Lyme Disease: Chronic Pain & PTSD Part 2

Robby Besner PSc.D.

It’s Robby Besner, and I’m back with another great interview, Dr. Matt Cook. So Matt, welcome to the Healing from Lyme Summit. You were talking about sort of the traditional allopathic approach of just trying to find the one thing like the one a day vitamin or the one culprit that is in charge, and it isn’t that way, really not in nature, whether you’re healthy or you’re chronically challenged. And so treating the whole person and being an active listener you properly said, if you listen to your patient long enough, they’ll tell you their diagnosis and you listen longer they’ll actually tell you how to cure them. So I think that we, as advanced as we are in so many ways, we just stopped listening, we didn’t have time to listen anymore. I’m not sure who the we is, I don’t come from that orientation, it doesn’t sound like you do either. But I think that for Lyme is that are just tuning in now, if you don’t have a practitioner like Dr. Cook and his associates, I had the pleasure of meeting one of his colleagues, Dr. Brian Plant, and we spoke for a while and he was original and young and just eager to help and to heal. 

And these are amazing qualities, not just from a young practitioner, but certainly what I would like to walk in forward, I’d love to see more of, and it feels like, you know, the command came, you must be setting a good example over there, Dr. Cook, because he’s taken lead, so that reductionist piece, I think is interesting to me, because that’s most of the people out there and also generational, and my parents, when I asked them, mom and dad who’s in charge of your health care, they would say, you know, Dr. Anderson, Dr. Cohen, Dr. Schwartz, one of these doctors like they’re in charge, you know, and my generation, so it’s a mix a little bit, younger generations, they seem to be more involved in taking an active role in either maintaining their health or teaming up with the practitioning team to buy in, it’s my life, I wanna be part of this, and it feels to me like you’ve created a platform that really invites that kind of interaction, which is the information that you need as a practitioner and your team in order to properly understand what’s going on. 

And as it changes, because all of these things we’re talking about, isn’t a static relationship, it’s dynamic, it’s always changing like your body is. And so having that voice and having a platform where you can actually communicate on that level, I think is crucial, and I wish that more practitioners took that view, and it’s sort of refreshing for me to hear that from you today, and you treat the whole person, you’re not, again, back to Western, they like to is modernize, everybody’s like this, give it a big label, that’s sort of amorphous and they’ll go away because now they’ve got a diagnosis and they can hide under or go over that diagnosis. 

And, you know, but you, well, let me just put a different way. I’ll personalize it, for my daughter, I said to her, you know, Julia, you may always have Lyme. It might just be like hepatitis or like malaria. You might always have something inside of you. This is what we’re made of, a lot of these relationships with different organisms, but what’s important is it’s important that you hang your hat on the name Lyme disease or the co-infections or Epstein-Barr or whatever, or is it important to focus on living purposefully and finding your bliss or making some contribution to your community, your family, whatever your passion is. And the label is a label.

Matt Cook, M.D.

So I’ve got a good one for you on this one. And then this’ll kinda, I’ll give you a little then insight, ’cause we were talking about, well, what do you have for somebody that might be real sick or real healthy, but on the journey of getting better, and then if you said, and then you’re using, we’re using this word diagnosis, which is kind of confusing, I think for people because it’s like, oh, I have Lyme disease, okay. So then it might be that a significant percentage of the population has been exposed to the tick Borrelia. It might be that a significant percentage of people have been exposed to through a tick Borrelia or to Bartonella, and so then now a lot of them, most of them don’t have any symptoms, and then some of them have symptoms so bad that they got that inflammation that I was telling you about in the brain, and then there it started to create stress on their immune system, and then they might have like POTS or mast cell, which are some of these things that are profound immune stress to some people can have, they might have extreme headaches and all kinds of symptoms, and so then it’s confusing that there are some people that got that and beat it, you know, it was kind of like, oh, I beat cancer, and they don’t have any symptoms, and other people that it seems totally overwhelming. 

