What is Lyme disease?

Hey everybody, welcome back to another amazing episode in our lime series. This is the healing from Lyme and chronic Illness Naturally Summit. And today I have a super great guy.

Really interesting guy, has a great background and a great story to tell us. Doctor Darren Ingles. He’s a practitioner. He’s immersed in Lyme disease.

He’s had his own personal, trials and tribulations with Lyme, which he’ll illuminate with us for us a little bit. And with that, I want to turn the camera over to Doctor Darren.

Welcome to the Lyme Summit. And I’m so happy that you’re here today to offer some, some wisdom and, and, you know, your experiences with the community at large.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Robbie. I really appreciate it. I mean, as you mentioned, you know, I have my own Lyme story. You know, I’ve been a Lyme patient.

I know exactly what it’s like, that everyone who’s been dealing with Lyme disease, I think I’ve probably experienced at least a large majority of symptoms that people out there have experienced themselves.

So and when people come in my office and like, you know, do you have no idea what it’s like to experience X, Y and Z? I’m like, well, actually I do. I mean, I’ve been there and I’ve done that.

And, you know, really my, my background, you know, I’m an physician by training and, I did my training in Seattle and I moved to Connecticut, shortly after I finished my residency to work at a practice there.

And for those who aren’t aware, you know, Lyme disease is named after Lyme, Connecticut. It’s a city in Connecticut that was about 30 minutes away from where I lived.

And, you know, shortly before I was, due to open my own practice, I got bit by a tick. And I actually am one of the few people I’ve ever seen that actually had classic Lyme disease.

I had every single symptom that you read about in a medical textbook. I had the big bullseye rash. I had a headache 105 fever, migratory joint pain, neuro apathy, numbness, tingling, you know, really the whole gamut.

And so I caught it early and I started on the standard, you know, 21 days of doxycycline because, you know, at that time that’s all I really knew about Lyme disease.

And four days into my own treatment, I felt fine. I felt okay, great. You know that Lyme no big deal to you. The infection got rid of it. But, you know, I when I started my own business, anyone who’s ever run their own business knows what this like.

You know, I couldn’t afford staff, so I was doing everything myself. So, you know, I was seeing patients, I was scheduling people, answering phones, working our dispensary, doing my own books.

And eight months into that long schedule, I started to relapse and my symptoms started to come back. So I started having back pain again, having joint pain, having neuropathy again.

And I’m like, okay, I recognize this. I’ve had this before. Now it’s February in Connecticut. It’s cold or snow on the ground. So I’m pretty sure this isn’t a new tick bite.

And like, okay, I’ve heard about relapses. No problem. I’ll just go back on antibiotics and that’ll take care of it. So I went back on a month of doxycycline and it did absolutely nothing.

Then I went on a month of is that their mindset? It did absolutely nothing. And then I started working with a local Lyme doctor. I knew of. And we started doing different, you know, mixes of antibiotics for about nine months.

And over that course of nine months, I actually got progressively worse. My gut was Iraq. I was nauseous all the time. I lost about 30 pounds in that nine month period, just from really not being able to eat and digest my food. So I was fortunate to have known of a doctor in New York City named Doctor Zhang.

He’s a medical doctor from China, but works as an acupuncturist in the city. And he basically started me on a series of Chinese herbal supplements. I’ve started getting regular acupuncture, and really within about a month’s time I was 80, 85% improved.

And, you know, it was also my wakeup call that, you know, I wasn’t eating well, I wasn’t sleeping well. I really wasn’t taking care of myself. So, you know, everything.

I’ve been kind of preaching to my patients I was ignoring. So that was, you know, my come to Jesus moment of like, look, you know, you can’t get well when you kind of continue to abuse your body this way, you know, you’ve got to get good sleep.

You’ve got to feed yourself nutritionally. In addition, doing all the things to manage, you know, the Lyme itself and, and at once, I really kind of started on that path that really took, I’ll say, almost three years to get to a point where I felt like I had my energy back, I had my brain back, I felt fully functional.

And I can remember, you know, being so just darn fatigued that any kind of exercise or movement just seemed impossible. So I would literally I’d plop in front of my couch in front of the TV, and while I was watching TV, I would just start stretching.

I would just start, you know, doing minimal movement. And then, you know, I start doing laps around the house. And then I started walking around my neighborhood and eventually got to a point where my energy was good enough.

I started studying martial arts. And eventually, you know, eight years later, I got a black belt in karate. So, you know, I know that that path seems very arduous for so many line patients, and you feel like you’re just never going to get there.

But, you know, my my own personal story is that, like, I it took a long time, but it took the perseverance. It took the having the right attitude, the right mindset, you know, knowing that there is the capacity to heal.

It’s just you got to get all these obstacles out of the way. I think, you know, this is the beauty of the human body, right? Is that it is built into our DNA to heal.

We are designed to do that. It’s just there’s something that’s stopping us from accomplishing that. And I think, you know, we can maybe talk about this a little bit more.

But if we think about Lyme or really any kind of other persistent infection, you know, why is it some people get Lyme, you know, they get no symptoms at all.

Some people get Lyme, they get treated with, you know, 21 days of antibiotics and then they’re fine. And then there’s that other percentage that just end up with persistent, chronic Lyme despite all these other treatments, you know, what’s the difference?

So, you know, I’ve learned again through my own experience. And then, of course, I took what I learned about myself and really started applying it to my patients.

