all the nuances, but she also has a bigger picture viewpoint of things that allow you to actually start taking action right away. So today in our conversation, we're going to talk about Lyme and Bartonella and specifically they their role in mass activation syndrome and intolerances and sensitivity in general, but really focusing on those two different parts.

The one part is stuff you can start doing right away at home to start making progress. And then the other part is like, what are these little nuance things that you might not have heard about before that can really you might be doing right or wrong and you could ratchet that up so you feel a lot better. So, Beth O'Hara, thank you so much for joining us. It's a delight to be with you. I'm so excited about the wonderful introduction. I really appreciate it. And I'm thrilled about this because, one, I find that in this kind of tick borne illness protocols, we need to start bringing in the mass angle.

We need to be thinking about this because so many people are failing these protocols or they're flaring or they feel worse after them. Some people are getting much better and that's fantastic. But I'm always focused on the people that keep falling through the cracks. What do we do for them? How do we move things forward? Probably because that's who we both were, you know? And so that becomes our passion. And I think some light bulbs that go on both for people are going through this themselves and practitioners.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that's really the key is like we have summits like this and we talk about all these possibilities and everybody sort of starts going, oh, I'm sure compared themselves or to another person or compare themselves to a protocol. This is about learning some information, but then realizing that you and I see those people who do fall through the cracks. And so a lot of the people that we focus on, it's not that everybody's ultrasensitive. It just happens to be the people that we see.

And we love helping them take that next step. But also, a lot of the folks, if you're listening, you're like, Hey, I'm pretty robust. I can handle a protocol. These are the things that you might want to be thinking about as you're going so that you don't make and you don't accidentally end up in the sensitivity category. So whether you're someone who's like really super sensitive when which case this conversation is going to be all about you getting better or someone who is really pretty robust, but you want to make sure that you don't fall into that category.

This is going to be just knowing Beth and knowing the conversation is gonna be amazing. So, I mean, Beth, one of the things is like you mentioned that like we were there and we both see these people and we're so passionate about helping them because we were there before. We kind of dove into kind of like I mean, one of the things I think you're most well known for is and this is why I love you, is you have a clear roadmap of success. You have a roadmap of thinking about how to work with mass cell activation syndrome.

Reverse it before we get there. Like, why? Why mass activation syndrome? And why do you care about Cas and Lyme and Bartonella? Because we all know there's so many better ways to spend our day than focusing on the sickest of the sick. So why are you so passionate about helping this group of people? Well, it really comes from because for me, there wasn't a better way to spend my day. There wasn't any other way to spend my day. And I was that person. I was so incredibly ill and it started when in my childhood we moved out to the country.

So people have heard me before. I've heard the stories of shortcut. It just that living in the country we lived in an old farmhouse that was full of toxic mold and I was been by ticks all the time and mosquitoes never thought a thing of it back then. Nobody knew that one mold was an issue or toxic, and two people were. Lyme wasn't even on the radar back then, certainly not in a in a rural area. So this was rural western Kentucky. So looking back, my health had started declining around age nine. And the same time I had a significant head injury, I had a traumatic brain injury. And

Beth's Illness Journey and Search for Answers 5:01

the that opened the door for these tickborne infections to really start taking hold. So I ended up with Lyme, Bartonella and rabies. Yeah. And I muscled my way through. But by the time I was in college, I was barely functioning and I wasn't able to. I had gotten a full scholarship to medical school and I wasn't able to take advantage of it because I was so ill I had to turn it down. And it was one of the most devastating things in my life is still probably outside of my health issues. The the most devastating event in my life was to watch that dream just go up in smoke, which has happened for so many people are dealing with these illnesses now.

Back then, I was the sickest person I knew and going into my twenties, so my late twenties, my friends were still going, they were going clubbing and partying and I was walking north. It actually was barely walking. It was hobbling with a cane and orthopedic shoes. I could hardly walk. I'd have to use the scooters in the grocery, and then I would just feel so embarrassed and I would feel the shame because I could see everybody looking at me like, Why is this young person using the scooters? You just lazy. Like I could.

I could hear the judgments coming off of them, you know, and people would say, You don't look sick. And so asked me like, why are you using that? Like, I didn't have any right to use the scooter, but this was before grocery delivery, so that was the only way I had to get food and that was my life I got to where I couldn't read a book. I was so light sensitive with the lights off in the house during the day. I had to wear sunglasses. I couldn't listen to music, even classical. I couldn't listen to a movie.

I could most days barely handle conversation. And it was like my brain just melted down. I had a system wide joint pain, muscle pain, severe GI issues, extreme sleep dysregulation. I have not talked about this much before, but I think it's time to bring it into this conversation. I had periods of psychosis and that was the most terrifying was to know that I had lost touch with reality and not be able to do anything about it. And and also know that if I went to an inpatient psych clinic, that that would be the worse thing for me and that I would lose complete control.

And I wasn't tolerating anything. So I couldn't handle being given psych maps. Mm hmm. So it was it was a terrible existence. And I have seen over 75 practitioners I've totaled up. I stopped counting it, and I've probably spent over $500,000 on my health every penny and it's not like I've been a wealthy person. So I was buying clothes at the thrift store so that I could spend money on supplements. So I lived that. And I remember the day that the functional medicine was new and I got in and was a functional medicine doctor who was the most experienced in our area.