I fundamentally think that you can 100% beat Borrelia and Bartonella and you can 100% percent beat Lyme, now we just have to balance and reset the immune system. Now then you say, okay, how do you do that? And so then, and I think this is gonna be an intriguing one for people to think about, and I like to talk as an analogy to something that maybe other people have heard or to a process that people may have heard of, and so, you know, when you hear about mold, a lot of times in the traditional mold treatments, what they would do is they’d say, okay, we’re gonna give you a binder that’s gonna bind onto the mold in the gut, and we’re gonna keep doing that for a long time, like a year or two, and then once your mold levels go down, inflammation in your brain starts to go down, and so then when that goes down, they do this test called the visual contrast sensitivity, and that’ll start to show, hey, that inflammation in your brain went down a little bit, well, that’s awesome, and so then they say, oh, okay, now you’re a candidate for this other peptide that is found in the hypothalamus called the VIP, and then you may be able to take that. Now that peptide, what it does is it regulates which genes you print. 

So it’s kind of like the foreman and the factory that’s kind of goes over, it goes into the nucleus and says, okay, we’re gonna print these ones, we’re not gonna print these ones, and if you’re in the setting of that high printing the high inflammatory genes, when you give VIP, it tends to come down. Now the chaos of mold, and this really struck me because there was like right at the beginning of my journey, and I thought, oh, this is too complex for me to even understand, because we knew these people that have been on a two-year-journey or a three- or five-year-journey, a mold, and they were still waiting to try to get VIP and, you know, and not better. The amazing thing is is that in the last few years, all of a sudden, a whole bunch of other peptides, and a peptide is like a baby protein, but the bioregulator peptides are real small peptides, two, three, four or five or six aminoacids, so they’re not that big, which means they can go in, they can go into a cell and they can go all the way into the nucleus and affect how we’re printing genes and stuff like that. 

But it turns out there’s a whole bunch of bioregulator peptides that are similar to VIP, but have way less side effects. And so then what happened, some of, and interestingly we’re experiencing ourselves, so when we put some of our patients who have mast cell activation and POTS, and some of the downstream expressions of neurological and immune inflammation, when we put them on those bioregulator peptides, they start to feel better. And so then, and even when I took them, both getting in a cold plunge, eating vegetables from the garden and taking bioregulators, all kind of remind me of being like a, you know, a seven-year-old kid running around, you know, on Mount Jumbo, in Missoula, Montana, where I grew up, which is as good a feeling, you know, as I probably ever experienced, you know, free running in my imagination in the woods, and so then there is a … And these are relatively low cost. 

And so then suddenly there becomes a way to start to intervene in neurological inflammation that as you lower that inflammation, things like your visual contrast, your eye, the eye tests that they do, it gets better, but then a whole bunch of these other downstream thing gets better, and then you start to feel better, and then as that inflammation is going down, it’d be like, if I had this analogy, I said, you know, it seems like we’re getting along great, and I like talking to you, and so then I was like, just occurred to me that I have like 92 favors if you could do and help me, which I would appreciate. But then like, you’re like, oh, okay, well, I have meetings all day tomorrow and the next day. So then if I asked you to do 92 favors, you probably would consider maybe do none of them. But if I gave you like one, almost for sure you would do one, the immune system’s like that too, when everything’s out of control and it’s overwhelming, the immune system sort of gives up and it almost retreats and does nothing while it’s waiting for things to get better. 

Whereas once inflammation kind of comes down and starts to be reset, and so then this theory that I have for people who are kind of trying to hack the journey themselves, and this is kind of my, maybe my intention for this call would be like, okay, let’s say you’re trying to do the cheapest possible way to try to get better, you know, and work with some guidance, but, you know, trying to manage your way through, because a lot of managing your way through is fundamentally lifestyle. So then the peptides start to regulate that inflammation down. Now that conversation that I had would be a conversation that would kind of tell a story of what we would call SURFs. 

It also kind of a similar story to long COVID, long COVID is kind of like that, but then Bartonella and Borrelia, which are the really, the neurological expressions of Lyme really are on the same spectrum with that. And then often there’s a little mold along with it, and so then as a 1.0 strategy, I find that really helpful, and that’s something that might change someone’s trajectory sort of in terms of … And interestingly, whether it be peptides, whether it be supplements, whether it be medications, the big gigantic proteins are the ones that people have sensitivity to, there’s the things that people can have immune reactions to the real small two and three amino acid peptides are the ones that tend to be real anti-inflammatory. 

And then interestingly, you can pick some of the bioregulator peptides orally, and there’s sort of a famous, and I think very good doctor in Russia actually named Dr. Khavinson, who has been a thought leader and pushing sort of the oral bioregulators. We like them very much as an injectable. And so then I think that that’s an intriguing idea doing them injectable. And so then just for the people, a lot of times people might in a month do like a milligram a day or half a milligram a day of a bioregulator. 