And again, it’s really about the terrain. You really got to treat the whole person. You’ve got to get the terrain. And so that’s your gut function. That’s, you know, how well you’re breathing, how well you’re sleeping.

It’s everything that’s part of you. You’ve got to get that functioning well, to get to allow that natural process of healing to occur. And again, I am making it sound more simple than it really is.

But, you know, I think as a practitioner that’s part of our job is that, you know, we need to help each of you figure that path out of, you know, where is that obstacle?

What’s that thing that’s really stopping your body from functioning? Well? What’s that thing that stopping yourself from repairing the way they’re designed to.

And if we can identify those things again, you know, we give you the opportunity to allow that natural process of healing to occur. You know, it’s so interesting just what you’ve talked about for people that are just coming in and joining us, you in your own pursuit, first off, you did the classic.

Yeah, I how long ago was this event when you first started experiencing your Lyme symptoms? And, and you got bit by a tick and like you described your classic.

How many years ago was that? Yeah. So it’s almost 20 years ago. I got bit in June of 2002, and I had my relapse in February of 2003. Okay, so my point is, 20 years ago, certainly in 20 years, there’s been amazing advancements in Lyme research and Lyme applications.

But 20 years ago and I can relate to this because that’s we started on our journey with our daughter close to 30 years ago. And so within that timeframe, it was even though Lyme has been around for a while, the thing in the the methods that we and the available different, integrated functional ways that we can approach the same challenges today are very different today than it was that.

So I can relate exactly to what you were going through. But dialing it back to that time, really all we knew was to do Doxy or arrhythmias. The various different antibiotics, if you caught it early enough, and the idea that you did catch it early enough, but yet you still relapse and it still was recurring within your body is a is a different kind of concept.

And so people and the other part that I thought that was really interesting, that you were set what you said was, the realistic time frames that it takes for your body to recover.

And, and I think that’s part of the, the problem, like you say, what is the problem? Well, maybe the problem is us. We don’t have realistic time frames or there’s emotional, baggage or content that’s getting in the way of us healing completely.

And, and, I really want to dive into some of the stuff with you, but I just find it really interesting because most people maybe it’s just a Western approach to medicine, you know, the classical approach, that you take a medication and boom, it’s knocked out and that’s it.

Move on to your next episode of of health challenges, if any. Or what what is the combination. But but I think having realistic goals and expectations is really part of, of the journey and and allowing your body, like you said, to create that healthy, healing primal platform.

So it’s not it is about Lyme today, but it’s not about Lyme in the grand scheme of things. Having that primal platform of, you know, strong immune system and strong gut and strong microbiome, these are all parts of the components that we need to be healthy long term, not just about live.

Yeah. Well, I think what you’re saying is so important. And I one of the things I find extremely frustrating, and I’m sure those who are watching, you know, have probably experienced something very similar is when we start talking to other people with Lyme disease, or if you just go online and start reading about other people, you know, it’s really important that you understand that your Lyme is your Lyme and you can’t compare yourself with anybody else.

It affects people so profoundly differently that what you experience may have no relation to what anyone else experiences. So we’re always comparing apples and oranges.

And, you know, one person, I mean, I’ll just give you an example. I had a patient come to my clinic years ago. She came to me from Arizona. She had very severe Lyme symptoms, a lot of neurological impairment.

In my mind. I kind of thinking that I kind of expected this was going to be kind of a long path of recovery. She had had lime for many years, was symptomatic for many years.

So we started treating her again. We’ve talked about diet, you know, sleep, all the environmental lifestyle factors. I started her on this in a series of Chinese herbs.

She came back a month later and every single symptom was 100% gone. She was 100% fully functional. And then I’ve followed her now, for it’s probably been 7 or 8 years.

She’s never had a single relapse. She was done in 30 days. And I would say that’s the exception more than the rule. But, you know, I can’t compare her with, you know, other people that might have similar symptoms where it may take them months or even years sometimes to get to that point of recovery.

And I can’t stand when I see people go online and start bashing other Lyme patients about, well, why are you doing this and why are you doing that? Look, as a practitioner who’s treated over 8000 Lyme patients, I can tell you I’ve done some treatments that worked beautifully for one person and do absolutely nothing for the next.

And it’s incredibly frustrating as a practitioner because we’re always trying to find the things that, you know, we think are going to help you the most.

The reality is, is that everyone’s uniquely different. You’ve got to start factoring in your genetic disposition, your environment, all these other things.

We kind of alluded to diet, lifestyle and stress and so forth and all that plays a role in to get your capacity to heal. So, you know, just be very cautious, you know, when you’re out there, particularly on the internet, unfortunately, there’s some great information and there’s also some very, I think, bad information.

I get so frustrated, especially with a lot of the Facebook groups. Now, you would if you went on these groups, you would think, no one ever gets better from Lyme.

And what I realize the people who get better, they’re not on Facebook, they’re not out blogging, they’re not living their life. You know, they’ve kind of put that behind them.

So you get this very skewed view of Lyme that, you know, no one really gets better, and you’re all kind of stuck with this your whole life. And I’m here to tell you that that’s not true.

I mean, most of my patients, you know, get to a point where they’re I’ll consider, you know, recovered and they’re functional. They’re doing much better.

And, you know, we get into this interesting question that I don’t know if any of us really have the answer for is, you know, do you ever completely eradicate Lyme disease?

