 Well, hello everybody. Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Dr. Jill Live. Today I have Brian Plant with me and I will introduce him in just a moment. Super excited for you to hear more about brain immune connection and all of the complex and chronic illness that both of us treat. Many of you suffer from Lyme and mole toxicity and everything in between. If you've missed any previous episodes, you can find all of them on my YouTube channel or on iTunes or Stitcher or anywhere that you listen to podcasts. And I hope if you haven't already, you'll stop by and leave a review because that helps us stay on and get more subscribers, which we want to do just because this is great, hopefully great free information about your health conditions. So super excited to have Dr. Brian Plant today. And we were just reminiscing about how we got introduced by a mutual friend who is also a previous guest of our show. Dr. Brian Plant is a licensed naturopathic doctor with extensive training in integrative, whole person health care. His comprehensive evaluation helps people identify and removes patterns of imbalance, preventing them from living their healthiest lives and he tailors treatments to each unique individual. Dr. Plant is a graduate of the National University of National Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, and a member of ILADS, which is you and I know is a professional group, international Lyme and associated disease society. So we're going to definitely talk about Lyme disease and what's happening in that world. He and I both work closely with the complex chronic immune dysfunction. We're going to talk today about brain and immune and some of these connections with the body. He worked with the AEMON clinics and applies his approach to treating neurological and psychiatric mental health conditions. Super excited to dive into this tonight today, Dr. Plant, because so many people are suffering. I won't read the entire bio. You've got lots of great credentials and experience, but I'm super excited to have you here. And I'd love to start with just your story of how did you get into medicine? What drove you? You told me you grew up in the Midwest. Tell me a little about your background. Yeah, super excited to be here. Thanks. So what really got me interested in this, I was kind of a science nerd in high school. And I was like, what do I want to do? You know, going into college, like, do I want to do chemistry? Do I want to do medical research? And I knew I liked some of that stuff. It never really occurred. Like, oh, I should become a doctor. Like some people just know, you know, when they're a kid, they're like, oh, yeah, I knew I wanted to always be a doctor. For me, it was the word healing and healer that really grabbed me. I was reading a book. I don't remember what the name of it was. And in the introduction, the author was talking about how her brother was a healer and I became just so fast. I'm like, what is that? How does that really medicine? And so I did a quick search online on medicine and healing and I came across naturopathic medicine. And it was one of the campaigns from one of the schools that said, do you have the mind of a doctor and the heart of a healer? And I just love that, that graph. And so I don't call myself a healer. I think that's a title that's earned, not claimed, but a whole person healing and transformation has always been what this is about for me. I wanted to really get to the root of who we are as human beings, what causes us to suffer, what is health, and how do we get there? Or get there, create it, explore it. Maybe it's not a destination as much as it is a journey that we walk with each other as humans. So what I love about being a naturopathic doctor and being in the integrative medicine space is that we get to ask these questions every day. What is the person in front of me really needing for health and what is making them sick? Yeah. Love, love, love. Everything you just said. That's funny because I'm on the other spectrum with all of the medicine, but I always joke and say truthfully, I have the heart of a naturopath. I probably had more naturopaths on my show than MDs because while we both have value, I have, I've learned so much from my naturopathic colleagues because you really dive into systems and systems biology and before functional medicine was popular, naturopaths were kind of doing that, right? So like I have such great respect for you and for that pathway. And for me, I've kind of infiltrated the system between you and me and hopefully making some changes to bring it more holistic approach. So I think we think a lot of like. So brain immune, let's just start like a real high level and then we can go into maybe some of the Lyme disease and what we're seeing and how you're looking at them. I noted in your bio, the Amen Clinic, clarify for me. Are you working with them or tell me a little about that connection? Yeah. So I now work at the Amen Clinics in our Orange County location. We're a brain health optimization clinic. Okay, fantastic. So you guys go really deep with. So let's talk about that first because again, this brain immune connection and obviously you see the things that affect our brain like Lyme and mold and toxicity and all these things in between. But talk about brain immune. How is it connected? Why would someone want to think about the two of them? Because maybe someone listening is like, Oh, those are two