Why Eczema Shows Up Where It Does (and What It’s Really Telling You)

Intro and Dr. Ericau2019s healing journey 0:00

Hi friends, welcome back to Eczema Kids. Today I am talking with Dr. Erica Schultz, and she's a doctor of Chinese medicine and an acupuncturist who developed something called the resiliency method. And her own health story is totally bananas. She started having grand mal seizures just as a teenager, And instead of accepting you just have bad genes or just meditate, she spent years digging for the actual root. And that search is what eventually led her to treating chronic conditions professionally.

We get into why eczema isn't just a skin problem through a TCM lens, which I think is especially helpful because this modality of medicine really treats the whole person. And in TCM, eczema is connected to your thymus gland and your spleen and you nervous system and where on the body the exima is showing up also tells you something. toxins inside the body and how your body literally encapsulates them for you. And we talk about why testing too early could really backfire and why your child's eczema might be way more closely tied to the nervous system than you've ever been told.

So if you felt like you're doing everything right, you are following a very clean diet, giving them the supplements, cleaning up the environment, doing anything you possibly can and your child's skin still isn't healing, this episode might connect some dots for you. So let's get into it with Dr. Erica. Is your child struggling with itchy nights and endless flare-ups? I'm Andrea McHugh, mom of four and host of eczema kids. Here you'll find natural solutions that actually work so you can heal your children's exima without steroids, without the overwhelm, and finally see calm, healthy skin again.

Let's get into it. Hi, Dr. Erica, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Andra. Our pleasure. I'm so excited because you developed something called the resiliency method, which is sounds like something that we need to know more of. But before we dive into that, I'd love to start with you because most practitioners don't develop a healing framework unless something shifts their perspective along the way. So was there a moment, either personally or in your clinical work, where you realized that you just had to go deeper than symptom management?

Absolutely, yeah. My journey has been a long one, but you know, we are wrought with our own lessons throughout the pathway, and we don't usually get to the point where we're helping to lead others without our journey. And so certainly mine is unique. I did start having a seizure order when I was younger. And my, so my health journey was really complex kind of earlier out of the gates. Once I got hip puberty, I started having grand mal seizures and then that led to, you know, as I age, not getting to the root cause of that, led me to need to go further and deeper into exploration and understanding what was going on with my body.

because I knew that it was all connected, essentially. You know, I ended up going into a second career was going back to grad school in my 30s to become a doctor of Chinese medicine and acupuncture. And that education was really great because it helped me to understand how everything is connected to everything else, and then also how there's certain patterns that emerge inside the body. that are often indicated in a lot of different conditions. It's just that our thinking and our way of oriented to our health because of the Western paradigm is kind of based off of a really mechanistic drug label condition view.

And all of those things are necessary when you're trying to understand what's going on with you and you are trying look at your body from a standpoint of, or doctors trying looking at you body really and give you a prescription for a particular medication that will help your condition, right, and help you with symptoms. But, ultimately, what I started to see was that the things that were contributing to what appeared to be different disparate types of symptoms in my body actually all had a lot to do with each other.

So, you know, a not-rude-cause approach to understanding even seizures, and most people just think of a situation like that and go, Oh, sorry. You know, you got dealt a handful of bad genes in your life and there's nothing we can do about that. you just got to simply medicate, right? And that did, medication helped for a long time in terms of at least not making it so that I fell down in front of everybody and you know worried about all the time. But even as I aged, I still wasn't getting to the root of it and they'd still happen and are terrifying.

And so I really kind of become a little bit of a zealot. I just never really accepted that it was emotional, that It was just something genetic I had to live with. You know, just didn't feel at an intuitive level that that was really my story. So I just kept looking for answers. And then as I became a clinician, I started working with people inside of my clinic. For over 10 years, we did a lot of the root cause treatments and approaches. We were able to customize it for people, which oftentimes look like miracles happening on the regular.

But we were looking at heavy metals, we're looking parasites, were look at fungus, bacteria, all the things, viruses that contribute to some of these chronic issues.

Why eczema is more than a skin issue in TCM 5:01

And we are getting a lot of great results. However, after 10 years of doing that, I was stuck and I seeing more and more people around me that were kind of stuck in their journey. And it wasn't because what we were doing was wrong. It was just that it was not enough. Every time you complete a level of healing in the body, the Body wants to give you the next bit of the story. Right. It wants to tell you what else is there to be dealt with. And, you know, by the way, this approach is really based off the whole notion and the paradigm that your body can heal, We were made perfect in design.

