The Missing Link In MCAS And Histamine Intolerance

Beth O’Hara, FN

Welcome back to the Reversing Mast Cell Activation and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I’m your host, Beth O’Hara, of Mast Cell 360. And I am really, really happy to have with us today, Alison Vickery. This is somebody whose blog I’ve followed and worked for quite a number of years. And I’m delighted that she’s going to share with us her method that she uses in her own practice and give us a whole nother perspective on mast cell activation syndrome and histamine intolerance. So let me tell you a little bit about her. Alison’s been working in the area of histamine intolerance and mast cell activation for 10 years, and she was first diagnosed with histamine intolerance after being prescribed Metformin. So this is a medication used for insulin resistance, but it blocks the histamine degrading enzyme, DAO, or diamine oxidase. Then, a series of severe adverse reactions to other medications saw her diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome, and she developed chronic fatigue and even acquired a brain injury from that medication. She has trained extensively over the past 10 years with some of the thought leaders in health restoration and recovered her health, and the person who’s influenced her the most is Dr. Klinghardt. She uses his ART testing in her practice along with functional health testing and tools, and she’s also an advocate for better prescribing practices, and she appeared in a governmental Australian health inquiry and her recommendations were adopted and implemented. And she’s really been instrumental in educating doctors on identifying medication errors. Welcome, Alison. It’s so wonderful to have you with us.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Thank you so much. I can’t believe we’ve not met before now. I’ve followed your work as well so it’s a real treat for me. And thank you for doing this summit because we need to be talking about these issues more.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Absolutely.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, yeah.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah. And we both have these personal stories with it-

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, absolutely.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Where we had our own problems and health issues and we recovered.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, and I see it almost as an awakening, actually. So the backstory of my story is that I was working in a public company in incredibly stressful environments, not looking after myself, not knowing how to look after myself. And I really didn’t know how to look after myself. And it took a series of adverse drug reactions, which actually took down my histamine system, for me to become awakened. And there were two very precise moments that can probably explain a lot of what people are about to hear. The first is I had the extremely good luck to meet a professor of immunology who was an expert in drug allergies, and he took one look at me and said, “You’re being poisoned.” I mean, I was bright pink. It wasn’t hard to miss. And he said to me, “You have to learn to keep yourself well without medication.” And I could literally hear myself saying, “What are you talking about? I’m sick.” 

Yet, what I was doing was making me sick. And look, I’m not against medication. I use medication, but that medication wasn’t right for me. And the penny dropped that I really didn’t know how to be healthy. So that was that. And I went, right, well, I’ve gotta learn how to keep myself healthy. So I sold my house, and I appreciate not everyone can do this, but by then I had a severe brain injury so I could do whatever I wanted. I wasn’t able to work. And I set my goal of getting myself healthy. And then about five or six years ago, I met Dr. Klinghardt. He came out to Australia and a friend of mine said, “Alison, you gotta go down and do his course.” And it literally took me about a month to reorganize my view of the world. So profound was his approach. Now, just to put it in perspective, I use anything that works. So what I’m presenting is very much hitting fairly harder Klinghardt view of the world. I’m incredibly grateful for his generosity and sharing. I can’t claim to have thought of all of this, but it’s certainly what I’ve practiced for the last five or so years. So I’m not against genetic analysis. I’m not against functional labs. I’m not against the way lots of people are working, but I just wanted to present a slightly different perspective.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I love that. Yeah.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, and so that’s my journey, really. And what I hope to do in the way I work is teach people how to take care of themselves, so, self-mastery.

Beth O’Hara, FN

We all need that.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

That’s right.

Beth O’Hara, FN

I also had no clue how to take care of myself when I got sick. And I think,, I see that over and over. And that’s a lot of what we do is show people, how do you love your body? How do you love yourself? How do you care for yourself in ways that not just not just we recover our health, but we can maintain our health going forward?

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely. Because what I realized in that moment is health is not a disease. And I was busy getting sick rather than busy getting better. And look, there are times where we have diseases. I’ve had my gallbladder out, it needed to come out, but there’s a lot that can happen before that that I can do to keep myself well. And that was my big aha moment, thanks to a professor of immunology, believe it or not.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Wonderful. Well, I’m excited to dig into what you’re gonna present. And I know that we have similar worldviews in terms of our big picture, and then we have some different applications. And I’m gonna have a lot of fun learning from you about what your applications are and what you’re finding working in your clinic with the population that you work with, and seeing where we can even maybe dovetail some of these different worlds. So let’s dive in. I know you’ve got some slides you’re gonna share with us, and we’ll get those pulled up.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, so as I said, one of the key realizations I had is that health is not a disease. That doesn’t mean that we can’t get diseases, but certainly there’s a lot that happens before that and a lot of healing possibilities. And the other realization I had was that health happens in an environment. And so a lot of what I’m gonna focus this talk on is the environment. And that doesn’t mean that other things don’t matter because they do and anything that works, works. But I think one of the key aha moments I had from Klinghardt was just the sheer importance of the environment. And as Klinghardt puts it, and I’m giving him full credit for this, there are really five types of environmental stressors. And so often, we are focused on the physical level, but in the remainder of this talk I’m going to predominantly focus on the other levels. And so this is Klinghardt’s view of the world, which is that there are five environments. And some of these may not mean very much at the moment, but hopefully as I go along, it will make more sense. So there’s the physical body on which all the levels sit. It is very important, but it is highly influenced by the other levels. 

So there’s the energy body. So I know you have people talking about the vagal nerve and how things communicate, so we can think of this as the wiring level. There’s the mental body, and by this, I mean our thoughts and beliefs or what is conscious to us. Then there’s the intuitive body, which is really looking at things like our unconscious beliefs, our inherited beliefs and archetypes, and personality, unconscious, of course. And the final level is the spiritual body. And this is none of my business. It is between the individual and the spirit. But I have seen blockages in my clients on all of these levels, particularly for example, the spiritual body, I’ve had a client whose father died and what brought her body back online was actually working on the spiritual body. And for her, that meant, amongst other things, mantras and chanting, and really re-engaging with the spiritual. I see blockages on the intuitive body and the mental body all the time, and definitely the energy body, as we will see. I’m sure you’ve got lots of people talking on the physical body so I’m just going to give a bit of anecdotal information on that level. So those are the five layers. And so I am going to be focusing a lot on the second, third and fourth, which I think will hopefully add some new information.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And Alison, I just wanna share that we see this a lot too. And I think just the languaging is, maybe just different ways of wording it, but we absolutely see this. And in some of the most sensitive people, when we’ve tried everything we normally try with what we have here is the energy body, and I have seen this in my studies in medical yoga therapy, but when we’ve tried working our ways through these, we’ve had many people have those spiritual blocks. And so I’m really excited that you’re gonna talk about that because it’s not something that we’re talking about enough, and it’s different than saying, it’s all in your head, which so many people have been told. It’s not that. It’s a level of ourselves we could think akin to biochemistry, but at a different … It’s hard to even find words for it. But there can be blockages, just like you can have an enzyme blockage, you can have a spiritual blockage, you can have a mental block, an emotional block and so on.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

