The Healing Process: Clinical Pearls From A Lyme Expert

Lyme Summit Introduction 0:00

Hey, welcome back to the Lyme Summit. My guest here needs no introduction. He's the host with the most Dr. Tom Moorcroft Dr. Tom, pleasure to have you on the summit. - Well, Dr. Darin, thanks for having me. I'm really excited that we actually get a chance to have a conversation with each other and share a little bit more about our background and and why this is such an important topic that we join together to be able to do this amazing thing. - Now, I'm just thrilled that I would have been able to be your co-host in this event.

We've talked to so many great speakers and I know it's bringing just so much value to people who've been struggling with Lyme disease and tick borne illness. So I wanna talk a little bit about today about things. I don't think other speakers have talked about. I want to help fill in some of the gaps of things that people may not be aware of, that's gonna help move the needle. And you know, we talk so much about detoxification and different strategies that people can do to help lower their body burden because we know we're just exposed to garbage all day long. But one of the things that very few people talk about is lymphatics and particularly lymphatics in and around the brain, you know, they call it glymphatic. Right. So, maybe just talk a little bit about, you know, the lymphatic system and why our glymphatic are important.

- Yeah, I think it's a great topic because, you know, the lymphatics are kind of cleaning up a lot of, you know, it's like kind of the drainage pathway almost like the sewer system. And, you know, it's interesting because I remember like first really learning about low

Lymphatic and Glymphatic Drainage 1:34

pre, yeah, we have like high pressure and low pressure systems in the body. Like the heart is pumping the blood away from the heart. You know, a lot of people under know that and have heard of that as a high pressure system, the low pressure is kind of the return, you know, the veins are returning and they need like say in the arms and the legs, muscle contractions and that's really cool to know because we know that about the veins. We also know the lymphatics are very similar. They're more like passive channels that need other assistance and they have valves that help things move in the right direction.

It's a little more complicated than in real life. But, but essentially like, that's a part of it. And so we know that movement is a way to clean up our arms and our legs. And then the other part is what happens when we get into the thorax, the chest and the belly and those veins and lymphatics really need more like pressure gradient changes. And with the pressure gradient changes, this is a lot of the reason you go to a yoga class or a therapist and you're like, oh breathe down and feel your pelvic floor pushing on the chair.

The idea is we want to get that breathing muscle, that diaphragm to descend and to change pressure gradient so that we can detoxify more optimally. So if you breathe shallowly, will you detoxify? Sure will it be optimal? Probably not. And you know, it's really interesting because when I, when I really look at this, the body is so this is the thing I love about our summit man is like when we look at everybody is talking about, we're talking about how to heal from Lyme. We're not just saying we're gonna be sick forever. People are actually talking about how they themselves and their patients and their family members have truly healed.

Part of it is going back to the natural things in our processes in our bodies. So that diaphragm when it descends allows air to be brought into our lungs. It also as I just mentioned, can help us with the pressure gradient change. But a lot of us are talking about the solar plexus, the limbic system, the vagus nerve, we talk about all these parts of the nervous system that are major nerve centers where we have like in the solar plexus is that region under the diaphragm where we get the the gut reaction. This is an actual biochemical physiologic response to whatever you're perceiving in your environment.

And one of the things that happens when we get like hyper sympathetic and we get all wound up chronically stressed out is we might store some of that there. The descension of the diaphragm will physically mechanically essentially massage the solar plexus area. And it is one of the ways the body is allowed to release. So, from a breathing perspective, if somebody like comes up behind me and goes boo, I'm like, and so I get my, my, my diaphragm and my ribs locked up. So that's gonna happen in life. But even just me right now, I have to do the fixer upper, right because I just did it to myself and I haven't undone it and I can feel it. I can feel my diaphragm's a little up.

My ribs are a little tight. I feel a little bit of extra tightness here. So I take a breath and I relax and release all that. So it's not that we shouldn't be stressed out. It's not that we shouldn't, well, maybe stressed out is not the right word but experiencing acute stress, but just like inflammation. Acute stress is sometimes good and necessary. But chronically, we need to chill it out. One of the ways we can do that is just through those simple breathing exercises. So it's not like I'm just working on my limp fat system right now and detoxification, I'm also working on my nervous system and calming it down. So the body, like you do one thing, like really nice, deep relaxed breathing, bringing ourselves back into the moment and into our body, releasing the physical strain by the breath through the breath.

And oh by the way, we're detoxifying better and we're not getting as wound up. So I'm just always really, I love the way the body works. So we've gotten to about here, you know, up to our neck and in our neck, we've got some gravity that helps, we've got some muscle contraction that helps the neck is a really important place because one it needs to drain on its own, but it's draining. It is the pathway of release of the toxins from the brain and the head out. So this a lot of it has to do with posture.

So we have a little bit of movement. We've definitely got gravity. But that head forward posture. The reason I talk about low pressure in the beginning is that low pressure systems can be pumped by muscle contraction, but muscle spasm or like if I were to grab my phone here and do one of these, like everybody else. I, my voice isn't the same. I'm not breathing as well, but I can also decrease the rate and the, and the ease of the detoxification out of the brain by, you know, because that, that a structure when I'm not in that nice standing up posture will potentially push on these and just make it a little slower, like a slow drain, it's not gonna make it stop. So that's all really important.