We're made capable of healing. So that's what kind of led me into going beyond even where a lot of practitioners are getting. And so it started with like, for example, eliminating gluten and wheat and all those things, doing all of those food elimination and such. But then ultimately seeing that there were some things that we were kind of missing and glossing over that were really pivotal in terms of the direction that my immune system and my nervous system were going. And that was true for many other patients that are dealing with chronic illness.

Or we're just looking for another way to age. Yeah, absolutely. And so everyone listening is either experiencing eczema themselves or a parent of somebody who's experiencing Eczima and they're given the same advice, right? Like, okay, we're going to have to medicate this with steroids or biologics. Sad for you that this is a genetic condition that you're just going have manage. That's it. Want to know from a TCM perspective, What do you think the body is saying when you're exhibiting eczema symptoms?

Definitely starts with the gut. So from a Chinese medicine perspective, we call that spleen-cheat efficiency. Now people go, spleen, what do mean splean? My splene is not there for any reason. People get their splenes out all the time, right? Well, technically speaking, the Chinese medicines, there's no separation between the spline itself, you know, anatomically, and the pancreas. So, those were seen as one organ called the spleen. Okay, so the splen is actually very instrumental in producing sufficient enzymes in your body.

The spleen also has an important factor of making sure there's adequate amounts of blood cells to work ineffectively with your immune system and your The spleen's also really important to transform dampness. That's usually via, you know, adequate enzyme producing ability, right? So all of these things are at that root cause and create when you have a skin condition. You have at play really a chronic oftentimes, and some of the other things, but by far a spleen, what we call splean chi or splene energy deficiency.

And that's what our approach looks at from the resiliency method is, is which organ, tissue, or gland is not operating appropriately such that you would need to create and help facilitate some healing for that organ tissue or a gland. Whereas a lot of times we can find some results certainly in the world of supplements, whether that be herbal, homeopathic, you know, nutraceutical or whole food supplements. You can often treat a of things at more of like a medicinal level, which is great because that's an alternative to a drug, to certainly a biologic.

Sometimes a lotta skin conditions are being treated by, no, via the biologics, the steroids, things that are pressing the immune system. But the resiliency method really is taking an approach to the body of like, great, let's see if we can find something that would help address the symptom of a skin condition at more of that medicinal level. Because again, it's an alternative. It's another way of dealing with that symptom. But ultimately, we really want to go after the organ tissue or gland insufficiency because that's how we get lasting healing.

And then that is more importantly how you get even more permission to even go to deeper levels of healing in the body. Interesting. So would you put all types of eczema like the really, you know, it presents itself in really different ways depending on the person, but like, would you say the dry eczema versus the really wet, weepy eixema? Would you all of that is a spleen-chi deficiency? Is that what you said? I would say that the weepier ones are more of the damp pathology, that damp condition type of situation.

The more dry ones would be more like an aspect of blood deficiency, which can also involve liver, But also starts with spleen too, because blood deficiencies means you have poor function of your blood cells. And sometimes what I see too is the drier ones often too, and even any eczema can sometimes have a lot to do with the condition of the bone marrow itself. And so oftentimes in those types of situations, we're looking at the tricult, the trifecta, which is thymus gland. We can talk about that in a little bit more detail.

The spleen and then even the bones marrow, because a lotta times those are coming, especially if you've got exima in certain spots, you know, and not necessarily systemically, but like maybe on a leg and it's just that one spot that always comes up and comes and goes, comes, goes. That's oftentimes an indication of some deeper level of challenge going on in the bone marrow itself. So we will go after the spleen, the thymus gland and the bones to help deal with the root cause of that skin pattern.

Interesting. So, what herbs and foods help revive your spleen? What helps that? So ultimately, it's still going through the process of looking at what's stressing out the spleen, right? There's a lot of different herbal formulations you could use to help with the splen. It's till herbs, so it still at an herbal level, meaning it is medicinal in nature. So you can get some relief for a period of time, but if it keeps coming back, it's because you still need to dig out even further what's going on that's challenging that organ tissue or gland.

Okay. So specifically in our case, we might be looking at heavy metal toxicity. We might looking for chronic parasite infections. A lot of times eczema will present with bacterial or fungal overgrowth. Sometimes that's directly linked to what they have done in the past with medication therapy. A lotta times doctors are trying to teach or treat these skin conditions with antibiotics, for example. Chronic use of antibiotics will certainly allow fungus to overgrow in presence of that because there's not a good balance between the two.