You know, we don’t know. We don’t have the testing methodology that measures Lyme directly in your body. We’re measuring your immune response to life and in reality, like look, I lived in Connecticut for almost 20 years, so I’m sure if I tested everybody in New England, I would probably find 70, 75% of people would have antibodies to Lyme, and that all those people don’t have Lyme disease.

Some people may have gotten bit by a tick. Their immune system did what was supposed to do it, got rid of it before it ever became a problem. And that was the end of that.

So when we’re measuring the immune response, understand what we’re actually looking at. We’re just looking at have you ever had exposure? The diagnosis of Lyme disease itself is really a clinical diagnosis.

You know, do you have the symptoms that point towards Lyme. So yes, if you happen to be lucky enough to get a CDC positive Lyme test, great. We know you’ve had exposure.

I can tell you, being a former clinical microbiologist, I used to do Lyme testing for a living before I was a doctor. False positives on a Lyme test are extremely rare.

False negatives are very, very common. So if you get a positive Lyme test, pretty good idea that you’ve had exposure. Negative test doesn’t exclude the possibility of having had exposure.

And if you go to the CDC website, they even tell you right there in black and white that, you know, Lyme disease is a clinical diagnosis based on your signs and symptoms, and particularly if you live in an area that’s endemic for deer ticks, that’s sort of their definition of, you know, being able to diagnose Lyme disease.

And the test that is out there was never designed to be diagnostic. It was used as a surveillance tool for people that had known Lyme disease. So on the 40 plus years of, you know, having this test available, we’ve never refined it to a point of really trying to pinpoint, you know, who has had Lyme exposure, who hasn’t.

And at the end of the day, it’s still a clinical diagnosis. But, you know, nonetheless, if you know, you happen to get a positive test grade negative test doesn’t exclude the possibility.

But, you know, it’s just, you know, well, I guess we could be a very long conversation about testing as a whole. But again, at the end of the day, you know, you your experience with Lyme disease just understand that your path may be very, very different than someone else’s.

So if you hear about other people, you know, going a little bit faster, a little bit slower, don’t worry about it. You know, it’s really about focusing on you, finding the things that work for you, for your body.

And ultimately, you know, that’s what helps get over the hump. Well, that’s so important. A couple of things you said, were you just hitting all the head like the hammer right on the nail?

As most people out there that are viewing, they’ve heard that Lyme mimics many other diseases. And that’s a challenge within itself. But do you ever get rid of it?

I took a pretty modern approach to that with our family, and I said to my daughter, you know, Julia, you may always have Lyme disease. That’s sort of a label.

In some instances, people use that diagnosis or that label as a rock to crawl under. I don’t want to do my homework well because my Lyme is acting up.

I don’t want to join a family function because I’m not sociable today, because my Lyme is acting up and there’s lots of rocks to crawl under in that regard.

What I said to to my daughter was, what’s more important isn’t the diagnosis or the label. It’s really how your body is responding similar to what you’re saying.

And to me, the true definition of health and wellness is living symptom free and living purposefully. So you may always have a little Lyme. We always have.

So all of us have a little Epstein-Barr and a little streptococcus and a little pneumonia. We all have all that. That’s the microbiome. That’s all the organisms that live in, in, somewhat of a symbiotic, harmony in our bodies that, that, that it has been going on for, God knows, since the beginning of life on this planet.

I want to say. So to me, what’s more important is how we act and our attitude, which is really what you’re talking about, our, our, our will to live and to to live, in a, in a healthy, functional manner.

And, and so I said to my daughter, this is our goal, symptom free and living purposefully. And that might mean but my daughter’s definition of that could be working 3 or 4 hours a day and not 14 hours a day.

Whatever the definition of that is self-defined as the expression of how lie might be showing its symptoms in your particular case or the individual’s case.

And so so I think to deflecting the absolutes of let’s kill this disease, it’s the enemy, it’s this, and it’s that. Let’s just focus on the bigger the bigger picture in a way.

And, and, you know, center back on our life and our family and our purpose and our bliss, you know, being able to express that because I believe that’s why we are in Earth camp.

That’s what I call our session right now. Our experience with life on our planet and, and making the most of it. And so whether life gets in the way or emotional challenges get in the way or other kinds of physical challenges, get in the way, you can get through all of that.

And the body is amazing thing with its regenerative processes. So I couldn’t agree with you more. On on everything you said. Yeah, well, I think of Lyme, you know, even though it’s technically a bacteria, it really has more behavior, like a virus and its ability to be persistent, invade cells.

And like you said, you know, Epstein-Barr virus. Herpes virus. Chickenpox virus. Right. Like, like like you can get chickenpox as a child. You can get shingles as an adult.

It’s the same virus that’s been in your body for 30, 40, 50 years that never bothered you. Something happens. Your immune system gets compromised. Now that virus is able to become active and you get a shingles outbreak.

Almost everyone I see who gets shingles can pinpoint. Yeah, I’ve been under a lot of stress. There was a huge trauma in my family. Some event that kind of precipitated that.

Like. Right. So the organism’s been there for years, decades, and now it’s becoming opportunistic. And I think Lyme to a degree is an opportunistic infection.

It’s allowed to persist because something in the body just isn’t functioning the way that it really should, that regulates the response to that organism.

And then we get into this very interesting. Pattern with microbes about is it the microbe itself that’s causing the problem, or is it the immune response to the microbe that creates the symptom?

You know, we’ve got good evidence, not just with Lyme disease, but with a lot of other microbes. I mean, stress, like kind of a classic example. You can get rheumatic heart disease, rheumatic fever.