So then that is, so suddenly I, the story I’m pinning just got a little bit more robust, because now you can do these bioregulators as an injectable, you might be able to take them orally, in addition to sort of the bioregulators, there’s also some peptides that are very kind of helpful at sort of just calming things down, KPV is a peptide that can help a lot with mast cell, and that one is sometimes you can find it orally. And so then suddenly imagine that you’re in this journey where suddenly we find some things that can kind of down-regulate things and start to balance things, and generally what I’ll see is people will say, oh yeah, my symptoms are a little bit less and I’m feeling a little bit better. 

And so then that, and then if you kind of begin to accept that all of these things are in the same kind of conversation, mold and Lyme and probably long COVID and they overlap with each other and they trigger each other. But then now there’s kind of an entry-level conversation of the bioregulators, then that is a sort of nice place for us because suddenly people have some power and they have some things that they can do, and these are almost all treatments that they do at home. One of the things … Have you talked to anybody about ozone therapy?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

It’s due to come, we have a guy, who is, that’s his whole deal. We actually use ozone as another sort of synergistic hack with infrared sauna, and some of the protocols we put together and get great results, but ozone in this discussion is great. I mean, it’s nature’s disinfectant. And certainly in terms of balancing your biome, the anaerobes don’t like ozone or extra oxygen, and so, however you do any, either IV or insufflation, there’s different ways to get it. In sauna, and even in like hot baths, we bubble ozone into the water or in sauna, once your skin gets hydrated, then we use the skin as a breathing organ to bring ozone directly in if it’s not, it’s a little less invasive than doing it through IV therapy and it’s super effective. So yes, the answer is yes, categorically. We like ozone, it’s our friend in on many levels, so —

Matt Cook, M.D.

And for people that are like, oh my God, where did that, what the heck is ozone, ozone is an oxidative therapy, and so they can donate an electron, and so then if it donates an electron to a virus or a one cell bacteria that is going to be toxic to that bacteria, we have all of these buffer systems that go from low energy to high energy, and so like, NADH gets converted to the high energy NAD plus, and so then when ozone’s floating around and donate some electron, it recirculates all of these kind of low energy state molecules back to their high energy, and so then that high energy state molecule it acts kind of like currency in the body. So for be that for mitochondria or a variety of other processes. 

And so then I like the trajectory of this then, so then we’re kind of, we talked about some peptides that are interesting, that you can do at home, and then the immune peptides would certainly be something that I would add to that, and then there’s some mitochondrial peptides that maybe we can go back to that kind of stimulate energy and cellular efficiency and function that a lot of times can make people feel a lot better, but then on the ozone front, there’s all of these ways to do ozone that you can do at home. And one of the really good ways is with skin. 

You know, I have an ozone sauna at my house that we like , and the skin is a great way to absorb ozone, and probably there’s a lot of low level skin problems that ozone can kind of be quite helpful with, infections, and interestingly, when you hear about mold, they say, mold is no longer mold, it’s mold plus this actinomycetes, and the actinomycetes can be in a water damaged building, but it also likes to get colonized on your skin, and so then like a ozone sauna is a interesting thing for that idea, we like the ozone water quite a bit, and then that goes into the small intestine and gets absorbed there. If you have bacterial yeast in the small intestine is kind of toxic for them, but good for your intestines, so then that’s good, and it’s a way to absorb some ozone systemically and particularly going to your liver, which, there’s more NAD in your liver than anywhere else, except for maybe the brain, and so then anything that you can do for that upper gastrointestinal system is good. 

We have intermittently used the insufflation over the years. There’s a part of me that sort of is, I’m in a mode right now of doing everything I can to build microbial diversity in the gut. And so I’m beginning to sort of question a little bit the insufflation, and so we’ve been doing a lot less of that than maybe we had in the past, but those are all kind of low cost, easy things that people can do at home, and they’ll have their own machines. But then it turns out you can have an ozone generator that can be hooked up to tubing, and then you can mix ozone with blood, and so then there are machines called a 10 pass machine that’s high doses on therapy and from a doctor named Dr. Lahodny who I’ve studied with quite a bit, he’s an incredible doctor, and so then there’s a bunch of approaches, and so then, and interestingly, I would say a significant percentage of his greatest results are the two categories that I remember, his skin infections and problems and Lyme disease. 