And I've been on the waitlist for a while and I got it and I thought, okay, I'm going to get some answers here. And everything we tried made me worse. I would try little quercetin this before, and Cass even had a diagnostic code, but we knew I had something going on with mast cells. I get these flushes and these hives and these rashes and all this stuff would go on and everything we tried made me worse. It was all these paradoxical reactions, extreme anxiety and panic attacks. Sometimes I'd drive to the grocery I shouldn't have been driving, but I couldn't afford the supplements and afford a taxi.

So, you know, you got to make these kinds of choices. And I drive when there was least traffic so I can even be saved as possible. And I had no proprioception. So I run into the curb all the time. My poor car was just like messed up. It's just messed. Up. And I didn't want to get it fixed because I just messed it up again. And I. So we'd worked together for like three years, even Gabo, a sprinkle gamble would make me more anxious. All this weird stuff was going on and at least he believed me. Whereas a lot of practitioners had told me it was in my head and what I heard.

I wanted to be sick a number of times and like, that's preposterous. Why would I work so hard and want to be sick? And they said, Well, there's something you're you're getting out of being sick, really. I'm getting nothing out of. Being sick, getting pissed off. Pretty sick. And so at three years he stuck with me. And I remember the day said that we have tried everything I know what to do and and we knew I had massive activation, even though it was still in the theoretical phases. We knew for certain this was a thing and I was already starting to study it.

And, and he said, I don't know where else to turn, but if you find something, let me know and I'll support you. I don't know what to do and I appreciate his honesty, but that was probably the second most devastating thing that went on in my illness, because I'd planned all my hopes on this practitioner and it was before telehealth, so it wasn't like I could set up a phone consult with somebody like you or, you know, these other people available. And I sobbed in a hallway home. I had such fatigue.

It took me a week to recover just from going to that appointment. But then when I got home I thought, I'm going to give up. There's just nothing left for me. I don't know if he doesn't know. I don't have access to anybody else. I have exhausted everything. Traditional medicine, holistic medicine, homeopathy, shamanic work, psychotherapy. I mean, if nothing else, I'm persistent. And I woke up the next morning after this huge meltdown that I had and realized I heard this little voice and said, Beth, what else are you going to do?

I couldn't sit on the couch and eat bonbons because I was down to ten foods. I couldn't, you know, anyone to sit on the couch. And bugs weren't one of them. They would sit on the couch and eat carrots. And I so I thought, you know, I have this whole pre-med background. I've been learning stuff as I went along and I get these little windows where my brain would turn on for a few minutes. So I just started reading anything to get my hands on about masturbation. We knew I had Lyme, but I couldn't tolerate anything to hand to address that.

And then I stumbled on the mold toxicity, and then I stumbled on the nervous system dysregulation and it had a number of traumatic events and this head injury and all that stuff. And by working my way through things, piece by piece and hitting a lot of dead ends and turning back around, I started slowly getting my health back and my brain back and my life back. And then the more I got my life, my brain back, the more I studied and my recovery was. So it wasn't overnight. The people that hadn't seen me in a year or so, they would see me off the cane and my color come back in my face and say, Oh, my gosh, what did you do?

And then they started asking me, Can you work with me? Can you help me? I'm like, okay, I don't have any qualifications. What am I doing? I had gone into spiritual work and I was working as a spiritual coach and teaching spirituality and things like that. And it was part of what saved me, part of what kept me going, kept me alive. But I became a health coach and then I realized I needed more and that's where I got my brain back to go into marriage and family therapy, because I want to look at the role of trauma and stress on our health and our immune system, and then went to naturopathic and that became national.

360 And it's all driven by this passion of there's so many people out there suffering and stark. And then that's where the system that we'll talk about was developed. And it's been tested and tested and not tested on, but refined. So a lot of people have helped me refine it. And now we've got this really solid roadmap that works for people who are super are really robust. It's just gives us a way through. Nice. Yeah. I mean, I think it's so important. It's like so many interesting little points that you bring up in your story.

And part of it is, yeah, the psychiatric stuff is real. And whether it's frank psychosis or just that, like being left out, you know, it was really interesting. I've been, you know, years and years ago I saw this study where they checked out, you know, your brain and they're doing functional MRI. And they had three people in different rooms playing a video game where they would throw the ball to each other. And so after a couple of minutes, the researchers had two people. They signaled to them, hey, don't throw the ball to the other person, so exclude the other person.

And then they went and sent everybody the MRI machine and they found out the areas of the brain that correlate with feeling excluded, feeling slighted and sort of dissed by the other person and feeling significant emotional pain as well as areas of the brain that are related to physical pain, got triggered by this exclusion. But what was what was really interesting to me, Beth, was the other two people were just a computer program, so there weren't even other people. So it's not just whether the doctor blows you off or you feel betrayed or whether someone starts making fun of your cane and saying You don't deserve this, but even if you think they do so I think that spirituality component, the trauma stress piece is like so critical.

I mean, where do you find that really fitting in with all of this? Because I know we want to have a sensitivity in how to get over it and stuff, but I mean, we tend to just go right for the jugular here and go with that topic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think it underlines to everything there was a whole period, Tom, where I was so ill that I didn't want to live, I didn't want to hurt myself, but I didn't want to live. And I was in excruciating pain and I couldn't sleep. And then that does weird things to your brain on top of having these kinds of infections going on in your brain and toxins affecting the brain and I would and I share this because I share this with a lot of clients when they've been in this point, and it helps them not feel so alone.

