 Hello my friends, this is the 92nd episode of Patterson in Pursuit. This is my beautiful wife Julia joining me today. So when I came back from the break for Patterson in Pursuit, I said that eventually I was going to talk about some of the medical issues that we had been having. And it's been a long time coming, it's a very long story, but we finally are putting enough pieces of the puzzle together where I want to share with you guys what's been going on because I imagine there's lots of people out there with health issues, maybe unknown health issues, maybe chronic unknown health issues that we have had for many years. And we might be able to help with sharing the story, what we're going through and the treatment that we're now on and make some improvements. So we have a bit of an outline for the stuff we want to talk about. It's going to be a bit impromptu, so bear with us, but hopefully you'll find this helpful. A good place to start is to say that for the past six years, we have had a bad illness which has progressively gotten worse to the point where a few years ago we had to stop our travels, we were traveling around and had to stop and come back to the states because traveling made the symptoms a lot worse. And then just recently, I guess last July, it got really, really bad where I had to stop everything I was doing, I couldn't work, Julia went to the ER, had some heart issues which we'll talk about. It was pretty scary and pretty intense and since then Julia has done a massive amount of research figuring shit out and not like I said before, now we're recovering. For a while there, it was pretty scary, it was pretty ugly and we've been pretty private about it because we didn't exactly know what the heck was going on. But I think we can now share a little bit more. So over the past six years, Julia and I have seen literally over 50, 50 doctors in multiple states, even a few different countries and out of those 50 doctors it's been a bunch of different specialists, probably five, ten different types of specialists, nobody was able to correctly figure out and diagnose what the heck was going on. And I think that in hindsight now, I understand why because we've learned about the state of the Western medical establishment but at the time it was incredibly, incredibly disheartening and expensive to keep going from place to place to place to place to 50 places and still not figure out what the heck was going on. So a big part of this story is I think the failure of the mainstream medical establishment. Just like in the world of ideas, I think the orthodoxy, orthodox consensus about everything from interpretations of quantum mechanics to the philosophy and foundations of mathematics post canter to the basic economics, I don't think the mainstream gets it right and in this case I think sometimes the Western establishment may be doing actual harm to people as we discovered. So I guess the last note of preface is also throughout this we have both seen how important philosophy is where in trying to piece together pieces of the puzzle there are methods of reasoning which are inferior and superior and you can see when you actually analyze some of the studies we're looking at and some of the lectures and some of the methodology of where mainstream health orthodoxy comes from, there's not a lot of intellectual rigor. I'd like to assume I had faith that there was intellectual rigor prior to investigation but there's a shocking, staggering, unfathomable lack of intellectual rigor and we have got some pretty good examples of that not just personally but also in some other things that Julia's been researching. Okay, so that's the preface. Want me to start the story? You want to start the story? What happened? Yeah, you start the story. Okay, so we got sick all the way back in our honeymoon. We had a wonderful engagement, we had a wonderful relationship, everything was great and rosy and then BAM got a really nasty infection on our honeymoon, a pelvic infection. You got a pelvic infection that was treated with antibiotics. Unsuccessfully, it didn't quite go away very shortly after that. We came back at the start of while we were on the honeymoon but then right afterwards it became really bad. We simultaneously got very sick. We simultaneously got sick and I suddenly got a kidney, my kidney, top of my kidney blew out. From whatever happened, whatever infection I and we had, I don't know if that caused the kidney to blow out. I'm not sure but it turns out I had a congenital defect where my ureter was wrapped around my artery and so for some reason something got pinched or whatever and it backed up the top of my kidney. Kidney blew out, had to get surgery. I think it was probably just inflammation that really set it off finally. Yes, it could have been. I'm not exactly sure the cause but after that, she had an infection that didn't fully go away. I got this infection and then I had to get the surgery. I had a stint put in which is a little tube in my ureter to keep the urine flow smooth or whatever. When they took that out, I got an incredibly bad infection. Just like it had to go to the ER to get IV antibiotics, horrible, horrible pain, epididymitis that also in the short term, you know, the getting the antibiotics made the extreme crippling pain go away but after that point there were persistent symptoms that never went away. That was the beginning of it. Yeah and I think for you it was considered like more abnormal. Like there was a lot of doctors that were like, oh, this is very intriguing and kind of confusing. You're a young guy. For me, I think a lot of people apparently women often get pelvic infections on honeymoons. This is a common thing are UTIs or some urogenital issues on honeymoons and my problems were kind of looked at as small in comparison and then they were in some sense but seen as very trivial and that they would be over and minimized quite a bit. Yeah. So that's setting what our expectation was. This was going to be a short, oh this was unfortunate, this is a short-lived thing and we're just gonna have smooth sailing from here on. Right and I think a lot of people have that idea as, oh you get an infection, you take some antibiotics, it's over, you forget about it and you move on. Yeah. But when that doesn't happen and when the problems don't go away then things get really bad. Yeah. So all this was happening when we were living in upstate New York and while we were there Julia was in school and it was kind of middle of nowhere upstate New York with a health care quality was not great but even then we saw, I mean between the two of us, we saw a ton of people. We saw everybody from OBGYNs to prostate doctors and urologists to general practitioners, got antifungals, fungals, antibiotics. We had persistent reproductive system problems that wouldn't go away and for me a lot of that was manifest I think in my prostate or that was one area where apparently this is a problem that men get is it's really hard to kick infections out of the prostate. So one funny story I might as well on that topic to demonstrate the insanity of some of the people in medical establishment. So shortly after I had my stint removed and I got this horrible infection and then I started having these prostate problems. I did a little research figured out okay this is it's likely going to be prostate I got to figure it out I'm gonna go into that it's the same people I think it was the same people that did the surgery did the the initial exam and you and it was text it was like textbook prostate yeah yes and so so at this is this is when we were still very naive a little frustrated the medical establishment little stuff naive and how bad things were so I go to the doctor's office and the it was a lady it wasn't the the main doctor it was a nurse it was one of the second-in-command people and tell her what's going on and she said well you know you look healthy and you're very young it's probably not prosthetitis you know it's you look okay well I'm having all these symptoms said okay well I guess we'll do a prostate exam and you know we'll see we'll try to diagnose if it's if it if that's what it is so little graphic but if you're in a prostate exam finger up the butt and they do this little back and forth motion it was excruciating for me I literally remember like the way I was sitting down I had my hands like on the wall up against the wall and my fingers like curled into the wall it was so painful I was not I have a very high-paid tolerance as well well you think I have a high-paid tolerance I don't know if I do or not but nothing you don't even say anything is bothering you until it's after like past a six yeah yeah well so I'm in a lot of pain and I had never experienced that before and I was like oh well obviously something's there so she she stops the exam and she goes oh yeah no I don't think it's prostatitis well she's she even said oh it is kind of large but maybe you just have a large prostate yes and I said well wouldn't it fit with the symptoms and she said no if you had prostatitis you'd be a lot more sensitive you'd be a lot more tender when I