And look, I think just to emphasize, we are not talking about what religion you believe in. This isn’t about religion, it’s about a connection to the grace and mystery of life and something bigger than yourself. And I think there’s some really amazing work being done by people like Joe Dispenza with brain scans, showing how having a connection, and we’re about to traverse into polyvagal theory, which we are definitely in on these levels 100%, we’ll link to polyvagal theory shortly, showing the change in our chemistry as a result of having a spiritual life. For some people, it’s walking in nature. For some, it’s having a dialogue with a spiritual body. For some it’s even yoga, or it’s really meaningful meditation. I often find that teaching people awe and wonder can be a portal through which you can access your spiritual connection. And so that’s like a tit-bit I’d like to throw out there. And I find that teaching people awe and wonder can really open up the understanding that we can change our lower levels through that level. Yeah, so I find that often if things aren’t working, we need to stand back, both as people and practitioners. And this is where working with the practitioner’s really helpful. Because a good practitioner will be lovingly observing what level is playing out and ask, what level is this really happening on? Bearing in mind that, as we will shortly see, the spiritual intuitive and mental body flows down to the energy body, which I will show in a second, and flows downwards. So one of the things I like to say to my clients, and look, this is oversimplifying it, is there are five levels of healing and four of them are non-physical, and arguably have a emotional component. And we are emotional beings, and to deny that is to do us an injustice, a grave injustice.

Beth O’Hara, FN

It makes so much sense to me, Alison. And something that I’ve been trying to find ways to communicate is the ways that we live in the world now are not congruent with who we are as truly animals of nature, where we walk on the earth, we’re in connection with the earth, we’re in connection with all of the beings. And in living in rubber-soled shoes and houses and having Internet, as many wonderful things as that’s brought, we’ve lost pieces of ourselves. And a big part of what we’re doing in the healing is regaining some of who we truly are, which is so much bigger than what we think. And I often ask people to, and I’ve talked about forest bathing. I’ll ask people to lie on the earth. I’ll ask people to get back in connection with those rhythms. And there’s something that happens with that that’s essential for us to be in optimal health and-

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

We’re part of the world. We are part, we are not separate, we are part of something much bigger than ourselves. Now, I’m a spiritual person, I’m not a religious person, but I absolutely know that to be true.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yes, and we talk about nature like it’s this thing over there, like we’re not part of it, but we are. We are nature. We’re one with nature. And we’ve done this twisting of it. And that’s part of it in terms of this bigger scale of what’s happening with these chronic illnesses is that it’s not about what happened to me, it’s about what’s happening in the world that’s shifting us. And then we have to get back to some of our true nature. And I’ve noticed again and again, Alison, that people that have this connection to something bigger themselves, however they frame it, they get through better and they heal faster and it gives us the fortitude and the strength to make the journey. This is not an easy journey. It’s not a journey for the faint of heart.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

So I first learned about the importance of the non-physical levels from two clients that came to me at the identical time who tested with the identical infections, their ART test couldn’t have been more similar if it tried. One came to me saying, “I’ve got this trauma in my life and I want to do work on it.” And the other, actually the client I was talking about before whose father had just died and she was still grieving, she wasn’t ready to do the deeper emotional work, the first client got better in half the time.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Mm-hmm.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

I’ve got clients who, we don’t even go near the physical body to begin with, that it’s quite clear that there is a trauma blocking them usually on the, well, I often think the mental body and intuitive body go together ’cause a lot of trauma and our response to it can be inherited. And I’ve seen people come alive before my eyes simply by doing mental body work. I literally see, they come to me gray and lifeless, almost, and burdened by their predicament, and I literally see them just come alive. So the moral of the story, particular for practitioners, if clients can find a practitioner to work with, I’ll cover the benefits of practitioner in my talk, but lovingly observing someone and trying to work out which level is playing out before your eyes allows us to have the greatest service to our clients. And it may not be on the physical body at all. In fact, I think I will show you some data on some of my clients that would suggest that it’s flowing down. 

So yes, there are relevant physical issues, but we need to love ourselves, the whole person, and see the whole person is what I learned from Klinghardt, what I continue to learn. So just moving on, just to put this in some context, what I’m about to speak about is very much cell danger response territory. And I know you’ve got other people speaking on that, but I just want to really say that what I’m about to talk about and what Klinghardt teaches is very much in line with that theory. The slight difference is that I’m talking about the autonomic nervous system as a whole, which is a slightly bigger concept than the vagal nerve, but as we’ll be about to see, the vagal nerve is integral. And so I’ll also talk shortly about supplements that I use for mast cell activation when that’s ready. And what you’ll see is that it is very much based on the cell danger response theory that Naviaux, can’t say that name.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Naviaux, yeah.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

I’ve got a brain injury, sorry. And what we’re also going to see is the proliferation of pyrroles, methylation, acetyl defects and other things, which, for the record, are reversible. So they’re-

Beth O’Hara, FN

Absolutely.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Response.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Beautiful.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

So I just want to make that point that I’m totally on board with cell danger response. I’ll leave that to others to explain, but I want to put that in that context.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I just wanna very briefly for people if it’s the first time they’ve seen this, this is a groundbreaking model that redefined how we look at chronic illness on these various different levels. And we’re looking at chronic illness develops when there’s an overwhelm of stressors, traumas, it describes pathogens, chemicals, and then the body shifts into the survival response, we get all these biochemical changes, but we have to unwind it by feeling deeply safe, all the way through the system, down to the cellular level. We’re communicating that through the nervous system. And then there’s a whole talk by Eric Gordon on cell danger response if you wanna dive more deeply into the biochemistry of what this is.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Beautiful, yeah. And I really recommend people do look at that. And I think one of the main takeaways is that our body is doing its very best to protect us and keep us safe. And one of the other really important points just as we move off this slide, is that the immune function is under the control of the autonomic nervous system. So-