And then we, we get into when I went to medical school and I'm sure, you know, I think we went to school, similar gene, you know, timing wise, they were just saying, hey, look, the brain doesn't have true lymphatics in it. So We just think the cerebral spinal fluid, which is this beautiful nourishing bath that's of water, primarily like 99% water. And so, and just a few other things that's around the brain and protecting it when it's slashing around a little bit is also the brain just magically dumps its toxins in there and then that gets rid of it.

And the problem was, it didn't account for all of the change in the brain that needed to happen in order to keep it metabolically, you know, functioning. So over time, what we found out was there was actually a system that cleaned the brain back in the day. We couldn't find it because two things, one, we didn't have the technology to figure it out. The other one was, we went in with a really big, you know, knife to cut open little lab animals to look. And what we needed to do is something much more delicate. So we're actually destroying some of the anatomy that we were looking for. So when we fast forward, the beautiful part Darin is we found out that there's a system in the brain that works both with the cerebral spinal fluid and another fluid called the interstitial fluid.

So just stuff in between cells and in the brain. So the cerebral spinal fluid actually moves from an arterial over to a venule. And in the process of moving aro it moves into the brain and it starts combining with the interstitial fluid. And there it creates a wave of detoxification where it clears out things like amyloid beta tau protein, things that lead to neuro degeneration. And we see that then it comes out along that Venus system. Again, we go back to the Venus system. It's really important very much like the lymphatics, low pressure. So as it's draining out of the brain, we look at what are the pathways of drainage. Well, one we have the veins, but primarily the glymphatic system is draining around the veins, around some arteries, but very much around the cranial nerves along lymphatic channels.

And this is really kind of cool because then we think of our neck posture and we realize how much more, how much I how more important it is. So we have this system where this fluid wave comes across. So, anybody going, hey, I need to drink more water right now.

Sleep, Nasal Drainage, and Brain Detox 8:40

Yeah, you're probably right. It's a good, it's a good thing. So, then we go. All right. What are we doing with this? And how does this system work? Well, there's a couple of key points we have to look at and one is, when does it mostly work? Well, we know that it works all the time, but primarily when we're in sleep and most researchers are finding and this is kind of like in the last three or four years, we've been trying to sort this out, but it looks like deep slow wave sleep is critical. So all of us who are like, hey, I don't sleep a lot and I'm and, and it's all in, you know, just screw it.

But we, we need to focus a lot on sleep and turning off your electronics, turning off your wifi, turning off the, the, the Bluetooth and all these things like your phone and not being on them late at night is more important than just say, hey, something that all the bio hackers tell you this is really if you want to clean your brain, the very, very, very, very best supplement for brain detoxification is sleeping. And according to all this sleep research, all of the adults watching you need 7 to 9 hours of sleep. Most of us 8 to 9 a night to rejuvenate and clean your brain your kids need more.

And national Sleep instituted. I think it's or Sleep Foundation at Sleep Foundation 90.0 R G has a really nice graphic that tells you by age group how much sleep you really need. So, it's kind of important. The other part too, Darin, I think is the routes of drainage. About a third of all the drainage out of the brain comes through the nasal lymphatics, which I just think is, you know, we can kind of dive into it. But it's just such an important piece because we have so many different things going on.

We have chronic sinusitis and just stuffy nose. We've got people with mold illness that that may be congesting their nose. And also in, in strep, we find that strep that leads to pans and pandas because lots of us listening have experience with this. If you don't, it pans is pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome. The big important part about this is it's an, it's a in, it's a recurrent infection that triggers autoimmunity that leads to the symptoms. So it's not the infection. That's the problem. Now, the infectious trigger should be removed.

But the problem is autoimmunity. And what we're finding with pans and pandas, specifically the strep, which is the pandas part Is recurrent infections in the nose, get TH- 17 cells ready to go after the group. A strep in your nose that are going up the nasal lymphatic, the same pathway that lets the drainage come down, they go up and that leads to the brain inflammation. So this part of your face is so critical to understand what's going on and to, to really focus on it. And most of the fixing of your nose and the fixing of your sleep are things that you can do at home for free.

- Well, free is always great. You know, I, I've, and some of the other speakers I've spoken with, I appreciate when we talk about things that are simple, easy and not high cost. You know, again, I think so many people who have been dealing with lyme, there's an expectation to get, well, you have to spend a lot of money. You have to do all these high tech things and there's so many simple basic things you can do, like you said, getting to bed on time. You know, I know you and I have had a similar experience with our patients where, you know, if he'll say, well, I've been a night out my whole life.

I mean, I can never get to bed before midnight one. I'm like, no, you just have a very long history. I've have dysfunctional sleep and it doesn't mean that you can't get back on a normal sleep pattern. And, you know, when you, when you look at the research on shift workers, you know, that work overnight and sleep during the day, it's not about getting, you know, necessarily the eight or nine hours of like, yes, you need that length of time, but the timing in which you get that sleep is also critical. So, you know, we work diligently to find ways to get you that good quality sleep. For all of the things that you just described again as help with tissue repair, it helps detoxification.