separate systems. Talk a little about that connection and how you're looking at it. Yeah, practice. Yeah. So if it's all right with you, a little bit of backstory. So I when I was in medical school, I was like, I know that I want to do integrative mental health because, you know, a lot of people are suffering from anxiety and depression. So I was doing a lot of that. And then when I was in a residency, I got exposed to a lot of Lyme and mold patients. And I was like, wow, a lot of these folks have mental health challenges, but there's a lot going on with their physiology, a lot going on with their immune system and their environment. So how do we get really good at treating that? So I spent the last few years really diving into that. And then when this opportunity opened up, it was like the universe brought full circle. It was like, we're bringing you back into integrative mental health, but you're going to do it now from this new lens of the immune system. And a lot of our patients do have untreated chronic infections and environmental illness. And so it just it's if the future of psychiatry, I think that the future of psychiatry requires an understanding of the immune system. So what is this brain immune connection that we're talking about? There's several dimensions to it. There is the fact that inflammatory signaling molecules can cross the blood-brain barrier. And so if there is a systemic inflammatory response from allergies, autoimmunity, leaky gut, infections or toxins, we can have an increase in neurological inflammation that can drive or perpetuate emotional and cognitive dysfunction. We can have the vagus nerve, which connects the brain to many of our visceral organs become dysregulated. And so that's our rest and digest system. And so there can be imbalances there. And then of course, no discussion about the connection between the the immune system and the brain is complete without mentioning the microbiome. There are so many microbes that are creating, I think I read in a book a few years ago that our microbial cells in our gut and on our skin and all over our body outnumber ours 10 to 1. But the metabolites that they make outnumber human cell metabolites by 100 to 1. We're not an organism, we're an ecosystem. So I talk about that a lot. And then I also talk about how the limbic system, which is that part of the brain that is involved in emotional regulation and safety has the same job that the immune system does. It's just that the immune system is out in the field, so to speak, doing that. So differentiating between self and other and differentiating between safety and threat becomes really, really important. And so many of the folks that we work with, and I'm sure you see this too, who have chronic immune dysfunction also have limbic dysregulation and have difficult time with regulating a sense of safety. And so I'm finding that as we try to pull these apart and say we're dealing with the brain or we're dealing with the immune system, we can't do that. And we can intervene at different levels, of course. But we're really dealing with this integrated system, which includes the gut and the hormones and nutrients and all of that. So that's in a nutshell, how I would think about it. Love it. You've just really outlined all the connections. And there's so many things that come to mind as you're talking. First of all, how, and maybe we start with infections, because I think you talk about toxins, infections, and trauma and all those things and how they play in. And maybe we can take each category, and maybe there's more that you want to talk about and kind of say what's common that you see. And usually, these interplay, it's not that someone just has one. They often have multiple layers. One interesting thing, and I love your comment on this, is in my research for my book, I've looked at limbic system triggers. And obviously, I deal a lot with mold and biotoxin illness. And what I found is something that I see, and I'm sure you see as well, almost 100% of patients who've had a biotoxin illness like mold and maybe Lyme as well, there's this limbic overactivation. And even if they're healthy, they've done the emotional work, they are their great family system, they still, and what I read in the research is that there's literally a chemical trigger direct through the hypothalamic pituitary axis through our nose. So we smell in a chemical in someone who's susceptible, and it triggers a limbic activation on a chemical level, even if your emotions are steady. So what I found in some of the treatments is you have to decouple that, right? Like you have to work with that limbic system. Because what you mentioned before, and again, let's start here safety, our body feeling safe in our body, you know, in our environment, it's so core to healing. How does that fit into these diseases in the brain? And like, how do you could safety such a like a generic word? But it's all related to the limbic, the neuroendocrine system, right? How do you address the person, even if they think they're okay, but you know, from studies and things that they're likely feeling unsafe or they're limbically activated? