Redefining Integrative Medicine

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. I’m so excited about this interview and the time we’re going to spend with Caspar Szulc today. This guy is on top of his game. He’s a New Yorker. It turns out that we had a chance to meet each other because I was interviewed on his, Your Story Podcasts, which is super cool. And there, we discovered that we actually went to the same undergraduate school in Boston together. Caspar is a really dynamic guy and he is the managing director and the co-founder of a cool group in New York. 

The name of the group is New York Center for Innovative Medicine. And in the name itself, the whole concept of being innovative in medicine seems kind of, doesn’t necessarily go together, but these guys have figured it out. And I really appreciate what they’re doing. And as soon as I met Caspar, when before, besides all the common threads of being from New York and all that stuff together, he’s more like minded. He kind of has the same view. He looks at the whole body, not just the individual parts.

And what I really love is that he dives into the individual, which is very different than the normal allopathic approaches where they want to carve things out. And it’s relatively in personal. And our journey in healthcare is all about our personal experience and everybody tuning in the whole Lyme community, I mean, they’re totally on top of this because Lyme is so individual, it expresses itself in so many different ways and it’s really misunderstood. And so with that, and this guy is amazing, Caspar, please join the healing from Lyme naturally summit. And give us a little bit of a backdrop of kind of like how you got interested in medicine in general. I know it’s in the family cause you work with your dad. He’s a medical practitioner, but that’s different than you wanting, being involved intimately in the practice and management of the practice. And then let’s go a little bit, walk a little forward to where and the kinds of things you’re doing today.

Caspar A Szulc

Yeah. Well Robby, thank you so much for having me. And happy new year to you and everyone listening. Listen, my story really started from birth. It’s one of those stories that I was born into a family, immigrant family. My parents and brother came here from Poland in 1976. I was born in ’81 in Manhattan, Lenox Hill Hospital. My father was a doctor at the time. He was an anesthesiologist. And so completely conventionally minded. And he worked up the rankings in the medical field as I was growing up, a little toddler at the time. 

And he became chief of pain services at North Shore General on Long Island in Plain View on Long down there. And he was actually, he had a great career and it was a budding career. But in the late 80s, he began to become very frustrated with what he was seeing with patients. And what he was seeing was he was giving them the most cutting edge therapies that he could have, a lot of drugs, some surgeries, he was doing spinal cord stimulation at the time, one of the first to do that. 

So you are trying to push the envelope even then in conventional medicine. But he saw that his patients were coming back worse after that. So they get better. They would have that acute improvement and they’d come back worse with a chronic condition. And so he saw it as a revolving door and he always said, it was frustration that led him to seek something better. And I think any patient understands that, especially Lyme patients understand that. Usually it’s frustration with the system that leads you then to search for something else. 

And that’s what my father did, starting in the late 80s, he started to travel the world and I was lucky enough to go along with them. So as a young kid, I was on the Great Wall of China while he was learning about traditional Chinese medicine. And I remember going to the rainforest in Peru when he learned about shamanism. And he continued this and it wasn’t, he went to Oxford to learn about low-level laser therapy. And he was learning from people like Raul, all these guys in Europe that were coming over here and talking about European biological medicine. And so I had that unique upbringing where I was always around other people in the medical fields in a vast array of different areas. 

So I knew I would, I had been at conventions with all conventional doctors when I was little and I was always the kid running around the table with all the doctors talking grown up talk and kind of making a little bit of a scene. But I did that in many different countries. And I got a really unique perspective, not just on the cultures that are out there and the differences around the world of people, but also the approaches to healing. And when it came time to decide what I wanted to do when I went off to college to BU, I said, I didn’t want to become a doctor because my father was always so busy. 

Little did I know 20 years later, I’m probably twice as busy as he is in business and running companies that I have no time, and he actually had much more time being a doctor, but I said, I wanted to go into business. So I went to school of management there, Boston University, and started to learn about what it means to go into business finance, marketing, all of that. Graduated, went into finance, wanted to be a Wall Street bro and then make money on Wall Street. One year in, I was just, I was totally out of it. I did not want to be in this field anymore. It was not for me. 

Fortunately, my co-founder at innovative medicine was in medical school, Cornell at the time and said, I don’t want to do this either. I’m feeling really tapped out and you know what? I went to your father recently, he knew my father. And he said, I was searching for something to help me with my allergies for years. I’ve had terrible allergies and I’ve been to every allergy specialist in conventional medicine. They couldn’t do anything. And then my father who worked with your father at the hospital at one point sent me over to your father. And I got better in three months. And he was doing some far out there stuff and giving me some remedies and herbs, everything, and he got better. And he said, let’s start a company. And I said, why not? It’s 2004 at the time, entrepreneurship wasn’t even a thing. I didn’t even learn that in school. It was just starting. And I said you know what, what do I got to lose here? I knew what the medical field was like by just being around it my whole life, by being around my father, by him always looking for something new and talking to me about it, about how to view health from mind, body, spirit.

So we started that, we started to distribute products that we would find at integrative centers and we started to educate doctors and then we expanded the center. So there are many different periods of time and changes and pivots in the company’s life. So we’re to the point where we are today, we’re looking, we’ve really grown out the center itself, the clinical application of what is innovative medicine. And now we’re looking to expand to other areas as well, build out and continue to push that message that we all have this incredible self-healing capacity within us, that we just need to be given the right environment, the right tools, the right catalyst, the right coaches in a sense to cure the incurable. 