did the exam and I was like lady that was incredibly painful like incredibly painful she's like yeah no I it's very very unlikely for somebody your age you know it's something out blah blah blah sounds like good it happens this is high-paid tolerance you folder yeah I get I don't think I feel probably squealed so that was that was one representative case of these doctors had in mind for years that if you if you don't look sick yeah and you're young and your symptoms are non-standard then you're not sick this has been brought up multiple times throughout many years that we do not look sick I've been told I look healthy that I'm young you've been told same similar things and I often wonder well what does a sick person look like you know like I can't tell somebody has cancer just by looking at them I mean I guess eventually you'll be able to tell somebody sick but you know they were sick before they you know are gaunt and have big dark circles under their eyes I mean people are sick way before that stage so it just doesn't it doesn't even make sense to me that concept of you don't look sick very few people who are sick people with autoimmune diseases don't look sick yes and we were being told this at a time where our symptoms were stupendously obvious we eventually will we've got a list of the ones that will share but one of them one of the biggest ones is the fatigue extreme fatigue like sleep 12 hours a day you can only do one one thing per day and then you're totally gassed for the day but we're we're in our at that time early 20s mid 20s and because we don't look sick though we have all of these very big side effects they say oh well yeah it's maybe it's something that's in your head yeah so it's something that's another recurring theme that I'm sure other people have struggled with and it's dismissal it's the doctors have a very small as Tom once might say the 3x5 card of allowable illness medical illness and if you and if their understanding is insufficient so they don't and they don't know what's wrong with you they literally will conclude oh well you must not be sick or it's psychiatric yeah or it's psychiatric instead of thinking well maybe maybe I don't know what's going on it's oh well because I don't know what's going on therefore it's in your head which is elementary that's an elementary mistake for a philosophic mistake especially when you're talking about literally the most complex system in the known universe which is the human body human brain is the most complex little piece of three-pound piece of matter but the brain is just one little well not one there's one big variable in this fantastically complex system that we have we don't understand we don't understand the basics of digestion much less complex chronic infection and yet they conclude well if I don't understand it even though you're reporting all of these symptoms you must not be sick and I will say too I have noticed from the outside that I think the frequency of dismissal of symptoms is more common with female patients than with male patients because I have seen it firsthand that Julia does not get treated with the same amount of respect and severity that I get treated with yeah that I don't feel like sexism is something I've had to deal with for the most part in my life but this is definitely one area where I felt completely dismissed and was even you know suggested by a couple of doctors that you know I was young and married and maybe this was a very stressful time for me and you know it was very abnormal in upstate New York to be a college student and in a liberal arts school and be married at 19 and I was just treated like a very impressionable young idiot and that was really frustrating for me and this whole process has been really frustrating but that has been a very ugly side of it and I would also say as a side note that the probably the most harsh comments that felt derived from my gender were from women from women doctors so I just find that interesting it is interesting and and I don't really see that in many other places of life but there really does seem to be a double standard and and maybe it's the case like look I'm politically incorrect I do think that women tend to be more emotional than I think that's for biological hormonal reasons yes I do think that's true so I think what happens is maybe doctors see that trend and then they run with it and then they go well therefore if I don't understand exactly what's going on in the system and it's a woman well chances are she's just being emotional or are she just on her she's just PMSing or something like that it's like this cheap this cheap reasoning process we can just dismiss goodness goodness knows how many women have had serious medical problems simply dismissed by virtue of the fact that they're women and I think part of the problem too is that women's diseases I think for the most part are harder to diagnose so this becomes kind of like a running theme with doctors that they see a bunch of women that they maybe they never follow up with they don't know what their story turns into so they just see a woman come in a couple times to their office the woman gets dismissed and leaves and the doctor concludes she wasn't actually sick years down the line she's probably diagnosed with autoimmune illnesses or a bunch of different things and I feel like men's diseases for the most part present a little bit more physically noticeably heart disease and I don't know different male diseases prostate I mean you can feel a prostate you are ignored but you know prostate problems you can feel for the most part in different things like that so I don't know I'm you know part of me understands it and part of me is really angered by the whole thing well and so in the research we've done you've done mainly since all of this it is actually the case that in reality there are lots of diseases that do affect women differently medication medication affects women differently some of the autoimmune stuff is more common with women so especially yeah so yeah that is a I mean heart disease is even harder to detect in women so it's just it's different it's it's just we are more complex beings right so you want to say the bed stat story before we go on to the next oh um yeah so this was probably one of the worst doctors that I dealt with and it was one of the first doctors I dealt with as well and I went into her office and told her that I had an infection and she did an exam and told me that I did not have an infection but that she was going to run tests just to reassure me because she thought I was a young married anxious child might be in an abusive relationship oh yeah she made Steve leave the room and really questioned me on whether I was being abused and I said this has never happened to me before and she said oh it's policy but I didn't see that happening with anybody else so but anyway she told me straight out that I didn't have an infection completely confident and brand some testing and called me a few days later and said well you have an infection and I said yeah so yeah I mean that's just one example of money but that was one of the more egregious things that happened to me and and the way that she had treated me and you was really horrible yeah and if you didn't insist on getting the tests you would have walked out of that office being misdiagnosed from that lady and who knows well yeah who knows how many sir how many women have gone to that doctor been treated like crap dismissed and not had their even disease diagnosed literally walking out of there with negative information it's one thing to not know if something's wrong with you it's another thing to think well X is not wrong with me I don't have an infection when you do have an infection like better would have been just to say I don't know but no she was exactly opposite it would have been way better if she was just kind of agnostic about the whole thing yes or I mean even then I think is giving her the benefit of the doubt because I think you kind of have to be a fool to say that you don't act you don't have an infection that's another story so after we leave New York we go to Georgia we moved down to Georgia and got saw some more doctors nothing quite worked I actually had it maybe the only really good doctor that either of us has had in the in the mainstream Western establishment is my prostate doctor in Atlanta was great wasn't an idiot and recognized that I was having prostate problems tried a bunch of different antibiotics still to his credit the best I have ever felt it was after taking IV antibiotics for like three weeks something like that 20 days and unfortunately didn't last but I felt like 10 million bucks and I was so excited because I thought oh finally obviously we've had this infection this is what I needed I should have got this before but sure enough it it's still they came back but we also kind of gave up we were really intense for doing the go in the medical establishment route and then this was after a number of years we kind of petered out on that for a few years because like what the heck did we do who do we who do we talk to it was