The Rising Importance of Lyme Disease

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

It’s such an honor. And I love the work you’re doing and sharing all this important information with people. You know, I mean, I think it was like everybody else, you know, well I hope I’m like everybody else and I had all these dreams and aspirations growing up. I really love the environment. I spent a lot of time playing outside and you know, and so in college I was learning everything I could about the environment, but I figured, you know, I’m talking all these adults who just talk but didn’t take action. So they wanted more research and more meetings where we could share a cup of coffee and debate, but we weren’t really seeing major changes. And I said, how the heck who is really interested in this planet that I love playing on and I want to have around for myself and my kiddo and all the kids. And so I started actually, I went to this place called the Institute of Ecosystem Studies and they’re now the Cary Institute, but it’s really cool, it was started by Jean Lichens who was the guy who discovered acid rain. And so it was really a cool place. There’s all these scientists talking and there’s a bunch of outdoor education going on and we were doing school programs and kids were coming out and I was seeing all these kids light up, you know, and they’re still pumped. And then all of a sudden one day my boss comes up to me, you know? So I’m like, living this dream, right? I’m getting paid playing outside hanging out with kids all day. I mean this is like, right. And so one day my boss Chris comes up to me and she’s like, tom we’ve got a problem. I’m like, what? She’s like, you haven’t got anything done in the last couple of weeks. And I’m like, what do you mean? 

Like, I’m like, I’m, you know, my I’ve actually stayed longer. I’m doing more work and she’s like, well You’re staying, you’re staying longer, but usually in like six or seven hours you get done like 14 hours worth of work? And then you just leave early? But now you’re staying 12 hours and you’re getting nothing done, like, what do you mean? Like, look, this project is overdue, I need you to get this done. And so I’m gonna work on this stuff, I’ll check in on you in an hour because I don’t know what’s going on and so literally Chris comes back in an hour and has to shake me and and she’s like, what are you doing? What do you mean? And literally the computer screen, the curses at the same place, I have a blank white screen and then we both looked down and I’m drooling on myself and she was like, I think you need to go see the doctor. And I was like, when I was reflecting on like, well, you know, I was certainly very tired, which was unusual for, as you may be able to tell, energy is not an issue that I usually have, and then it’s like all this joint pain and muscle pain I had and then, and when I kind of really was looking at, I was like, my brain was kind of fried and I couldn’t remember much and then she’s like, you know, I have an appointment with the doctor in two days, I in those two days developed a rash that covers 1/5 of my body and I walk in, this guy goes, hey, tom you’ve got chronic Lyme, you have acute Lyme disease and piece of cake, it’s totally classic, here’s your doctor cycling take one pill twice a day for 10 days and you’ll be good to go. 

And the long and the short of it was you know I felt like crap for four days. I got a lot worse and then I felt a lot better and after those 10 days I was like cool I’m good to go but right it’s like the doctor said that over the next eight years I kind of got like worse and worse in the brain fog and the joint pain and the fatigue crept back in and you know I went to doctor to doctor there like depression, bipolar depression, you have A. D. H. D. And then eventually my primary goes, hey you came in with brain fog fatigue and joint pain. I think you’ve got fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. And like you just told me I told you this and you told me the exact same three things back and the problem with that that grab, you know kind of bag approach to coming up with a syndrome that I had was that he didn’t tell me why what was wrong with me or how I had an opportunity to get better. And so I just went on this search and eventually I started doing yoga and as I did more yoga and learned to move with breath, my brain calmed down and then I started to detoxify both emotionally and physically. And then the cool part was I didn’t have access to at this point in my life. Nobody who understood diet. I had met like three chiropractors and one natural path and the natural path was indio school. So I’m like I don’t even know what any of that means. 

And so I just my body started rejecting foods that weren’t natural and so I started eating less and less processed foods just because of the physical movement. And that’s really what got me interested in this field was I was learning an osteopathic school. The body is a self regulatory self healing mechanism and if I took proper care of it it would do most of the work. And then through my healing journey did two years of a lot of that and then I was about 70% better. I ran into two docks the D. O. And a natural path that actually could learn what the natural path was and what a real osteopaths was. And they actually I did need medicines and herbs to get fully better. But at this point it’s been over 12 years where I’ve been 100% symptom free from Lyme disease, The busy and heavy metal toxicity. So super excited to be able to share all my knowledge from personal experience and then dedicating my professional life to helping other people not have to suffer for beginning to end 13 years before they can actually feel better.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

No thank you for sharing. And that sounds like a journey to say the least. So I always I never know where to start, where to start because we share this passion for people with Lyme disease and helping them because nobody else can. And it’s chronically misdiagnosed. So where do we start? Do we talk about what Lyme disease is? Do we talk about? Why is it on the rise? Like what’s a good place to like get going there because there’s so much lyme is so broad and then we’re not. When I say lyme, I talk about all the lyme tickets associated illnesses which we can we need to talk about also. So any thoughts about how to weave this in and how to where to go.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah. You know, I think I think you’re one of the most important, It’s funny when you when you were talking about environmental toxicants, I’m like, yes, someone who knows the difference in the toxin and the toxic and I know you and Wendy so it’s like but it’s like, it’s important to define things, right? Because that to me the definition doesn’t mean it’s the be all end all, but it’s a starting place for knowledge. And to me the more I know the more options I have for treatment because like I said in my story is like and my you know is I didn’t know certain things and I had to learn them the hard way and the hard way was actually kind of cool because you know, I have so much experience with this now and I can really empathize that people are suffering because I thought I was going to lose my life. Like not literally, but despite the fact that one point describe my mental capacity as brain dead because I couldn’t do two plus three in my head, which is kind of weird for someone who has the ultimate capacity to become a physician, that’s a scary place to be. So, Lyme disease is a sort of descriptor of symptoms that are caused by the infection with from and bacteria called borrelia burgdorferi in the United States. And then we have borrelia burgdorferi, greenie I and zell I in europe. And now as we’ve learned more there’s probably more bugs. 