And so then they found that out and started taking care of Lyme patients, and so then I was, I found ozone early in my journey of integrative medicine, and it was sort of a profoundly helpful tool that we had. And then now we do something called ozone dialysis where we run blood through a dialysis filter and then do ozone at the same time, and it has a huge surface area, and we do very low amount of oxygen concentration-wise, but because of the surface area, it oxidizes the blood, and has an anti-infection kind of component to it, and so then that’s been quite interesting, and so then if you think of one idea of Lyme is kind of managing Lyme diseases, let’s say regulating and balancing the immune system, and so one way to do that would be with peptides and other way to do that with regenerative medicine, stem cells and exosomes and things like that, that we do out of the country now just because of regulatory issues, ozone also is a great way to regulate and modulate immune function, and so then that would be a category, another thing to do would be to do an antibiotic. 

So then ozone is kind of falls into this two for one, because it’s kind of an antibiotic and it’s also immune regulatory. And it also helps people feel good because it gives them some energy because it facilitates things like mitochondrial function and stuff like that. So the ozone’s been an intriguing tool for us, and we also have a form of plasmapheresis where your body’s about half plasma and half red blood cells and white blood cells. And we’ll pull out about a third of the plasma, and that plasma is where all of the inflammation and toxicity is, and so it was kind of a big detox. And then while we do that, we do low dose ozone and it’s kind of a microdose of ozone. And so then that is a really sort of, has been an interesting tool that we’ve used to help people with these chronic immune problems where they have immune dysregulation and infection, and then now one way of thinking about that immune dysregulation is in the heart and the lungs and the blood vessel sort of flooding around. 

And another way is to think about it is in the brain, where, and they’re constantly talking to each other, and then we’re living in kind of working harmoniously balance everything that’s going on in a way that is killing the infections, but not killing so much that it makes you feel sick and causes a lot of side effects, and then managing how you balance and support things, so that you’re balancing it down, but not balancing it down so much that you can’t actually fight the infections. So it’s kind of like, it’s a double-edged sword of kind of the, we’re serving two masters in terms of regulation, and kind of in fighting, trying to fight. And so then the way that I, and I heard this great lecture from the professor at Hopkins, who was talking about, he said, you need, just like I was using my conversation of mold as an analogy to think about how these are all fundamentally the same, he said, you need to think of a analogy for chronic, persisting, neurological Lyme. 

And so when he says, what is the analogy to that? And the analogy is entrenched drug resistant tuberculosis of the brain, because there was kind of similar, and what happened is this that they said, well, you’re gonna need to use three and four drug cocktails. And so then you say, oh, okay. So then interestingly, what we’ll do is we’ll use peptides, and so then that’s kind of like an antimicrobial. So there’s a peptide called LL 37, and we tend to use low dosing of it, and so then and I’ll just say a little bit about dosing while I’m going through. We’ll tend to do maybe five to 10 micrograms. If someone’s sick, we’ll do 10 micrograms, I mean, 50 to 100 micrograms. So if somebody was sick, they might do 100 micrograms twice a day. 

If they’re struggling with chronic infections, we might start them with 50 micrograms, and for sick people, I sometimes I’ll start them even really low. And it helps to actually like break the cell wall and kill infections. The thymus and peptides are hard to find now, but there’s some alternatives that are coming out from compounding pharmacies, and so think immune peptides LL 37, and so then that’s almost, my analogy of a three drug or four drug cocktail, I already got two down. And so then and sometimes you can do a couple of those. 