But ultimately, even fungus and candida problems can keep coming back if there's an underlying heavy metal problem.

Spleen, thymus, and bone marrow patterns 11:59

And I'll take you even another level of this, which is where we get to using the resiliency method is going beyond the organ and tissue and gland, or at least I should say building enough energy in those areas of the body for the to actually allow us to start to deal with deeply encapsulated toxins. And by encapsulation, I mean just that. Anytime the body sees something it doesn't like, it's smart and it'll put a little pillow or a container around it. It'll encapsulate it, and that's all an innate intelligence program design of your body to protect you.

Well, the problem is, is when you have so much of a toxic burden or a topic load or and then you you, have coexisting, you know, infections of parasites, things like that, oftentimes the body will say, I don't like, that I'm going to contain it, put a little capsule around it. Well in chronic skin conditions, actually what we've seen is that a lot of times the really challenging ones are because of the fact that there is encapsulated toxins storing in the peripheral nerves. of the body, and they're leaching on the regular.

Now, you will store heavy metal toxins in your brain, in you nervous system, meaning your central nervous, like along your spine, right? And then the peripheral nervous is what goes out from the trunk of your spinal and goes into your arms and legs. And that's where you can sometimes see a lot of skin. Then peripheral nerves, any nerve can come up to the surface of this skin too. So that actual damage or encapsulated toxin on the nervous system is oftentimes what's leeching long enough and over with some consistency to where it then suppresses and creates an immune response in the body, activates it, and then you've got a skin condition.

So, that's a good example where we'll see a lot of that weepy stuff and especially fingers, toes. Peripheral nerves are in concentration around the lips. You know, any orifice or any opening of the body itself has a lots of concentration of peripheral nerves. So if you have toxins that have been stored there, then oftentimes they'll come up even around, you know some of these areas of your body with some regularity because of encapsulated toxin. Yeah, interesting. What about if it's really present on your cheeks?

What is that saying? Just in particular, that could also be potentially it is close enough to we're encapsulating a lot of times toxins even in our gum tissue, even our tongues. It's crazy. We'll find these things, aluminum, mercury stored there deeply. And so again, if you're, whatever areas nearby there, there could be also even parotid gland involvement. There's the parotic gland which is inside the mouth there. And that's one that is helpful in terms of, you know, producing enzymes in your mouth, but also helping with detoxification inside your body.

And if that overburden, that close by could also exhibit or come out towards the cheeks of the skin, and it also could be coming from leaching from the gum tissue itself. Interesting. What about the back, if it's really concentrated along your back? Along the back, like along the spine? Right, or just, you know, on your back in general. I would be looking at the central nervous system, as a part of what's storing and encapsulating. So a lot of times encapsulations are happening along, the sacral, lumbar, thoracic and cervical spines as well.

Yeah, interesting. Same, and if you're talking about like upper chest, I would be looking again, you have nerves anywhere in the body, but you could also be seeing direct involvement with the thymus gland there. So inside each of our bodies is this thimus, gland like sort of upper part of your chest. Sometimes we refer to it as the mediastinum. And this is something that's getting really overlooked. And really, I will say, Andrea, probably to about five years ago, because this is always something for me as a clinician, and I was like, oh, don't get that.

I know the body is smart and we were made very intelligently. It does not make sense to me what is said about the thymus gland. And that was after adolescence, yeah, it starts to atrophy, just kind of you know, goes away and that's just the way what we've noticed with it. Meanwhile, our autoimmune conditions and our skin conditions are going like this in our society, right? So I'm going, wait a minute, that doesn't really add up, Right? Well, clinically, we started to see that you could have stress going on.

That was things that were stressing out your thymus gland. And if we gave people, more importantly, we addressed the stress, but then we also gave them repair parts for their thimus glands. So that was the whole food supplement that had the repair part stuff, the actual thymos gland in it from other animals, you know, in part in terms of, because that's how our ancestors healed. They would eat, they would kill the beast and then they'd eat everything on it. You know? But we only eat the muscle, right?

We don't eat But that's really truly what we need to heal ourselves is are those other parts. So if you combine that or you put them into the proper sequence for the body, because oftentimes you can't build back up. It's like everybody wants to go in and like do the thing that like builds them up perceivably.