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think it's really kind of a sign of our times. I mean, we're exposed to so many foreign molecules that our biochemistry just is not used to. And a lot of us have, and humans have been dealing with trauma, complex psychological trauma since the beginning. But now we're in an environment, a biochemical milieu, so to speak, that we've never really had to deal with before, to quite the same degree. We also don't get the resolution of the stress response that we used to say we're in starvation mode, we get to feast, or we outrun the predator, and there's a resolution now with technology and with our need to constantly be on, there is no resolution there. So to some extent, we're all dealing with this chronic sympathetic fight-or-flight activation. And we feed ourself most of the time, feed ourselves with pro-inflammatory foods, and we're not getting deep restorative sleep, our circadian rhythms are altered, but using our technology late at night. And so I always take that into account and try to normalize it for the person in front of me. It's also really, really important because of just how many of the folks that we, both of us, work with, that I don't give the impression that I'm saying that their illness is in their head. This physiologic is hard-wired connections, as well as the wireless connections between voluntary signals. And most of these folks have had the physiology of their immune dysregulation under addressed and under respected, but there is a possibility that the pendulum can swing too far in the other way. And there's so much attention to antibiotics and detox protocols, and we neglect the brain. And so part of why I'm so excited to talk about this topic with you is that when we think about the brain as an organ that is inter-relational with these other organs, it's a lot easier to talk about the mental, emotional, and cognitive symptoms and our responses to environmental triggers than if we make it seem like it's just an emotional response. So the example you gave is great. There is a biochemical initiator, but the limbic system, because of psychosocial stress, because of other inflammatory stresses, has become primed to respond as if it's a threat, usually under the radar of conscious awareness. So what that may look like on the ground is just a really casual, open conversation around the role of stress in chronic illness. And most people will be, will tell you right away, oh yeah, I feel so much worse when I'm stressed out, or I feel so much better when I got a good night's sleep, or when I got to call my pet, and then we talk about how some infections come from. So get too into that, that's loaded up on that the hard way, saying you should get rid of your cat, and they're like, wait, what? But so I think normalizing it is key. Talking about just how complex all these variables are in the interact with each other, it's not to say, oh, this is your fault that your limbic system. Your brain is doing the best that it can, just like the rest of your body, to survive and flourish in the circumstances and conditions that surround your life. But how do we start to slowly pick apart these things, and create a little bit more space for curiosity in that therapeutic relationship? And usually people will tell you, wow, I have a lot of trauma, or all of this has made me more reactive to stress since I got chronically ill. And so our approach is very individualized, but it more or less revolves around those kind of key topics and support needs that people have. Wow. Love, again, love how you're describing this, it's so relevant. And I'm sure the people listening are going, you know, they're having a haze in their understanding themselves in this too. A couple of thoughts, as like you've said, is what the ha for me in this book was, I know that for my personal experience with mold and Lyme and my patients, there is a lot, like you said, there's this fine line between we all have difficult situations, stressful situations, maybe traumas from our past. But there isn't a blaming here of the symptoms. It's like even that aha with me with a chemical trigger is like, oh, people who have this like PTSD around mold and mold exposure, they may be really healthy and well, you know, emotionally stable and all those good things. But if you don't decouple that chemical trigger, it could still be a physiological trigger that causes trauma, even though you're like, I am okay, you can even walk into a moldy feeling like I'm gonna be fine. But your chemical system still triggers that limbic response. So there's so many layers. So that's one and we clearly covered that. The second thing I love that you said, and I want to be clear for the listeners is depression, anxiety, bipolar, mania, schizophrenia, and there's more insomnia, you know, any sort of realm of these mental disorders, what you're saying is, and I love this. Yes, there's, so for, I guess for so long, our psychiatry psychiatrist and have just labeled this as this is a disorder boom. But when we go to root cause, we realize not that we can't have some control. So if there is some like agency, but it's not like you're destined to have this forever. And especially now when we label these five year olds with with mental illness, what you and I are saying is there's real chemical, immune, endocrine and inflammatory triggers, infections, toxins, and we could go through that list that can cause mental illness. And I'm sure you would agree, I would guess that 90% of mental illness has an underlying trigger. That's not just I was born with this, it's forever. I'm going to have this forever. Correct. Talk about that a little because I think it takes away from the stigma around mental illness, right? Yeah, absolutely. And