expensive and time-consuming and when you have no energy and are just you know we were trying to work at that time too and we weren't we weren't telling people we still really hadn't told anybody until recently what that we were struggling for so many years and we were just trying to hold ourselves together and it was really hard to do all of those appointments and yeah and be dismissed and spend the money and the time to try to schedule an appointment with a doctor only to find out this is not going to be the doctor for us and do it again and again and again and again it was just really exhausting yeah exhausting and expensive and incredibly disheartening where we would literally be thinking well why am I doing this appointment I mean we had this conversation was like why am I doing this I know what they're gonna say I know the tests are gonna come back negative the standard tests that they're gonna run because they only have this little limited framework of understanding of what might be wrong because we look healthy and sure enough that was the case over and over it was just kind of predictable that you go in tell them story let's run some tests they come back negative you get dismissed and yeah and as and as this process was going on we were getting more symptoms as well and so it was almost funny because we would get happy that we would get a new symptom because we were thinking oh I can tell this new symptom to the doctor and maybe this they'll have like a doctor house moment right yeah and that never happened the opposite it was like oh yeah you're making shit up right like the more symptoms we put on the list the more we were told it was psychiatric which was really unfortunate but in our mind it was like oh we we have all this new information to give you and be that they were reasonable right well yeah so but that was kind of that was really rough and that lasted for six years really yeah and so there's this term that came up I've learned about let me be a year or two ago which is gas lighting if you guys don't know what that term is it's the idea of like if you were trying to be really manipulative let's say of your spouse and try not like screw with their head you would turn on the lights they turn on the gas the gas lights and then you know leave the room and then say and then come back in and say hey wife why why'd you turn the lights on I don't understand why you did that and they go well I didn't do it and they say well I didn't do it you must have done it and so you just kind of screw with their head you do crap like that over and over and lie to them I guess for the purpose of manipulate manipulating them this is what that felt like was gas lighting from these doctors would we go in and self-evident to literally to a five-year-old that we're sick when we're talking about what's been going on and they would say no no you're not you're not sick it's in your head because you know go see a psychologist or psychiatrist or another thing that was really interesting is that nobody would consider our illnesses connected where I don't think oh yeah I don't think I think maybe your prostate doctor was like oh yeah obviously you guys have some sort of connected infection and everybody else besides that was like completely unrelated it doesn't matter that you got sick the same day and that you progressively have gotten worse and we are each other's symptoms exactly and react positively to the same things and negatively to the same things are not connected to the point yeah that we had a infectious disease doctor oh yeah tell us not even kidding that we both came down with depression severe severe psychosomatic symptoms of depression on the same day you can't make it up and at the time and I still I feel silly honestly and hide like what the heck took me so long to realize these people are idiots many of them not all of them but I remember that conversation this is the same infectious disease doctor that's that told Julia we've ruled out the possibility of infection yeah I've been told that many times as if that's a thing you can do as if there's a list a great list a platonic list out there of all possible infections one can have and if the tests assuming the reliability of the reliability of the tests are accurate if they come up negative well then it is the case we've ruled out the possibility of infection I of course you can have a long conversation with this person well how was it the case that you come up with new diseases how do new diseases get added to that list it sure would be something like you have all these symptoms and the tests come back negative maybe you have something that's not on the list yeah well it's funny too because we were recommended to that doctor because my EKG was abnormal was it that late yeah and I remember asking him I said so okay let's just go with this theory that Steve and I simultaneously became depressed is that going to make my heart electrical signals abnormal and he kind of stopped and thought and said well maybe yeah it was just like kind of just dismissed that and I was like well I'm here because I went to the ER with stabbing chest pain and had a severely abnormal EKG and that's why I was referred to you and it was just like that didn't make a difference yeah and he was saying yeah it's it's in your head so so we that was we kind of skipped along chronologically but that's okay so we're in Atlanta failure so in the middle of all this right around this time we also have a bunch of family deaths so my mother died your father spontaneously died my father spontaneously died two heart attacks and then we had some grandparents die so we have family tragedy going on during all of this and around this time this is when we started talking about traveling where we were thinking okay I don't I neither of us know how long we're gonna live we'd like to travel it was looking grim it was looking good say that why don't we get our everybody wants to travel but they wait tell their kids leave why don't we travel now before we have kids and you know get it out of the way and so we started traveling we started they started the Patterson pursuit tour interview series but shortly after starting we went to Europe first and shortly afterward the symptoms especially for you got significantly worse very rare very rapid decline to the point where only a few months in we know we would plan to be out for a few years only a few months in we had to come back because you were having horrible horrible symptoms so yeah then we come we were able to go out later but we came back tried to you were doing more research at the time we have changed our diet we even try to vegan diet for a little bit which worked for a little bit but then we had to stop because that's what happened with vegan diets yeah but had some have some improvements we figured we discovered that so part of the symptoms list is autoimmune stuff and like joint pain your inflammation you call it systemic inflammation or something we discovered that the cold weather was really negatively affecting both of us so we said okay well it's winter or going to be winter and we're in upstate New York why don't we do another leg take it a lot slower take a lot slower pace while we're traveling we'll just go to the southern hemisphere so we went to New Zealand spent the winter there which is their summer and then went to Australia and in Japan where it was where it was warm and wonderful than in Japan but yeah so that was that was an interesting mix of being able to do something that looked like oh wow look at these young go-getters out there in the world but in reality it was incredibly hard especially yeah I am I kind of plan to blog during our trip just to kind of remember it and share with family and friends and that didn't end up happening because I was so sick and even the second leg I was very sick and it was better it was better it was less stressful because we weren't moving as much but I was still really sick we spent a lot of that trip indoors actually and not exploring you know which was really sad yeah yeah and partly working to it was a mix of a work vacation but that's that's one of the other symptoms that we've been dealing with it which is because of the fatigue we will kind of stay inside a lot and one of the things that's happened over the years is like when we have family get-togethers for a while we had a family farm in Virginia and we go up there occasionally and we just sleep pretty much the whole time and we could just couldn't help it our bodies whatever I'm being maybe being out in the countryside or something about is like this is a time to repair so we'd have all the family together and we just it was a kind of like a running joke at the time sleep literally would be sleeping you know 12 hours a day and it'd be groggy the rest of it but it was also the same while we were out sometimes it was just yeah okay you're in a new country that's exciting but you just got to go in and there's not really another option you can't really power through it or anything you can't you can't so we go to Japan and we had a great fantastic time in Japan