Toxins, encapsulation, and nervous system involvement 17:28

But you got to put things in the right order at the time. If you're too much in an excess phase, you too toxic or you have an excess amount of parasites or an extra amount candida on your body floating around, you got inflammation, heat. One of the classic things everybody thinks they need to be doing every day is sauna therapy. You don't need a body that's already got several little micro-burns going on all over it and sticking it in a sauna. It's just going to add more heat, more fire to the flame, right?

Well, the same thing would go. You want to put things in the right order at the time. So we don't want repair the thymus gland before we've dealt with what made the Thymis gland need to be repaired in first place, so there's a sequencing aspect too that's oftentimes getting overlooked when we're just dealing with the body more at that protocol approach level. Now, you know, people need to start somewhere. So broad strokes. If you've seen a protocol that works for a lot of people, hey, give it a shot, man.

You got to search somewhere, right? We're kind of talking and having a conversation now that goes into a little bit more depth. right around what might be missing from the whole scene if you're not responding to the protocol approach very well, or if did initially and then all of a sudden you are on the third or fourth time trying to implement the protocols and it's not working for you the same way it used to. Yep, absolutely. I just mirror so much of what you say, but that really helped me understanding what, you were saying is like, if you're accepting this heat condition, which eczema absolutely is, like you can feel it, or you could feel the heat off my kids like a foot away.

And right, then you wouldn't put them in a sauna. You wouldn' t eat spicy foods. you Wouldn't give them coffee. If you' re an adult and you have coffee, be putting gasoline on the fire. Opposites balance, right? So like just navigating it that way as a mother really helped me understand what would be the right choice. Because a lot of times it's like, oh my goodness, I don't know. And you're trying to decide between pastured chicken and shellfish. Like everyone listening is way past Cheetos or even dairy or like they're doing everything.

They're so well-resourced and doing every single thing they can, but navigating life that way and is specifically in just trying to navigate this type of, like understand the properties of the disease. And even if you don't fully understand just that it's a heat condition, that gives you a really solid path to just say, okay, this might help in healing and this would likely delay healing. In the resilience method, we're really going after, again, things a little differently than a lot of practitioners are.

And again it's not that those things are wrong. It's just that oftentimes if you're not responding to those thing after a bit of time, it is just because the body has said, I need to go a littler deeper than what you are offering me right now. So everything has a purpose at the right time and the place and we always say in the amount too, right? And that's what we do on our side of the Resiliency Method is we really just put it in a sequence. I like to say it's like an algorithm. It's a series of questions that we go through to put things in their right order, in there right times and then that helps you in right amount which is really important for some people especially if you're talking about skin conditions because I'm sure that you also are seeing too people with mast cell activation syndrome, right?

Yes. Those will start to look like a skin condition, at brass tacks. But that's even more in-depth involvement of the immune system for which you need to repair your thymus gland guys. And that the thing, it just gets so underplayed. It was like we were taught that you don't need it after adolescence or it's like useless or something. It's just like, what? I love those useless organs that are just... Or the spleen, how many people you know, they're, my doctor said the plane doesn't really have any purpose.

What? Gallbladder, you're fine, I've heard that. Just get rid of those extra organs. They just add weight to you, like... Consoles and adenoids, just go ahead and yeah, that's why you don't need those. Absolutely. But a lot of these things are all interconnected. So while you might be looking at somebody and saying, well, you're showing you have a skin condition, they probably also have brain condition. And they also probably have gut condition and they have the thing that connects those two, which is a vagus nerve.

challenge, right? And so what people don't realize is because they're looking at the condition or the symptom that they are missing the big picture, which is that these things all have something to do with each other, Which I love how you also bring that together in terms of the root cause of autism, the Root Cause of ADD and ADHD, The root Cause Of these Things in the eczema, the asthma, they all have to do with the same things, guys. And if you go after that thing, you're going to see healing start to happen across the board, right, in multiple conditions, rather than piece-milling the body out and pretending that, oh, it's just this house, and a family lives there, but everybody just lives in their own room.

They never interact. They don't converse, you know. Like, we would never think that about a family in a house, right? Like they don�t get dropped into their bedroom at night. But that's the way we look at the human body, when we dissect it in these parts. Yeah. And sequencing is such a big deal in the work that we do. Even if there is something growing in there, like H. pylori or C. diff, there's some pretty serious stuff showing up on some of these GI maps. Your body isn't strong enough to like, you can't target it with these strong antimicrobials until there's just been this stabilization period, right?