That exclusion you're talking about every day, I would think about that. I'm going to die at some point and maybe I'll get hit by a bus and it'll be over quick. And it would give me a sense of relief that there was some ending point, but I would always force myself to continue the fantasy

Trauma, Spirituality, and Finding Hope 16:40

to where my husband had to find my body and what how that would be for him and what that would do if I died. And the reason I did that was because I knew that would keep me from going forward on something. If I got to a point where I wanted to hurt myself and I just wanted to share that with people because this is a desperate situation. A lot of people are in that place and with the spirituality because it reminded me of how connected we all are and how connected not just he and I are, but all of us.

And that's what kind of took me into, okay, I'm living this life that's excruciating living hell. But what's happening in my body is not the only thing happening in the world. And it's when we're that sick, our lives just shrink. And it's like it was sometimes it was. That was all I could see was this pain, this GI distress, this insomnia. And I started working on connecting outside of myself. So I didn't have the ability to go on hikes or things like that at this point. But I would go sit on a bench and watch the birds and get my focus outside of me just for a moment.

And that would bring relief. And in the the spiritual work that I did really did carry me through and also the work I did with other people probably saved me. So I would have days where and have an appointment scheduled with somebody a session. And I was such a mess. Tom I would sometimes get to the office and realized I had brushed my hair. I remember one time when at the office I started slippers on because it just really struck with my shoes. I'm like, Well, it's a slippers day. And and then I would just tell them, you know, I it's a slippers day and we'd just laugh and it would be fine.

And then they would start sharing their pain and their suffering and mine would disappear for a while. And so interesting, the pain would fall away. The depression that I was in, the anxiety would just kind of fall out of the background and I'll have to deal with where my focus was. So I had to limit the amount of people I worked with and didn't have stamina to do a lot, but as much as I could, I retained that and then I retained this connection that for me it's about there's something bigger than us, that there's this energy that weaves us all together, that connects us all.

And I know there's so much New Age stuff that's talked about in terms of where you attract what you're experiencing. So if you're sick like this, you attracted it somehow. I don't believe that. I don't think that's true because that only works if we're you know, if we're in a vacuum and we're the only ones on the planet, but we're living in this world where we have all this climate change which is driving the increase in tickborne infections. We're getting these new Borrelia species and other tickborne species every couple of years and all this stuff is happening.

We have this toxicity that affects our immune system's ability to fight things off, and then the mold situation is epidemic and related to climate change. And so we have all this going on. It has to do with the destruction that people have brought on our planet. And we brought on ourselves and on each other. And so I realized I'd felt like a victim to that, and particularly because I was so sick. And then other people weren't sick or the people I knew weren't sick, so why me? You know? Then I was like, Why me?

Why, why am I doing all this? And there was one point where I just had to shift and realized it was when I heard the phrase canaries in the coal mine, that we're the canaries in the coal mine, all of us, whether we're sensitive or not, those of us that are getting Lyme versus the people that were by ticks and maybe they carry Lyme bacteria, but they're not expressing the symptoms or mold or mass activation or whatever, where the the we're the carriers of this message that, hey, this will change.

And I shifted from being in this whiny victim place to I want to be a leader in this, and then I want to really encourage all of us to inspire and even challenge all of us who are dealing with these things, to also be leaders, whether we do it in a way that you and I do it or we do it by changing our lifestyle and putting in a water filter and teaching our kids why to drink filtered water and why to reduce our plastic, and why to not wear polyester and and participate in these types of things. Why not to buy regular cotton as the highest pesticide sprayed crop?

How do we how do we do these things that we shift the world that we're living in? And I really sense that we're starting to hit some critical mass around that. There's something that's shifting globally and it's been shifting globally in the past year or so, and I think this is part of it. Yeah. I mean, I think like what you highlight is so critical and to me, one of the most toxic, I think the pandemic was so great at showing how toxic all this shit is. And we do have a choice and people are starting to hear we've getting spoon fed stuff from social media and then regular media outlets without being critically evaluating it.

It made me mad. I want to live that way anymore. Maybe I do want to turn off the TV because I'm realizing that everything that they're talking to us puts us in this negative state of mind. And I think the leadership that you're talking about exhibiting, we're on a you know, you can choose to say that my life sucks because I got one of these or multiple of these things. Or you can choose to say, hey, it is a gift. Maybe the reason that I got it and somebody else didn't is I'm awake enough to actually do something with the message.

And I have enough personal responsibility and energy deep in my soul. I mean, I feel like it every day. Like you were saying, I did a little and then I rested. I did a little somedays. A lot was resting, you know. But when you can be a leader, you don't need to be on the Internet. You don't need to be on the stage. Your kids, your friends, your partners, they're all watching you. You influence them so much. And I think this is kind of that leadership that I hear you talking about. Beth, is moving forward and showing people that if I'm in a support group, I'm not going to be like everybody else who just complains about the bad stuff.

I never once right now have I heard you say anything other than I acknowledged. I wasn't feeling well, and then I was open to supporting someone else and then supporting someone else and being open to that. I was able to create space for myself to heal more so I just think it's just such a an amazing concept because we all know we're sick. We're not. When we are sick, we're sick. We're not going to forget about you cannot think away, you know, positive affirmation away Lyme disease and Marcus, if you can, you fixed it and it was a mental thing.