But in terms of your mental health, your physical health, you know, it's just, it's, it's huge and it does take a bit of time and it does take a bit of commitment. I mean, you know, we've seen people who've had sleep issues for often decades and are you gonna turn it around in a night? Probably not, but with the right effort of, you know, good sleep hygiene, sometimes some supplements and, and I want to talk a little bit too because, you know, you're an osteopathic doctor and you know, your training is very different than mine and medical doctors and even chiropractors where you learn so much about the structure of the skull and the flow of spinal fluid and feeling the tissue.

You know, if people haven't ever worked with an osteopath, can you just describe a little bit about like what that is and why osteopathic work can be really helpful with this? - And I think it's a, it's an amazing point and to just, I just want to make a quick comment about one of the things you were just mentioning. The only reason that the, these free and very low, level treatments don't work is people don't do them and I find that the more I charge for anything, the more people are likely to listen to it.

So I'm just saying, like everybody seems to want to get the most expensive new blinking device or I V or whatever. I 100% agree with you, Darin like that, the, the low hanging or not even the low hanging fruit but, but it's low hanging because it's easy. The really great stuff is the stuff you have, you can do at home, but you have to take personal responsibility. And that's really what the whole summit is about is. Yes, we're talking about the meds, the machines, we're talking about the supplements, all these things.

But if you guys have noticed so many people go back to the simple things you can do at home to heal from Lyme disease. Now, another thing like you're just mentioning as one of the bonuses that I always like to give people is my ever improving version of a thing I call relaxing reboot. And in there we have a home osteopathic treatment you can give yourself. It's one of multiple things. And actually this go around actually have a full guided experience that goes along with it because not everybody lives near a cranial osteopath who really knows what they're doing.

But to your point like it's interesting, Andrew Taylor Still is, was a frontier MD and preacher because that's kind of like how it went back in the day and he was working with people and he's like, if we give them strict nine and Arsenic, they don't do so well. So let's stop doing that. And, oh, I learned about manipulation and osteopathy grew up in the, you know, the American Midwest around the same time as chiropractic. But they're very different philosophies. Little bit of overlap, not saying one's better than the other. Although I'm an osteopath and I chose that for a reason. But there's a lot of value in a lot of these different manual therapies. But the difference is As early as 1850, this crazy guy still was going around the body and the mind and the spirit are all connected and they're part, all of them are part of you. And if you address only one, you're not gonna get fully better, you have to do mind, body, spirit healing.

This is not in the eighties and nineties when people started talking about it, this is like 150, 173 years ago or so now. So then he said, hey, there's this other crazy thing that your body has the ability to self regulate and self heal and it's not a bucket of disease like conventional medicine leads us to believe it actually go, it's, it's inertia is towards healing, towards being optimally well. And when it's not optimally. Well, one bad shit happens. Right. We know that stuff happens that we would just prefer. Yeah, I mean, I fell and broke my ankle, right. Like I slipped on the ice.

Obviously something physically is wrong there, but there's a mental and emotional spiritual component to that, that some people fall down and break their ankle and they're cool and they just heal up quick and then there's other people get all revved up about it. They put more value on the physical injury than needs to be put on it like, oh, so and so left this out and that's why I fell and now I can't do this and blah,

Osteopathic Medicine and Whole-Body Healing 16:58

blah, blah, and it just, we go on this downward spiral again. It's like I need to take that deep breath and get that out of my chest. But be aware of when you're talking even like great. I'm talking about an example with somebody else, but I'm acting it out and I can feel it. So I just go, oh I just, I just said something that made me feel funny. So I'm gonna work to relax it. And part of the osteopathic profession is learning more about anatomy. So much about anatomy and physiology that you can walk in and put all of that down and then put your hands on someone's body and go body, where can I help you today?

But also it's about the awareness as a practitioner, you become innately aware of yourself and your patient. And one of the things that I learned through having Lyman Babesia as well as training as an osteopath is a lot of the stuff that our Lyme patients complain of as being too sensitive is actually our natural state of being. The difference is I had an experience where I got to learn that one. I, that's how my life was. I, as a four year old, I remember a four year old, I, I remember feeling earthworms crawling under the ground when I was standing barefoot.

So I was like, oh, I should be able to do that with my shoes on too. And then I could, and I could put my hands on the trees and you can actually feel sap running in trees. It's a little easier in early spring than it is in late fall, but you can do it. So all this stuff where you're like, you're noticing, I have a light over here that's bright. If I go to a suit, if I go to a store and there's bright lights and that, that make all that vibrating noise and crap. Like in the mall, the all the fluorescent crap drove me nuts.

And then I realized that that was just me being sensitive to the environment, which is normal, but I had the ability to turn the Rio sta down or up as I wanted. So now I can actually go, oh, that light is really abrasive to me. And I just turn and I just go, I notice it, I'm aware and I just turn it down, like not the light but my, my experience of it and I've practiced it and that's one of the gifts of osteopathy. And I think the other part too is, is I look at everything I do for a person, Darin, as I'm saying, there's an old school saying it says, find it, fix it, leave it alone, right? And the idea was what's wrong, address it and get the hell out of the way so that the body does not become reliant on the treatment or the doctor, the body be remains reliant on itself and you and your mental emotional state.