Then ozone is kind of a modality that it is as almost like as a pulse, is something that can be helpful, and that could be something you can do at home, drinking ozone water, that could be something that you’re doing in a clinic, kind of like what we’re doing, and then a lot of times what we’ll do is we’ll add an herbal antimicrobial, and so the herbs, a lot of times I find are a great place to start, and so then with that, now we’re up into the ballpark of four things that have an anti-microbial, and then while we’re doing that, in parallel to this anti-microbial thing, we’re doing a lot of work and trying to balance and support and regulate immune function, which is sort of like if you go back to the analogy of those firefighters, we’re kind of trying to win the hearts and minds of those guys that have PTSD from running around, fighting these infections everywhere, balance them, and then kind of get them oriented to, okay, here’s what our plan is. And then when that happens, often see people feel, you know, quite a bit better.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Wow. Listening to you was incredibly, you know, defined and intriguing, and, you know, earlier you were talking about what really resonated for me was when you talked about your immune system, and how, if there’s too many battles, it sort of just shuts down and says, I’m coming back to the game or to the field when things are calmed down, a little bit, because I can manage that, but I can’t manage this. And you’re ending up with basically kind of the solutions or at least part of the pieces of the puzzles that you put together because using these four interventions that you mentioned, what you’re really doing is kind of lowering that confusion, lowering the toxicity, lowering the inflammation, so that the immune system can come back online and actually do something meaningful in terms of what it was designed to do, absent knocking out the immune system all together and going after the enemy, which might particularly if the patient is very delicate, and or very symptomatic, just froze them into this tailspin. 

That isn’t helpful for anyone. What I love about all of the things that you said is you found it’s multifaceted, it’s individualistic, but you found some key players like peptides and certain particular peptides that are like the frontline first string, second string, third string, and you you delve them into the mixture as appropriate as it’s for the patient. But what you’re doing really is you’re creating, you have a symphony that you’re turning up, and while you’re lowering the amount of population and imbalance, correcting the imbalance a little bit on the biome, microbiome, at the same time, you’re building up my, if I was your patient, my natural immune system, to really go after it and do what it was designed to do, without all of these other exported influences. 

And then the lastly, hopefully besides just gaining part of your health back, redefining your new self, you’ll learn about the better ways to eat, and the better ways to live and, you know, touching the earth, community with the earth, and some of the modern stressors that are now called conveniences, but that’s fine when you’re not ill, but when you’re ill, they’re not conveniences, they’re actually getting in the way of you, you know, being thin, you know, being yourself, and doing what were you’re hopefully finding your bliss and purpose in and exercising that right. So I love your approach. It’s certainly very original, and no one’s really described peptides and how they sit in the as one of the players, you know, on the field and how important they are, and how subtle they can be. 

You know, you don’t really have to dial it up. You can actually kind of have a low dose entrance, see how the body responds, and then shift, according to the way the body is responding. I think that’s super important, because we’re all individuals, we’re complex and the story, it not just being Lyme, it could be a cascade of different relationships of organisms that are creating this internal imbalance, that is the reason why you’re symptomatic, not to mention glyphosate, leaky gut, leaky everything actually, because of glyphosate. 

So, I mean, we have things we can’t change about our environment, but we can do things to be proactive, like you mentioned, sauna and cold plunging, and these are all things that activate exosomes and stem cells and all the regenerative parts of our bodies that are still in our blueprint, but, you know, you can’t really enjoy it, your body really can’t enjoy it when it’s fighting so many battles. So to have that kind of create, you know, bring it down, simmer it down a little bit so that you have the patient gets more of their life back. They feel good, then the practitioner or a team has more time to really go after and create that proper playbook for that individual, this is …

Matt Cook, M.D.

Okay, so that’s a good one. So then I’m gonna go into a little playbook type of thinking, and then I’m gonna give you, I got a handful of things that I remembered that I should tell you, a handful of interesting things that are like kind of low cost and worthy of thinking about, because if we took this spectrum between somebody that basically is almost totally fine, but they definitely tested positive for these infections, and maybe they’ve had some intermittent reactivation of them and somebody who’s despondently in a terrible state, and so then we’re talking to, these are my two avatars that we’re speaking to. Then there are a whole bunch of like awesome hacks that are kind of worth trying and working your way into experiencing to see if they help you. 

And now a lot of these are in kind of the public consciousness, and so then, yeah, one, and so then I’d like to talk about them, if there’s any controversy or kind of interesting things that kind of get into, one of them is this thing, NAD have you heard about that? So NAD is a derivative of vitamin B3 and it has all, its kind of like currency in the body, and when it’s in the plus form, it’s in the high energy state, remember I told you ozone can, and so then it can do a lot of good things. I liken the assembly line of biochemistry, in chronic infection gets fairly dysregulated. And so not only is the immune system real stressed, but the assembly line that creates energy and life and our actual cells gets kind of stolen from, and the viruses and infections can steal energy a little bit and shunt energy away from that, which is why all of the chronic infections do what, give you fatigue. 