I just have found that time and again, that you really can skip that step. And that's also why I recommend testing less because you have to go through this time where you're calming the body down. You're calming those mast cells down, you're helping your body break down the histamine, your helping you body just dampen the fire just a little bit. So then the real work, the phase two is actually instrumental and can actually start to do some repair. And then you can look at labs if you're still not all the way there and actually derive some actionable insight from those results because otherwise they'll just be lit up like a Christmas tree and it won't really help you out as far as next steps.

So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think what your time out there is the importance of drainage, you know, ultimately you got to open up. especially if you're dealing with a skin condition, because if it's coming out through the skin, it is usually because liver is compromised,

Thymus repair, sequencing, and heat management 24:18

kidneys are compromised. The bowels are also compromised and you don't have proper drainage facility open to be able to start entertaining what we'd like to take out. If we're at the bar and there's a bad guy starting a brawl and it's not like we are going to tap him on the shoulder and say, hey, bud, we think you should get out of here. No, and we going go get the bouncer at front door and tell him to come over and walk this guy out. Make sure he gets out, take him out the door, see him in his car.

We don't want him here, but that's ultimately the same kind of situation you're dealing with, right? With the body even, you don' want to necessarily, like you said, just start killing things. Just kill, kill kill without having some pathway and escape route figured out too. Yeah, absolutely. So the lymphatic system is a big part of this, right? That's a huge part this work. And, you know, in Ayurveda, like traditional Ayureveda that was like the first round, if there was any sign of illness, they would first address the Lymphatic System and you were talking about drainage.

It's just also though a little ambiguous and not something that as many people have heard about. Can you go a bit into the lymphatic and like what kind of things help it out? Yeah, well, so my entry into being a natural, from the corporate world to being an natural health person was to do a yoga teacher training, a 200-hour yoga-teacher training. So I learned some Ayurvedic medicine at that point, you know, and having some exposure to these things. And I thought, this just feels like a waste of time, And I laugh now because how that's culminated over the last 15 years is that, you know, I now have this process that goes really in depth with the brain and nervous system healing.

And what I discovered was, oh my gosh, these people were so right on. They were doing the nasal rinsing, the dry brushing. That was for the nervous They were encouraging the body to continue to create space, so the nasal rinsing was so that the brain could actually have access to taking out garbage into the sinus cavities. The brain takes its garbage out to the sinuses inside the brains and then that spills over to sinus cavity themselves. So, anytime you're dealing with chronic phlegm congestion, I say, what's going on with your brain?

But nobody puts that together because they're like, well, you are just reacting to the environment, allergies. I would say there's no such thing as allergies, guys. There's just an immune system and a nervous system that aren't optimized yet. Yeah. And that's truly what we've seen clinically as well is that how we're getting the full reversal of food sensitivities even to dairy, gluten, some of the worst. I was a really bad one. It was an anaphylactic gluten sensitive person and now I can eat that.

You know, my body doesn't have a problem with that But ultimately, it really came down to realizing that the nervous system takes its garbage out where it's taking it out and that these ancient techniques were actually pretty spot on because those people were not even exposed to the number of neurotoxins that we're exposed today. You know, it's kind of an insane amount of difference that we're dealing with in the last century inside of our bodies, right? The exposures that We've received in our own bodies but then ancestral exposers from, you know two and three generations ago for us.

And so, you know, back to your point, we have tons of neurotoxins floating around in our system all the time. And, so that shows up in the sinus cavity, it shows in in lymphatics all over the body. So that's where we recommend dry brushing very early on in process because we know the importance of making sure that nervous system is dealt with correctly. Because for a long time we did only focus on organs, tissues, and glands, right? And then we started to see, well, hey, okay, great, we've got everybody loaded on the airplane.

Things are looking better. Passengers are happy. We're ready to pull away from the gate. But oops, We forgot that there's an air traffic control tower down the tarmac here and it is been, you know, the steps are rotted out. Nobody can get up to the top to direct the airplanes. That's the brain and the nervous system. So if you're not dealing with the signal center, you know, the command center then you are going to keep seeing recurrence of things and then your back to where we're just using our medicine, our natural medicine to deal with symptoms, right?