And what's beautiful is so when I see a patient, whether I'm prescribing a medicine I V I G low dose. Now, Traxson, you know, herbs, water breathing exercises, which we can talk about because that's one of the ways to open your nose for free. And just as a reminder, we did talk with Patrick McEwen, who is one of the foremost authorities on the betao Breathing method. And we talked specifically. So if you guys are interested in really diving deep into how and why it works and getting in experience of step by step, how someone with chronic illness can learn to do this technique in a way that is accessible to you. Look at our my interview with Patrick McEwen, but really Darin, I think the thing for me is I look at every single thing I do as I'm catalyzing and the idea of a catalyst is I'm not putting something new in the system that's supposed to be used up. I'm just pushing you over the edge a little to get the ball rolling again and then I want to get out of dodge and let your body do the work.

Now, we know in chronic infections, catalyzing with a antimicrobial herb or four or five or it might take 16 or 18 months, but I'm still using the mindset of your body is doing the work, right? And so then I remember like residency and they were all like, I went to my, um when you're in residency every year you get more and more responsibility, you know, and more autonomy at the same time. And so I saw somebody in the hospital, who had pneumonia, we treated him. They got better, changed him from I V antibiotics to oral. We sent him home and then they followed up with me in the office a couple of days later and all their and uh oh, I should say a couple of days after they finish their oral antibiotics, like four or five days later their symptoms are returning.

So I go, oh my God, what's going on with this person? I go to my supervisor and I say, well, so, and so's, was in the hospital, they stopped their antibiotics and now they're worse and they're like, all right. Well, what do you want to do? I go, well, I don't know. I mean, maybe we'll get another chest x-ray, we'll see what's going on and then they go, you know, and then I said, I mean, maybe change their antibiotics or maybe there's something else they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, they just had pneumonia.

You stopped the antibiotic. It came right back. What do you think they really have? I'm like, well, like, probably like pneumonia and they're like, they do just give them the same antibiotic for twice as long. And then they said, don't repeat the chest x-ray or any blood work because they're gonna have a delay in changing. And they would be irrelevant at the moment. I was like, wait a second here, wait a second. So I just talked to you last week about the person with Lyme disease who stopped their antibiotics and their symptoms all came back in four or five days.

And you told me they have post treatment Lyme syndrome or fibromyalgia. How do you have acute fibromyalgia? Two days after you stop an anti, it's like, makes no sense. So I, I kind of was like, really interested in, in that, kind of, that was that's modern medicine, right? But I also then started thinking about the pneumonia question. And I said, so I started, uh polling all the pulmonologists I knew in the critical care doctors. And then I started polling everybody. And I said, when you treat somebody with pneumonia, do you sterilize their lungs with your antibiotic?

And I have never, and I do not use that word off almost ever because you'll always find it. But I literally to this moment in time at the date of this recording, I have never spoken to and uh any fully licensed physician, Apr N or even a nurse who thinks that the IV, that I V or oral antibiotics get the job done. Every single person says we bring down the bacterial load until the immune system is strong enough again to do the work. I'm like, well, why aren't we allowed to do that with Lyme disease?

So anyway, to me, the osteopathic piece is we're not only just looking at the part that most people leave off, which is from the neck up the cranium. We're looking at how the body functions as a whole. And it also is a uniquely American style of medicine born and bred in the United States, not imported from anywhere where we say, let's introduce common sense. So still said, let's stop giving people stuff that's poison that is killing people. And oh by the way, let's do manipulation because it works.

And so they laughed at him. So he had to create his own profession, which he did. But the bottom line is, most osteopaths these days are just MD'S in, you know, like sheep's clothing, but true osteopaths are looking at how the body functions as a whole within its internal and external environment. And they're looking to help remove the impediments to healing, catalyze healing and let the person be in charge of their own healing and give the re not only the responsibility but the right and the privilege of healing back to the patient.

And that's the part. So in the, if you haven't seen a cranial osteopath, definitely go to cranial Academy 0.0 R G and look somebody up in your area. It's one of the er places where we can get you to see somebody who's potentially really good. But yeah, it's about optimizing. So if, if we go back to the physiology part and how the there's compliance in the brain and, and, and, and the, the, the brain, I keep saying the brain, the skull. So not everybody who hits their head needs to go have part of their skull removed to release the pressure. It really is the, the, the bones move a little bit. That's why we have sutures, there's compliance or, or, or flexibility in the bone themselves and there's this flow, this pumping movement that augments this glymphatic function and there's multiple different sort of flows you can feel in the brain.

And if somebody's got a muscle tightness that's holding their, you know, locking up some of the cranial sutures. So the key do you know? So it's stuck and it do the gears don't move. We can release that. We can also work with the fluids in the membrane. So there's a lot of connective tissue that's around the brain as a support and protective mechanism. You can work with tension there just like you can work with tension. Like if my shirt is all tight, I can iron it out, we can iron out your peck muscle.

We can also iron out the membranes in the brain. But I mean, all of that is so to me superficial like and I love doing it because it's like, you know, it's like basically the practitioner can be meditating, the patient can be meditating and the patients getting better and it's really cool because it's healing for everybody involved. But it's about getting back to the common sense and a and recognizing the body given the chance to get out of survival mode to get out a fight or flight will heal. And almost every osteopathic technique that's been studied has been shown to improve parasympathetic function and decrease sympathetic function. Some of it's through the vagus nerve, the other part too. Since I know we're gonna get here in a sec.