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

Cousins, cousins, cousins, all the borellia species.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Exactly. And you know, so basically, you know, in life Connecticut in the seventies they saw a group of kids who had like this weird sort of arthritis type presentation. And so most people think of Lyme disease is like summer flu. It’s most common to be seen in the summer despite that is what we’re told despite you know, being able to one contract it and also present any month of the year, there’s definite a spike in the Northeast during the summer months. And what happens is you get bit by a deer tick that’s infected. It feeds long enough for the bacteria, the borrelia burgdorferi. This kind of swim from the tick mid gut into you and then you if you are susceptible to getting an infection in your body is not able to fight it off. You develop these symptoms and scientifically we’re thinking about flu like symptoms, joint pains, muscle aches, fatigue, feeling blah. We like to call it malaise but I don’t know what that really means but kind of that block just I’m off. I’m kind of sick but not sick. And then some people will get crazy things like a big swollen knee or a heart block where you’re in the emergency room with weird chest problems and you have K. G. And all this junk. But the bottom line is if you think about what lyme is, it’s like fatigue and brain fog and joint pain and muscle aches and feeling blah. I just described like the human condition especially with the recent pandemic and all that stuff. So when we have it also can create a lot of neurologic symptoms and heart symptoms, musculoskeletal. So it’s called the next great imitator after syphilis was the first one because it looks like a lot of it looks like multiple sclerosis. 

It can cause Bell’s palsy where you have a facial droop but for most people you’re just gonna feel blah and you’re gonna feel like you have a flu like thing. It could even be confused with covid it could be confused with the flu and the problem is like if you get bit by a tick in august or September when they’re kind of their activities a little lower but still pretty high. You might not present until December and January and now they’re like oh you have flu or covid when really you have Lyme disease that you contracted in the summer and you didn’t present till now. So that that I mean that’s a starting point and then to your point, the tick that gives you Lyme disease, the deer tick and on the east coast it’s anxiety scapula ours and there’s anxiety specific asse in the west coast they’re all pretty much the eastern or western black legged or or you know deer tick but they carry other things like dysbiosis, anaplasmosis, borelli, miyamoto is conveniently not like a regular cousin to lyme. It’s more like a combination of all three of those first things I just said in one which is very confusing. And then some studies show that bartonella and even some species of mycoplasma, maybe in ticks and whether or not it’s transmissible or not really 100% clear yet. But there’s more than one thing in there which makes the presentation sometimes even more confusing.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. I mean I always said it, I’ll emphasize it is I’ll say line could present with fatigue, joint pain, fever etcetera or how my finger hurts and everything in between. So it’s so hard to tell. And just like your story with fibromyalgia. How many times have we seen so many other disease states described disease states that yes I definitely have fibromyalgia or definitely have rheumatoid arthritis or definitely have something and we find a tick associated illness in treated and people get better. So it’s a major major issue major problem.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

And one of the other things have to interject for a second to its with kids because about half of my practice is treating Children. It’s really important is right there’s a couple people there. Yeah and so many of us who are interested in functional medicine and learning how to take care of our bodies and detoxify our parents You know just you know and we’ve come across it and we have kids and we want them to live as safe as possible. So kids do not necessarily present just like adults and kids have more of a propensity for a situation called Pans and pandas. And basically Pans is a pd is pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome And then the pandas one is just essentially almost the same thing but it’s a neuropsychiatric disorder after strep infection. And basically we were seeing kids after streptococcal infections which is just recurrent strep throat having acute onset of behavioral changes not eating food restriction. O. C. D. Rage like starting to wet your bed again when you’re 12 or your 10 when you’re potty train and a whole constellation of weird behavior and regression speech school performance and on and on and then they realize pants or pandas was too restrictive because it wasn’t actually just strapped, it was Michael Plaza and strap and candida yeast and lo and behold Lyme disease and bartonella as well as babesia and then we start to think about this. 

And so when I look at kids who get Lyme, I often will see there’s behavioral component and there’s an oddity to behavior. It’s kind of almost like they’re ultra over tired all the time. So if you’re seeing school regression or they’re doing great in school and they collapse when they come home because they’re keeping it together during the day, we often will see that, tick disorders if you see this thing all the time or the blanking or the puffing and you know the blowing through the nose repeatedly. It could be stress. It could be just a nervous tick or growing pains or whatever which is another one. But it’s often these triggered by these infections that cause auto immunity and brain inflammation right? And so that’s an important thing to think about the other thing. If you have Lyme disease straight up in your kids. This is something where you’re where we’re not thinking about pants because I kind of jumped the gun a little one of the common presenting things for parents to be aware of is isolated abdominal pain. And I see a lot of kids who have gone through the multi million dollar workups. They’ve gotten the, the, you know, the endoscopy, the scope up top, the colonoscopy done and they’re finding nothing. But these kids have abdominal pain and treat them for Lyme disease or abdominal pain goes away. We also see food sensitivities, which I’ve seen kids there. 