Can you go into, so we know this isn't just a skin issue and we It doesn't exist because dairy, because gluten, or because of your IgE allergies or even your IGG sensitivities. What is happening for the nervous system and on an immune level for people experiencing eczema? Yep. So oftentimes, you don't have that long-term immune system optimized. It's being suppressed by toxins in your system. And that needs to be dealt with, ultimately, too. Otherwise, like you say, your skin might get better, but it's going to pop up somewhere else.

Then we're playing whack-a-mole with the body. You got to get to the root cause, which is insufficiency of the thymus. gland for a lot of people and then insufficiency in the case of this obviously with the spleen, sometimes the liver, anything really a drainage problem, bowels, kidneys can also be problematic. It depends on, you know, the exact condition and like I mentioned the bone marrow. then also the nervous system. If that wasn't enough. And did I even mention skin in that at all? No. It's like, it's really truly almost the last thing.

if you're really trying to work from the inside out. that needs repair because the body is really dealing with those insufficiencies in the organs, tissues, and glands and the nervous system. And this is specifically true for if you think that the only reason or the time your skin ever breaks out is when you're stressed, that's because you have a nervous-system insufficiency going on. So, when we were really going through it, I knew a little about this nervous system component. And I was like, oh no, you know, my kids are stressed and I'm stressed, and it's impossible not to be.

It's just not a good time. But like what can I do? And oh dear, i'm a terrible parent. I mean, what do you say to the people that are spiraling like that? One foot in front of the other. Yep. Time to just really focus on what is in front of us, and you got to start somewhere. So you've got start with looking at the thing that is going and they're encountering the most, which is their food, right?

Lymphatic drainage, vagus nerve, and immune resilience 30:48

So it's a place to star,t and then you gotta make some repair on that gut, that spleen, we gotta do that. But insufficiency of the vagus nerve,which is a neurological situation, over time can also be causing chronic gut biome and dysbiosis scenarios too. So if those encapsulated toxins ultimately aren't dealt with at the level that the body needs to deal with them, you could potentially have recurrence of the eczema and or it'll show up in another way. And the number of conditions, if you start really peeling in and looking at the vagus nerve in particular too, you're going to see that's the command center for the nervous system.

It's a big connector of the brain and the gut. So if keep on tracing, which we did for many years, the parasites, bacteria, fungus, it's really because you have a toxicity and capsulated toxicity at a deeper level. And that is disrupting the body's ability to find that perfect nice biome, that gut biomes balance, microbiome balance. Yeah, that's a big reason that we use the herbal oils too. It's like, it's help the nervous system, help that make us nerve, you know, like it just on so many levels.

This is such a powerful therapy that is applied on the skin and which is great because it can be circulated and infused into the tissues. Like you said, the body is just like has this such incredible capacity to heal and using the scan as like a nutrient delivery vehicle is so effective, especially for kids, right, when you can't. Crazy supplement stacks and they're not going to take anything that doesn't taste good just because it's going be good for them. Absolutely. And that's what I'll say too.

Encapsulation has a lot to do with time too, so encapsulation, that deeper level I'm talking about oftentimes is really the situation as we get, it gets worse as age. So that's why you're going to see kids be a little bit more responsive to some of those therapies you are talking about because you getting them early, they've only had a few years in their body. Whereas a lot of adults that are starting to embark on their healing journey, you know, let's admit a long of us don't, until we hit our 30s, 40s 50s 70s sometimes, And you got to start somewhere and you gotta put one foot in front of the other, but you've got get started because there is no body and there's no perfect diet and no way of getting out of aging poorly and seeing some of things we're seeing in our current environment.

by not taking action. I'm sorry. It's just you wouldn't do that with your car, your motor vehicle. Why would you do it with you body? Take a no strategy strategy. You know, not do a single oil change on your vehicle, you just wouldn' do. Right? But somehow you think that that's an okay strategy to take with our human bodies. And then time goes on and then these situations, these patterns are left undoubt with for longer and longer. So now the pattern's been at play for not, three years, But 60. Yep.

I know. It doesn't get easier. That is the silver lining, too. If your kids are young, goodness gracious, they just- Do it now. They bounce back so quickly. Not only do you change the trajectory of their life, but too, yes, it's a much easier go. Their time on this earth just has not been that great. So you can undo so much faster. When you're starting to see a bit of healing and then things stall, even when you're continuing to do the right things, you are saying that this continues to be a detox capacity problem, yes?