because Japan is a paradise practically Julia goes home I go to Thailand I want to talk with Buddhist monks in Thailand I got food poisoning while I was in Thailand which is exactly why I avoided right so I stayed inside most of the time anyway but while I was there you know going from the pot to my bed I did some thinking and I was thinking okay I got to be real with myself like right now what do I want most in the world and it was sleep and it sounds that's just sounds awful it was it was a sad moment where I was thinking I've got all these problems I've got all these ambitions I've got all these things I want to do but honest to goodness all I want to do is sleep I just want to I just want to sleep yeah so that was that was a bad point and then it got much worse so this is now such a ending happier we'll get there yeah see right so we haven't even talked about the symptoms list at some point but I don't know maybe we'll just make a segment just going through as the symptoms are piling up here so chronologically so come home from Thailand shortly after that we moved to Charleston yeah this was last this is just last year so moved to Charleston in July of last year and symptoms got horrible so the fatigue was way worse and then we had a very scary few days or a week where I was invited to speak in Ohio and so I flew up to Ohio to give a talk up there and while I was up there Julia was kind of you know she was she was sending me messages and I was clear she was not doing well physically that she had the time that I left she started going down however I quickly so I was like damn like I'm gonna be home tomorrow like let's let's really try to get on this if you got into the hospital go to the hospital she was having serious extreme chest pain down my left arm down down her left arm very and the way she was communicating I could tell she was off she was not quite delusional but she was very like fuzzy so I get back and that I get back and it's literally the worst I had ever seen you I have ever seen you you were just you were on the couch the whole day you were totally flush you were practically delirious you were in tons of chest pain we went to the ER a couple of times for the chest pain and my EKG was bad that's when your EKG came up abnormal yeah this is this is all in our head guys yeah to the point where all these symptoms progress and now literally shows up on the EKG something's affecting her heart which was terrifying and awful but fortunately we actually did that was one other doctor that was at least open-minded it was an ER he was the he was the heart specialist there and said yeah this I saw this I looked at it again there's something wrong we told him the story he's like I'm so sorry guys that you've been dealing with this this is obviously something that's you know between you it's probably some kind of infection that might might be affecting her heart there's a list of things that it could be different infectious things it could be so I don't know why how that improved I don't think you didn't do any antibiotics after them did you I did oh you did have some I did I had some antibiotics which improved it slightly at least as a band-aid yeah and just got me to kind of a more stable point yeah and then and then we discovered some more of the functional medicine alternative medicine stuff and that really that turned it around immediately right well my chest pain like completely went away and about that time I also came down with it was like it was like the flu it wasn't near a dozen nearly as intense as Julia's was but I was just I was probably out yes 16 hour I think one of these it was like 14 or 16 hours yeah I was flush and like couldn't couldn't think clearly so yeah one of the other one of the persistence and there's been two major symptoms that have followed us throughout this and of course it progressively gotten worse to the point sometimes where they're really really bad one is the fatigue the other is you could it's gets called brain fog and it's hard to describe but it's you could I like to think of it as like brain inflammation call it brain smush and it is it's kind of like being a mixture of like being hung over and being so tired that you're fogging and know you can't think straight and having like it just what feels like the pressure in your head yeah and I would say like your I would say your intelligence kind of goes down you can't grab words you're more disconnected articulate you feel like you're not you feel like you're kind of in a dream yeah I I as an extension of that you didn't suffer with this as much but I was extremely dizzy during this time period leading up to the heart problems leading up to when we moved to Charleston I started getting very very very dizzy and to the point where I just stopped driving sometimes if I exerted myself I would feel like I was gonna fall over your vision would go sometimes you get double vision in those yeah double vision yeah and and that's really that's maybe the saddest symptom of this problem is that it really takes your mind away and it take and when it takes your mind away it takes a lot takes a lot of your your soul away almost it's like the soul crushing thing that just makes you fuzzy which is especially hard maybe this is arrogant but especially hard for us because we're such cerebral people so like I'm doing and during all of this I don't want to give the impression that this is a constant thing where it's like every day you're at this level of being on the couch and there was ups and downs it's constantly ups and downs it's just it's been going you know it's been it oscillates but the trend for six years or five years six years was oscillating and going lower and lower and lower and lower and all the troughs will be lower than the previous one and of course to the point where we you know you had your your heart problems but all through this I'm trying to put together a philosophy show trying to have these conversations these I think a pretty damn elite conversations at a very high level that demand a lot of mental performance and awareness and presence and for the most part perhaps to my body I was able to muster and almost every conversation I think I've had I was able to be with it but it took everything that I had and I would be exhausted so literally it sounds pathetic like I was saying before you do kind of one thing a day maybe you go to the grocery store and then you're tired for the day I have these conversations for an hour maybe a couple hours and I would be I would literally like pass out on the floor just completely dead tired afterwards which was funny because while I was having the conversations I'd feel great you know if they're intellectually stimulating like I after the kind of like literally right after the conversation I you know I'd hang up and be like oh that was great I'd come talk to Julia and be like all these ideas blah blah blah and then the adrenaline or whatever it is would kick off and it'd be like oh boy and then I would just crash for hours and this was I'd like to add that you know having this as a couple has some of heartbreak to it in a sense because I feel like we were so in love and we after we got sick we kind of became a little bit secluded in ourselves and had a hard time connecting and enjoying you know enjoying life and enjoying life together but at the same time I'm so grateful that we were both sick because if you were suffering with this and I had no understanding of what you're going through or the opposite way around which I think is more likely more women go through this without their husbands realizing what's going on it would have been really difficult so I'm so grateful that we I'm in hindsight I'm grateful that we were sick together and I've gone through this together I agree and a huge part of this that I want to talk a lot about not only has it been life-changing to kind of have your mind taken away from you from illness and it's just it literally has affected our lives more than any other thing that we dealt with more than family death more than losing three of our parents two of our grandparents is the sickness by far we're truly by far this has affected our lives much much greater than that but the the lessons that come with it is but the lesson that you learn maybe as your start your health starts improving maybe not once you're at the low but now that I feel like once we're improving we can reflect on it the lessons have been invaluable not just the lessons in philosophy but the lessons in terms of non-judgment and not and understanding how frail terrifyingly frail our bodies are where you may think that you're some hot stuff and that you're got a high processing brain but you are you are an inch away from losing everything and we are fortunate that we have been able to slowly turn it around recently as we'll get to but other people aren't that fortunate and they literally can have their lives totally taken away from them and there is not a human on this planet that can stand up to illness there's maybe you can maybe you go with a common cold or maybe whatever there is some illness that would not