They, you know, they do a test, they’ve got like 46 foods you can’t eat. They’ve also been in a place where they’ve removed if they put the foods in their sensitive to them, they take them out, they feel better. And we find Lyme disease, we treat them and their food sensitivities go down to like gluten, dairy and soy, which is, you know, not that uncommon, but it’s not 46 foods anymore. So it’s interesting. It does mimic and, and the sort of the place that brings it all together is it’s a soft tissue organism and it likes the gut wall, it likes the muscles, it likes tendons, it really loves the lining of your joints and it likes things like your heart and your brain and not in everybody. And it’s not like this terror. It doesn’t have to be this terrible thing, but be aware that it’s not much of a blood borne pathogen, right? I mean it floats around your blood, but it’s going somewhere deeper. So we look at testing, we have challenges because of that. But it allows us going back to, hey, how do we define it? And, and how do I identify it in people’s look at the organ systems it likes, you know, and all these soft floppy tissues in our body, it tends to like, like you don’t see a lot of people with liver problems from Lyme. Now the liver gets overtaxed, but the gallbladder, which is part of the liver and the gut all right in close proximity tend to be higher target, higher. You know, they’re, they’re more commonly affected probably because they’re less dense and they’re more floppy, which is where lyme likes to go.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

As you know, we have four kids and all of them had Lyme disease and I’m, I treat Lyme every day and I’ll share a story about our son because he’s a sweet, nice or wasn’t sweet, nice kid for a while and then all of a sudden his mood changed and we thought, you know, he’s growing older, his hormones are kicking in, He was a little bit of a beast. But you know, that’s boys and getting older, that’s kind of how it is. So we left that alone for a while for a while and he turned out to be a real beast and he was getting worse grades and he wasn’t paying attention and moods were outrageous. And finally we figured we were like, wait, hold on. There’s something else going on and we figured out lyme and we treated him obviously it’s not that easy but treat him and he’s back to his nice cool kid. I mean obviously every kid has their moments but the thing and that’s a personal story but if I took my time to identify it and I this is what I do. How about all these other kids and all these kids that have mood issues that are put on antidepressants and antipsychotics and A. D. H. D. Meds and everything else that there’s a it just kills me. That’s why I like when you say kids it just kills me because and how many times have both of us seen 15, 17 year olds that can’t get out of bed and they lose years of their life and that becomes their identity. So it that’s what really adults I get. But it’s really

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Like yeah on one of the things to to just let everybody know. We’re talking about these environmental toxicants, these toxic substances that are introduced in your body from outside the bite of an infected deer tickets one way to do that. But when we’re talking about like Bartonella infections, most of us go to medical school and we learn like cat scratch disease and we think about Bartella. Bartella can be found in ticks in some studies that they’re there and some studies it’s not so it is a regional phenomenon. So it’s not a definitive thing. We do have evidence that if it is in a deer tick it can be transmitted to a mouse. We do have some evidence that looks like it happens in humans. So that possibilities on the table but lots of kids are exposed to cats. But then also one of the ones that I think that when you’re talking about the kids with behavioral changes in the anxiety the O. C. D. When you have these kids who are like seven and eight and they have acute onset of O. C. D. That they didn’t have last week or anxiety. One of the other things to think about is life because I see a lot of times you’ll see lights go through a classroom and three or four kids in the classroom we’ll have acute onset of A. D. H. D. Or O. C. D. Or rage. And each kid maybe a different picture but you have three or four kids with completely new personalities. That could be a Bartonella infection. And so it’s really important to understand and then also spiders have been implicated in potential transmission. So it’s not just these tics and so many people. So I didn’t see the tick bite. 

Well lyme is transmitted if you just go to straight up lyme 95% of them by the knife and the knife is the size of a poppy seed or 12 point font period. I challenge you to find that right? 5% or by adults because they’re easy to see. So of course we miss it. And so just be aware of that. And a lot of people talk about that era theme of migrants rash. And the problem is we equate that to a bull’s eye and the bull’s eye is only about 20 or 30% of all era theme of migrants rashes. So we’re already looking for only a bull’s eye. And in the research it shows about 50% of the time you see a rash. The CDC for some reason tells us 70 I’m like, okay, so what is this rash? Because it may or may not be there? Well, a reddish purple splotch could be an E. M. Rash, right? It doesn’t have to be a bullseye and clinical practice, we’re really seeing about 20 to 25% of people remember a rash and or a tick bite. And and and so the problem is it’s just like where is this all coming from? And part of it is you were saying like and one of the reasons I love working at the that the cary Institute back when I had a different name is they’re actually doing a lot of landscape research and what they’re finding is a lot of changes in in the past that patterns of of how humans inhabit the planet, you know, one global climate change and like when I went to the University of Vermont, there were no ticks up there. They’re in southern Vermont but not in northern Vermont now, they’re everywhere.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

Let’s talk about that because that’s actually an important piece of why. I mean global warming is first of all, line prevalence seems to be going up and global warming is seems to be increasing that. So let’s talk, why would, why is that.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

A couple of things. I think I should probably behave today and say called global climate change because a lot of people like, well it’s really cold here and it’s really hot there, the climate has changed and we don’t believe in science that’s out there. And part of it is during the winters there’s a line where it got frosty enough that it would like any ticks that kind of migrated up during the summer, it would kill off. And there’s kind of like this line of where they could live, you know, so that’s changed and the cold snaps and the depth of the frost just doesn’t exist in some of the northern parts of the U. S. That it did. The other part though is we’re also seeing that one of the things to know about deer ticks and they’re the vector the host for lyme disease, which are primarily rodents. A lot of people talk about deer, but deer actually may, there’s some research that the deer may actually sterilize the ticks. They’re coming out of the university, I think Binghamton is doing it, but it’s really cool new research. 