Beth O’Hara, FN

Absolutely. And what you said is so important because I know when I was extremely ill, I felt like my body betrayed me, and I hear that again and again and again from other people as well. And it was learning that, oh, my body did not betray me, it was protecting me.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And if I hadn’t had those responses, honestly, I probably wouldn’t have survived.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, I absolutely know that our body is working hard to protect us. And that’s probably another talk, but I do get clients that have maybe been to some of the leading researchers and doctors being diagnosed with the syndrome, when you run their food tests, they’re reacting to everything. But they go, I really believe that my body is doing this for a reason. And that’s a really good starting point.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And that’s another place of safety. It keeps coming back to this deep sense of safety that we’re talking about in this whole summit. If I see my body as an enemy, that’s not a safe place to be in. If I see my body as protecting me, and then there’s this whole other layer of seeing my body not as separate, but as me. And so it’s really, I’m protecting myself. Even just talking about it, there’s a shift into safety with that.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah. It’s a really important point. I absolutely know that my body is working hard to protect me. And I absolutely know that my body has the most enormous capacity to heal and regenerate itself. I mean, we spoke about the brain injury. At the moment when that first happened, I couldn’t speak in a full sentence, I couldn’t remember where I parked my car. And look at me, I’m sitting here speaking to you. My working memory is affected, which as I used to be a finance director, adding up numbers, I can’t add up numbers anymore. And I’m not really upset about it to be honest. And yet, my body has had this tremendous capacity to heal and I absolutely know that to be true. And one of the things I really try to do with clients is get that experience pretty quickly of them realizing that the body has the capacity to change, even if it is changing our brain state with awe and wonder or self-compassion, is something I often start with. And then the minute a client has had that experience, it’s very easy to move forward from there.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Lovely.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah. So a lot of working in the environment is about shifting approach from trying to control biochemical reactions to restoring balance. So I believe that symptoms or even syndromes or extreme symptoms are just the boat rocking, trying to restore balance. And what I absolutely know is that if you start removing stressors, including stress, the boat can return to a place of balance and be healthy. So I just see symptoms or even syndromes as the boat or the body can still restore balance, it’s just struggling under strong winds or rough seas to correct itself. Disease is when the cell stops functioning completely, that is not what mast cell activation is. So it’s all about balance.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And this really speaks to that, people get so stuck into, I have this CBS mutation, I’ll never be able to do sulfur. Or, I have these MTH-04 variants, I can’t methylate. And I hear that all the time. But we see these amazing epigenetic changes that happen as people are healing. And I have, for example, pretty significant variants in my heme pathway that caused acute intermittent porphyria for me, or that contributed, that played a role, but I don’t have it anymore. I don’t have those attacks. And the only thing I ever noticed is if I’m at a altitude for a while, I need a little more carbs, and that’s it. And I used to have severe attacks on a daily basis. Frightening. So I just love that we’re bringing a lot more emphasis and attention to these areas that have been not highlighted enough, not discussed enough.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

I totally agree with you, because I’ve had people that come to me with all their genetics run. But the question is, why? Sometimes that’s coming, what often goes wrong, and I will cover this shortly, is fear-based approaches, which do not help. And they’re subtle. Something’s wrong with me, is the underlying belief. Something is wrong with me genetically. Something is wrong with me so I need a medication. Now, maybe you do, I’m not saying you don’t, because if you have a disease then that is where the medical model belongs. But I think it’s really important to understand that maybe the unconscious thing playing out here is, something’s really wrong with me. And I absolutely know that the environment pulls the trigger.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

I’ve seen pyrroles reversed. I’ve seen a friend of mine that tells the most amazing story, he’s trained as well, about a child not being able to talk and doing emotional work and the child start talking. So we’ve always gotta be asking, what is pulling the trigger here? Not what the downstream effects are, which might be genetic issues, but, why? And the why is that something’s wrong with me?

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah, we’re on the exact same page. And I think of the genetics as being just a blueprint that when we start to get these domino effects, certain things will be highlighted, and that’s where we get these different expressions of symptoms. But other than we have those super rare, true genetic diseases, and those do exist, but what we’re talking about in functional genetics is all really about the expression level. And what we don’t talk about enough either is that these genetic variants, we look a lot at the downside of them, but there’s a lot of upsides as well. They can be protective. I have FUT2 variants, well, sure, that can affect gut lining, and I have only in my life ever had a stomach flu, maybe twice. It’s very protective against stomach flu for whatever reason. But it’s not like they’re all negative. It’s just different genetics.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Well, and we need to come back to, why did our genes alter? And it was always for some sort of additional protective mechanism. But I could not agree more that, so I’ll give you quite a personal example, which is, I ran a notes test on myself and I had almost genetic levels of mutation. I mean, a notes test is one way, it’s pretty good to work out whether it’s genetic or it’s environmental.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So you have some of those really extremely high markers.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah. So we’re looking for, genetic things, always for me, extreme. Extreme cholesterol, most cholesterol’s not genetic, extreme mitochondrial dysfunctions, extreme presentations of things. And I’ve completely restored my mitochondria. So if, extreme things, I think, for me, if I’m confident it is genetic, I’ll definitely go down that pathway. But my approach, failing that, is to at least start with the least invasive, let’s see what’s happening in the environment, why is this happening? And move forward from there.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And there’s this whole model of, just to recap, that it’s not that there’s something wrong with me, it’s what’s happened in this survival, in this protection of myself, and then how are we going to restore the balance?

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely, yeah. What is my body trying to protect me from? Is the question. And small changes. It’s not big things, we don’t need to completely reorganize our life-

Beth O’Hara, FN

Will you just say that one more time? That was such an important question. What’s-

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

I can’t remember.

Beth O’Hara, FN

What’s my body trying trying to protect me from?

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

What is my body trying to protect me from?