only kill you maybe worse than kill you is turn you into a zombie over a period of many years or a decade yeah so that's just incredibly humbling yeah this has made me a better person definitely more empathetic I think a lot of people are really sick and don't necessarily want to talk about it which is understandable and we didn't want to talk about it we were a bit proud and also didn't know what was going on and didn't want it to be the subject of conversation every time we saw somebody but I think there's a lot of people that you may think are acting strangely and I would you know urge you just from our experiences to kind of look at those people as though you don't know the whole story because I think there's a lot of people out there that are struggling and you don't have the whole story right yeah and I also this has been the catalyst for a quite a few philosophic breakthroughs and understanding mind-body relationship and other things but it literally is the case that your mind and your personality and your energy and even your values can be taken away from you without your control in an instant I remember thinking prior to this sickness I remember thinking I don't know like I feel like even if I were really sick I would be able to like think my way through it like mind over matter you can if you have a strong left mind you can like happiness is this mental state you can achieve when you think through things no how dumb we were incredible night that is not the case yeah and and if you have the luxury of thinking that that's because you've not dealt with this illness and had it taken away from you which is a valuable lesson so so what I want to do is we'll just go through some symptoms that have been piling up because other people may be dealing with them and then we'll share with you what it is because as these symptoms were piling up and as we've been recovering we've even discovered more symptoms that we thought were normal but as they disappear we go oh well gosh that we just became accustomed to that we didn't even think it was a symptom there is a an illness a basket of illnesses out there which actually seem to explain our circumstance explain all 45 of our symptoms let's where you think it's like okay you have a cold or a sinus infection so it affects your sinuses you sniffly maybe your ears ringing or whatever now when you got an infection in your arms so your arm hurts this is like you literally were probably it maybe you could probably identify something wrong with everybody part yeah like 45 and they seem so disparate yeah one for example is like paint you could say tightness on the bottom of your feet sounds completely arbitrary thank tightness on the bottom of your feet another one another really bad one is inflammation at the base of the neck or base of the skull and your neck which is a horrible one that that we can talk about hair loss hair loss is another one you think I didn't have to deal with that but you had to deal with that more than I did you don't think you dealt with it I don't think there was a lot of hair on the pillow there for a while but it turns out actually these aren't disparate this isn't oh you have an infection of your foot and there's something and there's a fungus on your scalp and there's this other thing no it's one basket okay okay so let's let's go through the symptoms list we've talked about the fatigue yeah fatigue yeah and we have other one thing that so there was like a lot of neurological kind of stuff going on for me especially so I would get numbness tingling stabbing sensations at the end of my fingers on my face down my face sometimes I had a leg go numb one time and you know I had this thought that like maybe I'll just power through it and I'll start exercising you know which I had tried before in the past and had really hurt me kind of taking a lot of my energy but you know during one of my exercise routines my whole left leg went numb and I've had double vision tremors twitches yeah so a bunch of like neurological type symptoms yeah I haven't had as much of the neurological stuff I've had a few but I've had a bit of double vision as I've got you you've had it worse than you've had the whole sickness worse than that but as I have progressed downhill though all of those things crop up the poor vision will crop up to the the tingling will crop up joint inflammation crops up the thing which is really has been incredibly scary is a base of the skull inflammation I guess this is something that happens with men it's essentially meningitis that's when if you have like if you would have a really bad wave that's when you would have horrible joint pain and then the horrible brain fog and the neck would stiffen and it would hurt so bad it was just scary in it because you could feel it right there just swollen and inflamed which is what happens when you have this problem oh another thing that was really scary for me and you had this last as well you've always had less of the severity but for me memory was a big issue to the point where I would take my dog for a walk and I wouldn't remember walking him or I couldn't remember you know so people say oh would you eat for breakfast in the morning and maybe you'll have a hard time remembering it but if you think you know throughout your day you can say this is what I had for breakfast I couldn't tell you if I had eaten that day so I was having severe memory issues couldn't remember if I had taken certain supplements couldn't you know just I would leave that I would I was like an Alzheimer's patient in some cases I would leave the stove on I did that multiple times I got just to taste it that a little bit sometimes that we would you'd kind of pat me on the on the on the head when I would have a clear forgetful session rose you just forget something that you know you shouldn't forget because you're in that state mm-hmm yeah another thing we had written down this is not a bad symptom but it's something that's interesting in hindsight is that you and I have both been very sensitive to alcohol where it doesn't you know she's a one-drink drunk and I'm not even you're like half a drink and I'm like one drink and I'm pretty buzzed and we don't drink regularly at all but we've all it's been noticeably sensitive and there's a reason for that our system's kind of screwed up but it's also been like a perpetual dehydration that I've had you wake up in the morning and your calves are just super tight and like I've just guzzled water constantly walking around as if you're hungover just a state of perpetual perpetually hungover and which was worse with the alcohol much worse with the people wouldn't I would I remember going to doctors and saying I had one drink and felt like I had ten the next day right and they would go like no no like this is a serious thing yeah just crazy crazy sensitivity that our systems weren't working right and what happens with me I don't think it's happened with you as much is whenever there's bad dehydration I always get my heart skipping palpitations right and I don't unfortunately discovered that and I don't think it's dangerous when you're in that dehydrated state but it's still scary you dehydrated and then your heart skipping and you take a ton of water and even when we would take a ton of water sometimes it we wouldn't feel hydrated again there's a reason for that yeah so then the last thing that's a big category is depression and anxiety so this is a frustrating one because throughout all of this there's been many doctors who have tried to lump all of this in the category of depression that it's sudden onset depression at the same time or if we don't understand what it is then it's something that's in your head and it's frustrating because definitely part of this has been depression worse for you than for me but we both had it and it's partly or largely in fact because of the damn illness it's not we're depressed which is making our symptoms all these things it's that we're in our early and mid 20s got this damn infection that can't go away has spiraled into this list of 40 freaking symptoms everybody's dismissing us we can't figure out what the hell is going on it's massively affecting our lives and we can't do anything about it that's depressing yeah and the more research I've done about mental illness is is that there are a lot of physical causes for it and it seems like outside of the normal medical establishment that these physical causes of depression are quite widely accepted and studied and in practice you know diets and supplementation are used to correct a lot of these disorders for just to give one example there's something called pyrol depression where some people are more disposed to leak a lot of zinc into their urine and vitamin B6 and this can cause depression anxiety rage and this is not something that your normal medical doctor would test you for or you know look at your fingernails to see how healthy they're looking or to ask you you know can you recall your dreams this is not a common practice however this is something that a portion of the population struggles with and they have a depression that's