So I want to see where it goes. Like if you get ticks that are feeding on the deer, they were finding 2% infectivity, but if you found them on a mouse in the same plot would be like a 40-50% infectivity rate. It’s really wild. So I’m hoping that that comes. Yeah, but anyway, the ticks and the rodents that host the line that eventually the tick feeds on the rodent gets infected and then malts and does its thing and then bites us and gives us the infection. They love to live on what’s called the edge. And so the edge is really defined as where the forest meets sort of the prairie or the field and 10 ft into the forest to 10 ft out is where these rodents and where these ticks primarily live. Now as the temperatures change, the ticks for some reason are going further and further into the field than they were expected to go. But the problem is if you think about what an edge is so many people have gardens, that’s an edge. So many people want to have a greenway between their house and their neighbor’s yard. And so now you’ve got basically you’ve created artificial and habitat development where we’re putting all these people all over the place and cutting up the forest actually incur increases the edge. And then these planned pathways rather than just a little hiking trail, but an actual planned sort of paper edge. So we just as we have more humans and more development, we have more edge, we have more edge, We have more habitat for the ticks and the and the rodents so we have more likelihood of exposure. So as the climate has changed and the, the kind of cold snaps are not what they used to be. We’re seeing the ticks range where they can live being a broader and we’re also seeing the habitat in which they would thrive, being more overdeveloped. So we have increased risk of exposure.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

Yeah, more things to think about, right or more things to worry about. But it’s a challenge because we need to really, I do want to highlight that even though it is a deer tick by name, it is a mouse carried, the mouse carry it. And a lot of times they people say, well aren’t they aren’t they killed in the winter? And you were talking about the line, but also for people to think about there being carried around by mice who are right below in a nice warm den. So they’re going to be around and the only other thing else may be mentioned from and correct me if I’m wrong because you said incident goes up in summer. But I always thought the worst, the easiest time to catch a tick was in the spring when, before the green came out. And they were really searching hungry for blood. Is that incorrect?

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Well yeah, kind of yes and no. So kind of what we see is we see the adults sort of spike earlier in the spring into the early summer. And then we see a spike, especially in the middle of the summer, July ish of the nymphs. And then what you’ll see is that as those populations go up, we do have more of a transit. You’ll see the human population or I should say the human infection rates go up. But again, like, so that’s really important to understand that that is the highest risk time of the year, but there’s also a few other things going on. More people are outside then generally speaking. We do see that. What’s really interesting is that Children ages 5 to 15 and adults somewhere in the mid to late thirties into the early fifties are the highest two risks of categories. So parents and their kids. And then we do see that boys are almost 50% more likely to get Lyme disease than girls, which may be the way they play in the environment or not. I’m not sure anyone’s really figured that out, but we do need to kind of be careful. It’s interesting that, you know, and then the other part to just remind everybody is we have this spike sort of depending upon where in the country you live to. I’m going in early June May in early June and then it gets really July and August and then it drops off. But you can see the trend if you go to the C. D. C. Which they are on board and have since 2013 been finally pointing out that their numbers for research purposes only are probably an underestimate by at least 10 fold the actual number of lines. So but every single month of the year the possibility of infection rate by 10. So literally lyme has done has been shown in every month of the year, consistently not currently except Hawaii all other 49 states have reported Lyme disease. And then what’s interesting, another two to the previous thing we’re talking about with the environment. I have a colleague who’s out outside of Oklahoma city and he had somebody with an erythema migrants rash diagnosed him with Lyme and put him on antibiotics. Got a blood test CDC positive, like the hardest positivity you can get. 

And they’re like there’s no Lyme disease in Oklahoma and he’s like this person hasn’t left Oklahoma. There’s lyme in Oklahoma. They’re like no there can’t be because well it just so happens that I had the patient saved the tick, here’s the tick. And so rash clinical response antibiotics. They they had a positive blood test and then they sent the ticket and they said, oh the tick is positive for Lyme, oh it must have fallen off a songbird. Well yes of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in Oklahoma, just doesn’t, I mean it’s like and that’s one of the other things as our songbird populations and their migration patterns change with habitat development and destruction as the environment changes and that you know, we’re starting to see like greater and greater exposure. So I mean this is sort of this big complex picture that our environmental exposures have gone up as time has gone on because of those other changes.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

Alright, I’m gonna I want to change subjects because I think we can both get into it and spend all the time but I want to really get into I know you do a lot of detoxing with people with Lyme disease. I want to get into that. I want to talk about what a to Fiji is and what’s your kind of, let’s talk about general approach to Lyme disease and what happens and what kind of like how do people want to, how do you want people to think about it?