And I do think that that Lyme has almost become this incurable in a sense. And I’ll say that only because once conventional medicine gets done with the antibiotic route, they say you’re done. Anything else, I’m sorry, you can go somewhere else. So that’s where we are today, Robby and it’s exciting that I see everything moving in this direction and connecting with people like yourself and so many others that there is a movement. There are so many more options now today than there were years ago, even when I got started in this company. So that’s a little bit of my story.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Great story. First off, I have to tell you. One of my mentors is Dr. Lee Cowden and was probably the father of Lyme disease. And like you mentioned, Dr. Rau, Dr. Cowden and Dr. Rau, and now your dad, which I didn’t know, they have a similar common characteristic, the quest to not take no for an answer or the conventional way of looking things where they would just shut the door and say, sorry, I don’t have time for you, really is what it comes down to because they don’t want to dive deeper. It’s just easier to get the next patient and the next patient and so forth, right? 

But all of them did the same thing, including your dad, which is that what they would do is they hear about a guy in some abstract area that got some results. And rather than just kind of reading the white paper on it or the assay or the published IRB or peer review, they call up and they go, Hey, do you have a few minutes? I’d like to come and visit with you and spend a day with you, spend a month with you, whatever it took to glean that information and then bring it into their world. And I loved that. And the idea that you were able to kind of hitch the ride with your dad through all that is just an amazing life experience in general. 

And the other part that you said about, I’ve been fortunate too, because I’ve traveled in a lot of our manufacturing and things we’ve made have been overseas. And so for, not since the COVID came in, but 20 years prior to that, I’d spent six weeks a year in Asia, mostly in China, visiting the factories. And it’s an amazing perspective when you see US activity, lifestyles, medicine, you can look at only, almost every aspect from the Chinese perspective, from the European perspective of how they look at the US and how they treat certain things like healthcare. and having that broader view, first off, it made me, the first thing that came to mind was we don’t have it right here, we’re not doing it right. 

You know? And so that really opens up a big door of letting a lot of other alternative types of approaches, which brings me to my next area of discussion with you. You use the word integrated and functional kind of some way interchangeable. So I need to hear little bit about your definition of that. And for the Lyme patients that are listening today, certainly there is the traditional Lyme approach, allopathic approach, and we’re not saying that’s good or bad. This isn’t a place of judgment. But I am interested in the integrated functional part because it really is a much broader view of how you treat the patient in general. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Caspar A Szulc

Yeah, I always like to give the analogy because I remember like when I started off and there was one thing that I was really into was UFC MMA, mixed martial arts, fighting. That was just coming around when I started getting into all of this. And I remember seeing the different disciplines and I wanted to be like this big guy that know how to fight. And it’s like, which discipline do you learn? Brazilian jiu jitsu versus Muay Thai, versus wrestling versus boxing, street pro, you had so many different styles and you had these people going up against each other. And sometimes they went in at the time, Royce Gracie was great with Brazilian jiu jitsu. 

What it morphed into very quickly because it had to cause people realize to be the best, you have to integrate it all. You have to be incredibly well-rounded. The best today are basically the best at each of those, they’re amazing wrestlers, they’re amazing black belts in jiu jitsu and all these things. And you saw that, that for it to be successful, you had to bring it all together and apply it and then come up with a good strategy each time you went in the ring or fought. And I see that’s the problem right now with medicine on a whole, I’m not gonna throw conventional medicine under the bus cause alternative medicine does this too, where you specialize and you just go down the rabbit hole in one thing. And you have specialists all across conventional. 

But now you have the same in alternative, people that only do one specific thing in energy medicine or only do herbs, but won’t touch homeopathy and all the others. Listen, when you walk into our clinic, we have over a hundred different therapies from around the world. And that could span from looking at things like surgical options, which are really conventionally minded and drugs too. Two, spiritual things, the things that are very far on the other end of the spectrum and spiritual practice and ho’oponopono, and consciousness raising and all these different things that you could apply there and everything in the middle. You you talk about yeah, of course, we have light therapies and we have frequency things, and it’s all of that. 

And it’s to say, why wouldn’t you want your toolkit as mixed and as complete as possible when you are looking at a patient that today and especially Lyme patient, that’s going to exhibit such complexity. It’s never just Borrelia. We know that. It’s multiple infections. Usually it’s a lot of toxins. Usually it’s emotional things. And you could keep going on that cause it’s the onion, you peel it back, right? So when people say what is integrative medicine? It’s the integration of therapeutic solutions and then finding the best ones for them. But you got to integrate as many as possible. Now there’s always been the claim, well aren’t there really millions of different solutions out there. I think that’s where at least my fathers saw, well, what are you doing, and how do you get it to be the smallest amount for the most optimal results? Because yes, if he wanted to, he could keep adding, all right, let’s do this snake poison for someone here and let’s do this. And you could keep going. But as he progressed, he saw some times that things would replace. 

He found a technology that replaced an ancient tradition maybe of practice and healing. And he kept going and he kept seeing what was the best. So you’re right when you say what was around others, they experienced it. My father always went in skeptical. He’s a very conventionally minded doctor. And when he saw some of these energy practice and spiritual practices, he said, hold on, I have a scientific mind to this. I want to apply it and then see how it works within the context of everything else I have available and whether or not the patient will actually do better or not. And it was through that experience that the integration and comprehensiveness started to show, well, this works very well because again, if you look at a Lyme patient, you’re going to have to address multiple systems and multi root causes at the same time and sometimes in different priorities. So you have to look at integrative medicine and functional medicine, really as the application of this robust and truly comprehensive approach to all that is out there. I want to bring everyone around the table. 