fully treatable with really benign supplements and it's really unfortunate to me that a lot of mental illness is now seen as just something that's unavoidable that is all situation oriented or a serotonin imbalance or something of that nature yeah psychological and I think definitely obviously some people go through really stressful times and it's very it's very clear that their life circumstances can be really depressing but there's a huge subset of the population where their life seemingly would result in a happy productive person and they're still struggling and I don't feel like the medical establishment is looking at these people correctly in a holistic sense where let's look at your body and let's see how things are going right there's no there's no systems level analysis and it seems like in the mainstream medical establishment there's specialization there's people who know how to cut out little nodules from your liver but there's not people that synthesize their knowledge across and see the big picture of what the body is which is this massively complex system where if you change one variable it's going to change a lot of other variables I know there's a lot of research coming out now about the gut brain connection people are saying well maybe depression is caused by some gut imbalances yeah that's totally possible if you were to say that prior to the the fancy that the experts putting it in the official journals you'd be labeled as a crank what do you mean there's a connection between your gut and your brain they're so far apart there's no way well actually it turns out there is probably a very strong connection between the gut and the brain it might be that taking probiotics and trying to fix the tight junctures in your intestine can help people with depression you know which that's totally possible when you see the whole thing as one functioning system rather than these isolated things that don't communicate with one another yeah and even you know even like severe disorders like schizophrenia you know schizophrenia has been linked to that pyrrole problem where you're leaking zinc and B6 and things of that nature and you know people who commit crime have you know been shown to have higher copper levels and in their brains and different different things like this where maybe maybe we can't just label somebody as a bad person or your brain is messed up and this is just the dice that you were that you rolled and everyone has their crap and you know this is yours I just feel like that's so unempowering and really unfortunate for anybody who's struggling with mental illness out there I would really urge you to look into some I think there's a YouTube video called the molecular basis of depression on YouTube it's by the reorting clinic in Wichita, Kansas it's extremely interesting and probably helpful for a lot of people yeah I think it's reasonable to suspect that biology may underpin a huge amount of human behavior maybe all of it I'm not sure and questions of free will here and what exactly is the mind and how much can you control but going down this route and looking at some of the stuff you've been researching and we've been talking about I really think that if you could fix people's bodies you may very well fix their minds and their disposition they may be better people they may be happier they may be more fulfilled they may be more spiritual yeah I mean the rabbit holes goes very deep when you discover just how intimately connected your mind is with your biology yeah so yes and I don't want to imply that there's no in no circumstances there no causal connection between a psychological depression or like a belief system or a network of beliefs that are very negative and it manifesting in physiological problems I know that happens that's definitely the case but yeah I think very often it's a bludgeon that people use where if you don't if they don't understand what's going on they hit you they hit you with the head with it and say well it must be psychological in our case a pretty dang healthy functioning minds pretty dang healthy functioning psychological systems yeah we had some bad experiences but they were prefaced by getting this this mutual infection that just hasn't gone away okay any other symptoms you want to you want to talk about before we those are the main ones okay let's not bore them with the laundry list literally the more than 40 other ones that we can talk about okay so now we get to the near the end of the story so Julia has this horrible reaction in July of last year somehow we stumbled on I think what it was is she she came across a I know an infection it was image in Italian wasn't it yeah it was but just to preface what you're saying I had seen a doctor in Charleston and the doctor had said something like it sounds like you have chronic fatigue syndrome oh yeah right and I arrogantly for many years had not looked into chronic fatigue syndrome because I had thought that that disease was psychological and I blame myself a little bit for that but I also blame the kind of messaging in the mainstream media and the mainstream medical system that this disease doesn't really exist and that it shouldn't be really taken seriously and only like rich housewives get this disease or something like that and so she said you know it sounds and she printed me off a thing from up to date.com which I have my own problems with but from up to date.com she printed me off this little pamphlet and sure enough I read it because somebody had handed it to me and it really did sound like partially what I was going through and so I humbled myself and went onto the internet and discovered a huge group of people suffering from a very well the same condition as what we had is what I would say and putting together all these disparate symptoms where it's like oh people have this and that together right in my mind chronic fatigue syndrome was just being very tired and in it's such a bad name unfortunately for the disease and I think it's the main symptom of the disease which is why it's called chronic it was called chronic fatigue syndrome now it's called myalgic encephalitis I think and there's a lot of clinical things that they can get into now that people with chronic fatigue syndrome show and have in common you know mitochondrial dysfunction gut problems swelling of the meninges I suppose in the brain so I really had a wake-up call and in that search there was a few interesting things that came up one of them being and genitalium right so there was this bacteria it's either bacteria or a tiny parasite something like that called in genitalium and apparently it's not very well understood it's not it's very hard to diagnose kind of goes under the radar it can cause reproductive problems that we had been having we'd never been tested for it we'd never had I don't think we had the drugs that they prescribed for it so it was like oh my gosh I bet this is it it's obviously infectious well and it caused different it's left to go on long enough it caused different body issues as well so we're thinking oh maybe this is the thing we were thinking this I was at up to that point it was the most confident by far I've been in any positive diagnosis and this has got to be what it is this just fits so well well it wasn't that we got tests for that it wasn't that but getting that breakthrough led to discovering some other tests that were also not really done properly that we did figure out what was going on shall I continue or would you like to dun dun yeah go ahead so after all of this after all of these tests and all of these freaking years and all of these doctors Julia insisted on getting a Lyme disease test I think we had one crummy Lyme disease test a long time ago but it turns out that that test that we had is poorly made I guess pretty much all Lyme disease tests are poorly made or most of them at least yeah so we just dismissed it I remember doing research and thinking yeah it sounds like some of our symptoms but we got tested and that's not us I'm gonna be moving on Julia insisted even even the doctor we went to our first alternative health doctor person down in Charleston and he was like well yeah probably not but if you want it will order it anyway bing bing bing it came back positive that it is Lyme disease yeah and it was Bartonella first or was it Lyme disease first it was Bartonella first Bartonella I have a positive serological test so there's um well yeah so so I would say so okay there Lyme disease comes with co-infections other little bugs one of them is Bartonella and one of them is Babesia and then there's the the Lyme bacteria Borrelia Borrelia yeah and take it might be the case that the actually the things that causes the symptoms are the co-infections Bartonella in particular for our symptoms yeah but Babesia and it Lyme disease is this really mushy area where there's a lot of confusion about it partly because the diagnostic criteria is poor and other things but also it's got a nickname as the great imitator it is the known as the disease that gets misdiagnosed for years at a time and gets called maybe it's RA maybe it's