so that's a huge goal of us at Amon clinics. And with Dr. Amon in particular, you know, ending and the end of mental illness is a revolution by leading a revolution in brain health. And so when we change it, the conversation away from your fundamentally broken to there are brain imbalances that are at play here. Then we can it's much more empowering. And that isn't to say that there aren't emotional or cognitive patterns at play that need to be kind of untangled and looked at, but it's a lot easier to do that from a place of resilience and resourcefulness. If you're sleeping well, if you're not in a living in a toxic environment, both environmentally toxic and maybe emotionally toxic, if you're in difficult relationships or you don't feel safe at home, it's going to be very, very difficult to get well in those types of contexts. And so the just how much is going on with the brain at an organ level? I don't know why it's so easy for us as a society. Forget that. We wouldn't say that about the heart. We wouldn't say that about the gut, although I guess there are some emotional dimensions to those organs, but the liver, right? You wouldn't blame somebody for the liver issue necessarily. To the same extent, when we think about the, we just hyper focus on the software brain. And so it's a lot easier to rewrite the software and download updates, so to speak, if we have a well functioning machine, so to speak. That's a great way to frame it. And I've heard from my friend's neuro neurosurgeon for the Denver Broncos. He's done a lot of work with concussions. I'm sure you deal with this as well, but he pulled the papers and did some of this, the research on concussion by itself is can be harmful, but often people recover quickly, but concussion plus underlying Lyme, plus underlying multi complexity, plus underlying inflammation is a way different beast or difficulty with treating because the layer. So if you already come in with an unknown tick-borne infection or an unknown mold exposure, and then you get a concussion, he showed in his research in his clinic that it's a whole more, it's a lot more difficult to treat. And it sounds like that makes sense. Again, that's what you do all day long, but any comments on, does that fit with what you're seeing is the layers of the complexity of, are more difficult? Yeah. So a lot of that has to do with the micro glia, which are these resident immune cells in our brain. And their job is to prune the way we think about pruning in gardening. You know, you clip away the branches that are dead or dying so that you can have a really flourishing system. What happens when these micro glia become exposed to toxins and other inflammatory stressors is they start to get rid, they start to prune healthy living neurons. And that's a problem. And so that plus some of the inflammatory signaling involved, we're looking at brain fog, mood changes, anxiety, and degenerative, neurodegenerative diseases. So absolutely. And a lot of that is what we do is we're having those conversations with patients who are like, we're here, just fix my brain. And I'm starting, I'm asking them about cat scratches and flea bites. And they're like, why are we talking about this? It's like, well, occult infections contributing to immune dysregulation may compound your concussion and the mold and the genetics and you know, all of that. And so how is the bowel function like, wait, where I thought we're here about my brain, right? Right, right. And the, and I love using this analogy, just kind of a weird analogy, but I say it's, it's not a, it's not a salad where you have, oh, here's the tomato. Here's the lettuce. Here's the, you know, the onion. It's a pure soup where all of these ingredients are synergistically bleeding into one another and it's, you pull the lime string and it's attached to co-infections and PTSD and then you're like, okay, like, well, which one first? Yes. And it's like, you know, and it depends on the individual. Of course, there are strategies that we use, but absolutely they're connected and they seem to have a not just additive effect on one another, like one plus one equals three, but a synergistic effect where it's actually saw me right. Right. So, so critical because it's always really having trouble post concussion. There may be something underlying besides just that concussion that needs treating in order for them to get well. Tell us like, say a patient came to your clinic, how do you approach, I'm sure you sit down with them, but what's some of the basics of kind of the workup of what you would do as far as testing and questions and things like that? Yeah. So our system, so we have a program at Amon Clinics where we do a several component, comprehensive evaluation. And so someone will sit down and speak with a one of our history patient outcome managers who takes a comprehensive history. They'll do functional neuroimaging studies. So we do SPECT here, which measures blood flow to different parts of the brain. And so you can see if there's overactivity, underactivity or what we, you know, see considered normative activity in different parts of the brain. And then they have a visit with one of our psychiatrists who reviews the scan and gets more of an idea of the brain specific elements, which is, you know, of course these boundaries are a little bit blurry in terms of the physiology, but in terms of what we're focusing on. And then I come in with functional