Now, Robby, that’s not to say, let’s dismiss acupuncturist, chiropractor, specialists. No, let’s bring them to the table, but consult them all at the same time. Let’s not go one at a time and say, oh, this is neurological. Listen, the body is all interconnected. You can’t just chop it up like a machine and say, just look at this one part and fix that. It all works together. So I will say, put the patient in the middle of the table and have all these specialists and all these people around. You could do that. And that’s what I find is the best approach is collaborative approach. Unfortunately, most of the medicine right now is a little bit competitive, a little bit ego-driven and people like to say, I know best, I’ve special, I’m the expert in this one thing, you need this. But I think again, experience shows and results show in the end, what is the right way or the most appropriate course of action and with most of Lyme, at least what we’ve seen and what others have experienced an integrative approach, a personalized approach is the best approach.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Were where you twenty-five years ago when my daughter was in the middle of all that. We really could have used a lot more of that medicine advice. What great advice. We experienced exactly what you talked about. She had a neurological team that was in Florida. She had a Lyme literate doctor in New York. I mean, and none of them talk to one another. And so each of them were doing their best in their specialties, but because it wasn’t coordinated, like there wasn’t a quarterback and then having the team around him, it really wasn’t the best delivery system I suppose, or platform to get it all together. 

So that aspect is amazing. And then what you spoke to was super important I think for people to know, is that the more tools you have in your toolbox and the more you’re constantly tweaking those tools as more advancements come in, those little areas, the more equipped you are to know what to do when a symptom comes up or the way the body responds, and Lyme disease is pretty complex. And then the body is pretty complex. So you’ve got two complex situations going on that you have to kind of figure out the Rubik cube as to which direction to go and that best serves the individual. And so that’s why talking to you and understanding what you guys are doing. And by the way, is your practice virtual also? Can people kind of clip in, if they’re not physically in New York, do you have a setup like?

Caspar A Szulc

You can always clip in, but the end of the day, it’s what your body calls for is usually some kind of therapies and everything that have to be administered. So we could absolutely help from afar. But to say that you could actually really get someone to a resolve place or really get them to a healed place that’s difficult without actually understanding the case. So we don’t like to do virtual just because the toolkit, the toolbox is here. You can only do so much where we send out, it’s a small portion.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

All right. It’s good to know that people can contact you in that way and we’ll get into that a little bit later. But certainly the best is having them, it’s just like the personal experience because there’s this intuitive connection and you did mention oponopono. So for the people that don’t know what that is, it’s basically addressing the emotional component and the asking for forgiveness. It’s a Hawaiian technique, and it’s amazing. And personally speaking, when I learned it and started practicing it, emotional healing, like different than physical healing, really like almost when you figure out where it is that you got stuck emotionally and you ask for forgiveness, it’s like, boom, like it’s like you’ve healed and it’s incredible. 

And it’s multi-generational because we inherit the emotional baggage, so to speak, or challenges, I call it my emotional DNA and we also transfer those emotions to our children. And so when you heal yourself, you’re healing back and forth and forward with the next generation. So I love that you brought that up in such an important concept because I don’t really believe that you can fully heal unless you manage the emotional piece also. And people think it’s an emotional challenge that you’re crying and you’re weeping. No, it’s not about that. It’s about having areas that you’re stuck, that you may have swept under the carpet that are somehow embedded. 

You’re not thinking of it consciously, but it’s there. And every, like from every disease, every chronic disease, but particularly Lyme, you have this area of suffering, you have this area of feeling. There’s a lot of depression often in Lyme because you’ve tried everything, you’ve exhausted all your money, your family, everybody’s frustrated, you’re frustrated, you don’t feel better. It’s this kind of rollercoaster of doing well and then going back into slipping back and having well, so you go into remission and then you have a relapse. And so at the end of the day, maybe years of that challenge, you’re no better off physically, but emotionally, you keep making new lows. So to really fix it, I think emotions are important piece. All right. So Lyme is complex and the body’s complex. What are the kinds of things that people are missing that you see in your clinic that you feel you can give insight into our discussion today?

Caspar A Szulc

Yeah, the thing I always say, there’re particles and patterns. The particles are the unique little pieces that each individual patient will have a different treatment program for. So that’s one of the interesting things I get also Robby, before I really address that question is what’s your protocol for Lyme? Like I hate to say there are wrong questions, but there are in a sense because that’s not a, because we don’t treat Lyme, we treat you who happens to have Borrelia, which exhibits as something like Lyme, which exhibits as hundreds of different things too cause you’ve probably been misdiagnosed many times before you even got that Lyme diagnosis. 

So, and then even people with Lyme know it’s really such co-infection disease that has so many different neurological emotional things. So I can’t speak to the particles cause that’s a very individualized thing. And every patient that would walk through this door is going to get a unique program, a treatment to them, no two alike, but I can speak to the patterns. The patterns are overlapping all the time. And the thing we see, whether it’s a patient who’s gotten Lyme just recently, young and normally vibrant, there are the patterns versus even someone that’s older and had it chronically for decades. There is always the pattern of toxicity. Listen, in a very clean environment it’s incredibly hard for any pest, pathogen, anything to survive. It can do it, that’s true, but it becomes very difficult. And my father always used to say this. He used to put up the slides when you teach other doctors of a very dirty house, a kitchen that was just overflow, dishes everywhere, garbage on the floor. And he would say, listen, you could put all the mouse traps and roach bombs everywhere in this house. 