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah, I mean I think it’s a great way to frame it, you know I went to osteopathic medical school which I really dug because we had this crazy philosophy that we talked about and admitted back before it became a little more understood but the body has a ability to self regulate and self heal and so left on its own with the right resources, it should be able to, its goal is to heal itself. The goal of the physician or the health care provider, even the patient is to if the body is stuck somewhere, figure out that the spot where it’s the most stuck and it needs the most help and catalyze healing and then get out of the way and let the body do its own work so that the body remains dependent on itself and its inner workings and and this amazing drug store we have inside of healing rather than from the external and only use the external when we need it. And that’s really what I learned Ed in my kind of journey was I didn’t even know what I was doing. I was just like my back’s against the wall, I haven’t found anybody who wants to do anything then give me meds that don’t work and then when they either on them or taking me off, I get really sick. So I didn’t want those external toxins put into my body and so then I just kind of like took that osteopathic philosophy in my personal experience and said when I’m looking at someone, I have to look at them body mind and spirit and I know we talked about this all the time but lyme can change areas of your brain and the way they metabolize things and utilize glucose and food and energy so that you can’t recognize that you’re safe to heal. And then the problem is if you’re, if you’re chronically sick, you don’t understand, you don’t have the, you don’t feel safe and with the changes in your brain don’t allow you to recognize safety. 

So now you’re stuck. So whether I tell you to do herbs or meds or detox or whatever, unless the first thing I do is sort of work with people to let them understand That safety equals familiarity. And so we, all of us with kids will look at it and say, Hey, my kid play the same song 75 times. I’m ready to blow my head off. Please stop or watch the same movie over and over. The reason they like that as they’re developing is its familiar. So it feels safe. And when we look at poly vagal theory and we look at how people get stuck and frozen in this kind of, you know, nervous system response to the illness or to isolation which think about the pandemic. We need to, if we safety such a overused word that I don’t understand, but familiarity helps me personally understand this and I think my patients when you first get Lyme, it doesn’t seem familiar and it does not seem safe. So you try really hard to get better. But if you have chronic symptoms or like me, I got better. But then they crept back in, They crept in before I even knew it. My familiar state of being there for my safe state of being is literally illness. So if now I take the person and I say, hey, I’m gonna give you this drug or this herb and you start to feel better. That is now unfamiliar territory, ergo unsafe. So the foundation of all my healing protocols is to work with people to figure out where they’re at, on that, on that emotional mental, spiritual place and give them the tools and there are many, many, many different tools out there to help them start to change slowly but consistently. 

Why physically while making those changes. Because I’ve seen people because I know we’re supposed to talk about toxicity right now and getting rid of toxins. I’ve seen people who the only thing they do is detoxify and it’s so intense for them that they can’t handle it and they go right back to being sick. So a lot of you, if they’re saying if your doctors and your providers are telling you like, hey I’m, you have an illness mentality. You kind of just need to change your mind. Yes and no, and really it’s not you on purpose, it’s the infections of the toxins that are changing the brain pattern. So you can’t recognize that you’re safe to get better and it’s actually our job to give you the tools to do that. And so my first step in detoxification is giving people some tools that could be a simple breathing pattern and it could be you know a meditation. I do a lot of brain mapping and e e G s right now because we can actually measure exactly what you need and does it really small so that you can make small consistent changes and not only can you do that, but we can measure it. Which I find some people really that helps. And that way we start with this sort of mental emotional spiritual detoxification part. Because sometimes that’s the part where when people have seen seven doctors, I’m like wow this protocols have been great, what’s wrong? They’ve had a trauma, they’ve been traumatized by line. The medical system has betrayed them or accidentally or on purpose trying to do a good job or you know otherwise. And so I work with that first.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

Let me just pause for one sec. I mean I 1000%. Yes. The one thing I’ll say to add to that is I and please correct me. But I usually say there’s three types of line people. People that have linemen don’t know don’t care. People have Lyme disease that take a couple of weeks of antibiotics and they’re done. Then they’re like people that see us and it’s never just line right? It’s always 3 to 5 to 10 different things going on at once from toxins to methylation to trauma which is what your and not only are they traumatized by the medical system. A lot of people have previous traumas that this just added on to and the medical system might have been great but the response to it was from the past and they just added out or not. So I apologize but I just want to add that there’s a lot of times underlying stuff going on.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

And I think that I love that you highlighted it because it gives us this concept of like there is hope for getting better, but we have to look at it. And so I just I look at my glass a lot. I love my glass one, I like my water because it helps me detoxify but years and years and years ago I I coined this phrase chronic toxin overload and literally I think about it like you have this amount of toxicity you can deal with and so it’s like if you’re here and I add this much in you overflow but if you’re down here and I had the same amount and you just go right up to where it is now. And so different people have different sized vessels, we can help you increase the size of your vessel and decrease the amount of toxicity or you know toxicants that are in your vessel but all sides emotions, you know and so one of the easiest places to start because I always feel like there’s so many, everybody talks about limbic retraining and all this hard stuff doesn’t need to be hard, it’s called gratitude. 