slupus maybe it's this maybe it's that maybe it's in your head that this is what happens with Lyme disease and finally yeah we're both from upstate New York we came from places where I know I've been bitten by plenty of ticks yeah so yeah I have not been bitten by ticks but right we'll get into that later but right also just wanted to add there that out of all the 50 doctors we saw nobody recommended this so our kind of conclusion with the mainstream medical establishment is that most doctors I think we have a good sample size at this point most doctors will not be able to figure out anything that's slightly complex however we have a Steve has a viewer and a patron that we both know and I remember after we had figured out or not actually before we had figured out what was going on but we were getting testing for Lyme disease and you were talking to him on the phone and you were kind of telling him what was going on and he said oh it sounds like Lyme disease right the guy right so you know who you are you know who you are but he was right and he is not a doctor but he's smarter than any doctor we saw and he's a medical professional so shout out to you yeah interested in philosophy and critical thinking to not coincidentally yeah but anyway and what had you know we got some testing for Lyme disease and this testing the testing that is standardly used is serological testing which is a testing your blood and an immunotest so if your immune system is reacting in a certain way to an infection it will show up on the test through your antibody levels and they can that theoretically they can say whether or not you have an infection turns out with Lyme disease that you know if you've had it long enough your immune markers for this disease are not as straightforward they can come up in Steve's case his immune test shows false positive yeah for the for the reason which is this is laughable so well for you what let's just say okay you got a PCR test yes so PCR is tests where they take a little probe of DNA and kind of go through cycling heating up mixture of your blood and seeing if that probe of DNA picks up its mate and replicates that over and over and over again with an enzyme and it's very accurate in terms of not giving false positives and this is common knowledge among biologists and medical professionals alike and I had a positive PCR test which means blood from blood which means I had Lyme DNA in my blood there's also another test that can be done called a live culture I think I believe it's called and many people have seen the Lyme bacteria in their blood but Steve Steve had an interesting result where he his I had no immune markers for Lyme like essentially none but this apparently has been shown Lyme has been shown to kind of mess your immune system up so your immune system can't respond to it appropriately Steve interestingly had immune markers for the acute infection of Lyme disease which they call a false positive okay so this you can't even make up yeah okay so the first part what you said I do want to give a little more meat to the bones here so lie one of the Lyme tests is this immuno marker but the trouble is with Lyme disease is such a bitch that if you've got it for long enough and your body can't get rid of it it starts killing your essentially starts killing your immune system so you don't get the markers anymore it's been shown to dysregulate yeah right so so they're trying to diagnose people with Lyme disease with this one test by seeing whether or not you have the immune markers but even if you had it for long enough and severe enough you're not gonna have the immune markers which is why there's it's misdiagnosed all the time one of the reasons fortunately Julia got the PCR thing she's got Lyme in her bloodstream no questions asked well well I don't think it's funny because that would be no questions asked for any other infection but because Lyme disease because there's a taboo around there's taboo around Lyme disease PCR suddenly not not acceptable for for Lyme disease so that's something we also will have to talk about because probably people won't realize how controversial Lyme is for lots of reasons that we can go into but for me this is so absurd so I have the acute inflammation markers what that means is according to their diagnostic criteria if I had the symptoms of Lyme disease for less than six months I would have a positive diagnosis of Lyme disease because of that test because I have had the symptoms of Lyme disease for more than six months they now call it a false positive because you can't they go you can't have this marker after six months or whatever yeah crazy absolutely bananas that we had you've got in your bloodstream I've got the markers for it because I've had it so long even though Lyme disease can last for a long long long long long long period of time they're gonna say no it's a false positive yeah and what's really interesting too is that people who have access to microscopes and like a university setting or who are biologists themselves come down with the sickness you know chronic get diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome or some autoimmune condition or you know and then somebody says to them it might be Lyme and they'll take their blood they'll look at it under a microscope see the Lyme disease and tell their doctor hey I looked at my blood under a microscope and I saw Lyme disease the doctor will be like you don't have Lyme disease so it's really interesting that I don't know I don't know why the confidence I I don't I don't get it but anyway yeah so it's a methodological error it's just pure philosophy that these people have been taught and trained that the diagnosis procedure that you use is what comes out of the CDC that's what they all refer to unfortunately it's just an appeal to authority they have trust in the accuracy of that diagnostic criteria if it's the case that the diagnostic criteria is wrong then these people will dismiss you they will they will be wrong they will misdiagnose you because they have no other method of knowing whether or not you have Lyme disease if it is not in accordance with the CDC diagnostic criteria now this is now this is a super controversial issue now Lyme is controversial issue I think because there's quite a lot of egos involved at this point didn't know this prior to the fact but when you start investigating suddenly you discover well actually there's quite a lot of MDs professional MDs out there who are who are saying screaming the diagnostic criteria is wrong these tests are wrong we've got a really bad problem here and now you get into like medical politics yeah the CDC also to connected to there's a small minority loud minority of people who are dealing with these patients and see firsthand what they're dealing with and run run more in-depth testing and run and like immune tests and inflammation markers that aren't typically run and you know they're finding these really big significant markers and people and it's just it's just really interesting and recently they just revised the CDC revised their estimate for the frequency of Lyme disease up by a factor of 10 there by their own metrics they were off by an order of magnitude yeah so what's to say they're not out by another order of magnitude but when you dive into it when you see the politics of what's in the egos and arrogance of the parties involved with Lyme disease testing diagnostics treatment it is just totally depressing it's a damnation of the human condition in my opinion so just to kind of address the some skepticism that you know we both have as well I'm going into this and we had read a bunch of stuff online saying oh you know there's a bunch of quacky doctors and quacky people out there yeah there are there are a bunch of quack doctors and quacky people out there I'm sure well actually I'm actually not so sure anymore but that's another story but there's a there's I read online that there was a bunch of people out there who think they have Lyme disease they don't have Lyme disease and we went into this very cautiously and and skeptically and go okay well we have this test but who knows if it's actually Lyme disease although mine was kind of pretty definitive but you know your test was a little less definitive but so we started working with a functional medicine doctor who is an MD and started treating our Lyme disease with a laundry list of supplements and herbs and we have seen gigantic improvement over a period of six months now yes which has never ever ever been the case before so at this point my kind of conclusion is I don't care you know if this disease is kind of accepted by the mainstream or even if this is really the right diagnosis all I know is that there is an alternative health community out there that has figured out a way of treating people with symptoms like us that is helping us and I'm you know I don't care what they call it I don't really you know it's really interesting as you start looking into these diseases our doctor as soon as you start talking to a doctor who deals with people like us he would be able to tell us our symptoms and you know