That was why, like we got all of these names, we could call it whatever we want, kind of, but like, you know, one of the old names was chronic fatigue syndrome. And so then you get the sense that fatigue, brain fog, and low energy might be like the defining sort of symptoms of people that were in between my two avatars. And so maybe I have somebody in the middle that has fairly significant fatigue and low energy and not feeling good. So I had been doing a lot of NAD, I was one of the first people in the country doing any NADIBs a lot. And it turns out if alcohol addiction, really, and opioid addiction, devastatingly lowers your NAD levels, and so we were doing a lot of IV therapy for that, and we were doing super high dose, like 1,000 milligrams and to a great effect. 

And so I started teaching all my friends that were Lyme doctors, how to do it, and they were like, oh, hey, by the way, sick Lyme patients get sicker, if you give them even small amounts of NAD. And so then we started to kind of find out about this, and I think that’s a little bit like if there is a assembly line that’s kind of broken and not working and stressed, and then you put a whole bunch of energy into that, it’s a broken system, and so if you drive it too hard, those patients don’t do well. So you have to have this very potentially gentle approach for the people over here who are real sick. The people who are pretty healthy, can kind of do anything they’re kind of fine, and the people in the middle, you know, we will have to see. 

So then what we started doing is we started doing, and this is a great tip for people out there, we’ll get the subcutaneous NAD, and you can get this from compounding pharmacies Archway is good one, and then what we’ll do is we’ll take an insulin syringe, and so then with the insulin and the way that they make it, and then this is just some math for you, they make it so that it’s 200 milligrams in a milliliter, which means 50 units is 100 milligrams, okay? Which would mean that 10 units is 20 milligrams. Okay, so then what we would do is for sick people, we would have them start to do NAD, but we would give them like five units, little tiny and tiny tiny amounts. So I may do 10 milligrams. There’s also some medications that you can take that kind of help recycle NAD, NMN is one of them, that’s good. And Nicotinamide riboside is another good one. 

And so we started to do these micro micro dosing, and then when I do that, I never have any trouble. And so for the sick people, I slowly ramp them up, and a lot of times people, once you get people doing this, they’re doing real low dosing, but suddenly it gives them some energy, kind of helps them NAD helps you detox stuff in your liver, and feel good. So then that’s an intriguing one, and so then learning that, oh, okay, if I’m doing these tiny dosing, I can get a lot out of a treatment, and now I’m stimulating a detox pathway, stimulating energies and mitochondrial function, so I feel better. So then that became an intriguing sorta tool. 

On a peptide front, what we started to realize is, and I think this is interesting, as we age, the amount of the natural peptides in our body, from the thymus gland, for example, go down. And so then what happens is, our hormones as we age go down. And so then what happens as we get older, we’re much more susceptible to infections, and so they have these graphs of your peptide levels and then particularly immune peptide levels as immune peptide levels in general, go down in society and in cultures, then infections tend to rise. And so then taking immune peptides as a sort of, almost like you could think of hormone replacement is as an intriguing idea, just for health 101. 

And one interesting way to start there, I think is with some of the oral immune peptides, because then you’re starting to take some smaller peptides that are gonna start to regulate and balance immune function. Interestingly, you know, they have the oral formulations of cavinton that I really like, I think it’s kind of somewhat analogous to, for example, some of the glandulars that you take from Chinese medicine companies like process make the standard processed one we’ll have a diversity of peptides and thymic growth factors, and then we found those, and as a concept for patients with chronic infections and immune problems, that’s an intriguing way to start with some of the glandulars, because you’re gonna be getting some peptides in there, but then imagine you’re adding peptide support that is immune and then we’re adding peptide support that is kind of at a bioregulatory anti-inflammatory level. 

But then if you think about this idea of pick my three people, all of ’em probably have a little bit of brain fog now and then, and I think that a lot of that brain fog is either A, because they can’t detox that well, and there’s some toxicity, but B and I think more likely is this, that there’s a challenge in mitochondrial function. That challenge in mitochondrial function is, is that viruses and these infections, all these infections kind of puts stress on your mitochondria, and they don’t work quite as efficiently. And then when they don’t work efficiently, we tend not to feel so well. And so then there’s some interesting peptides that I’ve found to be extremely helpful for the Lyme and mold community, which are the mitochondrial peptides, one of them is humanin. 