You will always find them here. So even if you give this person tons of antibiotics, you’re actually just making a bigger mess because the bodies of those things are just stacked up and not clearing out. And you’re just going to have more infestation. It’s just a truth of how we live, we know this. Now he’d show a very clean, very pristine house and he’d would say, listen, when you have an environment like this, even if you do happen to find a mouse, a cockroach, anything, it becomes very easy to just put one or two tracks out and you’re done and that’s it. And throw that out once it’s done and you should have a clean house. 

So we all know this. And address any holes maybe if there are any that they’re getting in, of course, but that’s the analogy of what toxicity is about. If you don’t have a clean environment, I don’t really care how much you use those antibiotics, it’s just going to make, actually usually, invest in your environment. And guess what? Pathogens like Borrelia love messy environments, they could borrow in, they could outlast. They are like cockroaches that outlasts nuclear bombs and then come out, it’s incredible. But it’s unfortunate too, because that’s what Lyme patients see a lot of. They’ll take that nuke bomb, which is antibiotics, feel a little better as everything boroughs in and kind of dorm it for a second. But then you have a wasteland, and they come out and they party and they bring friends and then you have but B’s, you got EBV, everything else going on. So toxicity is a really big one. 

A lot of people know that though. I think the one that goes a little bit undercover that we’ve seen a lot of is energy and balances. And I don’t mean that from a biochemical sense, like ATP energy and chronic fatigue or anything like that. I mean it from a sense of actual energy within the body and meridians and everything. If your energy patterns are off and your chakras are off you don’t have proper cell to cell communication is off and regeneration is very poor. So that’s something you have to address also, usually at the same time, if not first. And I think that component, you said as well, the emotional side is incredibly important. 

When you look at a vicious disease cycle that everyone goes through, you could address the biochemical over and over. If you don’t address the mind, the , as they call it now, HPA axis all of that, and the spiritual side, which is really information consciousness, whatever you want to call it. Bruce Lipton does a lot of work into that, even cell membranes, right, potential all that. If you don’t address all three, you’re just going to have one area that turns green. The other two are red that lead into the vicious disease cycle, going back around to red. And you will have a pattern like that, where you feel better worse. That’s the roller coaster that so many Lyme patients ride and it’s incredibly frustrating and breaks you down. So you have to address all three. And those are the patterns that we’ve been able to see is how do you do that? You bring the toolkit with over a hundred different things for all of those. And then you see, where are you on this? Which tools are going to match up, which are you most compatible with to help you in your personal state. Is your toxicity actually not that bad, you need to address other ones. Okay, let’s start you. 

Normally, what we would do is start you on some kind of detoxification, normally oral, sometimes IV, sometimes different types of things you could do. Of course, there’s infrared saunas and everything that you know so well about. But let’s clean the house up first, right? Let’s do some spring cleaning before we start to really address those pests in there. Because if we try to address the pest first in a dirty house, that’ll never happen. And also a house that’s emotionally unstable or a house that is energetically unstable. 

So those are really the patterns that we’ve seen with Lyme patients. And I think the reason some people would say our center is a Lyme specialty center, but it’s really not. My father never wanted to get into Lyme alone, he wanted to help chronic conditions. He wanted to help patients across the board. It just so happens to be Lyme is the perfect condition that is great for using comprehensiveness and personalization, but it goes beyond that, of course, it goes into all chronic diseases. It just so happens to be, Lyme’s a pretty big problem out there. And so when you look at those patterns, you start to address that, that’s what we’ve seen as far as looking at Lyme in that lens of things and being able to say, okay, what are the patterns versus the parts?

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Okay, great answer. And I’m reading between the lines and the words that you said, because what we’ve discovered and seen in clinic and years focusing zero, focusing on Lyme and the confections and all the components around that is that the order that you do things in and the way that you dose what you do makes all the difference in a moderate or a fantastic result. And now we’re talking about science versus the art form of medicine. 

So you guys are practicing the art form, you’ve collected a hundred or more different interventions modalities, the way you combine those two modalities and the way you present them or bring them to the patient is really how the patient presents themselves to you. So it starts with being an active listener, and even have said if you listen long enough, the patient will tell you their diagnosis. They’ll tell you what is wrong with them. And if you listen to them even longer, they’ll tell you how to fix them. So what’s the operating word, listen, what’s going on there. I think that that is really great advice. And if anybody out there tuning in today is a Lyme patient and their doctor’s not listening to them, they need to check in with Caspar and his group and just get hooked up with, surround yourself with people that actually will understand and listen to you.

Caspar A Szulc

Yeah. And Robby, let me jump in there really quick because it’s listening in different formats. The body always tells stories in different ways, not just you saying it, right. And it’s not just lab results, I say. I know like lots of functional medicine doctors really hone in on just tons of labs. I think they’re wonderful. We look at labs all the time. You run labs all the time, functional lab tests. They’re downstream though. We want to listen to that, that’s a downstream message. We want to listen to the patient what they’re saying cause of course, but we want to tap into their inner intelligence as well upstream. 

We want to do things like HRV, bioenergetic testing EAV, all of it even do psychological evaluation, everything, be comprehensive in how you listen too, because we give you that hour to voice. But a lot of times it’s not just what you’re hearing, what you’re kind of telling the story yourself. We know there are limiting beliefs probably stuck in. We want to tap into that also. So my father always said he wants to have an intelligent conversation with the patients intelligence themselves. So he wants to pull out every, all these different pieces of information and only then do you get the full story. So I totally agree that you have to get a doctor and a team that listens, but you also have to get a team that listens in multiple ways.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah. Wow. Big, big, great stuff. You’ve focused a little bit on toxicity and what we’ve understood or what we see is that toxicity and inflammation, they sort of travel on the same highway together. And if you do anything to lower toxicity, then we’re kind of giving the chronic patient, the chronic Lyme patient, and in any area of disease, an opportunity to sort of get part of their life back, maybe brings down some of the symptoms that they’re experiencing, like chemical sensitivities or sleeping challenges, or energy and things that you focused on a little bit earlier. But it’s really interesting to me because I believe that you’ve got an imbalance in your microbiome and that’s however that happened. And it’s why the population of Epstein-Barr or Lyme, or B’s, the infections are thriving so much. So when I look at the equation, I say, well, how can I bring your biome, your body back into balance? So give your body, maybe some of the things that’s deficient that’s just happened over time, lower the toxic burden. 