Ultimately, well, so yes and no. And the reason I say no is because why I would say, no, is that yes, there is the presence of toxins still, but they're encapsulated. So for example, we see that when we get to that stage of detoxing, Andrea, they are not even needing a binder, a chelator, anything that an agent we may have used earlier on. to deal with toxins in the body. At that stage, we're actually using whole food to make the and a seed to help the body with dealing with that, you know, processing through the liver of those encapsulated toxins.

But the buddy does that gradiently. And really the only way that you'll get to that point is if you build up everything surrounding those encapsulations to where the bodily would go, oh, it's okay to actually open these things up now and start letting go of these little pillows or you like to call them little containers. We can start opening them up one by one and the body will deal with that toxin and you're just supporting it through whole foods, which is how our ancestors detoxed. They didn't have to have chelators and binders and chlorophyll and all the things, right?

No. So what are those whole-foods that you would recommend for somebody experiencing eczema? Well, I think just in general, like I said, somebody experienced eczema, it's like, where are you at on the spectrum of experiencing exima? Is this your first flare? It just depends on individual, because I wouldn't necessarily prescribe a whole food supplement to somebody that's just encountering their exema. Because again, its that excess phase that you're in. And you want to use whole-food nutrition and supplementation when the body's in a deficiency phase.

So you're using that to tonify. So there isn't necessarily one particular product. It's more of like applying an algorithm. At the very beginning stages and excess stages, we want to understand what is really behind your flair there. Do you have an overgrowth of bacteria on hand, parasites, fungus? Is heavy metal the thing we need to deal with? You know, is there something that you recently took that would cause us to have it increase the level of toxicity in your body? So that's really the process we're implying.

And for each person, that could be a little different. Certainly, I'm sure you see enough cases, too, where you think themes, right? But the reality is, everybody's reason for having a flare could For the kids that are just allergic to outside, right? You cannot even open the window and they react to all foods and stress and weather and sleep changes and all things versus the kid that don't. What do you see being the main difference there? I would just say, you know, ultimately it's going to be some involvement of thymus gland insufficiency going on there, right?

But then if you're talking about an environmental type of allergy, then they probably also are having a hard time clearing histamine in their blood, which has a lot to do with liver performance. If you talk about having the liver-performance issue, usually talking not having toxin issue because there's just an overabundance of toxicity going. in the body that then contributes to them reacting to their environment or creating histamine to everything that they're exposed to. So it just depends on the person and what the situation is.

And then there's a strategic way of analyzing that individual to understand what it is for them. And that's where the resiliency method really treats them from the point of view of like everybody's unique. Sometimes we need to put things in the right order at the time and the amount to get this body to heal efficiently.

Healing phases, testing strategy, and building resilience 38:08

And sometimes we have to deal with the heavy metal before we deal the parasite. We can't just do the parasites out of the gate. There is some sort of an order that needs to happen for the body. Right. And you talk a lot about this biological safety that the body needs to feel before it can heal. So what does that look like with somebody? I think that's more of like what I mean by that is in a progression. In other words, if you get your body to that point where you can have the conversation like, I don't take a body off the street and start working on encapsulated toxins.

If I started a phase, we call it phase one, which is, you know, just filling the dumpster with the binder, use the binders and things like that to help us with that surface level of detox. Encapsulated toxins is what we called happens in phase three in our process. And what that means is it can't come in Phase one just because we like it to. Right, right. The body has to, we kind of have to earn the right to go to that deeper level of healing. So we start in that phase one level, which is kind-of a level one that's probably the most common.

If there is a practitioner looking at and acknowledging that heavy metals are a problem, that parasites are problem. if they're doing and working with a body that way we call that our level 1. And then level two for us would actually be clearing out some of the material in the body that oftentimes parasites and some chronic stealthy infections will leave behind, which is oftentimes where they can have recurrence from. So we call that the mycoplasma layer. We'll deal with that inside the money. Then that gives us another access point to getting into deeper level of cellular toxin.

at cellular toxin, specifically of mycotoxins. And when we can do that work, well then that prepares the body now for doing, right? So then we'll use whole food products to help repair for a bit. That brings up the energy. We'll also assess for mitochondrial insufficiency at times, because a lot of times you can't keep the bodies moving forward in the healing process if you're insufficient in mitochondria function. So we may use and address that as we're sprinkling in. Oh, by the way, we are continuing to assess the thymus gland at every level because oftentimes the Thymis glands needs multiple levels of healing too.