There’s another one called MOTS-C, the MOTS-C everybody likes, but it has more of an immune reaction, sometimes people gonna have a histamine reaction to it, sometimes people can have a skin reaction to it. The humanin and not so much, dosing range is maybe 2.5 milligrams at a time for people who are sick, I start a lot less and kind of incrementally climb them up. There’s one called FGL that you can take maybe a milligram a day, all the way up to two or three or four milligrams a day, and then how I will, and when people kind of get their ability to kind of tweak and manage themselves with these immune peptides, they’ll give you the mitochondrial prep is it’s energy stimulating, almost like, you know, a cup of coffee. 

And so then you can kind of manage your way through, and so a lot of times what I’ll do is I’ll have a protocol where I’ll be working with someone where I’ll have them do some subcutaneous NAD, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then maybe a mitochondrial peptide Tuesday, Thursday. And so then that’ll be a week. And then the next week I’ll have them do like they may do humanin and an NAD, and so they would do that. Then the next week they might do FGL and NAD, and so then they, if they did FGL Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they would do NAD Tuesday, Thursday. And so then sometimes I’ll have them do the humanin week and then the FGL week, and then another humanin week and then an FGL week. 

And so then and often I’ll wait until they’ve kind of regulated and kind of balanced themselves, and they’re feeling better with the initial constellation of things that might’ve been immune peptides and regulator peptides. But so then within that, then you begin to see, oh, oh, okay, there’s a lot that you can begin to do to kind of feel better from a cell efficiency and energy spinning up those mitochondria, because what happens is, if you have brain fog and then you take mitochondrial peptides, generally that brain fog just totally goes away. And so then the journey for me is then finding it’s kind of part lifestyle, part medicine, part spiritual, part kind of exploration of finding the tools that get you oriented towards optimizing that biology. 

And, but then as that happens, there’s a moment that comes when you begin to realize, and this happened for me when I realized, oh, okay, almost any problem then I’ll be able to kind of start to do things, and all of a sudden everything will come into balance, and I’ll be totally fine. And so then, and I have six or eight ways to do that, you know, because if you imagine, like, let’s say we’re out of the country, what happens is let’s say I stood up, and I whack and I hit myself, and I created a big bruise and swelling. So then that’s inflammation. 

And so but now why is there inflammation, there’s inflammation here, because now then my body’s gonna release cytokines and it’s gonna release inflammatory mediators, and then what’s gonna happen is, is my blood vessels gonna get leaky, and then blood is gonna rush into that area, and when it rushes into that area, some stem cells are gonna come out there, and they’re kind of like the happening kind of regulators of everything, they’re the manager, and so they’d look at it and go, ah, this guy, he just bruised himself and he has inflammation, so the first thing that they do is they regulate inflammation, that’s what stem cells do. 

So they regulate inflammation. And then the way that they do that, it used to be, we thought that a stem cell would just go and like a seal team, six member that could then go in, and then convert themselves into some other cell. So they could go become a cartilage cell or do whatever they needed to do. Dr. Kaplan, who’s the godfather of stem cells and figured everything out about mesenchymal stem cells, he said, we got to change the name. I’m gonna retract the name stem cell from stem cell, and he said, it’s a signaling cell, ’cause a stem cell is just a mobile pharmacy that floats around and it comes out here, and then it’s just secretes an entire symphony of different growth factors and healing factors that calm that down, and then next thing you know, I just did that, but then my body’s just got totally heal that, and everything’s gonna be 100% fine. 

Now, stem cells are also doing that in the blood, so they’re regulating inflammation and exosomes, which are stem cell secretions, and are also regulating and kind of balancing immune function. When I was early in my career, we were, you know, taking people to other countries, and so there was other, and there were clinics and other countries that were doing that work. And the profound thing that we found is is that, you know, you would see some people were really overwhelmed with inflammation, and then all of a sudden the inflammation was literally just totally gone because the stem cells just are floating around decreasing inflammation. 

To a lesser extent, we saw that with exosomes, but then exosomes have almost no side effects because they’re the end anti-inflammatory aspect of the immune system that is doing the final healing. And so then, you know, that had been initially in my foray, an early thing that we did that was once again, both something good on the anti-aging kind of side of things, and on the chronic infection side of things, what I’ve learned over the years is is that if I had only one thing to do, if I could only do one thing, I’d probably put people on bioregulators. If I could do two things, and that’s assuming they’re gonna do the lifestyle piece. 