and integrative medicine and we'll run a comprehensive lab panel that's more or less a template. And then I'll do more individualized workup at that point. So when they're seeing me, my point with all that is I have a lot of information already. There's been a lot of foundational information. And so I get to go right to what's not been talked about yet. What's not been looked at. What is the person in front of me needing at this particular point, because maybe they've already started to do some of the psychiatric, whether natural or pharmacologic or both recommendations and some of the brain specific lifestyle recommendations recommended by one of our psychiatrists and say, we really need to take the deep dive in on testing your home for mold and doing comprehensive mycotoxicity analysis for you and some of the biomarkers and all those kinds of things. And so I'll do more of an environmental specific or functional med specific workup in addition to all that. We get a lot of information and I think that that's really important because without that it can be very easy to hyper focus on the tip of the iceberg instead of looking at, you know, how all this stuff fits together. That's tremendous. What a great system. I'm very familiar with Amon Clinic, so always had a good deep respect. So briefly functional MRI describe what it is. And then can you see differences in patterns that are diagnostic or is it just suggestive of things like say anoxic injury versus Lyme infection versus toxic versus, you know, birth trauma, you know, any of those kinds of is there how much can that really tell. Yeah, that's a great question. So the one that we use is spect neuroimaging, which is type of CT versus volumetric MRI, which is volume versus functional MRI, which, you know, both spec and fMRI are functional oriented. But essentially what we're able to see is if there is an inflammatory pattern, but we are not unfortunately able to differentiate without doing more comprehensive analysis, what the cause is. So it looks like a B pattern, patchy intake. And if that's diffuse, we often think environmental illness or toxicity with that. And then usually the history gives us some clues on, you know, what additional specialty testing do we need to do for Lyme and co-infections or mycotoxicity or heavy metals, or all of the above. With traumatic brain injuries, it really depends on what the injury was. If it was a blunt force trauma to a particular part of the brain or part of the cranium, I should say, you will often see that. You'll see. I was talking to one of our other doctors about a scan where there was like a what looked like a hole and it just means decrease blood flow in like a part of the parietal lobe up there. And she was like, this didn't happen with this patient, but one of my other patients in anvil literally fell on her. And so she was like, well, it looks like an anvil fell, you know, because it was like, oh, and then another patient that actually, I'm like, I don't even know where they make animals anymore. But you know, an example like that, or if you were to have a frontal injury, the brain will hit the front and then hit the back. And so you'll often see what we call blunt and the oxyput as well, or decreased blood flow to the cerebellum. So there are ways that we can infer. And then the temporal lobes, which rest inside the cradle of the sphenoid bone, you know, think about like a catcher's mitt and a ball, you know, the brain is soft. The skull is hard. And so if the brain is sliding around, even if it wasn't a major, you know, one time injury, but repetitive injury, is you'll start to see wearing down of those temporal lobes because it's like there's just they're constantly being shuffled around that hard kind of cradle, so to speak. So we are able to see some patterns that can give us a lot of clarity on what is most needing support. But the toughest cases are when we have infections and toxins plus traumatic brain injuries that are more or not specific, like you didn't get once, you played a contact sport. And then it becomes, okay, well, how do we, how do we prioritize here? What's most making you sick now? But we're going to probably need to address all these to some extent. So really tell that. Let's talk just a little bit about, I know with the eye lids, you deal with a lot of tick-borne infections, and many of our listeners do as well. Are there some like prototypes of like obviously Bartonella, we typically associate with more rage or mood disorders or whatever, but any sort of just brief bits on some of these infections and how you might see brain or immune dysfunction? So anything little bits or tips that you might, how you might. Yeah, so I'll never forget the first case of Bartonella that I saw when I was a resident. It was a teenager. I was with a lime doc, Dr. Jamie Conkel, who was brilliant, taught me a lot. And she didn't want to do anything. She was very irritable, was not interested in care, but was there because her mom made her, and we have these rage episodes. And I was like, I had never heard about Bartonella. We didn't learn about it in naturopathics school. We barely learned about lime. And so that became kind of this template in my mind of like, okay, it looks kind of like this. And then I just started to see it more and more in it. And it was like, wow, I've kind of, I've done a podcast on Bartonella and talked about Bartonella before. I didn't expect to really get