Like literally just find one thing that went great in your day, take a deep breath and bring it in your heart, think about your beautiful Children and if your kids are in, you know, and not in the right place now, think about where they were and then think about where they’re gonna be because one of the things that we didn’t talk about for me, I remember very clearly I was in, in my apartment in South Portland Maine, I’m looking at the wall and I’m like, I feel like my life is falling apart and it’s gone and I had two choices, I could either continue down that road of thinking or I could say, you know what I’m young, I’m recently married, I wanna have a family, I love my dogs, I love playing outside. I want some more ultimate frisbee, some more skiing, some more mountain biking. I love cooking with my wife, we love food, we love our, like all these things and I said, I want that future and if I focused on the future that I wanted versus the future that it looked like I was going to get, I at least had half a chance to get there and within days, if not the same day, I don’t know, I mean in retrospect, I don’t know for sure someone handed me the yoga DVD that changed my life and I was now open to a new possibility when I’m open to a new possibility of healing. So one of the things that we do in our practice said is we have people sign a commitment and and it’s mostly a commitment to them a little bit to me and my team, but two main things that come up, one is you’re open to trying things you may have done differently, but you’re open to trying them in a different order from a different perspective with other things with the expectation that you could have a different outcome because sometimes that’s important. And then the other part is you can tell me your story this many times and that’s it. I want you to regurgitate it with all its gory detail and no more than two pages. 

And then when you’re done, you hand that story over to me and my team, you allow us to use the details and if we need any more we’ll ask you. But now you let go of this story and you declare to the universe or your God or whatever is the right word for life for you, that universal power of healing. You let this go and say I am now open to writing a news story for myself because I am so worthy of receiving healing and love that I can now move forward. And I’m actually open to it. And the way you declare that is you let go of that old story, obviously you didn’t get you didn’t erase memory from your brain? I didn’t erase that line. Made your joints hurt. You can’t do that, right? But you’ve given yourself. What’s that? Not yet. We’re working on it. So anyway, but then you know, and the other part is so we’re working. I do a lot of that work because I’ve seen people have seen five and 10 and 20 doctors. It’s not that those doctors suck, it’s that we have this other piece to work on. And then I also always like to your point about Altaf Aji which is this process by which the body recycles like you know, there’s their cells in your body that are old and there, they need to be recycled. They’re kind of stuck. They’re not doing their job right? But they’re using a lot of fuel and they’re also creating a lot of inflammation. We want to get rid of them. We want to clean out the cells we want to create new mitochondria which are the energy factories in our cells. 

So this is all the normal things that all the bio hackers and the longevity. People are trying to do too. And also in lyme and bartonella and even mold a lot of our stuff goes hides inside of cells and we want to be able to figure out the holy Grail of an antimicrobial whether it’s an herb or medicine is can it get inside of cells and the cool part is your body has this crazy process called autopsy which is intracellular taking out the trash. And so I start with my folks and I say look how can we do that? Well I can exercise that’ll do it. A lot of my people can’t do that. You know when I first work with them I can fast. Fasting brings down your energy for part of the day and it also stimulates but when you do fast you stimulate this autophagy. The cool part is I love talking about brain detoxification because the number one thing to do for your brain detoxification is to get deep sleep. It’s not a supplement. It’s not an I. V. It’s not a medicine. It’s not a new device, it’s called sleep. So 72 upwards of possibly 90% of all your brain detoxification happens while you’re sleeping. Researchers have found its most likely deep sleep. So we really have to work on our patients with their sleep architecture. 

One of the best ways to get deeper sleep is to calm down at the end of the day with a little bit of focus breathing and give yourself five minutes to focus on gratitude. Because gratitude puts you parasympathetic, it gets you relaxed and it helps now the first time. Probably not second time maybe. Maybe not. But if you do this for two or three weeks and most of my people two or three days you’re gonna start to see that your sleep changes. So I give people this cool exercise at the end of the day, you can take three minutes and only three minutes, That’s all you’re allowed because we don’t have time for anything more. Find three wins from the day. Doesn’t matter how big or how small, In fact smaller is better because then you’re starting to look at all that nuance of how amazing your life is. But just pick three, write them down and then after you write them down, great. Now write down three things that are going to go well for you tomorrow. So pre plan your three wins because usually when you start this, you’re gonna go your conscious mind and no, no, no, no, that doesn’t work. So it doesn’t matter, write it down, then you’ve got three from today, three for tomorrow, read all six of them, that’s it all you do. Now go to bed. Now, the cool part is when you finally go to bed for anyone who has insomnia, might take a little bit of time. 

But when you’re finally asleep, your conscious mind dissociates from your subconscious and at this point, it’s kind of like where your subconscious kind of connects with the greater, you know, energy and life or God or whatever and you get to this point where you call super conscious. So there’s three wins that you just said you’ll have tomorrow, that your conscious mind says there’s no way you’re gonna get those because history proves it wrong, it’s out of the way and now you can receive the inspiration, the divine inspiration to wake up tomorrow. Now the cool part is you wake up tomorrow, you just read all three of them takes you 10 seconds, I should say all six from the day before. It takes you 10 or 20 seconds and that’s it. Now, what’s really funny is by two or three days into this all day long, all this stuff is gonna start to go better for you. It might not be perfect, but you’re gonna start to see little things you’re gonna recognize when God’s working in your favor, when the, when the universe is giving you this healing. And now at the end of the day, after four or five days you’re gonna go like, oh this feels good, like my life is actually better than I thought and you’re gonna start to savor the flavor of you know, like I think every time I say that I think about a glass of wine, like I love red wine, not that I like to drink a ton of it, but I just love the fact that I take a sip and if I focus on it for just 90 seconds to three minutes, it completely changes from 2nd 12 2nd 90 and it’s just like, I love changing.