But then what happens is now kind of from an overall perspective, what I’m trying to do is upfront try to do some testing at a DNA level, at a cellular level, at a biochemistry and at a blood level, build a model of what’s happening, start to regulate and balance things, and you have a huge diversity of things from peptides to supplements, to IVs, evolving into more complex things, but those on and stuff like that, and then that’s so effective that a lot of people that I would a thought in the past, so they might need to do stem cells, those people get better. And that is because this is a spectrum, and so then if you can shift someone from that sick part of this thing over here to that healthy part, next thing you know, they’re in the journey of healing. 

And so then, you know, we have Bioreset International is our sort of international clinics, and we have a real big clinic that’s gonna be opening this year in Tijuana, that does stem cells and exosomes sort of our total approach along with ozone dialysis and plasma free system, sort of all of those things. And that can be sort of a game changer for some people to sometimes it’s just so overwhelming, they can kind of start to turn the corner on things, we will still layer antibiotics and other things, and, you know, I was talking to some people about a clinical trial on a new antibiotic that may be profoundly helpful. 

And so if you’re interested in participating in a clinical trial on an antibiotic that is gonna very provocative and interesting because it’s quite effective, that’s in a liposomal form that gets absorbed in the small intestine so that it doesn’t affect your microbiome in your colon, but can have a real good effect on the infection, so we’ve got an ever evolving kind of amount of things like that that are sort of in the works, but then you realize, you know, between here and there, there’s a lot that you can do, there’s a lot of potential and opportunity to do a lot of those things. And it’s exciting for me because I, for myself and for what we face, what we face in the clinic, what we face with our friends and family, what we face personally, I have a great, great, great amount of optimism, and, you know, we didn’t really shine a light on this conversation, but now we’re shining a light. 

And, you know, I live here, I can’t believe that I’m saying it, I live in Silicon Valley, I thought for sure, I was gonna be like on a farm in the middle of nowhere, riding a horse and singing country music all day long. But since like 1969, the computer chip in Silicon Valley has doubled every two years. And I have to say that with what’s happened in peptides and what’s happening in ozone, and what’s happening in an IV therapy, and we’ve had a host of sort of very interesting and innovative kind of things on that side of the equation that … And what’s happening on the supplement fronts, and the things that are gonna come into the COVID space are gonna bleed over into Lyme and mold, and so we’re gonna have all kinds of very intriguing and interesting modalities. 

And so then my statement that I’ve been making to people, and I have kind of forgot about this until just now, I’ve been saying that every two years, the state of the art in Lyme disease is doubling, the knowledge is doubling. And now, like what happens is, it’s continuing to double. And so we’re twice as good as we were two years ago, but that’s not even true. We’re like 10 times better than we were two years ago, and, you know, in this format here, we are talking, looking at each other, and we couldn’t be in further end of the country. And this sharing, this platform, what people are doing with the summits, what the doctors summit is doing is sharing information so broadly and pervasively, and that network effect is leading to the information doubling at least every two years, and so then I would be super optimistic as you listen than there’s hope, and that the journey is gonna be one that you will complete, and then something amazing is gonna happen as a result of that.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

What I got from you was a sense of hope, and that tomorrow’s gonna be brighter than today. And when you’re sick with Lyme and flat on your back, it’s hard to consider that as a possibility, but talking to you and understanding what you’re doing, and you’re right on the front line of both the research of development and the clinical applications, which is a very unique spot to be in. And you have the quest to, you know, kind of figure it out. Like, I don’t know if you learned chess when you were really young in life and just applied that to life and your practice and the way you look at the world, but you are a five or 10 moves ahead on the board right now. 

And that’s super inspiring to know that there are practitioners, platforms, people out there that are willing to dedicate their lives as you have to raising people’s awareness, education, that’s why you and I are talking today, and then putting your money there by creating clinics and platforms, and I can’t even say it’s a franchise, but opening up different offices, bi-coastal, so that together, all that information, you’re really changing the way, and that’s super inspiring.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Amen.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Dr. Cook, good going.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Thank you so much.

obby Besner PSc.D.

Hey, everybody, it’s Robby Bessner, 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.