Right? So yeah, I think it's key. So where we when we're when we're looking at this, we have the people who get Lyme and Bartonella, like you said, maybe they're maybe they have a few symptoms are getting the antibiotic they're fine but then there's this other group of people that get Lyme and Bard or maybe a mild exposure who end up seeing people like us. And then they come in and we're like, Oh, you have Lyme and Bartonella and mold exposure. Oh, and you have mucus and you're sensitive. The hundred and 87,000 foods, what how does that even how do we get to that place to start with before we dove into how to actually start to reverse it, you know, using the road map approach.

But like, yeah, what, how do we even get there? Well, I can speak in terms of how we get into the mass activation. And just to frame this for people who may not be as familiar with it, when we're looking at mass cell activation, we're looking at these front line defender center cells of our immune system. So they have all these receptors on the outside and their job is literally to create inflammation and cell signaling and regulate things that are happening in our bodies based on what's going on outside of them.

So that can be what's going on in the environment around us because of toxins, because of EMFs or whatever can be what's going on inside of us. We have some bacteria, some viruses, some parasites that shouldn't be there. And then they're going to release some inflammation, start to localize a localized response and signal the rest immune system to come in. And they have all kinds of other roles that we won't get into right now. But

How Mast Cell Activation Develops 26:10

in a normal, healthy response, somebody will have an increased in inflammation and then it goes away. So let's just take since we're talking about the Tickborne infection world, let's just take a virus so cold and we'll take a type of infection everybody's had. And we start to get inflammation or throat inflammation in the sinuses. That's the immune response, not the virus itself, but our immune response to that virus. And the mast cells are part of it, not the only thing, but they're a big part of it.

And then it goes away. You recover and you completely forget. Most people don't remember, Oh, I had that cold back in 1993. Nobody remembers that as we recover and you go on. So that's a normal mass of response. Or you get a car, you don't get it cleaned out. There's bacteria in there, it gets infected, you get a clean out later. You clean out with some hydrogen peroxide. That's probably spore in or something on it. It's fine. They've totally forgotten you ever had inflammation. There you go. On the mast cells, when they have a constant onslaught, can get disregulated.

And that's what we're seeing. And this has become a huge numbers now. So pre-pandemic, the population studies showed that anywhere from nine to possibly up to 17% of the general population had massive activation syndrome. That's a lot of people that was prepared pandemic. So if you think about at least about one in every ten people that you now have massive activation syndrome walking around, most of the time they have no clue. We're talking hundreds of millions of people in just the US alone. Then we have this virus coming along called COVID and it's a virus.

We're not been exposed to before. A lot of people were already had low grade and cast. They didn't know about it. Nasal Activation Syndrome and it tips them over and these numbers are much higher now. We just don't have the population studies to look at where we are now. But a lot of this long COVID is really we can drill down to a few things that are similar in tickborne infections and mold toxins. And there's just all these underlying base pieces that would be helpful for people to understand.

And I'm sure that people are talking about cell danger response on here. So my really nutshell elevator speech on it, if this is the first interview anybody is listening to on the summit is with the cell danger response. We have an overwhelming level of any combination of toxins, pathogens, stressors, and we include stressors, traumas, but it can just be chronic stress can I've had people who were they were they were working 70 hours a week and being a year into that they just lost everything with their health.

So Lyme these tick borne infections are going to fall into that when we hit that threshold and we get all these biochemical changes in our bodies and one of them is increase in mass. So response, the parasites have a particular receptor on them called the toll like receptor and that's the receptor for sensing viruses, bacteria, parasites. So we think about Lyme bacteria, bartonella bacteria, and then the PGA and the Masters really sensing that organizing response. Well, what if when you get hit by that tick, you already have a toxin load that takes you up here.

If your thresholds here, you're already up to higher on the toxin load. And then you had a death in the family and then you had the stress of the pandemic. Or maybe you got bit before the pandemic, but you had a surgery or something that felt traumatic or surgeries are traumatic even if they don't feel emotionally traumatic. So you had all these things. Now you're at the very top of your threshold, but you don't know it. How are you going to know? Then you get bitten by that tick and now you're over the threshold.

So we get this driver for mass activation syndrome and we're living in this kind of world we're describing where we have these toxins at levels we've not experienced before ever in human history. We have EMF levels we've never experienced before, and in the history we have stress levels we've never experienced before. Just when we think about what your typical day is and the pandemic was wonderful for me because I went, Why am I running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to work and then get out to go meet a friend for dinner and then get home?

And I've got to finish some reports and then I'm going to get to bed late and and then everything slowed down. I was like, Oh, I like this pace. I'm going to try to hang on to this pace and just like everybody else is started to lose it. I'm trying to come back to it, but that pace just adds to that load all the time. So then that opens us to this mass activation syndrome, because our mass cells lose their fine tuning, they lose their ability to tell what's friend and what's enemy anymore. And then they start over releasing these inflammatory mediators.

Histamines one cytokines are whole class. That's the word most people know now are cytokines. That cytokine storm has a big mast involvement and all these other kinds il6 all these other things that are getting released. So this plays a role in these tickborne infections because you're getting this inflammatory load building, building, building. Then when you kill off these pathogens with the protocols, they're releasing more toxins when they die. Those toxins are triggering those mast cells, and that's going to increase this mass cell response.