And when by doing that, we’re getting the patient less symptomatic and that gives the patient more of their life back and does something that’s super important, which we’re going to cover in about a minute, the word H-O-P-E, hope, which oftentimes we get down that rabbit hole where we just kind of lose faith, and it could be years, it could be days, it doesn’t matter. Really, it’s just an individual expression. But lowering types of burden is I think that people are symptomatic simply because they’re toxic. And if we can lower that burden, then we give the patient part of their life back and we give the practitioner or the team more time to actually get to the root cause and then create a plan that is manicured or individual that really treats the patient, not the disease per se. And even with my daughter, I mean, I have to be honest about this and transparent Caspar, I said to Julia, Julia, you may always have Lyme, but is that the discussion today, or is it more about having sort of a complete life meaning that you’re symptom free number one, and that you live your life purposefully because absent that, if you have a blood test and something shows up that you had a challenge in your blood, but you are applying your life in a way that is meaningful to you, that’s really what I think, why we’re in earth camp to start with. And so absent that, you just have this diagnosis. Now, in many cases, chronic patients, they hide behind the diagnosis. 

They get a lot of attention when they’re sick. But if you get away from that and realize it’s, by the way, eight out of 10 diagnoses are wrong and particularly in Lyme, because it mimics so many other diseases out there that, and I think that goes back to what you said right out of the gate, the practitioner generally speaking, and I hate to do that, but generally speaking, they don’t really have the time or attention to personalize and actually listen to the answers and listen to what’s going on. And because of that, they don’t ask the right questions. And because of that they don’t get the right answers. And because of that, they make the wrong diagnosis. So hanging your hat on the diagnosis isn’t the direction, dealing with the person as you talk about it, I think is everything. And so once again, you guys tuning in, this guy’s talking about real medicine here and that’ what’s so important for us to know. So let’s talk about, let’s kind of dive into the hope and the depression and kind of coming out and understanding that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Caspar A Szulc

Yeah, I mean, it’s a big topic, Rob, because I think everyone that comes in through our doors, everyone that I meet in general, you meet so many patients, now it’s social media, everyone’s sorta reaching out. You realize how big of an issue it really is, something like Lyme. It affects people all over the world. This isn’t a Connecticut Northeast type thing, old Lyme, right, this is everywhere. All corners of the world, people are being impacted by this. And I understand that the conventional route, the route you’re going to go with when you first find out, even if you saw the red bulls-eye or you get the diagnosis is a conventional one, and it’s going to be, we’re going to put you on whatever it is. , anything for this many weeks and you should be good and we’ll see how it goes. And that may go on for years, that may go for a few months, you feel better, but then months later, or even a year or two later, it comes back. And so it’s, and then if you’re doing that over and over and you may be going a different, how about you try something else, you’re going higher dosage, you’re doing this that, you start to lose hope, right? And you start to deteriorate and that’s meaning not just physically, but also mentally. 

And you start to really question, will I ever be better? As you told your daughter, you may have to live with this, but at least have purpose, right? Purpose gives hope too. But I know so many patients with chronic neurological Lyme that were bedridden that didn’t have the capacity, the brain fog was so great. They couldn’t work, they didn’t feel like they had value. They contemplated suicide. That’s a very hopeless place to be. And I don’t think enough people realize this about Lyme cause you just think, oh, infectious disease, jump on a antibiotic, you’re better, right. Get over it. And maybe it’s a little long haul and you’ll be better. But that is not the case here with Lyme. It is truly debilitating condition. And it can last years, decades, I’ve known patients that came in here with 40 and said they probably had it when they were a very young child and have been suffering from it for 40 plus years. 

That is where you have to change the mindset because if you’re hopeless for long enough, you’re already in a state that is not conductive to healing. Hope is somewhat required. You have to have some faith going into something that it could turn out in the positive. Otherwise in a sense you’re attracting the negative. You’ve gotten so used to it. Your belief system is this is it. This is for me. I have no hope that I will get better. This is why, where science kind of fails this is people think, and again, I’m not going from personal experience. I’m going from the hundreds of thousands of Lyme patients I speak to and have seen get better or stay the same all over. But what they are looking for is not scientific proof in a research because truly that’s what conventional medicine follows is this study shows this amount of, whatever it is, gets you better and should eradicate this Borrelia infection. 

They are looking for others. They are looking for hope, not in the numbers of signs that kind of let them down in some ways. They’re looking for others that have gotten better. They’re looking for that one story. In my podcast, I’ve interviewed so many and they all said the same thing. It was just, I just want to find one person that was where I was and got better. And man, when I found that, when I saw that guy on Ted give that talk, heard this podcast, or somebody else or connected through a forum, that was enough. I don’t care what the doc… And then if you have that and you truly ride that, I remember speaking to one that ended up working for us and got better. But she said, I saw that one person get better. I didn’t care if you told me I had to shave my head and do anything, I was all in on it. And I think that’s what hope does, it makes you get that all in feeling, that leap of faith. That’s another thing I hear a lot of, you got to take a leap of faith with this at some point or another, you’re going to be in a position where you have to make a decision whether you’re going to go through with this probably expensive, probably somewhat intense treatment plan, where you’re dedicating your life and really putting a lot on the line or not. 