This is an autoimmune immune reaction to strep. And again for most of us strep is part of our normal flora. We don’t always get strep throat or any kind of complications from it.

But it’s just kind of there. So we know from the research on Lyme in specific that, you know, we know it can cross react with our brain. It can cross react with our peripheral nerves.

It can cross react with our joints. So that immune response to the organism starts tagging other tissues in our body. And that’s what creates the inflammation.

And ultimately that’s kind of what creates the symptom. So if we start talking about the, you know, the arthritis, the brain fog, the, the headaches, you know, how much of this is really our immune response to the organism?

I think we think so much that, you know, the bug is getting into the tissue, and it’s just in there eating it away. And that’s generally not the case at all, you know, and we’ve got evidence, you know, with Lyme again, no postmortem.

People have had Lyme disease. They’ll find Borrelia in the brain. But the brain tissue itself isn’t eaten up. It’s not dissolved. It’s there. And again, that may be cross-reactive, you know, with our immune system.

So, you know, it opens up this other whole kind of can of worms immunologically about, again, how much of this is really immune dysfunction versus just even the persistent infection.

And again, in reality, it may be a little bit of both, but the fact that we’ve got so much evidence, you know, if you go into, PubMed, which is our big medical database type in any condition, rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, multiple sclerosis, and molecular mimicry, molecular mimicry is this immunological concept that there’s something on the molecule of that organism that is structurally very similar to something that might be in our own tissue, whether it’s a muscle cell, a brain cell, or so forth.

So as our immune system gears up to try and fight that bug again, it’s now across reacting with our own tissue. And depending on what part of our body is affected, kind of dictates what kind of symptoms we’re going to experience.

But again, we’ve got literally thousands and thousands of studies showing this relationship of various microbes, bacteria, viruses and others that, you know, can be a triggers for a lot of these chronic autoimmune diseases.

So when someone comes into my practice and they’ve been given that label of rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, whatever it is, the first thing I always test for is infection.

It’s like, is there an underlying infectious agent that may be a trigger now? Is it the only trigger? Probably not. But if it’s part of that puzzle, you know, again, there may be something we can do to help, you know, either treat the underlying infection or modulate the immune system in a way that it’s not so hypersensitive to this thing that might be part of your normal flora.

I mean, gosh, what if you’re hypersensitive to Candida or Epstein-Barr? Again, once you’ve been exposed, it’s part of you. You’re never going to get rid of it.

So this idea that we’re going to obliterate it to the point out of existence, it’s just not practical. And I think with Lyme disease, if you look at the work Monica has done at Tulane University, and, you know, even some of the work that Doctor Zhong has done at, Johns Hopkins, you know, they’ve both shown, you know, both in vitro and in animal studies that there is a percentage of Lyme organisms that are called persist or cells from the time you get bit by the tick, they’re already resistant to treatment.

It’s like you almost start off with chronic Lyme, even when you really kind of have a new Lyme disease. So this idea that these organisms are already resistant to antibiotics, I mean, what does that tell us? You know, so again, is it the is it the organism itself that is causing the problem or is it the immune reaction?

And if we don’t have a good way that we can completely eradicate this bug? And again, I don’t think we have any evidence that we can. And I know there are some other doctors out there in the Lyme world who are very well known, who advocate that, you know, you need to keep killing the bug until it’s gone.

Yeah. We have no way of measuring that end point because we can’t measure the bug directly. So when does that happen? Does it ever really happen? Like, I’ve seen people who’ve been on antibiotics for decades, you know, every day, you know, what does that doing to your gut microbiome? What is it doing to your mind?

Of course, Andrea, we know that a lot of these antibiotics, of course, you know, disrupt your your normal microbiome. And again, we’ve got tons of evidence of how important the microbiome is for our immune system.

And really staying healthy. And of course, if we damage our mitochondria, that’s the part of the cell that creates energy and also helps facilitate cell repair.

So gosh, if you’re a chronic fatigue person with Lyme and you’re on constant antibiotics, how much of that are you undermining your ability to make energy by virtue of the treatment that you’re undergoing?

And if you again, you’ve been on this treatment program for, you know, months or years, you know, what’s that really doing? So, you know, this certainly isn’t any kind of bashing against antibiotics.

They have their place. Certainly some people benefit from it. But I think with every treatment, whether it’s antibiotics, herbs, any kind of active Lyme treatment, you know, you have to draw a line in the sand and say, you know, what is our our endpoint here?

At what point do we say this is working? This isn’t working. And I see so many people have been on the same treatment for months or even years. And, you know, their improvement hasn’t really changed.

So again, have we moved the needle in the right direction? We can say that this treatment’s really being beneficial. Or is it possible that we’ve now crossed that line, that we’re now undermining your body’s ability to really heal and facilitate cell repair, that it just becomes this vicious cycle that we can’t quite get out of.

So, you know, no matter what treatment you’re doing, I think it’s just important to understand that whatever you do, I mean, I tell my patients, like, whatever we start with, we give it two months tops.

And if we haven’t seen any improvement, two months, we move on. We’re on to the next thing. So it’s just important that you have that discussion with your practitioner about, again, you know, you talk about what’s a realistic you know, goal, what kind of improvement should you expect to see.

But with keeping in mind that, you know, is the treatment that you’re doing, is it in some way working against you instead of working for you? Wow wow.