So I, I really empower people to look through that and just experience it, because now you’re gonna get to the end of the day and you’re not gonna be able to do only three for today and three for tomorrow, you’re gonna want to do more, you’re gonna want to like 20 for the day, it’s gonna be so easy in a week and you’re gonna start to really see it change, and now the cool thing is you’ve accidentally tricked yourself into gratitude, you’ve accidentally tricked yourself into being parasympathetic, which you’ve now calmed your nervous system down and the way to get out of the frozen state that we talked about a minute ago is typically through gratitude, love, enjoy singing, connecting with other people, you’ve now done the thing that helped you get sick, you have undone it, I should say the reason that lyme is so so easily infects people is it doesn’t fight reality. We get in a balance, a state of dis ease, where we say that I’m fighting everything and I’m not looking at the way it is, you’ve now gotten back into the flow of life and now you can heal and now when you’re in the flow of life, you just flow easily into sleep now you get deeper sleep. Now your brain’s detoxifying, you wake up the next day, your whole life is better the next morning because now you’re living in gratitude. So my my things for gratitude and the spirituality of healing has as much to do with the spirituality and the wu of it as the hardcore medical science of getting you to detoxify your brain and I’ve just derailed myself a little bit, check out the food thing because I love talking about brain detox, right? And there’s this glimpse static system, sleep, water, that’s what you need. Now it’s really about sleep and water because most of your brain, you know fluids are water and then you need an open nose pathway which we can talk about if we have a minute. 

But what’s really cool is if you disrupt that through infection, head injury, any other kind of infection, Maybe one of the ways to help fix the brain detox system and get the everything, all the cells lined up better again is fasting. So this brings us back to autophagy but the research on brain detox shows if you want to optimize it and get it back working, maybe you should do a thing called alternate day fasting. And what’s really crazy is alternate day every time I say it, I think I’m saying it wrong. They studied So typically intermittent fasting for you, we do you know you work up to not eating for 16 hours and then you have your feeding window of eight hours per day and I usually tell my patients four or five days a week is fine. If you want to do seven you can be a bio hacker great. Some people will even do more than that. But the research for your brain and removing toxins including things that lead to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and all this good stuff Is actually 12 hours of fasting every other day is the minimum they found for it to work. So we can probably do better. 

Like if you sleep for about eight hours which is what an adult should do plus or minus a little bit, all I have to do is add a couple like two hours before and two hours after once every other day. This is not hard which to me is invigorating and and and should be and people should feel enthusiastic about it because they don’t have to do the hardcore bio hacking approach to kicking on autopsy gee in the beginning and then the other parts that we get with this autophagy cellular. So we clean out ourselves throughout our whole body. We optimize brain detoxification, we sleep better which then means we can do all these other things better. And then you also have cold exposure. That is another one. That’s really good too. So what’s really interesting is a little less food, a little bit of cold or a little bit of exercise for a lot of people. All three of these things are being slightly uncomfortable and being slightly uncomfortable is longevity and part of longevity is cleaning out toxins. So then when I take these three things I go I just asked you to do something slightly uncomfortable to help your healing and so almost anything you do that’s not stupid like do cocaine or something, you know I mean like that’s slightly uncomfortable for you is likely to push you in the direction of healing and detoxification.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

That’s awesome. That’s amazing overview. And I don’t know if I have a lot to add there. I mean the only thing I’ll say is what comes up is some people like when you ask them about gratitude they go blank and I know you said little things but I just say how about just being thankful for your breath breath, how many people can’t breathe well in this world and just be thankful that you can take a deep breath.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Or if you’re having the worst day of your life, what lesson did you learn today? Can you take one small lesson out of your crappy as day? Because the reality is that people you and I see do feel that way. Like I got nothing or maybe be thankful for Dr. Ed or Dr. Wendie in your life.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

I think Dr. Tom is good. Yeah no I think it’s it’s really so fundamental and all the things we want as I think as doctors we want to talk about supplements and doing this and doing that and what you’re really speaking to is really the basics like don’t need too much enjoy your life as much as you can have gratitude and be grateful. We didn’t talk about relationships, but I’m sure that’s a piece of it. Also family relationship. Absolutely get a little bit out of your comfort zone. Get a little cold. Don’t Our ancestors weren’t in environmentally controlled place. We were constantly stressed out as ancestors get a little cold. Don’t need too much, get plenty of sleep. It’s so fundamental. And yet, how many people, how many of us really do it? Right.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Well, I think there’s two things for me that is, one is my goal is to give back the power of healing to each and every person who listens to this and I hope they share it with all their friends because our society has removed the power of healing from the patient and given it to the doctors. But even the doctors have given it away and they’ve given it to the surgeons with a knife. They’ve given it to the drug companies with the pill and they’ve given it to the supplement companies and it’s all outside. And if you listen to my story, 70% of my healing was what I did within. I still needed all those other things. I used all of that. I didn’t need a knife to heal from line. But you get it and I’ve had surgery as a kid because I had umbilical. I mean I had two attorneys that I was born with and they repaired them when I was 18 months old. All of this is good but what I’m saying is do the things where you empower yourself and your body to do the beautiful miracle of healing and breath and life that it was designed to do and when you need help ask for help, let them help you and then rely on yourself rather than the other way around. 