And so our people can snowball into more inflammation, more GI issues, more brain issues, all kinds of symptoms can pop up. Mass cells are in every tissue in our body except the retina. So where they're triggered is where we're going to get those symptoms. So we're not. Actually rambling, but I hope that answered it. I think it's crystal clear and very well said. And I say like so from a clarity perspective, it's like you could be doing all the right things, but your mast cells are now seeing the death products, if you will, of, of, of appropriately killing Lyme and Bartonella as an example, as a foe.

Now, technically, they're kind of like our higher brain is like, well, no, it's just toxins from getting rid of it. That's good. But the mast cells are protecting us and now they've lost that ability to differentiate between friend or foe. So they're just dumping out more pro-inflammatory substances, which is why it looks like even if you're doing kind of the quote unquote right thing for Lyme, if it were Lyme were in a vacuum, your overall system can't handle that. And that's a big part of why for some people, after they go into heavy duty killing protocol, all of a sudden they can't tolerate the fragrant smell in the laundry detergent making them sick.

They can't handle the smell of fresh paint. They can't they're reacting to foods they've never reacted to before. That's what I'm talking about themselves lose. They're fine tuning, so they're like, Oh, I can't tell the difference between another Lyme bacteria or a cold virus and a carrot. And so I'm just going to be overprotective and over vigilant. And my my dear friend Bob Miller says now they're shooting at butterflies. So this is what I think he says. Police Officer So I think about now we're shooting at butterflies and butterflies, not enemies, but we have to regulate themselves.

This is why I find before we go into these Tickborne protocols, if we'll do the stabilization step where we're going to stable eyes, particularly two systems, so the mast cells on the immune system side and then the nervous system and the nervous system, very important stabilize as well for a couple of reasons. One, nervous system and immune system are not separate. Like most of us were taught in anatomy, they're all in it. It's all interwoven. And the mast cells are the interface. They're lining every nerve ending.

They're at every nerve sheath. So whatever's happening in the nerve system is happening to the mast cells because there's a constant cross communication. They're got it's like they're texting all the time, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. How are you? I'm really stressed out. Oh, I'm going to release more information and to protect you. How are you? Oh, I'm now I'm really inflamed. Oh, that doesn't sound good. Let's release more inflammation. Well, that's going to change my neurotransmitter signaling.

So that's what's happening. And they they get it's kind of like to people who are trauma triggered, trauma triggering each other and think of it that way and we've got to if we're going to calm the system down, we're going to calm both sides down. We people who have a lot of inflammation, they're dealing with a lot of stuff. We just calm one. It's not going to work on the other side. We've got to do both. So that's where we bring in the nervous system, calming the mass. So calming, bring everything down a few notches.

Then we can stabilize the system a little more with supporting sleep. You don't want to go into these killing protocols if you're not sleeping because whatever is happening, your top symptoms are going to flare more as you start these protocols. So I like to bring them down, make sure we've got room for some ups and downs as we're getting into those protocols and then we bring them on board. So unless somebody was just recently that and they have something that's acute, that's a whole different picture, then you got to jump in there and get on top of that.

But I'm talking about what we do with people that have been dealing with this chronically for years. Beth I couldn't agree more. I'm so glad you added the acute thing in because I'm always like, well, if someone comes in with a new tick bite, well, different story. Yeah. But the important part here that I really want to highlight for everyone here is what you just said. Beth is so key. I see so many people. I just need to kill it more. I just need to be on more of this or more of that. And I'm like, No, no, no, no, no.

It's the it's not just knowing what you guys have probably already heard this in so many other interviews, and it comes up in almost every one. And there's a reason for that. It's not just about knowing what to do, but it's about knowing what order to do it in. And I think, Beth, you really highlighted one of the core key components of why and again, everybody's an individual. You don't all have to be like doing it in this particular order. But what I what I love about what the way you talk about this, Beth, is you're like you're not saying I got to do the mass activation syndrome before the mold, before the Bartonella, before the BRCA, before the Lyme.

In that specific order, unless you have heavy metals and glyphosate, in which case you have to follow a protocol, what you're saying is, instead of looking at the name or the label, I'm always trying to get people to leave the label to the practitioner and then just know the label for reference, but get rid of the label. Tell us about your symptoms. And from a practitioner perspective, you just said this is me paraphrasing what I heard focus on the immune system and the mast cells within the immune system and focus on the nervous system.

And, and like to me now we're looking at a human being because the that the immune system and the nervous system are like the whole thing.

Stabilizing Mast Cells and the Nervous System 38:00

Yes, you have circulation and you have all these other parts, but you're essentially saying, look at the person as a unique individual and then give them treatments that allow them to be able ready to receive more of the treatment, whether that's physical, mental, emotional or even spiritual, as we've been talking. Exactly. And we have to remember that these different branches of immune system setup to talk about it very simplistically and I'm going to really simplify this, knowing that it's way more complex than how I'm going to describe it.

But we just think about having our pathogen killing side of our immune system when we're going after things like Bartonella online, these kinds of pathogens, we want to have a good, strong activation of that pathogen killing side of the immune system and the protocol does work in conjunction with that. And this is why if people immune system's not functioning, then antibiotics aren't working. These other things aren't working because they have to work in conjunction so much. Our immune system does not just we have to kill things off, but we have to have the autophagy process clearing all out and getting rid of those dead bodies and everything like that.