Great great great great advice on many levels. And I’ll tell you why. I think, in my history with Julia, we probably have seen 25 to 30 practitioners over 15 to 17 years.

And a lot of it is just what you described. How long like what’s the realistic expectation and what kind of result can you can you anticipate and put actually kind of like a date on a calendar for, for lack of anything else to use as a metric?

And so oftentimes what happens is, is that you get frustrated, you’ve got this chronic challenge, you feel like crap on a mind saying that, you’re not thinking clearly.

You’re depending on the practitioner to give you some kind of insight. Yet again, you may not have a dialed in or realistic expectation, so you get anxious.

You wind up believing that practitioner going on to the next one, two parts to that one. You may not have given that protocol enough time for it actually to show some real resolve through your frustration.

Secondly, what was the other side of that? Of the effect of that of that protocol, which could have created another cascade of series of events that may not be the most helpful for you in terms of primal healing?

And, I go back to your initial premise, or at least what you came out of the gate with today, which is about how resilient and how wonderful the body is and in its own ability to repair.

And we’ve got backups to backups, to backups systems within our body built in many of us that many of them we know about, and many we haven’t even discovered in ways that we can help us repair and get back on track.

But we do need to give our bodies the core things like nutrition and oxygen and good water supply and and things of that nature in order to give the body the tools it needs in order for us to, to get on track.

So having realistic goals and expectations, I think is part of it. And then allowing your body to have its own individual interpretation of whatever that protocol will be is also important.

And, you know, giving yourself enough time for it, for it to go for in the beginning for us, we would we were down in Florida and most of our practitioners were somewhere else in the country.

So we were traveling to New York. Doctor Buchanan scanner was one of our our lead doctors. And so we travel every six weeks to New York to visit with doctor O’Connell.

But really, most of the time we’re spending down in Florida. And that’s another aspect is it’s like you see your practitioner maybe less than 1% of your experience, and the rest of it is within your local family doctor and or your family and yourself to support your own health journey.

And that isn’t it’s easy to say, but not necessarily easy to do. I, I love how you just segue into autoimmune, challenges because people don’t often understand the correlation through with between a healthy immune functioning system and one that is sort of firing, you know, bullets at anything that’s moving, which is the auto immune response when the body is tricked into thinking that everything is an enemy, including the healthy cells within the body.

My approach has been more functional and integrated, where I just try to build up your own body resources. Your own body is not immune system to fight, to fight all these things off and then give your body the deficiencies that maybe the microbes or the the, the various different other protocols may have drained some resources, some minerals, some nutritional aspects of your body.

Give give your body the the letters of the alphabet. It needs to form a word and it will bounce back. So, yeah, I, I think that stress is a big part of it.

You mentioned that. And it can happen at any time and that often will create a relapse. You could be functioning. You could be, you know, another one big one is moles.

When you got a line patient that gets in a moles environment, all of a sudden they went from functional to nonfunctioning. And I think people listening and tuning in can relate to some of that.

But there are workarounds for all of these things. And just knowing and talking to today, Darren is so inspirational to me to know you’ve gone down that rabbit hole, you came out the other end, you were able to identify your own individual way and interpretation for you and created a manicure protocol that fits you and your lifestyle, and it puts you back on track.

And I think that that knowing that, that, that, that that can be achieved is super important for everybody out there that’s on the other side of the of the discussion.

And or is they’re frustrated as hell because they’ve tried everything, they’ve exhausted resources, they’re at their wit’s end. And knowing that you can you can come out of this and get on top of it is super important to know.

Yeah. And I think it’s also important to stress, again, there’s there’s so much you can do on your own. You know, you don’t have to completely rely on your health care provider to give you every tool you need to overcome.

Lyme, I mean, a lot of it is things. Again, it is it is being diligent about your bed time, you know, getting off electronics before you go to bed. It’s about, you know, what are you doing for yourself for self-care?

What are you doing to help detoxify your body? You know you’re getting you can get in a sauna, potentially. You can, you know, exercise to your ability.

You know, there’s so many things that are low cost, no cost available to you. If you make that effort to, you know, start incorporating that as part of your daily life, you know, ritual so that you know, you’re consistent with it, you’re consistent with your diet.

You know, when you think about food, what you put in your mouth, is it helping me or is it hurting me? And if it’s hurting me, we need to get it out of the diet.

I mean, no mystery that, you know, living on fast food junk food is probably not facilitating your body in the right way. So don’t do that. You know, again, you can get good, clean, organic food.

I mean, my gosh, the largest retailer of organic food I think is Costco or Target. You know, you don’t have to spend, you know, hundreds of dollars at Whole Foods to get good clean, healthy food.

So again, there’s so much you can do on your own, again, without relying on a health care provider because I, I get calls, emails from people all over the country, all over the world.

Now they’re in areas where they don’t necessarily have a Lyme expert. You know, they’re looking for guidance or looking for advice. And again, there’s just so much that you can take stock of and do yourself.

And I think, you know, one of the two biggest hurdles I see in people who’ve done a lot of things and haven’t gotten better, you know, I think the two pieces that you need to look seriously at, if you’ve been trying different therapies, you’ve done antibiotics, maybe you’ve done herbs.

I’m not really improving a lot. You know, you got to look at your stress. Stress is the one thing that will undermine your immune system better than anything else out there.

And trauma. I’m always amazed. And so I’ve gotten to the point now in my practice, because I never really talked about it early on. It’s always kind of an uncomfortable conversation anyway, particularly for people that have had these types of traumas.