At some point, we talk a lot about the limbic system, everybody limbic retraining. Right. Well, one of the things you can do is, you can actually directly, well, indirectly, I guess. But you, with your hands on the head or other parts of the body, you can sense in and feel imbalances in different parts of the brain, including the structural part, like the, the actual brain substance. And we're not fooling our, we're not going like putting our hand in and moving it around but through the, just like a pencil and I have a pencil somewhere here.

But if I have my pencil, I can write and I can feel what's on the paper, I can do, I learn you. We teach osteopaths how to feel this. And I've had so many like all kinds of this is during my fellowship in, in school, but all kinds of psych medications over and over and over. Lots of trauma. Um, all kinds of stuff bothered her. And I just remember one day I've been treating her a couple of times and it was free for students to come to the clinic. So she just kept coming and nothing's changing. So I just sat down and I was like, what is going on here that's preventing her from healing.

And if you step back, I actually the Amygdala, which is uh there's 21 on either side of the brain, that's part of this hippocampal formation, which is a part of the, what everybody knows as the limbic system has a lot to do with storing fear, memory, and anger issues. And sort of the emotional, especially negative emotional reaction to in this situation. I was like, one side was like, super fired up. The other side was like dead as a doornail. I mean, a doorknob. I mean, it was like, so it was the weirdest thing because I just stopped saying this is and I hope everybody gets this from our summit.

Stop telling me your lyme or your Barton Neller acting up and tell me what's wrong. I was looking for a way to fix a problem. But I didn't, I wasn't asking, asking the right question. I was like, I can find some physical strain that's wrong and fix it and make her feel better. And this day, I just was like, so humbled. I was like, I'm making no progress. How can I help? What do you need from me today? And how many doctors ask the patient's body or their energetic system? How can I help you? And all of a sudden, I just felt this imbalance on one side to the other.

And I just said, got it all I know how to do with that is observe, there's an imbalance and just kind of give it a little bit of like mental, emotional energetic love to rebalance that when I got the imbalance and the energy if you will, then the structure shifted and said, oh, if you help hold it here, this will set up what needs to release it just like that probably 35 seconds. All of that changed took a big old deep breath and I didn't see her for like, eight weeks and I was like, I saw her in the hallway.

I'm like, what's going on? She's like, I don't know, I'm complete, I went away to Boston. I went here and there because we're in Maine and, and she's like, I, I haven't been to my therapist. My meds must be, I don't know what's going on ever since that treatment. Like her depression and her severe suicide alley and all this other shit almost went away and all it was was stepping back and being humble and saying, how can I help and listening for an answer that comes through the sensitivity that so much many of us are trying to piss off and get away from because we don't know how to handle it.

And this is one of the things so many osteopaths missed this. And I just love the fact that we can really just feel it and then make a difference. And so the cool part is you can learn how to feel stuff like that in yourself. It's not always as easy to be objective, right? So for me, I didn't give a crap like literally, and I sit down, I'm like, I tell my patients, I don't really care what's wrong with you or what the name is. We just need to find out so you can get better. So I don't care if it's lyme or mold or even if you have cancer, I mean, I don't want you to have any of those.

I just need to know what it is. But I've seen people die of metastatic cancer because they said their air hunger was the Bezos. So, one of the things and, and I know I'm kind of getting uh on my soapbox right now. But one of the reasons that both of us wanted to do this summit was to share with you the PETA the possibility of healing when you don't get attached to the label. And you just say, what is the symptom? What is the imbalance? Like so many of our speakers have talked about this ease, disease comes from dis ease and imbalance being there for too long.

And so we, you all have the ability to heal, right? I can't tell you you're all gonna heal 100%. I would love to be able to say that, but I'd be full of shit, you know, but you can make a substantial improvement in your current state of health, especially if you leave the labels behind it, you start to embrace what that sensitivity is. Do trainings like Dr. Darin and I do where you're learn, you learn to turn up or turn down the gain, so to speak on, on these, these kind of sensitivities, you know, because like literally, like if I were outside this, so I, I mean, I've had to train myself to not have the light bother me because it, I could totally notice, hey, there's a good shadow here or over here and there's a light coming over here.

But I, the light when I first started using a bright light there and was like, so overwhelming and then I just kind of put it in context and I go, oh, there's a light. There. It is amazing what our mindset and our minds are capable of. So it's a very, very, very long winded way of explaining what osteopor is. - Well, I got to confess, you know, I became a naturopathic doctor actually, because of osteopathic work, I was introduced to cranial psychotherapy, you know, almost 30 years ago. And uh it was, you know, one of these kind of life changing events and uh it was through a cranial psychotherapist that introduced me to acupuncture and Chinese medicine.

It was an acupuncturist that told me about naturopathic medicine. So I actually have my career to credit. And really since then, I've almost always had an osteopath on my team. And I'm, I'm fortunate where I live here in Southern California. I have an amazing osteopath. I see her every two weeks. And, you know, I think what's important for people who haven't experienced osteopathic work is a, it's very gentle, it's not like chiropractic work. There's generally not a lot of high velocity thrust and popping bones and it's, it's often working at a much more subtle level and understanding that, you know, that structure and function go hand in hand.