into Bartonella, but I see quite a bit. I just want to say that it is massively increasing in incidents, isn't it? So you and I both, at least for me, more and more and more cases of Bartonella. So this is very relevant. Keep going. There was a time, no, totally. I love it. I mean, it's an unfortunate reality, but there was a time I was practicing in Sacramento, but my second year of practice where I was seeing more Bartonella than lime. And I was like, what's the deal here? And I know we haven't necessarily, we're not able to say that yet that in the US, it's the fastest growing vector-borne infection. There's still a lot of research being done on it, but it is something that's a lot more common than people realize. Cat scratches and bites, dog scratches and bites, flea bites, more so even than ticks. Spiders, a ton of spiders carry it too. Okay. That's interesting. That's that's one that I have seen less often. But yeah, a lot of times people don't remember an insect bite. They're like, I just woke up and I had these weird bites, maybe it was bug bites, you know, that kind of thing. But so, you know, Bartonella does seem to have some of the more obvious psychiatric manifestations. In fact, there was an article that came out fairly recently, like the swamp boy. I still have to read. Yes. I totally risked that and read through it. It's fascinating. And so well, there's like a comic book, the way it's done. Yeah. And was that schizophrenia or some kind of psychotic disorder was a diagnosis? Yes. Exactly. A young boy in his teens and diagnosed and, you know, put in a mental hospital and it turned out to be Bartonella. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is why psychiatrists, especially frontline psychiatrists and emergency care facilities have to become aware of these infections because we could treat that, you know, we could treat with psych meds all day. There's still an inflammatory process happening. Yeah. And while some of these meds may have anti-inflammatory and immune modulating side effects with benefits, that's not their primary mechanism, actually. At least that's not how we understand them. But anyway, tangent. Tosoplasma can show up psychiatric manifestations. Lime, I don't see it as often. It tends to look more neurologic or neurodegenerative. So I'm seeing a lot of folks with, excuse me, dementia early onset, Alzheimer's, and we're finding limer, we're finding a history of tick bites. But of course, there's usually other variables going on as well. There have been some studies that have showed that they've found Borrelia, spirochetes, Lyme, spirochetes, the bacteria in the brain cells of folks post-autopsy, which is bagging the question, what really is Alzheimer's, what really causes these. The plaques, they've seen all kinds of HSV and Borrelia, spirochetes. And so there definitely is. I think some of the research has been done around, do the plaques actually protect us from infection? Are they actually being created? Who knows, but that may be part of the theory. Toxol, you mentioned it's super important. Can you tell us anything briefly about that one? Seems like it's a little bit more tricky to, obviously there's titers. Is there any other good ways to diagnose that? That's a great question. I don't treat a ton of toxoplasmosis. I usually will just run lab core titers, and I've found it to be reliable at detecting it. I wish that was the case for some of these others, but that was transmitted through cat litter. What's interesting about it is there was a study that came out, was it a study recently, or an article recently that I saw about wolves that tended to be leaders of packs, tended to have higher levels of toxoplasma. Now, this is correlation, not causation, but it's an interesting concept because they will infect mice and they'll make the mice disinhibited, and so they will approach cats so that it will perpetuate the lifestyle. If you want to talk about a weird psychiatric infection, toxo is like at the top of what I've read about. I'm like, this is crazy. This organism actually does this change in your brain and your function and your, like you mentioned, disinhibition because it perpetuates the species. It's like insane. Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of how I describe, not maybe to that extent, but describe how some of these vector-borne infections, because people will say, well, why can't we test for them reliably? Why, you know, this sounds kind of like pseudoscience. They won't say it, but you know, you get that look, you know, and you're like, okay, how do we defend this? It's like, the way I describe it is it's like, well, if you were this organism and you wanted to get picked up by the next deer or lice or fly to pass to the next deer, you would want to remain undetected. Yeah, exactly. You would not want to lead a massive immune response that would either kill you or kill the host. Right. Right. And so, but it is very interesting how some of these organisms can affect behavior in very observable ways. Yeah. I love when we think about, this always helped me frame things like, things like a bolivirus can kill someone in three days. It's very virulent or aggressive. And I remember, obviously, you and I deal with Lyman, Molden and EBV and some of these other viruses, HSB, frequently. So we know that they're significant in the overall health immune system and brain. But when I, when I heard someone talk about it, they said