But, you know, as I start digging deeper, it’s amazing how many people I come across that there’s often this unresolved trauma and whether it’s some sort of adverse childhood event.

I mean, it may not necessarily. I think when we think of trauma, we think about like these horrible things that happen. And granted, those do happen to some people, but oftentimes these traumas are not what people on the outside might even consider major events.

You know, trauma could be something that was that happen when you were a child. You know, something happened in grade school that may have been relatively minor.

But as a child, the way your brain interprets that information is very different than the way you think about it. Now, as an adult. And so, you know, working with someone who really knows how to walk you through that experience and kind of help you resolve some of that, can make a huge, huge difference.

And, you know, for people where, you know, we’ve been working for a while and we feel like we’re getting stuck, I mean, that’s always the next place to go.

So again, if you’ve been one of those people that you know, you’ve tried a lot of different therapies and really been stuck, I think it’s important to really take a look at your stress.

Are you really managing it the way you think you are, as there are other things you could do to improve that? And sometimes that means making really drastic lifestyle changes.

I mean, hard core. I’ve had people have had to quit their jobs. Their jobs are literally killing them. They’re making themselves sick, or they work in an environment that’s toxic and not necessarily emotionally toxic.

But I have people that work in office buildings that are loaded with mold. And like if you were going to a moldy building every day and you have Lyme disease, it’s kind of hard to feel well, because there’s so much clinical overlap of symptoms with the mold.

Maybe 80% of symptoms overlap with micro toxicity as it does with Lyme disease. So your Lyme might be getting better, but you’re still sick because you’re in this toxic environment.

And so making those hard those hard choices about, you know, sometimes you have to move schools or move houses. Sometimes you have to quit your job. Sometimes you have to do these things because that’s what your body needs to really get well.

And it honestly, it sucks. I mean, it’s it can be really devastating for people and their families. But if you aren’t healing, if you’re not getting well and you know that there’s an environment you’re in that’s kind of stopping you from getting there, you know what?

What benefit you have of staying in that environment when you’re that unwell. And ultimately that may progress to something worse than what you’ve been experiencing.

So it may be like, I need to step out of this environment for a while. I need to really. He’ll get myself well when I’m at that point. Okay, maybe we can talk about trying to go back in that, at least to a certain degree.

But I just see so many people that, you know, are unwilling to make those changes because it’s uncomfortable. And the reality is, is that if you can’t make those changes, you know, you may get stuck in this position.

And these are really the people, again, who tell me why I take my herbs. I’ve been taking my antibiotics, I take my supplements, and I am no better. Okay.

Well, clearly then we’re not addressing the underlying issue. We haven’t, you know, fully, fix that problem yet. So we got to go deeper than what’s that next level.

And again, stress trauma for me is the things I see the most common in those folks. So I think, like you say, emotional addressing, emotional healing, is something that’s is an area of health care that’s way under under, served.

Absolutely. And it could be as simple as you say something that got a sticking point from a childhood experience that’s resurfacing in, in other ways.

And I, I think that you honestly, my own personal opinion is I don’t believe you can truly heal. And unless you address the emotional content of whatever that that part of that tapestry that created that, that component.

Now, that may sound sort of funny or opaque, but I will tell you in my own, my own journey that the fastest response I’ve ever gotten, healing response I’ve ever gotten was from emotional healing.

Because if you identify the area of the part of your life where you had a trauma of sort, whether it be as a child, like you say, you know, you’re a little person looking up at this big world.

And so the small problem as an adult was a big problem when you’re a little person and the but the stuckness is still the same, you know, and when you find that that area where you’re stuck and you relieve it, it not only fixes you, but it also fixes future generations because you pass on that emotion to your offspring.

And I probably and I and I do know this for a fact. I inherited emotional, trauma from they call it your emotional DNA, but I, I actually inherited from four generations before me from a relative of mine that I didn’t even, I didn’t even know by first name.

And that’s how how far and how deep and how reaching this can be. But, well, well, point well taken. And it’s all part of the context of healing. But I wanted to just center back on something else you just mentioned briefly, which is about toxic being toxic.

And again, you can be emotionally toxic and you can be, you know, biochemically toxic. But there is certainly a relationship between, the byproduct of Lyme and microbes, the micro toxins, neurotoxins, the biofilms, the deadline if you took an antibiotic and to kill Lyme, that becomes a toxin.

And I in my pursuit just from the infrared scope of work that we do, oftentimes, even though you may have a good understanding of the underlying cause, if you can lower the toxic burden in the body, you become less symptomatic.

And that gives both the practitioner and the patient a new breath. You know, I’m on life, a little bit of relaxation or a little chance to step back a little bit from there, from all the symptoms that they’ve been experiencing.

And it gives the practitioner a little bit of time to actually dive into what the root cause might be while the patient and people out there that are listening, they’re less symptomatic.

So they’re actually able to engage back into some of their normal life of what they thought was normal as it got redefined through their own journey, with their experience with Lyme and and various different things.

And so spend a few minutes at least talking to me, what you’ve seen in your practice, you know, what you’ve seen, you know what? You can or pine at least talk to us about detoxifying or the the role that toxicity plays on your symptoms.

Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, I I’ve kind of come to the conclusion I’ve heard other people say this I think I think we’re right. If you look at what is associated with chronic disease across the board, it’s chronic underlying infection, chronic toxicity and trauma.