And so many of you have been, you know, watching this, who have been dealing with Lyme and tick borne illness for so long at some point, your structure changes and whether it's because you've been sitting too much, you've been bedridden or something in your nervous system is gone awry and therefore your neck tweaked or your backs tweaked, you know, all this over time kind of compounds. And so, so I love the combination of dealing with the structure of the body, the mental emotional aspect of the body. And then we can deal with the physiology of the body. You know, when we combine all that together, we really create this environment where again the body does what it's supposed to do and actually gets a chance to heal. - Yeah. And it's interesting, I'm as you're talking like, and we have human connection both emotionally and energetically but also direct touch. And we all know from the recent pandemic that hey, the more isolated you are or the more isolated you feel, the more you know, the worst things go, you know, it's, it's interesting too because like osteopathic work has taught me and, and it was funny that I didn't say the structure and function because that's the other big one, structure and function are integral related.

But so here's an example, I use a lot of, and I, and, and, and since we're talking about, like, you know, a little bit about survival and safety and, and we talked about parasympathetic and sympathetic. A little, a lot of us talk about um poly vagal theory. So our typical weight like the lympha, oh, the other thing about the glymphatic, it's really interesting is they were saying there's no true lymphatics. So they, then they found the glymphatic. They also found true lymphatics in the brain now too. So it's like we're learning more and more about your physiology and the way the body works all the time as technology catches up to what people like, Dr. Darin and I, you know, are talking to you about all the time, just like a lot of our research in the last 56 years online with meds and herbs and also persistence is catching up to clinical experience.

But so if we look at the nervous system, the old school way of looking at it was, you know, fight sympathetic is like your fight or flight, right? You're driving down the road, a little dog runs out in front of your car, you slam on the brakes, you avoid him thankfully, but your pupils are blown because you needed to be able to see everything, your heart's going like this and you're already sweating and you're like, all I did was go to get away from a dog and you're pouring with sweat. That's cool in when you're avoiding running over a doggy.

But if you live that way all the time, we talk about being stuck in this fight or flight. And that's chronic, sort of sympathetic hyper cortisol, hyper adrenaline state. The opposite of that. A lot of people talk about is parasympathetic. And we look at the parasympathetic like rest of rejuvenation in medical school, we learn feed and breed. So basically you feel safe enough and comfortable enough that you can eat food and then digest it or you can have intercourse and go to sleep. And so these are and that was,

Nervous System Regulation and Mindset 35:40

that's like a great way to learn it if you've never understood it before, probably not the best way to describe it. But, but the idea is there was like a balance beam, you know, we're like, oh, we're sympathetic and we get parasympathetic and we go back and forth and a lot of our chronic stress that comes with modern living gets us um stuck in this fight or flight. But the problem is it doesn't explain everything Darin. And so one of the things that we find about sympathetic and I love saber toothed tigers for whatever reason. Um So if I'm sitting around a campfire back in the day and a save or two tiger pops up over here and he's like, ah, you know, and that was like the most pathetic roar I've ever done.

But whatever he's like, you know, and it's like so fun. But, but you're all like, so you turn around and in a split second, you make one of two decision. Well, you make 31 of three decisions. One is I can run away and I can get away. The other one is I can turn around and fight him and I have a good chance of winning. Right? And those two are very sympathetic driven. Now, the other part though is what about if you don't think you can win anymore? So, run away, wins, beat them up and survive for another day means you win.

The problem is what if I don't think I can win like I that and what happened? You're like, so you're in, you get in a freeze state, which is also parasympathetic. But this has to do with myelinated and unmyelinated vagus nerve and all this fancy crap. The bottom line is a, it's, it's another part of your nervous system and this is at freeze state. So if fight flight or freeze, none of them are great to stay in. And then the problem is we're like, oh, I, because freeze makes you numb and withdrawn and it really prevents you from healing. It suppresses your immune system just like chronic stress does.

But we have a lot of people who are like, like me, like, no matter how sick I was, I was fighting very sympathetic. But if you're past that point, you don't have that energy and you're so sick you can't do a lot of times you get stuck in a freeze state and you're like, no matter what I do, I can't win. And then you see, you see so much in people, their voice does what I'm doing. Now, they start to dip their head and they all cocoon up. How the hell are you? If, if you couldn't, if you couldn't win when you thought you could win, how can you win? When you think when you're pretty much physiologically sure you can't win.

So what's interesting is there's all kinds of ways to get out of this. And this is the reason I wanted to talk about this for a sec. There's all kinds of programs that will help you do that and all of them have some level of value for you. But one of the things that's really interesting to me is a lot of people think that this means we're blaming this mindset on you and that's not what we're doing because you the in order to get out of the state, you have to be able to recognize facial ges uh into uh yeah, facial expression, gesture and intonation of the voice.

So you have to be able to recognize the cues that you are actually safe and you can go healed. The problem that I run into is several f one is that um a lot of people with lyme, we have brain scan evidence that brain that Lyme will lower the metabolism and the function and the areas of the brain that are responsible for you. Understanding, facial expressivity, understanding intonation and understanding gesture. So, so now you're like, wait Lyme caused it and being sick with lyme or anything for a long period of time caused it.