And no one’s going to answer that question for you, but you. You got to tap into your heart and you got to see. And without that hope there, without that level of consciousness a little bit higher to make the right decision for yourself and have the intuition, that gut feeling, it becomes very difficult to make that decision. And that’s where I’ve seen a lot of people come in here, get it, I don’t know, maybe it won’t work, maybe this or that. They don’t go through. They just jump around from person to person again, maybe come back in a year, same thing happens. That’s their path, that’s their journey in it all. But what I’ve seen is that the people that can pick up that level of hope from others, from community, from family, from friends, from anywhere, and then come in and say, I want to take that leap of faith into this, that already is such a healing foundation, that already you are on strong footing to go in the right direction. 

And you will be able to last through the ups and downs because there will be downs. This again is not a linear progression where you just start and healing goes like this. You’re going to have this, but what you don’t realize that you are on an upward trend usually. And that if you go through with it, listen, almost all the patients, you can’t say there’s a hundred percent success rate. There’s no such thing, I feel like because it’s dependent on you. And I always say this Robby it’s how many hours in a week would you have in a doctor’s office where you actually getting procedures and therapies, maybe a few, you have 168 hours in a week. You’re going to be spending at least 160 plus on your own. That’s important what you do there. Are utilizing the tools to help you in all the ways outside of the doctor’s office. So the responsibility does lie on the person and that’s very different than conventional medicine. 

But with that, when you have responsibility, you have power. And I think that’s the one thing conventional medicine gets wrong. They say, you either take this or, oh oh, too bad, you got no other options. You have no power there. That’s where you lose hope. But when you have options and you have, you see that it’s on my shoulders to get better as well, I will have the support of everyone, the coaching staff, the therapies, I think that gives you empowered feeling, but also that hope. And that’s where we see people just start progressing and it’s like a blossoming load . You’re coming out of cocoon. You’re transforming. Healing is transforming. Every patient I know with Lyme that’s gotten through the other side and is better now and feeling great has said it was such a transformative experience for me, and coming out the other side, I am not the same person coming in. And for that, they’re actually thankful for Lyme. They actually say it’s a blessing, but I mean, listen, no one’s going to say that when you’re actually suffering from it, it’s only on the other side you’ve got that.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Actually got into that part of the discussion with some guys just less than a week ago. And I wanted to bring that to the view because of the blessing and the curse and that kind of spiritual approach to life in general. It’s hard to tell a Lyme patient that’s on their back that really what you’re experiencing now is a blessing. Oh my God, like, how could you even have that discussion? But what you’re talking about through however it came to that you’re having that challenge, working through the challenge and coming out the other end of the tunnel is so rudimentally foundationally important for you and your next generations that you pass those that experience onto and your storytelling that it truly turns out to be a blessing ultimately. You just hit on a big point, that will to live. And I’m just going to share with you something that I don’t think I’ve told anybody frankly. I had this little episode with Julia. We live in a split level home. And she was living with us at that time because she needed some special attention. 

And so we had this big island down in the kitchen on the first floor and she’s upstairs coming out of her bedroom, and there’s sort of like this little area where you can kind of look over the banister and then look down to the downstairs area where we live. And we had this big island and the island was filled with all of her medications. I was making a cup of coffee and I turned around to put the cup of coffee down on the island, and there was no space for my cup of coffee on this big island, because of all the medications. And I kind of caught myself and looked up and Julia was at the top of the stairs. And I looked at her and I said to her, Julia, can you ever imagine living one day without having to take any of these medications? And she said to me, dad, no, I’m always going to be on medication, I’m always. And so that’s what we’re talking about now is sort of a precipice. Like if that’s what you believe, that’s what your reality will be. And that’s what I said to her. And I said, yeah, well, that might be the case right now, but what about tomorrow? What if we take 10 of these, 20 of these, after two months we have 30 of these things done and we pair it down and keep paring it down, then before you know it, just like we accumulated them, we start pairing it down. It’s no different than I talk about toxicity, is sort of like climbing a mountain. It’s one step at a time. 

It’s hard to fall when you’re climbing, but when you’re coming down and you do it too fast, it’s easy to fall. And so a slow approach on detoxing, I think is a safe way to do it, even though it takes more time. And the challenge there with Lyme patients is that they’re so sick of being sick, it’s sort of the whole chronic emotional piece that’s all bundled up that once they start getting some results, they just want to dive in as deep as they can. And I spent a lot of time in our side and I’m sure you’ve seen this too, just, Hey, take a cold shower, you didn’t get here overnight. We have to really do it diligently in a low and slow, may seem conservative, but really is the safe way to do it that creates that primal hailing, sustainable platform, the long-term play is doing it that way. I love where we’ve gone today. I think that this has really been deep and I know we don’t have a whole lot of time left, so I’m going to put you on the spot. If you had to give me two or three tips, I’m your Lyme patient now, and I’m not flat on my back, or I’m your Lyme patient and I’m actually doing pretty good, but I want to keep that level and actually dial it up. 

Can you give me one or two tips, three tips, whatever you feel that might be important for me to know for me to integrate into my life as early as tomorrow that I can kind of do on my own that you feel might be coaching for today.