When we get in this chronic mess activation syndrome, we have this chronic inflammatory side elevated and they work like a seesaw. So chronic inflammation goes up, pathogen killing goes down, chronic inflammation goes up, autoimmune risk goes up. So now we come in and we start adding more to the low. We're actually increasing risk for things like autoimmunity. If we're not balancing the immune system first. So this is the real logic to what is is going along and it makes people get through smoother, faster with fewer long term effects and issues it's in.

People often think, why are we going so slow? Can't we just jump to it? And I tell them we're taking the tortoise approach so you can be the tortoise or you can be the hare. But remember, the hare kept making fun of the tortoise, and the hare kept jumping around and getting distracted and running really fast. And the hare ran off a cliff. Well, once you went off the cliff, you're not making it to the finish line. The tortoise made it to the finish line first. And that's what I even encourage my clients to get a little tortoise carving, put it next to their supplements so they can remember that pacing is what's going to get them there.

And this kind of approach and it's all about I say same thing you're talking about. It's about the right things for this person in the right order, at the right times. The timing and their symptoms will tell us so much because a lot of times the immune system isn't to pay attention to tick borne infections. It's not ready to attack that. It's on the mold layer. And then if you get the mold layer out, symptoms will start to shift. And that's why I love to have people do they just give me a symptom update every time and I have them keep them very simple 30 seconds a day journal not of mass of lots of stuff but just oh I started getting headaches I didn't had headaches for that wasn't a regular thing.

Now I'm getting daily headaches or now I'm getting internal vibrations. Now I'm getting muscle and joint pain, whereas I didn't have those. So that's telling me the immune system starting to shift into the tickborne layer. That's the timing to bring in those protocols. So that's exactly what you're talking about in terms of where's the where is the immune system focus at this point and how do we work with our bodies instead of trying to just jerk them along where we think they should go? I don't find that approach to be as effective for people.

Yeah, you know, I think it's it's so key to think about it that way. And I, I love the tortoise and the hare analogy. I use it all the time. One of the other things I say for those of us who are adrenaline junkies, like, like I claim to be, which is really kind of interesting, I find that like I love things that look disorganized and I love like high stress environments. But what's really interesting, those statements, because one of the things I learned through my illness was to be very cautious, examine what's coming out of your mouth, because what you say to yourself, both with your lips and in your mind over and over and over again, is how you reprogram your operating system, how you reprogram your inner, you know, programing, your your inner iPhone, so to speak.

I say I, I always love the term slow, as smooth and smooth as fast. It's a really common thing used in the military, but it's also used in the emergency room of critical care. If you ever watched someone on the side of the road, the EMT is if you go to an emergency room and you watch a show that's done well, which I don't know how many of those really are, but it looks like pure chaos. But to me, it's one of the most spiritual calming situations. And this is where I come to this. I like unorganized disarray things I really don't.

What we have is we have this that we call airway, breathing, circulation, the ABCs in medicine. Something's going wrong. We go step by step down the protocol, and then that's like 80% of it. And then when we follow, like a pathway, like a road map, like you're talking about breath, then we can freestyle. And to me that's that other 20% where we can really make this huge change. But it's all based on the other 80%, which is taking a deep breath and looking at the basics because there's nowhere in ABCs, in critical care medicine where there's anything complicated.

It's literally been the same thing since I started in 1995. There's like two medicines that have changed now. When you get past the 80% and you have to start to tweak things to the individual, all kinds of new stuff. But, but we don't start on the 20%, we start on the 80%, and we do it in the same order every friggin time. Well, but we apply it to that unique individual. So we might be able to skip around or move around, which is kind of like but I'm like everything we do in medicine, we try to like I find like the establishment tries to make it different than what we actually are doing in class and mold and Lyme and Bartonella Babesia It's like we're all doing the same thing.

They just think we're applying it differently and it's like, this is the old school way that they forget they're even doing where we're actually looking at a strong foundation in medicine, a strong foundation in functional naturopathic medicine, a strong foundation and who we are as a human being. And that connectedness that you talk about, that's why so many people are so sick with this damn pandemic. Most of it probably. I mean, I shouldn't say that somebody is going to test, but I'll say it anyway.

A lot of what we're seeing as the side effects of this are the side effects of isolation. The infection directly messes with your brain, just like Lyme to help isolate you. But then we make you isolated. It's the best way to make you sicker for longer and then when we get together all pissed off that everybody's isolating us, which is just more isolating. So if we learn this lesson that Beth has been sharing with us and we take some of these other examples you've just talked about with the pandemic and stuff, it's like we want to reconnect in a way where we have that direct human experience, but it's a direct relationship where Beth and I are sharing with each other and with you through our heart, and then we're going, Oh, objectively.

Well, maybe my shoulder hurts my ankle hurts, and I have some brain fog and somebody else like, well, I can eat six foods or I can eat 37 foods. Oh, cool. So how's that feel to be a human being? And we can all have this unique experience of the same exact infections without comparing each other and supporting each other. And I'm just I wasn't even expecting to sort of talk about this at the moment, Beth, but it's just like I'm so inspired by the way you put the whole thing together. And I do think we need to highlight it's that connection and it's and, it's about doing your protocol in the way it needs to be done for you and also understanding it takes some time until it doesn't.