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yes.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

The body is always working hard to protect us. It is doing this from a position of wisdom and love for us. And just to reinforce, it’s often small, subtle changes is all that’s needed. We’re not talking about massive things. It’s usually simple things that can make a big difference and bring genetics on board. That’s my experience anyway. So I think we need a robust autonomic nervous system, which vagal nerve is part of that, in order to be healthy. And I just wanted to share a few client insights ’cause I thought this might be broadly helpful. So I see histamine intolerance and mast cell activation on a continuum. And I do have a free e-course that it goes into this in a bit more explanation and I don’t wanna get bogged down in it, because I do have a lot more detail and I wanna focus on the environmental aspects. But it broadly comes down to having a leaky gut, having auto-immunity, or having something called blocked regulation, which is all about the body’s ability to bear the stressors. So let’s look at blocked regulation. Now, this is something Klinghardt does, which I think is really just helpful because it certainly points me as to what I need to focus on. And I’ve just done an analysis of my last 40 clients, I got sick of doing the analysis so I stopped there. I was hoping to get to 50, 50 sounded like a better number. But anyway-

Beth O’Hara, FN

Just for people who may not be familiar with this word, regulation, we’re talking about blocked nervous system regulations.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Autonomic nervous system-

Beth O’Hara, FN

So it’s gonna show up in ways like people having trouble adapting to stress, feeling revved up and then having trouble coming back down, can be temperature control issues where you’re cold all the time, you’re hot all the time, or you go back and forth. So these are some examples. Sleep issues, anxiety.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

But also idiosyncratic symptoms. So I’ve got some examples that we will come to, which I’ll talk through, but they include things like clients having infections down one side of their body but not the other, and not being able to clear it. Clients taking supplements and starting to cry profusely, or eyes watering profusely. These are regulation communication. The autonomic nervous system is obviously about the brain communicating with the nervous system and then communicating with the organs. Migraines, neuropathy, all sorts of things. And I will go through what I see the most. We’re talking about symptoms of often being far removed from the underlying cause and electrical wiring issues, is the way I see it.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Just starting down these paths, these types of things.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely, yeah. So in histamine tolerance world, we often talk about the bucket, the bucket getting full. And so we can think of blocked regulation also as the bucket being full. There’s lots of other things happening, but what is the assault that is too great for the autonomic nervous system to adapt to? Okay, so anything that exceeds the capacity of our body to regulate in that moment can block the whole communication. I’m not sure if that’s clear. It is a fairly unique concept, but it’s very valuable because it also points me often to where we need to start in order to start to have the body communicating, including the immune system, in an appropriate manner. And my clients are whoever have found me, I’m not suggesting this representative of the mast cell community or whatever. 

Most of my clients are now in the mast cell area, histamine intolerance is significantly easier. So 37.5 of them, although they had a lot of stressors that were activating their immune system, were not in blocked regulation. So, toxicity, which we’ll see how that comes about, extreme inflammatory events to the cell. So I see both COV!D and retroviruses in that same picture, it’s an extreme cellular inflammatory event. And then, really, the leaky gut, small intestine and Lyme and Co, we’re are now very much in the vagal nerve territory, or at least that’s the way I see these. We know that certain Lyme and Co love hanging out in the vagal nerve, and both the small intestine infections of which it could be anything, it could be parasites, bacteria, fungus, it could be anything, and change in the gut/brain communication, scream vagal nerve type issues. So does that make sense?

Beth O’Hara, FN

Oh, absolutely.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, and so often the very first thing I do when I’m starting to work on the physical level and with supplements and it may not be the first thing I do, is try and get them out of blocked regulation so I can get their immune system more in the game, if that makes sense.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And if this is somebody’s first video that they’re watching this summit, and we talked about this over and over and over, but the mast cells, the immune system, is interwoven with the nervous system. We shouldn’t even really be talking about them as separate systems. And mast cells are the interface between the nervous system, the immune system, and they line every nerve sheath, every nerve ending, there’s continual crosstalk. So if you wanna calm those mast cells down, you’ve gotta enter some point, for people with complex cases, maybe if they’re really easy, they don’t have to do this, but most people both of us work with, we’ve gotta enter through the nervous system.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely. And that is the gift, for example, of Klinghardt, of emphasizing that the missing link here is that health does not happen without an autonomic nervous system, which is very much run by those upper levels that we are talking about. What we think, what we believe, and so on.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And we’re back to communicating safety. Our autonomic nervous system is gonna be monitoring safety or danger, safety or danger.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, and an interesting thing which we’ll come onto shortly is that our nervous system is scanning for even perceived stress. It doesn’t know the difference between what we are thinking, like, something’s really wrong with me, something’s really wrong with me, our nervous system’s gonna go, oh, my God, I better send out the troops just in case where they’re needed.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I know we’re the same with trauma, when we’re telling the trauma story. It’s just like it’s happening again.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, exactly. So this is just a quick look at what my clients, what resonances of things they had and whether it was causing an autoimmune reaction or just an immune reaction. And I don’t wanna linger on this unless you have questions. Oh, look at that Bartonella number. I mean, I am seeing an epidemic of Bartonella.

Beth O’Hara, FN

We do too.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

The relevance of that is you have the leaky sleakys, gut and brain. It hangs out in the vagal nerve, you can have real boulders in your lymphatics. But the most underdiagnosed things that I see are Bartonella and retroviruses. And the importance of that is you can do all the gut work you like but you won’t clear Bartonella until that’s treated. And often I find if people come to me with SIBO and you do all the relevant treatments, but it doesn’t clear. And the reason it doesn’t clear, I’ve had people, it’s actually gone up rather down, and then you check retroviruses and bingo. Treat the retro viruses and then you can treat small-

Beth O’Hara, FN

Interesting. And I think this is where we probably have a little bit of being on different sides of the world. We see a ton of Bartonella, and we see a huge amount of microtoxins and I think we have major building issues here. And so those are our top two. But it’s quite interesting to see what you’re seeing there in Australia with a different population, different environment.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah. Obviously a lot of what’s happening here is the Bartonella is driving a lot of the gut stuff, at least in my population. I mean, if you’ve got leaky gut, you’re gonna have bacteria. Biofilms is a huge issue, often overlooked, and you’re gonna have parasites and you’re gonna have candida, you’ve got heavy metals, got lots of heavy metals for reasons we’re about to see, so of course you’re gonna have candida. Yeah. So I think that’s really what the driving point that … And of course some clients come to us, it’s easy. They’re just in that leaky gut category where it’s an environment causing leaky gut. But most of my clients, at least, are coming in the autoimmune or blocked regulation phase. But yeah, so two key takeaways are Bartonella and retroviruses are just, at least, epidemic. Also, just something worth pointing out is that I get a lot of clients that know their gluten intolerant, but haven’t excluded gluten properly. And I mean, they’ve done home order, but they’re eating chips from a fast food place and getting gluten-