So take back the control because then my goal is to super charge you guys all with being able to do this for yourself and when you need help you go to the doctor and it happens a lot faster because if you do all this groundwork on your own, you’re gonna start feeling better and better and better and then their treatments are gonna work better and you’re there like I wasn’t ready for the doctor, I was ready for this stupid DVD and the thing is like they gave it to me and literally I was a lifelong athlete until I got really sick when I started yoga. I could put my hands on my kneecaps when I bent for it. That’s as far forward as I could bend it. I mean I can I can that means I could basically not bend, you know it’s but over the course of slowly working and one of my teachers told me this and I think going back to what you said about breath is so key, he said yoga like everybody defines it all different ways. But he’s like when you’re doing the physical practice of yoga and you can apply this to anything. Physical practice is its movement on breath, it’s not movement. And then try to breathe, you know, not contortion and then hope you can breathe. So at any point, if my breath wasn’t full, I was pushing too hard. And so if you want a barometer in a conversation with somebody else, if you can’t take a deep breath when you’re going through it, you’re probably pushing too hard. If you’re doing so much stuff in your life that you think about it, you can’t you can’t, you’re paralyzed. And you find you’re like, I just, even when I said it, I felt my diaphragm tighten up my breathing muscle. If you’re doing that on a regular basis, let your breath freedom be the guide. And so anything you’re thinking about, if you’re like step back a little and maybe press a little less and just allow that flow state to happen more naturally. And as your breath as an indicator of the energetic and the healing flow through your whole body is expressed. That’s a nice indicator. So, always looking at that, you know, and that’s a guide that really served me well.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

Yeah, no, the one thing I’ll add is when you say to be in charge of your own health. I want our listeners to really be clear, listen to what you just said and not what that internal voice said. I got a doctor google this and I gotta figure out make sure that my doctors doing it right then. I gotta check all these supplements, all these medications, all that’s actually potentially necessary. I’m not saying that’s not, but that’s not what we’re talking here. We’re talking really about internal work. Can you take a deep breath and if you can’t please spend five minutes a day just breathing into your belly, you talk about detox, just just breathing into your belly is going to massage your internal organs, move your lymph nodes more than any other supplement or anything else can do.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

Yeah,

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

So yeah, fundamentally.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

And what’s really cool Ed. I found, like I find that I’m over complicating as you, as you can tell the way I could talk about these things forever. I’m so excited to share what I know, but like that gratitude practice is a simplification that I heard from Dr Ben hardy and and dan Sullivan and it’s the thing that using business people, but I just thought it was so much simpler than anything I’ve ever taught and also from a breath awareness perspective if you like, hey Dr. Ed, it’s really hard to take a full deep breath or whatever. I just have people sit on the edge of their bed or even lie down and pay attention to your breath, whatever that means to you, whether you feel something in your nose, your nose is clogged, that’s coming in your mouth, you feel it in your throat, You feel just a mechanical chest rise. You feel energy coming in from the cosmo. I don’t care what it is for you And you just focus on your breathing and you try to do nothing other than that. And if you start thinking about dinner or your supplement protocol or the doctor that didn’t call you back fast enough or whatever, that is totally cool. Now go back and focus on your breathing, give yourself the permission for five minutes and ultimately 10 minutes or more to just have your priority be the breath and you, all you do is focus on that. And then ultimately, what I find for almost everyone I’ve ever worked, I’ve actually never heard anyone not have this happen. But if you do this a few times and usually the first time all of a sudden you’ll take a slightly deeper breath, totally involuntarily. 

So good, even just thinking about it, I’ve trained my body to do it right. And the more you do it, the more it becomes automatic. And so what will happen is now you’ll start to do that deep breathing without thinking about it. Now just focus on your breathing, whatever new thing you notice or the same thing and then ultimately you’re going to see that the breath easily and effortlessly calms down and all you had to do was be aware of it and that’s a beautiful way to look at it because then ultimately you can take that gratitude practice, we talked about at the end of it, do the breathing and take the thing that you’re so much you’re so grateful for and just hold that in your heart as you breathe in. That’s next level stuff. But it’s how this is not hard Ed and and is it like you said, is it the whole thing? No, do you need a doctor or health care provider maybe and possibly probably, but give yourself this chance, you are so worth it. And that’s the thing. I think we just fall flat on our face and medicine. It’s not like your bucket of crap falling apart. 

You’re, you know, you’re bound for the pine box underground, like yeah, that’ll happen eventually. But you should, you deserve to live an amazing life, every human being is here and has something amazing to offer and I just want them to feel that. And then you can go and you can experience all this wonderful detoxification as you sleep in all this scientific mumbo jumbo. But all this science has come around To validate what people have known about their bodies forever, which is that we are these amazing divine beings that have the ability to heal. And it’s just like it’s just another part of your treatment protocol. But for me personally, it was over 70%,, That’s a lot of control that I could have given to them. So if I had only worked with the Doctor I only had a 30% chance of getting but I could only heal 30%. That sucks. I want 100 plus.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

I feel like we can talk for at least another three hours. I think I have to honor your time. So we’ve got more to talk about. But time is time is time. So thank you so much for just bringing so much knowledge and truthfully heart. Just pure heart and you can feel it, you can sense it and it’s just and I’ll add maybe some breath to that too.

Thomas Moorcroft, DO

There you go. I love it. Thank you guys so much for having me.

Edward Levitan, MD, ABIOM, IFMCP

This was Dr. Tom Moorcroft. My name is Dr. Ed Levitan on today’s host. Thank you so much.