And if it doesn't take a lot of time, great. But a lot of people, that does have to worry about it as much. Well, and it's hard, you know, because when you're desperate and you've felt really sick and I work with it, I'll say we work with a lot of people, you know, come through our clinic. We have a few practitioners and people come in and they're down to six foods and they they keep losing food. So they're like, What do I do? And I'm down to two foods, all this stuff, all this worries very real and very understandable.

I finally work the process and just the big picture, of course, and everything is customized is somebody have salicylate intolerance. Okay then we can't use certain herbals. We have to use low salicylate herbs or other types of supplements. Something has oxalate issues, all that has to be tweaked. How's your mass activation showing up? Is it in your gut? Is in your brain? Is it in your skin that shifts what you do? But the big umbrella of it, the big framework is that stabilizing the nervous system and the mast cells, making sure we're lowering the overall toxin load, coming in, looking at these overall environmental toxins for people, particularly moles, a big one, but even things like viruses, things like what's their air quality, what's their water quality, what's our food quality?

And then we when we bring things down a few notches, we pull the mold layer, repeal the mold layer off. There's been a few exceptions where I think they were more acute infections, where people needed to jump in that sooner. But for the vast majority of people, I'd say 95% that we work

Pacing Treatment and Avoiding Quick Fixes 48:10

with at our clinic, let's see where we go in and then at some point the body starts to say, I'm ready for the tick borne layer and our bodies tell us. So if we listen to our bodies, that that's really what I to get across is it's about that listening and it's also about us as practitioners listening. And, and that's key in the, in the practitioner relationship I've had, you know, most of our clients are, you know, everyday people with everyday budgets, but we also work with ultra wealthy people.

And I can tell you most of the ultra wealthy people take the longest to get well, which sounds so odd, but here's why they have the money to chase all these quick fixes, and then they backfire. And then they go chase another one and it backfires. And they go spend $50,000 on this and $50,000 on that. And it makes them worse and it makes them worse because they're not listening to the timing. It's not like those types of things don't have any kind of place, but it's this chasing the quick fixes. And when people have the ability to, they do it.

And then what could have taken two years now they're on a six year plan. Now they're giving themselves a seven year plan. So I want to encourage people to follow. Just get that stability, a stable foundation, just like building a house. You're going to put the basement down or a foundation down. You're going to build the walls. You're not to start on your second story before you have a foundation and walls in place for your first story, you've got to build it step by step. But a lot of people who have the means jump into only put an observatory on where you don't have any structure to hold your observatory up.

So that's it. It's the nuancing can be can, can need a lot of education and help with with a practitioner with experience. But the framework itself is not complicated. It's not hard. And it works. It works 95% of the time. We have 95% success rate with the people who stick with it. Not everybody sticks with it, but the people that stick with it and they continue to go through step by step. 95% is huge. I mean, I think it's so critical the way you point this out, Beth, it's like the biggest thing is to me, 95% of people get better if they follow directions and they trust their team to be a little more objective.

And I really wanted to also highlight, like I love a little while ago, you said journal your symptoms about 30 seconds, but that's about it. So not to focus on them, but your body and your brain and your emotions, you know, your heart, know if you're full of crap, right? Like, I mean, if you if you're like, oh, everything's great. And every moment, every way I'm getting better and better. Yes, that works. And you also need to acknowledge how you're really feeling. But I love the way you're saying, like just do a little bit so you can start to learn more about it and then you can give that over to your practitioner who then can tell you what to do next.

It's I find that like when people go from one place to the other to the other, they do exactly what you said. Some of the folks with lots of financial means, some mistakes that they occasionally make, which is just like look at chasing the shiny object. So and I do think it's it's important like and that's why I love chatting with you is we're both getting information out to the public. We're getting information out to the practitioner because as you mentioned, the practitioners also need to learn and be mentored in a way that they understand these nuances of how and when they add different pieces to the puzzle.

I think it's so critical. So I really appreciate you highlighting all that for people and for me, like every time I talk, I'm I'm like so motivated because I hear nothing but hope. But what kind of like, you know, as we kind of I mean, we could talk about this all day long and if we we have before. But what kind of like words of hope and encouragement do you have for people who are dealing with these symptoms? Because as you mentioned, and we all know, probably lots of people listening, it isn't all that easy. Right.

And it's not like we're trying to pretend it's simple and it feels great. There are those shitty moments there are those dark times. But yeah, I mean, like, I'm so motivated by everything you've said. But what if you had some sort of, like, summarizing, like because we're all hope dealers here in the summit. That's our goal. Yeah. And and it's it's really critical one to realize that where we are now is light years from 20 years ago. So when I started in this on the patient side, nobody had a clue what to do with me.

And, you know, I was the alien with three heads that walked into the office and even my practitioners had never seen anybody as sensitive as me. They'd not see anybody as sick as me. They just no clue. What do you do with this person? I don't know. And then just suddenly, after somebody else and this is not where we are now. So one, unfortunately, that means that the number of people who are sick like this have increased. But it's also our knowledge has increased exponentially. So when I started there, it wasn't even in theoretical phase for mass activation syndrome.