We'll support it in phase one, will see it again in Phase 2, We will support again at Phase 3. we bring up the energy and the function of the body at that root level at an organ tissue gland level, drilling with the nervous system function. Now we can have a conversation with encapsulated toxin. So I took you to the punch line, but it wasn't like I would take the body out off the street and start doing that. You can't. It's not possible. But it shows you the progression of sometimes what's missing for a lot of these.

pictures where you have the chronic situation coming back. And, you know, maybe you had the instinct, like I did, too, that there's more that you're missing, right, in that whole progression. Or there is something that always seems like, may be that rid of the skin condition, but now you've another autoimmune situation is coming up. That's what we're talking about, really, is the spectrum of an auto-immune scenario is where we'll see a lot of thymic involvement and that piece is getting missed. Yeah, yeah.

So thank you for detailing out the resiliency method. And I love it. It's just what it's about. Resilience, right? We should be able to, we were designed to go about our lives in this world, even though yet there are tons of toxins and they're all over the place and you can't avoid them. That's what we were meant to do. And my question to you is like biologically, what does that actually mean for a body to be resilient? I think it means that it does withstand its environment better, right? So for example, evidence of that might be, like I mentioned, once we filled up a lot of the dumpster in phase one or that level one healing, In level two, once we clear the mycoplasma from the body, and we've been supporting the thymus gland, we start to see a lot of those food sensitivities turn around for people.

And then when we progress into the next phase of level 2 healing in the And most doctors are not getting to this level. And this is a new conversation we're having, right? Even amongst healthcare practitioners is how you can do this with people's bodies. Everybody has access to these. We as healthcare practitioner oftentimes are the worst, you know, of the cases, but once you deal with the mycotoxins at a cellular level, because also our ancestors lived in moldy conditions, so we are kind of predisposed to being environmentally reactive to mold, And also our ancestors lived in really moldy conditions, you know?

And so when we take that at the cell line and detox at them cell lines, we put them in a mold condition and they don't have the same reaction anymore, right? So that's another way it would look. So we're talking about full, reversal of food sensitivities. We're taking about adapting better to environmental mold exposure. But then as you're continuing to progress through three phases of healing, you just start to not really be affected by as much. You know, You don't get the flu, the impact or the headache from the chem trails.

It's not that they're good for you. We didn't make them good. For you, we just made you better at adapting to them. Right. And so do you want to still limit your exposure to these things? Absolutely. You need to be obsessive about it, you know, I don't know. Because you're creating your own private you-know-what by being healthy. Right.

Closing thoughts and where to find Dr. Erica 44:08

And we want freedom. We want expansion with getting healthy, we long longevity, great aging. That's what we really want is more freedom from being health, not more constriction and restriction from health. Absolutely. So, for the people that are listening today and they're like, yeah, I want freedom. I wanted to be able to do all the things and I went with my child to go to all of the other things. And right now, the way we're living is so limiting. Now, goodness, Dr. Erica is talking about the spleen and the liver and thymus and all things that we are going.

Not right, right? Like, what do you want them to hear now? I just want him to take one step. That's all. Yes. No truer words for sure. Dr. Erika, you are such a wealth of information. I could just talk to you all day. This is so fun. And I want to be respectful of your time. Where can everyone find and follow you? Great. Well, we got some information in the show notes, so take a look at those. We can do discovery. You'll find a link for a discovery call if you are interested in learning more, if this is a better fit for you in terms of the next step for your health picture.

And tune into our podcast, The Resiliency Method, the Truth About Healing. you'll also find that out there on the podcast. So fun. I'm on that one too. It's so fun, it's such a good time to talk to you. Thank you again. Dr. Erica, thank you so much for that. If there's one thing I want you to sit with from this conversation, it's that if your child's eczema is showing up in a specific spot or only when they're stressed, that's a really big sign that we need to pay attention to. It's really useful information.

If this got you thinking about where to start for your own kid, that's exactly what An Alignment Called With Me is for. We'll look at what's actually going on for a child and figure out the right next steps. You can grab a time to chat with me using the link in the show notes. And thank you so much for listening, friends. I'm so honored that you take the time spend with us here week after week, and I will talk to you next week. Take care. Thank you for helping with my eczema. Love you. Thank you for listening today, friend.

I know healing your child's skin isn't easy, but you're doing it one smart step at a time. If this episode gave you a little hope or a better night's sleep, leave a quick review so more exhausted parents can find eczema kids and finally rest easy too. Follow, share, and let's help more kids heal. Take care.