Caspar A Szulc

Absolutely. And you know what, Rob, like we did this a few years ago where we basically tracked all these different Lyme patients and saw their outcomes and started giving them questionnaires and doing interviews with them on the side and seeing where again are the patterns of those that got better versus those that did not. And I have to say the one thing that came up that addresses some of what you’re talking about here is you got to find purpose. You got to find a reason to get better because I know and you know this too, too many Lyme patients start to think of themselves as a Lyme. That’s who they are. They’re not Sarah, they’re not Jessica, they’re not Bob. And they start to be I’m a Lyme patient. And that already frames you to be, I’m always going to be a lime patient. 

That is not good. That is not who you are. You are not Lyme, this is just a period of time, but find purpose to get out of it. Because without that purpose, it becomes very difficult. And that purpose could be anything. It could be getting married, having kids, or just really feeling that much better or going on a ski trip you couldn’t do because of all the joint pain you have with Lyme and make it something very personal to you, but write it down, put it on paper, think about it when you wake up, think about before you go to sleep, make that your it, make that your totem that is going to ensure, when things get tough, you’re not going to back out of this, you’re going to push forward because you will get better. And that’s it. 

It’s almost like burning the bridge behind you, that old person who said they were Lyme, that’s not you anymore. You are a new person. See yourself, visualize yourself, right? Become that person, do type stuff and start thinking about, and actually feeling yourself being healthy, give yourselves that memory, not the memory of everything that’s bedridden and feeling bad and so fatigued with pain and inflammation. So purpose is really important. 

Number two though is with that purpose also set your expectations, as you said. I think conventional medicine has spoiled us rotten where we think I have a disease that I’ve had for years. I want to take a pill and feel better tomorrow. That’s crazy. That’s like someone going to the gym and going to a trainer, that’s a few hundred pounds overweight and saying, get me in shape and fit and slim in a week. And that trainer would laugh you out and be like, no, that’s not happening, that’s not how the body works. And yes, if you wanted to cut it all out and do it that way, that’s kind of the conventional and be ready overnight. But you’re going to deal with repercussions there too. So you understand that it’s going to take a little while. 

The body does things at its own pace. Lots of people want children within a few months. It’s going to take nine months around, give her a sec. That’s just how the body works. Healing works that way too. Be patient and set the expectations right. I think we get a lot of patients in here that are expecting, four weeks, I’ll be a hundred percent. No, you’ll be much better. Don’t get me wrong, in four weeks a lot can happen. You can lose a lot of weight in four weeks too, but you probably won’t be where you need to be because there’s a lot of healing that has to happen, years and years worth of degeneration that need to then come about. 

I think number three would be look at those 168 hours in your week and how you’re spending them. You can think that you need the best doctors in the world. I think my father and other the best doctors in the world would say, we’re not the best doctors in the world. You know what is, mother nature. That’s your best doctor in the world. And guess what? She doesn’t cost much, right? Go out, reconnect with nature. When you have purpose and you have nature, I think anything’s possible. I’m not saying that you’ll get better in a few weeks or you don’t need treatment or procedures or some kind of catalyst or support and the help of great doctors that are doing great work out there. But I am saying there are 168 hours in the week, how you choose them is going to really truly determine whether you get better or not. It’s not going to the best doctors and spending the most money that is going to get you better. It’s the mindsets, the connection. 

From the second you wake up, what is the choice you’re going to make that’s going to push you to reach that goal that you have to get better. And so I would leave people with that positive mindset that it’s absolutely something you can do is overcome Lyme even if you struggle with it for so long. I know so many people that have done this, so it’s not like an impossibility or anything, get that out of your head. But at the same time, find those things that bring you passionate, bring you purpose even while you’re going through sickness, surround yourself with positivity and start looking at those everyday choices you make, to get outside, take a deep breath, relax a little bit. Even if you can’t do that, I remember one of the patients that we have here that I’ve worked with for so many years and just adore, Ben Errands, who gave a TEDx talk, it was called one deep breath. 

The man was stitched up with a catheter in him and taken hundreds of pills, couldn’t get out of bed. And he just made that choice, that one choice, one morning, he’s going to turn it around. And he said, it started with one deep breath and like a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, right, he took that one deep breath. The next day was two, the next day was three. And that was it. And day after day to the point where he’s swimming 10 mile, doing crazy stuff, just living his life to the fullest, healthy, happy. So I would love to leave people with that that feeling of hope and also that understanding that you have so much power within you to heal, and I’ve seen it and you could do so much on your own. And of course, if you need that help, there are clinics like ours and people such as your self, that they could lean on a little bit to get that support and help with… everything’s in here really already. You’re the one healing, we’re just the ones kind of cheering you on along the way.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Holy mackerel, that was like the grand slam answer. Thank you so much for that. I often reference what you call nature being the healer as the kind of the inner doctor or the inner voice inside of us. And as good as we are as practitioners, the real doctor is the one inside of you. And if you are quiet, quiet mind, and able to actually listen to your intuitive sense, which is really your connection to source and spirit and all that, not getting religious here, just understanding what we’re made of, the energy that we’re made of, it truly will be like your constitution. It will tell you if you ask, it will tell you right or wrong. And it will express itself in different ways like kinesiology and muscle testing, it’s your body’s reaction to whatever you’re bringing into your field. And we used to have this little, it was sort of a game, but it started with Julia as a tip just off the back of what inspired me off the back of what you have just imparted. 