Beth O’Hara, FN

Fried in the same fryer. I’m extremely careful, but I retested my antibodies after being off of gluten for many years and they were still sky high, and I realized I was going to a Thai place and getting rice noodles and I finally figured out they were boiling it in the same plot as the wheat noodles.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, yeah.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And it was keeping me inflamed.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

So it’s interesting to me that yes, foods can be inflammatory, but the one that I see causing autoimmunity or blocking people is gluten. And not-

Beth O’Hara, FN

Maybe some of it’s so high in glyphosate.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Glyphosate’s a huge problem in Australia.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah, it is here too.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Crazy. So one of the things we noticed was that quite a few people were in blocked regulation because of toxins. And one of the key things is really that most of my clients, at least 87.5%, have detoxification defects. Now, this isn’t the full, there may be other things blocking it, but these are just the ones I see. So 44.5% had pyrroles, which we know is linked to mast cell issues. But just a bit of a, it’s probably higher than that because I haven’t been testing pyrroles if people have COV!D. And what I’m increasingly seeing now is lots of people having COV!D infections, whether they know it or not, with minor symptoms. Acetylation pathway defects is a bigger issue than methylation. But I guess one of the real takeaways is also that if you’re, as a practitioner and noticing detoxification defects even on a blood test, we need to be thinking about liver flukes. 

And so in the Klinghardt world, and I will shortly bring up a slide that reinforces this, the infections are moving into the place of where the toxins are accumulated. Usually either the lungs, so something we are breathing in, but much more commonly in the liver and bowel ducts. And they’re moving there to absorb toxins, but in doing so, preventing bile from flowing and things from happening. Now, obviously they are more active around new moon and full moon. And I treat the liver flukes and lung flukes with the same protocol, so it doesn’t really matter which. So particularly if people are losing a lot of sleep around new moon and full moon, and waking up in that liver time, have had a history of detoxification defects, then we really need to be thinking about liver flukes and lung flukes.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And just for people who aren’t familiar with the parasites, there is a strong relationship with activity with new moon and full moon. And that’s what you’re talking about with this increase in symptoms. And it’s interesting is again, population differences. We don’t see a lot of that. But I’m hearing that you do.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

No, no, no. Yeah, half my clients are American.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah. I mean, I work with people all over the world, but it is not an exception, it’s a rule. Something to actively consider.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Interesting.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah, and so it’s difficult, without testing, we can pick it up. Quite often if people have had ultrasounds, they may be told there’s something happening, and the medical world don’t think about this phenomena, but as I said, with people who are poor detoxifiers or road sleep, back to liver with me, it is a rule, not an exception. At least that’s what I see.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

And Klinghardt and Scott, BetterHealthGuy, have written a really good paper on pyrroles and how it changes. It’s totally reversible. Their paper is written in the context of Lyme disease, but it is not specific to Lyme disease. Emotional trauma, any trauma, physically, structurally, emotionally, can cause pyrroles. And that’s part of that cell danger adaptation and a lot of the nutrients. So pyrroles, for those who are listening, is simply, very simply, that we need much more zinc and B6 than the average person to end up with the same amount. And the importance of that is that it’s crucial, those nutrients are crucial for detoxification. They’re crucial for DOA enzymes. They’re crucial for just about every cell in the body. And Klinghardt has observed that it is needed for mast cell stabilization.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And we see a lot of pyrroles as well.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah. It’s highly underdiagnosed in people that aren’t looking out for it. Okay. So now let’s talk about the elephant in the room. So as you can see, 95% of my client base have something that I would consider extreme trauma. And on top of this is often things they haven’t resolved that still have degree of emotional charge for them. And the only two people that didn’t were actually children of clients that were born with in utero infections so I just didn’t count them. So as we can see, violence towards the person, witnessing violence, emotional abuse, lots of personality disorder type stuff, their parents being alcoholics, or other things like war, death, pretty extreme events. And I see it not only as unresolved in their lifetime, but inter-generationally. So even if we think about the Holocaust, I mean, I think most of us hopefully know someone who’s Jewish, whose family have been greatly affected inter-generationally. And it’s not just the Holocaust. It’s something called vanishing twins, where you were one of a twin and the other twin was lost, stillbirths. All sorts of things. Anything that the ancestors have not resolved can be unconsciously inherited and beautifully resolved in our lifetime, making us a healer, not only of ourselves, but future generations.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Absolutely. And this has been well-documented. This isn’t woo-woo stuff. So in the study that I did, I did my master’s in this area and my research was in the psychoneuroimmunology. There’s study after study after study showing these genetic expression changes, but also mitochondrial function changes that could be tracked. And here we see a lot with civil war generational trauma being passed down. So many immigrants. I know the same there, and you’re working globally. And a trail of tears and the Native Americans. We live in this traumatized society and we live in this traumatized world. And then we think about these last two years, we have this huge, massive global trauma from that.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely. And look, just to reinforce this beautiful, just on two levels. There’s a beautiful study and it was of genetically identical twins, both of whom were 40, one of whom had had a lot of trauma in her life and looked dramatically older, and one who hadn’t had the same traumatic events. But I guess more importantly, and to reinforce your point, ’cause this might sound like a lot of woo-woo, and you don’t even have to believe me, you just need to deal with what’s happening in your life. But I actually had a detailed conversation with one of Australia’s top forensic psychiatrists about, does the medical profession currently believe that you can inherit in utero trauma? Yes. Now, this is someone who is so far into the medical system, is not into the woo-woo alternative world. And for those that are really interested in exploring this further, I always recommend people start exploring themselves first, but there’s a really good book called It Didn’t Start With Me or, It Didn’t Start With Me.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yep