Lyman, EBV, Epstein bar virus, are actually very low virulence, which is kind of what you're describing. They go under the radar. So there are people walking around that can have both of those from past infections and they're fine. So there's this thing between the immune system, either noticing it or that infection being more active and the symptoms. And that actually helped me to frame it because really Lyman, Epstein bar and some of these things we see a lot are actually not super aggressive, which sounds weird because there's some people affected by it. But when we think about that, then the people who are presenting with symptoms or brain dysfunction or mood disorders or any of these things we're talking about, they're actually suppressed immunity. And then why would that happen, right? Like there's can be this play because old, for example, chickenpox, we almost all get it when we're a kid. Or if you didn't, you had a vaccine against it, but it can pop up as shingles later in life. And that's usually a time when you're stressed, you're lacking sleep, you're under surgery, some weakened immune state. So there's this kind of really important combination of our immune systems that are really working robustly. We can have a lot of past infections that don't cause illness, right? And I like thinking about that way. How does that work in the brain? Like, do you think about treating the immune system as a whole as part of your protocol, as far as balancing the immune system? I do. Yeah. So absolutely. I remember reading an article that came out in a mainstream news source during COVID. It was exciting to see them talk about this. I don't think they went deep enough, but the title of the article is something like, you probably have a chronic infection right now. Yes. Yes. Talking about cytomegalovirus. And what was interesting about the article that I appreciated in a more of a mainstream context was our immune, we don't often think about this, our immune systems are fighting a war all the time, all the time for every one of us. And it was designed to do that. And that's not a problem. The problem becomes when this very delicate balance between, I don't want to call it balance, but the war is happening below the threshold of symptom of symptomology. That at some point, the immune system becomes overburdened. Either the host immune system becomes suppressed or the infectious burdens exceed or the toxic burdens exceed the body's ability to deal with that. And then it's like, I use the analogy because I'm a chemistry nerd of the super saturated solution. You have a glass vial of something dissolved, you know, some kind of salt dissolved. And when you mix it all in, you get as much of that into the solution as you possibly can. And then you show an unsuspected viewer what's in the vial, and it just looks like a clear solution. And then you add one grain of that salt and all of a sudden it crystallizes out of solution and you can't get it back into solution. It's kind of what we're seeing here. And so I don't necessarily have a brain specific protocol for chronic infections that are affecting the brain as much as I'm saying, what can we do to decrease neurological inflammation? What can we do to increase blood flow and nitric oxide, you know, recycling with iron recycling, you know, NAD to some extent, decrease support detox there and then address these systemic toxins because they're probably in multiple plates and all likelihood in multiple tissues. But I'm always considering what's the relative burden because a lot of times I've seen folks, particularly in my last clinic, where they're like, I was totally fine until I got COVID. Like I was perfect. Yes. And or I was perfect until I got the COVID vaccination. And now all of a sudden I have these weird symptoms that look like autoimmunity, that look like, you know, severe limbic dysregulation, dysautonomia and POTS, mass cell activation syndrome. And they're like, where did this come from? And then I kind of have to walk them back and say, look, your immune system was fighting this war for a while. And we live in a culture where it's like, we don't want to look at it unless it's right in front of our faces. And so there's a lot of opportunity there to kind of go back and say, well, where might there have been mold exposure? Oh, I didn't realize that it was at that office that I worked at for a few years or where might have been that infection? Well, I guess I did get bit by a dog when I was a kid. And I, you know, kind of had some joint pain for a little while, like something, you know, weird things that people don't often associate. You're absolutely right. Sorry, that was a little off your question, right? No, that's perfect. I think it's so relevant because it's the tipping point. And that's why I wanted to emphasize like, because a lot of people get freaked out if the line comes back positive and Ivan in the clinic, sometimes if they are not having massive fatigue and joint pain and they're asymptomatic, I don't treat them. And I want that to be even here a place where not everybody, again, I would say if you tested 10,000 people on the street, you might find 30% of them have had Lyme, but they're fine. So there is a tipping point of when these old infections and again, shingles, shingles, we don't have off shingles, but many of us have varicella history. So what does that, what's that point where the immune system can no longer keep it in