She used to say to me, dad, I can’t come to work today. I can’t do what I need to do. I’m just really challenged. I’m in horrible pain. And after I would hear that story for a while, and I was a little bit more critical of my daughter. She was really beautiful and she was extremely smart. And I felt after a while, she was sort of like, just hiding behind this, I don’t feel well because I’ve got Lyme disease thing, you know? And I started to kind of beat on her a little bit. And then my wife, Melody said to me, you don’t treat your other patients that way, why are you treating Julia like this? She’s sick with Lyme disease. And then that was like, whoa, yeah, what’s wrong with me? And then I said Julia, I can’t relate to you. When you say you’re in pain I don’t know what that means because your reference of pain, the way your body expresses it is different than mine. And so let’s just put a number on it. Tell me that for you, you are, if 10 is the most pain you’ve ever been in, you’re an eight today and you’re seven tomorrow and so forth. And I’ll tell you why this is important. And what we started doing was we were journaling and I do this now in my practice. 

I’ll ask the patient, give me three or five of the symptoms that you are really challenged with today. Let’s just put them on the calendar. And every day you you wake up and you say, okay, what’s my energy. Did I get a good night’s sleep? Check that one off and just give it a number. And when it came to pain, the numbers would vary. And if we were on a pain protocol, if I was on a pain protocol at your clinic and started off the beginning of January, and it was an eight, nine when I used to wake up and then towards the end of the month, I was seven, eight. 

And then the next month I was a five, six. Going to a traditional doctor, the doctor would ask you like he’s checking a box, are you in pain, Julia? She’d say, yeah, I’m in pain. And that’s the accurate, truthful answer. But she’s not an eight, nine anymore. She’s a five, six. So is the protocol working? Lyme, like the body is so, so complex and these things we’re talking about now are subtle changes, just how subtly you delve deep into your illness and chronic illness. That’s sort of how you come out of it, very subtle. And then when you combine the will to live or the hope, well, certainly she’s still in pain, but let me tell you something. 

When she came back and said she was a five, six on a pain protocol, and she looked back in the earlier part of the month and she was an eight, nine, that gave her a hell of a lot of hope. It also told the practitioner that they’re on the right path and she’s taking her body a little bit to kind of get onboard. And so we use journaling to try to sort of fill in the space between the letters that oftentimes people miss. And I think that that’s really important for people to know. Caspar, my God, like you just blew me out today. Today was, this was amazing. I really appreciate the time you spent. How do people get to you? Like give us the website, like how to contact you, the 800 number. I know there’s so many people and I really want them to get to know you better.

Caspar A Szulc

Yeah. So they could go to innovativemedicine.com. That’s the overarching kind of a company to us all. We have the New York center for innovative medicine. We’re hoping to have multiple centers for innovative medicine. So it makes it a little bit easier than everyone coming to New York. It’s pretty cold right now here and some people like there’s sunny spots and don’t want to leave, such as yourself down in Florida, but yeah, they could go to innovativemedicine.com. They could find out all about the center and learn about our team and everything. I would suggest even straight off the homepage, right at the top, you can take a quiz that basically takes you through, are you a candidate for this? Are you ready? Because the truth is you got to be ready for it. And you gotta be in that mindset. 

We’re not going to give you a pill to just take away the symptoms really quick and say, call a day. There have to be certain things that we’ve seen in patients that get better, prerequisites only that allow you to truly jump into this. So if you take that quiz and you see you’re a good patient, you really understand the approach that we’re taking and all the different facets of it, and then you could speak with a patient ambassador that can kind of take you, someone on the medical team that can do a free consult with you, talk about your personal situation and see how we can help, even if it’s from afar anyway, or what we can do. So I’d really suggest that that’s the best way to go about it. And after that, I think if anyone wants to reach out to me, they can do it, I’m on Instagram a lot. And that’s where I’ve kind of built up my community and respond people out there so they could see me, @casperszulc, it’s a tough last name. And I’d be happy to connect with anyone there.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

I’d rob your Instagram site.

Caspar A Szulc

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think it’s quite controversial on these days, even though it’s not controversial, if you know what I mean.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you take issue with issues and what’s wrong with that?

Caspar A Szulc

Right now I think integrative medicine is a little bit being attacked, right. I think it’s always been that way. It’s just, now it’s really becoming an option. And the conventional side is saying, and here’s where I say we can both be there. It’s not one or the other, we love conventional doctors. My father was one for so long. He still really, really appreciates his colleagues in conventional medicine, but there’s just more to it. So I think that collaboration will break down the kind of boundaries, I think in competitive nature of everything in medicine.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Well said. And everybody tuned in to this interview, blockbuster and really super appreciate your time and energy dedication. You’re on the path, you guys are happening and you got the answers. So clearly our bodies express it. And like that’s the big part of the puzzle, but having a good coach and having someone to guide you through the kind of the tumultuous reef that we’re all negotiating through in life but particularly when you’ve got a health challenge is so important. And so thanks again for what you do and certainly the momentum that you’ve created and your unwavering dedication to try to elevate people’s awareness through education. And by the way, I went on your website, which is incredible and the screening and the questions you’re asking, I mean, it’s a way for not only, I mean, it may seem kind of arduous and little litigious, like filling out these forms. 

But I find when I do that, Caspar, that it actually defines me in ways. You ask questions that I haven’t really thought about myself or thought through to answer. And through that, it’s not just, I learn from that experience alone. Not just understand whether I qualify or to what degree so that it helps you guys understand where I am kind of in the game, like in that little journey we’re on and that helps you guys have a better handle onto the best information and the best ways you can coach me. So thanks again, really appreciate you and your time. Happy new year back and looking forward to only great things from you and your operations and the facilities that you guys put out.

Caspar A Szulc

Thank you so much, Robby. Always a blast connecting with you.

Robby Besner PSc.D.

Hey everybody, it’s Robby Besner. Thanks so much for joining us today. Please share this content with