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

That gives lots of stories. But I’ve had the privilege of working with someone who’s German and someone who’s Norwegian, both traumatized by war, and they can see the patterns and how that’s played out in future generations. And they’ve made a decision that they will be the healers within their family and for future generations.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah, which is beautiful work in itself to do that we all can do. And there’s also very well-documented research that in people with chronic illness, there’s a much higher incident of trauma than the general population. We see that in our clinic, you’ve got the numbers right here. It’s rare for me to have anybody come through who doesn’t have trauma.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely. And I think for the clinicians that may be listening to this, I include that in my intake, and I’m shocked at how many people have never had that discussion and actually welcome it. Now, obviously if people aren’t prepared to go there, they’re not going to be my client. But I have lots of clients that have had things happen to them that have never had a discussion with anyone about it. And it’s not difficult to resolve. Because for me, trauma is not about the story, it is about what your body’s made of it, where it’s storing it, how it’s affecting your autonomic nervous system. And fortunately, that’s easy to resolve in somatic-based therapy.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And the best way to resolve it ’cause talk therapy has been shown not to be effective.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Only way to resolve it. I’ve seen great, great things with EFT in the hands of a highly experienced practitioner. I love Internal Family Systems, I’ve seen great results with that. I love Family Constellations. I have someone who actually trained with the founder and has got 25 years experience and is just … So you can resolve these things in one session and there’s no tissues or Kleenexes involved, it’s quite a visceral somatic resolution. And there’s lots of ways of working. I just work based on practitioners that have the experience. So the importance of, and the relationship between emotions and trauma and illness, and really seeing ourselves as whole people, is that we know throughout testing that emotions target specific organs, so they interfere with that organ function. So anything that we unconsciously don’t process, which we all do, let’s face it, can go to a specific organ and I will give you some examples shortly, and that then can cause detoxification effects. So heavy metals can accumulate, infections accumulate where the heavy metals are, and then the detoxification organs become overwhelmed. 

So we’ve got this stacking of, underneath the infections that are there to be helpful, or maybe not, but helpful, the toxins and underneath the toxins can be blocked emotions. Not always, but we need to consider that as an option. And this is a whole body approach, this is saying what’s really going on here. And I will give some examples shortly. So I really drive an individualized approach. I may or may not be working on the physical level, I may not even go to the physical level for three months, and that person may dramatically improve. One of the other things I’m trying to do is addressing as many stressors at once. Like if we are thinking about trying to resolve balance, we are trying to remove as many stressors as we can. Now, that doesn’t mean we are addressing everything at once, but we are certainly addressing as much as we can. So when I did my functional training, you start with minerals, you then do the gut, you do this, you do that, and you do it in a sequence, that may or may not work or be in the best interest of the client. So the concept of the autonomic nervous system is working on everything as much as the body will bear. If the body doesn’t bear it, it’s not a priority for the body and we need to listen to that. Okay, so let’s get to the addressing environment. So very much my view of the world is that the top three levels fit with the polyvagal theory, and I’m not sure if you’ve got someone talking on that, but-

Beth O’Hara, FN

Mm-hmm.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah. So this fits within the polyvagal modality. And both the mental, intuitive and spiritual level, we know that as trauma can interfere with those connections with ourselves, with others, the world around us and the spiritual, and as we resolve that trauma, we almost spiral up, and our emotions, our behavior, our relationships can just change by virtue of addressing that stressor. So very much the mental, intuitive and spiritual level have a very heavy polyvagal trauma approach. And I’m sure we’ve all had experiences where we’re in the flow of things, we feel happy, things are fantastic, we are enjoying the company of others, and other times where we wanna be left alone. And the only difference between those, in my world, is trauma or an unconscious belief blocking those levels. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but that’s the way I see those levels with trauma, working on that mental, intuitive and spiritual level being the key and resolving any trauma. And trauma, for me, is simply an unconscious belief or unprocessed trauma that is blocking our body from functioning. 

So something I think is really important just to focus on is, because we are working on an autonomic nervous system level, is fear-based interventions make things worse. I’ve had clients who, when COV!D started, they started Googling all sorts of statistics, had a huge increase in their symptoms, threw in a whole bunch of supplements, nothing worked. And the only prescription I gave them was to flood their brain with pleasure. And so I think particularly as clinicians, the therapeutic relationship is key. My role with a client is not so much instructional, but anchoring them in their parasympathetic system, modulate, helping them modulate, role-modeling, storytelling, anything to help move them back and anchor them in their autonomic nervous system. And I had a beautiful example of this, I’ll just share very quickly ’cause I’m conscious of time. I’ve got a client with autonomic nervous system dysfunction who said to me, “I was in bed all day before we had our group session. And I just didn’t realize how important connection was to me and to anchoring myself.”

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

So as clinicians, we need to really take our role as not being the experts, but really fostering and actively working that therapeutic relationship.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And we’re social beings. So that’s, again, a sense of safety is connection.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Yeah. So quite a few of my colleagues judge people if they haven’t done something or set harsh goals. This is not what we are talking about here. My clients are highly motivated to get better and they need a judgment-free, loving observer that is gently guiding them. What I find, also just quickly, is I am not bringing up things I am seeing until that client is bringing them up with me. There’s no judgment here, but there is a shepherding role. So we as clinicians need to be clear that if our role is to restore the autonomic nervous system, we are part of that dynamic. So I’m just going to, I’ve really gone over this in some detail, but the polyvagal theory explains very much how trauma can interfere with the autonomic nervous system. And this is a really clear example of, which is a beautiful example of, I had a client that had long-term issues with elimination organs, with being constipated and bioflow and everything else. 

And she had this weird thing where whenever she used binders or tried to even put in at one dose Bartonella, she started having idiosyncratic reactions, specifically, her eyes started watering profusely, not just a little bit, a lot. And the client was very observed. It was influenced by emotional stress. And we ended up identifying that it was unresolved guilt that she had actually inherited from her mother that was affecting her kidneys and adrenals. So this is an example of how unresolved issues can affect people. And when we’ve got these idiosyncratic reactions, it’s always wiring. It’s always wiring. It’s never the clients, it’s always the wiring.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Well, everything is connected by the nervous system, all the organs, everything. Yeah, so it makes perfect sense.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

And so we’ve discussed trauma in some detail, but I just wanted to discuss other things that can interfere, there’s lots of them, but other things that can interfere with how the body communicates. These are just things I see quite frequently. But dental, about 20% of my clients had dental issues affecting with the nerve flow. It can be infections, it can be just structure of the mouth or TMJ. Anything infected here is, tonsils, sinus, teeth, is likely interfering with regulation. Scars, not all scars, I don’t see this all the time, but I do see it because our skin has sympathetic nerves all over it. And I have seen scars that can cause limbic kindling. And obviously, just very quickly, more of the vagal nerve territory where we saw this blocking right from the start, where small intestinal infections, vagus nerve infections, of which Bartonella is infamous, and leaky gut and brain can all bring about that disconnection. 