That’s it. Those three things. It’s like if you can identify those three factors you can get people. Well it’s and if you look at all across the board diabetes heart disease cancer it’s toxicity.

It’s underlying infection. It’s trauma. It’s like these same things come up over and over. So when we talk about the toxicity piece, I mean I can say with confidence 95 plus percent of my Lyme patients have poor detox pathways by various means.

And if you look at the liver in particular, you know, we have a lot of different ways that we help get rid of, you know, garbage out of our body. But if those pathways are compromised any way and we know and again, with all our understanding of genetics, a lot of people are sort of genetically disposed to being poor, to toxic fires.

And again, that comes from generations. We also know that we just live honestly in a more toxic world. You know, the average Americans exposed over 80,000 chemicals a year.

Less than 200 of those have ever been studied for their safety and toxicity. So we have a bunch of wild cards out there that we’re all getting exposed to.

Have really no idea what the cumulative effect is on our body. But we do know that when you can’t detoxify well, your disposition for anything and being able to move through it quickly is going to be compromised.

So, you know, if you get exposed to a chemical, if you get exposed to another toxin, if you get exposed to a micro toxin, even in small amounts, they can have a very profound effect on how they affect you physically, mentally, emotionally.

So, you know, part of our strategy always in dealing with Lyme disease and again, kind of coming back to healing the terrain is that we need to help, you know, improve our body’s ability to get rid of this toxic soup.

And again, with the understanding that there may be some genes that we’re working against, there are still ways that we can help, you know, start to lower that body burden of the various things we’ve been exposed to.

I mean, just using my cell phone as an example, you know, again, prior to having Lyme disease, I mean, I used to spend my summers, my father worked for an oil company, so I used to spend my summers working at a tank farm in Long Beach, literally climbing inside a huge oil tank without a respirator, scraping them and cleaning them.

So, you know, benzene, toluene, petrochemicals. I had a ton of exposure that I used to work in a hospital lab before. As a doctor, I can remember even without gloves, we would stick our hands in xylene, all these chemicals making slides.

You know, I had all sorts of toxic, toxic exposure, you know, prior to Lyme. Did that set the stage for me to be more prone to chronic Lyme? Probably. That was probably part of it.

You know, I can look back to I was, you know, an ear infection kit. I was on antibiotics every month for the first five years of my life, and eventually had my tonsils taken out, tubes put in.

But, you know, you think about your gut microbiome early in life. Again, how much does that set the stage? Well, we’ve now got tons of research showing that it has a huge impact on your disposition towards autoimmunity and other chronic illnesses.

So we know that, you know, when the terrain again is not functioning well, your disposition towards toxicity is going to be much greater. So all the strategies that are available that again, we find that people have access to and can tolerate, you know, it may be something.

Again, I’m a huge fan of sauna. It’s a great way to mobilize mycotoxins, heavy metals, other types of toxic things. Doctor Steve Ingenuous has done a lot of interesting research on sauna therapy, and found that it helps mobilize a lot of stuff out of tissue because a lot of things, even like mycotoxins, know they’re fat soluble molecules.

So when they get into your body or even like heavy metals like lead and mercury, once they get into tissue, they’re very hard for our bodies to naturally just mobilize and get it out.

So unless we do something to kind of stir up the pot, so to speak, to help get it out of tissue, once they get in there, they may just stay there persistently for months, years.

So we’ve got to do something to try and help get that out of tissue, get it out of our body. Whether it’s know we poop it out, we pee it out, we sweat it out.

You know, we’ve got all these different pathways that we excrete. So we have to open up all those pathways to allow, again, that natural process to happen.

So, you know, exercise again, getting your body to sweat that way can be very helpful. Plus just the cardiovascular benefits. We do things like hydrotherapy in nature, path medicine using alternating hot and cold to help open up your blood flow.

That’s another way of helping mobilize things. Mechanical medicines like, you know, massage and lymphatic drainage. You know, we’ve got various nutrients and herbs that can help mobilize things out of tissue.

We’ve got different homeopathic. So I’m a huge fan of what’s called homo toxicology, which is a very gentle way, which I think gets down to the cellular level and again, starts getting your body to start dumping the stuff out of cells.

So, you know, for every person it’s going to be a little bit different about what you tolerate. More often than not, I find a little goes a long way. So, you know, you just kind of have to start gently to see how the body responds.

And if you feel like you’re doing well with that, we can always increase the time, the dose or whatever. You know, therapy we’re using to find that sweet spot that, you know, we can see that we’re starting to, you know, obviously get rid of things out of the tissue.

And of course, it’s important that we stop the influx of that coming in. So making conscious choices in your home are using natural cleaning chemicals.

If you keep using Windex and 409 and all this stuff, that’s toxic air fresheners, they don’t freshen anything. They’re literally putting formaldehyde and all these chemicals in the air that you smell. But they’re very, very toxic.

So again, making choices, what you have in and around your home, using, you know, pesticides, herbicides on your yard, all these things you can choose not to use because all those things, bio accumulate over time.

And if you’re already a toxic person, it just doesn’t take very much to break, you know, the straw that breaks the camel’s back. So as much as you can stop the influx is tremendously helpful.

And then again, if we can help with the excretion of all these different toxins, again, that makes the terrain much healthier. And we find just clinically, you know, my line patients feel tremendously better when we get their body, burn the toxins down.

Yeah. We we, we use binders, a binder protocol, different binders, which is basically like a sponge. Like a bio sponge. We call it. And there’s we we broke it into two classes.