check? And I think you and I both described that well. Last few minutes, let's just talk briefly about say someone, let's just say Lyme and maybe a little toxic load, maybe they hit their head, kind of a classic general. Where would you start with treatment? Would you start with like just basic nutrients, detox support? What pieces would you put into? I know they're individualized, but if we just say someone who has, and maybe they're moderately maybe they have some depression, fatigue, history of Lyme and a concussion, what would you start with that person? Yeah, great question. So for me, it's always about foundations first, and I've learned this the hard way, because I think a lot of us get really excited about some of this sexy regenerative medicine or, you know, fancy therapies and we're like, we want to go right to that silver bullet. But, you know, my naturopathic training reminds me repeatedly that the most effective treatments are usually the ones that are the least glorious and the least exciting. And so I will use a lot of supplements. I'm pretty supplement heavy. In terms of regulating the HPA axis, I call it anti-inflammatory buffering, which is where it's like, I want to make sure your vitamin D is good. I want to make sure your cortisol production is good. I want to make sure you got some kind of fish oil, some kind of, or anti-inflammatory Treg response supporting thing if they don't call it fish oil, because not everybody does, something to recycle or support glutathione or the glutathione pathway. And it's like this is pouring that concrete foundation for this multi-level mansion we're going to be building. If someone has an acute infection or acute traumatic brain injury, that's a different story. Then we're thinking antibiotics and or hyperbaric oxygen, respectively, as well as things like a combination curcumin, risk-variotrol products for the TBI. But for a chronic case, it's getting these foundations in place. Now, if they're so depressed that they can't, we're so anxious that they can't incorporate some of these foundational lifestyle things and we work on that. And that's where psychiatric medication and nutraceuticals for brain chemistry balance are really important. But getting those foundations in place is going to make detox treatment, antimicrobial treatment, and anything to calm down that microglial activation in the brain, like say from a head injury, way more effective, a lot more sustainable and better tolerated too, especially when it comes to detox. Folks might come in with mastel activation syndrome and they're like, I want to treat my Lyme. And it's like, well, if we don't call them the limbic system and call them the mastel system, we're not going to get very far. And I know they were not tolerated treatment system. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So more or less, I would say that there's a structure and an approach, but it's not a black and white protocol. It's like foundations for a diet, lifestyle, anti-inflammatory supplements, make sure we're not living in a toxic environment, make sure we're not living in a severe ongoing psychosocial stress type state. And then we begin to chip away. And sometimes it is a little bit of both. So I might use immune modulating mushrooms or lysine to prevent viral replication. These things don't really hurt people most of the time, but they are supporting host immunity or astragalus or immune modulating peptides rather than going for some of the big guns like NAD, glutathione, aggressive sauna protocols, antibiotics. These things are more of the, if we're going to use the house analogy, the interior design. You say that too, because I think a lot of whether you throw stuff at methylation or really every other entity, these things can be powerhouses. But if you have someone who's so toxic and so infected or so sick, and you all of a sudden ramp up all these pathways, they can get way, way worse. So love that. I think my approach is identical. This has been so fun, Dr. Plant. Tell us, tell the listeners, sure, where can people find you? Where can we get more information about you, your job, where you work? Tell us a little bit about where we can find you. Yeah. So our Aemon Clinics website, if you go to our Orange County location, you'll see me listed under our team of providers. I don't have my assistance email right off the top of my head. I'd be happy to share that to reach directly. But you give us a call. We have a call center that's fielding calls from all over the country. We do work with folks across the country. I see folks for functional medicine and integrated medicine consults only through Aemon Clinics in addition to part of the Aemon Clinics package where they do the brain scan, see one of our psychiatrists. And to be clear, the psychiatrist visit to review the brain scan is not just for psychiatric illness. It's also for traumatic brain injuries, neurodegenerative illness, neurodevelopmental, all that kind of stuff. And so we'd be happy to support you. And I'd love to talk to you if you have questions about tick-borne illness, chronic inflammatory or chronic fatiguing illnesses in general and how it interfaces with brain health. Love it. This has been packed with great information. I'll be sure to link wherever you're listening to this to Dr. Plant in the Aemon Clinic. And Brian, thank you so much for your time. This has been fantastic. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.