So I just want to emphasize that it’s not just trauma, we just need to be always asking, why? Particularly when there’s idiosyncratic things happening, you know it’s a wiring issue. So just very quickly, 20% of my clients have dental issues contributing. And I had a client that had infections down one whole side of her body that just weren’t clearing. And we identified a TMJ issue. And this was addressed with a SOMA plate, and we used a dentist that does kinesiology testing to make sure he’s got the balance right. And I think that’s always a good guide when you’re working with the autonomic nervous system. And also did some cranial sacral. And all of her infections cleared. So this is just a really quick example of, when things aren’t just working, we’ve gotta think about what is interfering with our body’s innate ability. Here is another. Tonsils. So clients that had their tonsils out, but clearly had a scar there. 

Lab tests, and this was the Neural Zoomer by Vibrant America, showed a strep infection in the brain triggered by dairy, which we know strep, there’s a dairy connection. There were no symptoms of tonsillitis, rather, they were mostly brain-based. So it was insomnia. And it was resolved with treatment for strep. So sometimes we can have things interfering that the body has failed to resolve and is almost shut down trying to fix, and gone onto other things. And this is an example where lab testing and pulling the whole picture together can be helpful. I don’t necessarily see these things all the time, but just if people get stuck, some things to think about. Neuropathy and pain and migraines for that matter, and they’re always worrying issues in my client base. So I had a client that had neuropathy, and it was aggravated by food intolerances. 

So I think there was some fondue involved, so gluten and dairy. She had a knee replacement and fortunately she wasn’t allergic to the metals, but it had altered her regulation of her nervous system. And we used LifeWave patches and cranial sacral to eliminate the pain and reconnect the nervous system after removing the food intolerances. And I didn’t mention, but there’s a lot of blocked emotional work here as well. So I’m not gonna talk very much on the physical level. I just felt that people would want some information, so this is more just, because there’ll be questions. The physical level is very important. Our body’s very energy-intensive. It has high nutrient demands. In no way am I minimizing that work, I’ve just chosen to focus on different things. But I thought this might be interesting because this is an analysis of 24 clients. It’s not the same clients actually, ’cause I did this some time ago. And what I’ve observed is that food intolerance is a link to what’s happening in the gut and the degree of gut damage. I believe that it’s based on lectins, and I actually think The Plant Paradox has got it right. 

I do adjust for histamine and oxalates, but I usually find that I can resolve salicylate and FODMAP issues quickly that I don’t have to eliminate foods. So what we can see here, and I’m not going to go through this in detail, but what we can see is, lectin-based grains in particular, I don’t think I put dairy on there, should be there, so grains go, but come back with gut repair. Dairy’s not on here, but it should be. And fruit often goes with candida, and often I can’t clear C4 without fruits going, and fruits are best for your environment. I focus on inflammatory foods that steal fuel. So gluten, cow’s dairy and sugar are my, don’t need to eliminate everything but at least eliminate these. 

I’m working on balancing macronutrients. So quite often food symptoms are due to people not eating enough protein or carbs. So even if someone’s got pre-foods, you can still reduce the symptoms by getting the fuel to the cell optimized for that individual. Balancing blood glucose, promoting metabolic flexibility, so I’m not a fan of carnivore or keto diets, I am a fan of promoting the ability to use all fields. And building butyrate which signals the cells to repair. So one of the reasons I try not to remove FODMAPs is for the butyrate ability. And just a general observation. We’ve got five levels. So a cascade of eliminated foods, we need to really consider whether the issue’s happening on a non-physical level. Just moving very quickly through some of these. Medications. Many can interfere with histamine mechanisms or are toxic to the cell, causing cell danger response. I use medication, I’m not against medication. I use medication, I can’t prescribe it, but we do find some medications work best for people. But for people that are interested, I do have this blog post which was agreed by a world expert. So that will give you some things to consider.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I just wanna encourage people to find that because that’s been a tremendous resource for me and I have used that so much. It’s a wonderful, wonderful resource.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Thank you. Yeah, and even if you need to use a medication, you can go about it with a low dose immunotherapy approach. So we shouldn’t be scared of it. When we need it, we need it. But just as someone that got histamine intolerance from Metformin, please read it.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And this is a great way to inform yourself. It helps people make choices, make good choices.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

That’s right, yeah. Next is supplements. And look, I actively use supplements and I don’t want people to be scared of them, but this is actually a client of mine that had COV!D vaccine damage. And look, all of these, in theory, make a lot of logical sense. But from my perspective, what really happened is it’s trying to control inflammation and biochemical reactions without actually addressing COV!D, and supporting the cell danger response. And what was actually happening and what I see quite a bit, and I’m sure you see this, Beth, is one thing hasn’t quite worked, so another thing’s added in and another thing. So we end up with this prescribing cascade. Now, as we’ll shortly see, I do use things to reduce inflammation and other bits and pieces, but the main point is none of these were actually addressing what was stressing him, if that makes sense.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah, and we need to know what we’re, one, we have to know what we’re doing with the supplements. But two, I like where you’re talking about they’re being used as if medicine, and medicine is there to suppress symptoms, not address what’s underlying. If we really wanna get out of histamine intolerance mast cell activation syndrome, which I see people recover from, I know you see people recover from, amazing recoveries-

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely.

Beth O’Hara, FN

We’re not gonna do it with this, supplements have their place and I find that they’ve been very, very important, but we’ve gotta get at what is underneath. And that’s the whole premise of what we’re talking about. We’ve gotta get at these triggers and restore that balance and harmony.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Absolutely. And so the key ways that I use supplements, and I am coming on to what supplements I use, are to support the cell danger response and to remove infections and help with detoxification. Simplistically, what is rocking the boat, what is rocking the autonomic nervous system. And that may not be anything to do with supplements, but I do like to support the cell danger response as a minimum. So just a few quick things. Don’t make up for an imbalanced diet, sleep or exercise. The environment’s everything. Health happens in an environment. Can be a stressor. So if you are having symptoms after taking a supplement, we shouldn’t assume that the supplement’s not the problem. It only addresses the physical level. And the focus is on rebalancing the autonomic nervous system, not chasing antioxidants or other bits and pieces. And a cascade of supplements always suggests to me that the issue’s happening on a non-physical level. And we need to keep that in mind.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And if I can just add, and that we’ve missed triggers.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

We’ve missed triggers, yeah. So let’s talk products, even though I often don’t even start with this. So one of the things I try and do is bind up the reactions whilst I’m working on the underlying issue. And three products I use are zeolite, and I use Toxaprevent, it’s readily available in Australia. I also use the BioPure ZeoBind. I always make sure that the product has been tested that it binds to histamine, and that it has a really high silica to aluminum ratio. So I don’t just use any zeolite. I do not like the intracellular ones. You don’t know what you’re introducing to the cell. I also use in Enterosgel, particularly where there’s a high fungal candida aspect. And if people can afford it, the Rolls Royce is PC Ecklonia Kava. So often when there’s a huge inflammatory reaction, this binder can also absorb immune reactions. It’s expensive, otherwise I’d put everyone on it. But yeah, so my approach is, rather than chasing histamine reaction, can I bind it up and deal with the underlying issue?