We didn't have that phrase, we don't have that word. There was no studies. The research that has come out, the information that's come out. When I look at what Richard Horowitz is doing and in his latest research and his his protocols that he published, they're very intense and a lot of sense of people can't do them. But we're looking at ways how do we do those with sensitive people now? We're constantly adding to the knowledge base and every year feel like what we know is practitioners expands exponentially.

So there's a huge amount of hope. The other is, you know, when I started, it literally took me about ten years to even find where to begin, where do I start? And all that time I was getting worse and worse. Now we know where to start with people. We know where to dove in, we know where to get going. So what took me 20 years takes most between two years on the short end for an adult, a year for a child to on the long end, usually three, maybe four years. If they're out of mold. If we're in mold exposure, it takes longer. But, you know, or maybe it takes five years, that's still whole.

Different world than 20 years also doesn't cost anywhere like what I had to spend. So I had to spend all that because nobody knew what to do. So I had to try out, well, what happens when when I do glutathione on IVs? Oh, that backfired. That was a bad idea. What happens when I try to keep late? Needles Oh, my gosh. That was one of the worst. Okay, that was the wrong order to do things. And now we've got that down and we save people so much money. I still some things we can invest money in and people who are who don't have a lot of funds, but they have some funds.

You have some resources to do this kind of out of pocket for a lot of what we have to do. You're going to get through this, you're going to do it. And then people have more resources. If you'll stop and follow the process, you're going to get through it. Great, and they'll. Have more resources left. You'll have even more resources. And then we can we can get better in these shorter amounts of time, and then we can go on to make more money. I mean, I went from having my whole life career completely dashed and no clue what I was going to do when I graduated at 22.

Hope, Recovery, and Where to Find Beth 56:20

From college to being able to build this, I had no idea I would ever build this. I had no clue. There's so much, and that's really my mission to get people. And that's our mission and our clinic. I know it's your mission is to get people not just to get their health back, not just to get their blueberries back or getting back to eating, you know, going out to eat with their families, which is all important. But to get people back to their full potential, get them back to living their hopes, their lives, living their dreams, building what they're here to do on the planet.

And then that elevates all of us as well. So it just builds and builds and builds. So that's where the hope is for me. And then we do this and we clean up our environment and we clean up our world that's driving this so that our children or grandchildren get to have better lives. I love it so much that the thing I'm hearing in my head while you're saying all that is like, I don't want anybody to do what their parents or their friends think they should do. I don't want them to do what you or I think they should do.

I want them to show up in the world and show us how amazing they are. It's like the way we raise our daughter and for everybody, just like you guys, the way we work with people. Yeah, we want you better, but we want you better so that we can learn who you really are. And you can shine your light on the world and give us your unique gifts. So, I mean, that's why I always love having these conversations and sharing this with everyone else. And I am a little guilty of just wanting to have this conversation, just so for uplifting myself too, because that's what we do.

We uplift each other. But I think you're going to you have inspired so, so many people today with our conversation. So for when people are interested in learning more about your work and maybe your clinic and all that stuff, how can they find you online and reach out to you? I just really want to invite people to check out our website mastcell360.com and we have tons of free resources on there. We have different course options. People can start learning practitioners. A lot of practitioners use those resources as well.

They're written for laypeople, but practitioners have gotten a lot out and if people are looking for help, then we have a clinic and I'm the clinic director, we have some different practitioners trained and our methods that are amazing are doing incredible work. And then I oversee all the cases as well. So we have that available and people can find us on Facebook and join our Facebook lives, which are most Mondays and have a wonderful community. So we just love to have people join us and this is how we keep growing stronger.

Yeah, well, everyone we're going to make sure that we have all those links on our Summit Resource page. The other thing is definitely check out MassHealth. It's mastcell360 at and on Facebook. Right, because the Facebook lives have been part of a couple. And I know we have another one scheduled in the near future, but what an amazing resource where you get to really have a conversation with people who their goal is the same as yours to get better. It's not. It's very much like our empowered by Lyme community where it's all about giving you the tools to say, This is my crappy day or my good day, and now we're this is how we're going to continue to focus on moving towards that, living your your goals and your dreams out while having chronic illness and recovering or supporting someone else that you love. And it's just your Facebook lives.

There are like, literally, like, I mean, it's it's so warming. It's like it's like I feel like I'm getting a hug when I'm participating or I'm watching as a as a, you know, as someone in the audience. It's like, so guys, if you're just even just looking for some, some extra love on Monday afternoons is a great way to check things out. And that does an amazing job. So check out her information. We'll have it all in the show notes. But everyone, again, let's join me in thanking Beth O'Hara for such an amazing conversation.

You can check out all our free resources. And Beth, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Tom. It's an honor to partner with you and get to do this together and just bring the light. I always feel like you elevate me and it's such a blessing. Thank you. Thank you too. I feel the same. And everyone, the reason that Beth and I are here having such a enlightening and uplifting conversation with each other is because we want to share this amazing information with you and really inspire you. Like our whole summit, the goal really is to give you the information so that you can work with your practitioner, maybe find a new practitioner who resonates a little differently if you're in the market.

But really, to give you the tools to understand that so much of this are things that you can do right at home, you can start doing today, you can work on your nervous system and your immune system, and so apply some of these tools. Reach out to Beth for some of the resources. If this sort of conversation resonates with you. And I want to say thank you so much for joining us and giving us this opportunity to serve you. And I can't wait to see you in our next episode.