Like a macro sponge. Those would be like the carbon charcoal, activated charcoal, sort of bentonite clays, certain foods like spirulina and like the superfoods, have a, binding effect.

And basically what it is, is a sponge. And so through either your activity, through sauna, massage, playing tennis, whatever. Will mobile that mobilizes the toxin.

Then you have the binder that’s there ready to catch it. And that helps take the burden off of some of your filtering organs. And at the same time, give your body the ability to expunge, the, these toxins.

So there’s one part, which is the big part that’s the toxic burden that’s being produced by all the organisms that live in some kind of harmony in your body and or disharmony when you have an imbalance.

And then obviously the external, toxins, like the big one now is glyphosate. Yeah. It’s it’s been around for a while, but what we’re seeing is that it’s now not just in our food sources, but it’s also in the air and the water we’re drinking.

And so basically, that creates leaky everything leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky throat, leaky heart, like everything is leaking. Which also goes back to your discussion about autoimmune, because now we have bacteria or undigested food that’s supposed to be in your GI tract.

That’s now in your bloodstream, and your your immune system thinks it’s an invader of some sort when it’s just your leaky. But all of it adds up. So I wished it was only one thing, but unfortunately it’s a little less and a little of that.

And then at some point there’s a tipping point, and that’s when you’ve just your body just can’t manage all of it. And you mentioned it earlier about all of our genetics.

We all have different genetic dispositions. So some of us are stronger or weaker in other areas. And generally it’s the epigenetic, the the effect of our environment that if that does change our genetics a little bit, that also has a overall, you know, effect on us.

And this our discussion today isn’t about to make things more confusing for everybody out there. It’s I think there’s a lot of big takeaways from today’s dialog between you and I.

And one of them is that there is a there is a road back. There are success stories. There’s a doctor that’s inside of us, our voice that’s inside of us that we somehow manage to ignore.

That’s super important because that’s the one that is the true north for each of us. And the true North is when you try a protocol, your body will tell you whether you have a good or a bad response.

You just have to be awake and alive and listen to that doctor inside of you. As good as you are and as good as I might be as a doctor or a coach, the best doctor for all of us is the one that resides inside of us.

And, you’ve given us so many great pearls. The auto immune part, the the idea that you can find the root cause, the effects of toxicity, is these are all the emotional part of the equation that is, needs to be, recognized and worked with in order for us to heal completely.

And also the family dynamic, you know, it’s you’re not alone in your, in your journey, but yet everybody’s in there and everybody’s feeling as inadequate as you are as being the patient because you’re not getting better.

And everybody’s frustrated and you’re exhausting time and money and, and, watching your, your life pass in front of you. This was an amazing time today, doctor angles, thank you for your contribution.

We only have a few minutes left. I know we’ve gone over time, but I just couldn’t stop you because you are in such a great role. So before we go, is there anything that you want to leave the audience with?

Any pearls or anything that we might not have covered that you feel is important? For for today’s interview? Yeah. No, I just want to say, you know, I just think it’s important that, you know, like, this is your life, you know, and nowhere, no matter where you are in the process, you know, there’s still hope.

And, you know, people say, I’ve tried everything. I can promise you. You haven’t tried everything. You know, sometimes you need to find a different practitioner, work with.

It’s going to give you different guidance sometimes. Again, it’s about being honest about, have I really done everything I’ve been asked to do? So just, you know, be be mindful of, you know, where you’re at in the process, but understand that there’s still a lot of opportunity for the body to heal.

Again, it’s built into our DNA, so just stay with it. You know, if you’ve been asked to do something, stick with the program. If you find it’s not working, find switch.

If you don’t have a practitioner that is working well for you, you know, you need to have someone who’s really part of your team and, you know, on your side.

I just come across so many people that are in areas where, you know, their doctors don’t believe they have chronic Lyme, and it’s just a constant, you know, butting of heads that doesn’t facilitate a healthy, you know, healing relationship.

So, you know, fortunately, there’s practitioners like myself and many other around the country that were in virtually. So if you need to reach out to someone outside of your local area to get that guidance, you know, please do so because that help is available if you want to.

Yeah, that’s great point. So how do people get Ahold of you? What’s the best way through your website? Do you have an 800 number. Tell us how they can find you.

Yeah. Easiest way is just to go to my website. It’s just Darren Ingles and SI.com. Dr.. In Eng L’s and the and is in Nancy d.com all of my information all the links to my social media is there.

So yeah we’d love for people to sign up. We have a regular newsletter. We have a lot of information about Lyme disease and chronic illness. And you know, we’re here to help support you in any way that we can.

And if you didn’t hear Doctor Darren works virtually, so you could be on the other side of the country, the other side of the world, and check in with Doctor Engels.

Get his take on what’s going on. You can have your local practitioner. That’s what we did for our whole journey. We had practitioners all over the country and we would check in with them.

Sometimes we would go visit, sometimes it would be virtual. And the world we’re living in today, it’s super easy for you to find a great doctor like Doctor Ingles, get some insight and tweak yourself back to good health.

Thank you Doctor Ingles for your insights. You’re amazing and I love your contribution. I can’t wait for people to hear you and get excited. Great. Thanks for having me Robbie.

Hey everybody it’s Robbie. Best in our. Thanks so much for joining us today. Please share this content with anyone that you think might benefit from it. And we’re looking forward to have you with us tomorrow for another great interview.