Beth O’Hara, FN

Reduce some of the load. And we’ll have these listed on our summit resources page. So you don’t have to madly take notes, we’ll have them listed for you. And that’s at mastcell360.com/summit.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Also, we are using, these are some of the things I commonly use to reduce inflammation. Really the ION Biome Gut Support is also a bit of a binder. So I use a lot of CBD, particularly where there’s retroviruses driving things. The ION Biome Gut Support I’m using where there’s leaky gut, but in really high doses. If there’s a leaky gut and brain, I’m often using the BPC-157. I like this integrated peptides. There’s also another one in Europe that tests quite well which I can add onto the list. But I find this really helpful, particularly with mold illness and anything gut/brain-related. And then this product which is a different peptide often tests with people with structural type inflammation. So-

Beth O’Hara, FN

And we want a whole talk on peptides. So people wanna learn more about those, they can grab that one.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

They’re often really good. And look, I’ve seen BPC repair a super leaky gut and brain in about two weeks. So then let’s talk about cell danger response products. I am actively using, even in the most mast celly types, the Zinzino BalanceOil, or AquaX if they don’t have a gallbladder or have a problem digesting fats. Very good for cell membranes with mold in particular. I have clients who have advanced Lyme, lots of neurological symptoms, lots of mast cell symptoms, tolerating this oil. Yes, it’s fish oil. Has polyphenols in it, and it has a little bit of vitamin D, but it is stable. And a lot of the problems with a lot of the fish oils we are testing is they’re not stable. And this one is. So then there’s a whole range of mitochondrial products. So this is Carnomed. In the US, I think it is called, and I’ll give you the link, Mitochondrial Rescue, is just distributed in the US. In Australia, it’s available from FxMed or I sell it on my website. These products are all activated. This one crosses the brain barrier. 

And this one we use highly successfully to stabilize that cell, it can also chelate metals and chelate stuff out of there. And these are the products that we use to restore mitochondria that were almost genetically damaged. We use them all the time. And even with people that, say, have metal, I had someone with titanium metal implants that they couldn’t get out and they were allergic to the titanium. And what we were left with was the support in the cell with these products. So I’ve tried all sorts of mitochondrial products. These are activated, and in my experience, are key. So that’s part of, if you like, the cell danger response. Then if we are looking at the energy level, I’m using LifeWave patches with tremendous results. Simplistically, they work with acupuncture points. Acupuncture is incredibly helpful for the autonomic nervous system. But to be effective, it needs to be really done every day. 

And I’ve got clients resolving, repairing mast cells that are pretty much torn, all sorts of things, using acupuncture combined with also red light therapy to regulate that autonomic nervous system, and getting far better results with these than machine-based vagal nerve. We also do tapping on organ points to bring energy and vitality to that organ. And I can probably give you the handout to the link, but so there are certain points relevant to gallbladder and other bits and pieces. This is really important to restoring the autonomic nervous system. And just about all of my Lyme clients tests for needing to stimulate the vagal nerve with LifeWave patches on these acupuncture points. But I can raise glutathione in the body by 300% with one patch. So for people that don’t wanna swallow things or a bit nervous about that, people that wanna get their nervous system into parasympathetic mode, I’ve seen people put brain caps on with the patches and completely lose Parkinson’s symptoms. So this is a pain-free way that I just am increasingly working with that works on that energy autonomic nervous system body. 

This really isn’t the mental body, but it’s more just the energetic body. But the cell danger response has a Soman product, and we actively use it very successfully. This one’s by BioPure, and there is another one available in the US, and I will provide you with that link as well. This goes with the mitochondrial products and I use this extensively. Typically tests extremely well. Obviously homeopathy. So it’s really training the immune system in what to do, and I use it extensively. I’ve just had someone I’ve tested that wasn’t included in those numbers who’s in a war zone and needs four mast cell stabilizers, one medication, needs this and a couple of homeopathy products. So we use homeopathy a lot for allergies to mold and other bits and pieces. And of course, low dose immunotherapy fits within this realm. But I guess the main product I wanted to emphasize is the cell danger response documented product. I just want to mention, I don’t use these a lot, but I’m increasingly playing with them, is on the intuitive level, using Infoceuticals, which are really just energy-based products. 

Might be a bit too out there for some people, but just for the sake of completeness. And so for me, everything is about the autonomic nervous system being healthy. We’ve discussed broadly three groups. You can learn more about this on my website. I do have a free e-course that goes into more detail, but in the mast cell community, we need to be thinking about histamine intolerance and mass cell activation being on a spectrum, with leaky gut driving a lot of histamine intolerance, not always. But autoimmunity, which is the immune system starting to struggle, and blocked regulation, which is a confused autonomic nervous system. And I really touched in this presentation on six guiding principles, which is, health is not a disease. Health happens in an environment. There are five types of environmental stressors. All approaches need to be individualized for that person’s environment. Addressing as many stressors at once has the greatest effect. And as practitioners, the therapeutic relationship is absolutely key to this whole process. And that’s my view of the world.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So there’s your website, alisonvickery.com. I wanna encourage people to check it out. It’s a wonderful resource, lots of information, you’ve been in this area a long time. Thank you so much for your really generous sharing. And also what you offer to the world. The hope that you bring, the support that you bring for people who’ve just struggled and struggled and struggled. And you work with really sensitive people like we are, and it takes these kinds of different approaches and coming at it from this type of philosophy that’s much bigger than just biochemistry. So thank you so much for joining us.

Alison Vickery, FDN-P

Oh, thank you for having me. I love talking about this topic and I’m really grateful that you’ve pulled this summit together. I mean, to think that this summit wouldn’t exist five, even 10 years ago, it’s unimaginable. So I’m really grateful for you getting this information out into the world. And I’d just like to conclude by saying that if I can get better, anyone can. And if you look at my journey, I absolutely know that with regardless of where people are in their journey, great healing is possible.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Absolutely.