So now how do I get out of it? I must have to treat my lyme. Well, the problem with that is if you, you're just saying that the, the structure is the only thing. But if you go back to the structure and function, you go oh wait a second, I can in a non lyme way, address, I have the ability to address my nervous system and get it to recognize it safe. So I mentioned, hey, there's a lot of different, there's Gupta, there's Annie Hopper, DNRS, there's a, I use a lot of neurofeedback in our practice.

There's a lot of different approaches. I have a program for this as well. But the bottom line is you need to change your mindset and you need to focus on what you want your outcome to be. You wanna, you wanna be a and so many people are like, oh, I have to have a positive mindset. I have to just focus on it all day long. No, focus on it three or four times a day and just live the pro we don't wanna make it a sickness, having a positive mindset. But there is evidence that if you focus on what you want your life to look like, you're not gonna forget about how shitty it is in the moment if that's the case, but you, the more you every it's like your your phone.

If your phone's not working, rebooted, if your body and your mind aren't working reboot, it put a new operating system in that says I am healthy, see yourself in that place because you're not gonna forget. But the beauty of any of these different techniques, whether it's, you work with your osteopath, whether you work with a therapist, whether you do some sort of psychedelic journey with a proper guide, whether you're doing brain mapping and neurofeedback, you're doing Gupta D N R s uh any I I could just go on and on. There's don't get caught up on the, the names and the options, the bottom line is if you wake up in the morning, well, actually I started at bedtime Darin to close this piece out.

I write down three things that went well in my day, even if they're crappy. And the only thing I can think of is three lessons I'm gonna learn from how craptastic my day was. And then I write down three things that are gonna go well tomorrow and then I go to bed and then when I'm asleep, my conscious mind which says I'm not safe. I can't do that. I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy of healing. I'm not worthy of financial success or relationship success dissociates from the subconscious, which is now becomes the like the super conscious and now you're tapped into the universe, whatever that divinity, life, God thing is for you.

You get all of these really new ideas coming in and you wake up in the morning, you read the three things that were great for yesterday and the three things that are gonna be great today. And that's it. The end of the day, you do it again, about three or four days into it, you're gonna go holy shit. I've got 12 things to write down that went well today. Whereas at the beginning five days ago I couldn't. And it's just this really cool exercise. There's so many other ones to do, but it's, if you could give yourself no more than three minutes at night to do this and no more than 30 seconds to do it in the morning.

If you don't want to give yourself three minutes and 30 seconds, you don't want to get better. And what's really interesting is now, if I go back to the reason we're talking about this, I can then start to change the brain the way the brain functions by, you know, by putting in an energetic new structure or an energetic new function because the function is the way I'm thinking. So now I can actually start to heal the brain even if the lyme is not out of the brain. I can start to heal my frozen state or my fight or flight.

And the other thing is most people go back and forth between fight flight and freeze. They don't just like live in one. I mean, and you'll get a little parasympathetic, but you'll start to move yourself to more healing, parasympathetic. You'll start to actually heal the tissue and allow that tissue again. Going back to the antibiotic example, the tissue and the immune system and the nervous system will start to function more optimally. So now it will start to work with your antibiotics, with your herbs, with your homeopathy to get rid of the infections or the other toxins. And now you can take back control of healing rather than giving it to a bottle or a dropper or a shot.

But the thing is you got to spend 3.5 minutes. And if you really want to get better and supercharge it, you might want to actually spend five or 10 minutes a day on your healing. But it, but it's that powerful and that's that piece of structure and function where it is not just hit lyme over and over and over again. And yes, there are other toxins to look at, but really look at what you can do because um one of the things I know we talked about a minute, uh right before we hopped on there and this, I'm a little frustrated that we all talk about having parasites.

Left and right in Lyme. Some people do, but they shouldn't be as hard to pick up as everyone makes them out to be. I actually think that the be the worst parasite that most Lyme and Fr Lyme and friends patients are dealing with is actually Lyme disease because it's, it is really an en I I view it as an energetic parasite that will set up easily. Just as we talked about the physiology, a negative self talk loop, a stuck in illness loop that prevents you from optimizing self healing. It is not the actual bug.

That's the problem. It's the energetic blueprint of the bug interacting with what you think about the bug. That is the worst parasite. Because if you look at what a parasite does is it eats away the host. It takes its nourishment at the expense of the host. Stop feeding this fucking infection with negative thoughts and letting it win because you know the negative thoughts are there. But when you say it, you just rewind and change it. So anyway, like I don't wanna just keep going on and on, but it's so powerful when you in my personal story, I am was more than 70% better before I met the doctors that I needed to get the rest of the way better.

And I would never healed as quickly as I did, which was super quick. 4.5 years, After I met them and that was two years into me trying to figure crap out on my own. So it's like six years. But I've been better for over 12 years now. So all you people that you can't get better, anybody knows me. I go nuts. I'm active all the time. But it's like I never gave up on my dreams. I always said I will get there if I die trying, I would rather die trying to get to where I wanna be than die just by not by giving up.

And that's my, I was very blessed with that opinion that doesn't help in all aspects of life. And I've had to learn to dial it back in order to actually fully heal. But, but I just think it's so important, Darin that, that people listening, there are doctors and other providers who not only themselves have been sick and now been better for decades, but they have patients that they can help them do the same thing and talk to people who are successful. And if they're not talking to you about your mindset, you probably need to get somebody on your team who can help you with that as well.

- Well, I know this is a lot to unpackaged for everybody. We covered so much information, but it is, you know, this is why we put the summit on. It's just so important to understand there are so many layers of depth of having a chronic illness like Lyme disease. And if we focus entirely on the bug, we're missing so many opportunities to give your mind, body, spirit an opportunity to truly heal. And I'm so glad you pointed out all the things that you talked about because again, I know this is something other speakers haven't really talked about yet.

At least not to the depth that you did. But understanding again, there's so much possibility here and I'm gonna, you know, say it as a plug. But I mean, folks, this is something you guys are gonna want to own. You're gonna want to listen to all these talks over and over because again, there's so much great information on what Dr. Tom and everyone else who's part of the summit is sharing with you that there's gonna be these little tidbits you get from each speaker that can directly change your life today.

You don't need your doctor to do this. You don't necessarily need other people outside your world to make all these changes. And I'm like, yes, please have a good team of people to work with you to give you that extra guidance. But there's so much here you can do for yourself. And I just appreciate Dr. Tom for sharing all this information.

Practical Healing Tools and Closing Thoughts 47:48

I know you guys are gonna really benefit from taking this to heart. - Yeah, I'd agree. Darin and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to have the conversation with you. And, you know, just kind of go with the flow because it's so important that we heal. And, you know, one of the things that you're saying it's really important to own the things like the summit, I get little tidbits and I go back to a lot of the summits and the other educational programs I own and I don't get everything. The first time I get what I need when I'm watching it, what resonates with me and then later on, I'm like, oh, I remember Dr. Darin said this thing and I go back and I listen, you know, I mean, I even go back to some of our old Facebook lives and stuff and watch stuff because it's like, you know, it's so important and I, I was just remembering as you were saying that there's, I remember I took a private ski lesson one time. It's really hard to telemark ski.

It's almost impossible to find anybody. And the lady was like, good, but I was already better than her. And she picked up one little thing that literally every single day I go out skiing I think about. And it has improved my enjoyment of the sport that I love to do immensely because she said one thing that moved the needle for me. Now, I know that's not a medical thing. Although for me, that's part of my health optimization and maintaining program. It's different for other people, I'm sure. But I got one thing and then I got, I went and I listened to another lecture. I had another private with one other guy.

Same exact thing. So you're gonna pick up little things and you're gonna want to go back and refresh your memory, take your notes, do it. And then, you know, the other thing too is it's one of the reasons Darin I created the thrive with line blueprint program is like the same thing. Like all this is overwhelming and a lot of people have done the limbic retraining or listened to a bunch of some. It's like I've got more work and more questions and answers and I don't have enough time in the day to do it. So we, you know, we created that to give people that road map that walks them through this process and they can do it on their own or they can have us help hand, you know, hold their hand the whole way.

But really it is about optimizing. I my goal in life is to live my life every moment that I have of it to this my best ability. And five or 10 years ago, definitely 10 years ago when I was sick, if I had died and someone gave me an opportunity to say, do you have any regrets? I'd have been like regrets all over the place right now. I don't want to die because I love living. I love my family. I love my friends like you. I mean, I wouldn't, but if I were to die I'd be like, I don't really have any regrets, maybe minor things because I live my life every day to its fullest.

And I understand some days it means being more of a dad than a doctor. Some days it means being more of a ski bum or a mountain bike bum than even a dad or a husband. But I find a balance point in all of that. And my goal for each and every one of you is to want is to live your passion, to be able to experience like the joy in your heart that you truly have in there that you want to have come out. The, the there you are unique individual, there is no one ever before now or later going to be just exactly like you, I wanna see your light shine in this world.

And the only way to do that is to start living. I was talking with Aimie Apigian who's we've talked to for the summit and, you know, Aimie does a lot of trauma work. And one of the, the things I'd love to close with is she's like whenever I talk to you, the thing that I think that you're saying if you were to simplify all the junk, I just spouted out was the healing is in the living, right? And so my thing is don't wait till you're better because that time ain't never gonna come. If you start to live your life a little more today than maybe you did yesterday.

Meaning actively engaging in the things you want, you will start to see that snowball effect. That's where the secret and the law of attraction, the law of vibration and all this positive affirmation stuff works is when you take a step and you say yes to yourself, you can't say yes to your spouse, your kids, your friends, your team, whatever, whatever you're in fully until you say yes, 100% to your heal yourself. And by saying 100% yes to you is when you say 100% yes to your own health and healing.

So I hope there's been a lot of fun for you. I've had a blast. And as you can tell there's a reason I have a program that helps walk you through this because I could talk about this and it's, you know, but let's dial it in. Keep it simple and I'm just there and thanks so much for this has been so much fun. - I know. I know we could go on forever and ever. And uh there may be an opportunity after the summit for you folks to work with Dr. Tom and I, we're gonna have some great stuff for you. So tune in. Dr. Tom it's a pleasure being your co-host in this event. And I just thank everyone for tuning in.