exactly what was causing them and would say this supplement here is going to make you feel like this and predict to the T what was going to happen so and explain to us what was happening in our bodies and you know that was just amazing to me yeah one of the things that was mind-blowing this has resulted really in a worldview shift in terms of like I pride myself in being open minded but I'm discovering I was very very very very dogmatic about alternative health stuff I just had opinions about things I truly did not understand nothing nothing nothing will shake you out of that then having a sickness like this that has improved in one of the following ways which prior to investigation I would have laughed literally would have laughed at part of our treatment is these tinctures there is little tiny little vials and they've got a bajillion different herbs in them and my skepticism about this whole going down this whole process has been smacked out of you it's been smacked out of me but at the beginning especially was through the roof it was to the point where I was like look we'll try this because we've tried everything else for years and it's failed but it's not going to work this is superstitious nonsense it's just there's not a chance that's gonna work so one of the reasons is because so there's little tinctures and sometimes and mix them with water just a few literally a few drops these tinctures and when we started we got huge side effects from it like positive negative our body was reacting greatly to just a few drops of liquid and then it got even crazier which is if you need a smaller dose you don't even take it in liquid you rub it in your hands you have these little you literally like in the evening you know we've got our stuff we do four drops of this herbal mixture on our hands rub it in and it definitely results in significant changes but I would have laughed at the idea that you could absorb an herbal tincture through your skin but actually and significantly affect your conditions significantly turns out when you look into it yes actually you can have topical absorption of antibiotic I don't know about antibiotic control yeah there's all kinds of things you can do topically I just had no idea that that was the case and I thought it was silly but these these herbs are super mega potent nicotine and you get here nicotine you get we've had huge huge symptom improvement as a result of among other things these little tinctures and I was just floored by this I thought there was no way that was possible but it happened mm-hmm I do want to comment on what you said about you know maybe this isn't the right diagnosis because from my perspective it's really hard to shake the skepticism that I have like if you guys have been following my show I'm skeptic massively skeptical of everything I had my life motto was that everybody is wrong about everything all the time and that's only a slight exaggeration so it's very possible that actually the the skeptical camp is correct and incorrect and the Lyme camp and alternative medicine camp is correct and incorrect at the same time in different ways and so it might that might very well be the case that actually this Lyme Borrelia is not the cause of these symptoms this basket of symptoms that is shared by a million people out there just a huge amount of people that are dealing with this it might be that this is like a corollary that the alternative health practitioners who are trying to deal with Lyme Bartonella and Borrel and Babesia in their process of trying to deal with this like side problem that is correlated but not causative they actually are fixing some of the more systemic problems that might screw up your excretory system for example you can't get out negative byproducts of metabolism like it might be that you're not digesting things properly but there might be a whole laundry list of actual causes that in effect get treated by the alternative medicine crowd even though they kind of have the theory wrong they get the cause and effect relationships wrong but in practice they can actually fix the problem totally open to that being the case yeah and and actually the more I look into kind of Lyme this Lyme community and the offshoots of the Lyme community I'm kind of coming to more of the conclusion that our problem isn't kind of reduced to Lyme disease that Lyme disease or an overgrowth of the Lyme bacteria I would like to say I'm a little bit unconvinced that just its presence is a problem that yeah that that right that maybe you can carry Lyme without it being an issue and I think probably a lot of people do carry Lyme without it being an issue but for us I think it's definitely out of balance you shouldn't be able to detect the DNA in my bloodstream and it's causing us some issues but I think they're the more research I do I think there is a broader picture of things that are kind of like a pillar effect of health and I think our you know modern lifestyles and a lot of things that we think are innocuous are probably not innocuous diet's a big one diet and a bunch of different things that are happening that we we've struggled with you know we had bad diets as kids and right before we got sick we both had rounds of antibiotics which I think is really interesting that may have made us more susceptible to this type of overgrowth it's it's a really big picture and I don't think there's a very easy kind of pretty box to fit it in right so I almost don't even like saying that we have Lyme disease I don't think we have Lyme disease in a normal kind of way that people would think of an infection or disease right it's like we have the thing called Lyme disease which is correlated with Borrelia yeah I would say that our bodies are extremely dysfunctional yeah and part of that reason is overgrowth of certain microbes that are pathogenic past a certain point and we are past that point and I would also say that our immune system isn't doing well our internal organs aren't doing that great with our nutrient levels aren't doing that great our mitochondria is not doing that great a bunch of things that I'm you know is really depressing when you kind of look at your health and and look at the state of your health and but I would also say that it's really encouraging because the alternative health community as much as we were skeptical of them before has helped a lot of people and a lot of people I've talked to personally who you know have no incentive to like bullshit me or anything they're just people that have lived their lives and have told us what's been going on with them and the alternative health community has really helped these people and figured out even if they don't have a clear understanding of why what they're what the interventions they're doing are helping people they are helping people and I would also like to say that a lot of this herbal treatment is based off of thousands of years of herbal study from Chinese medicine or other Eastern medicine practices that I think is really arrogant to discount and I I've been coming to this kind of conclusion more and more as I get older that oh people who have come before us were not idiots they were making causal connections just like us without the internet without peer-reviewed studies and to say to discount them would be stupid and I really don't like the idea that I feel like is really common that you know oh people were like apes before our generation came along or our technology that they didn't you know they were so stupid they didn't know what they were talking about I don't think that's true at all I think I think there was a lot of wisdom throughout the years that has been lost and which is really unfortunate and I think there's some really amazing scientists and thinkers that have come before us that their information has been lost or or you know use so minimally at this point that it's it's unfortunate yeah and I come at it from a from kind of the opposite angle where I'd say people at present are fantastically stupid but equally fantastically stupid as people in the past it's not that they were so smart before is that nobody was smart in my in my perspective everybody was everybody's always been wrong about everything but what the previous generations have had is the benefit of not having a screwed-up incentive structure in the medical establishment they've had the the benefit of having kind of a more empirical practice what works what doesn't work now their theories might be wrong a great example of this is Chi like energy flow so I am guilty of dismissing the the theory of energy flow for years and I didn't understand I took it very literally I well there is no such thing and it can't be measured that's silly that's a very myopic way of understanding what these people are talking about it may very well be that their theoretical explanation for the metaphysical existence of Chi is incorrect they might not even be claiming that such a thing exists in the first place it might very well be that it's metaphorical or that it has something to do with pathways of the transmission of waste through your body of the transmission of blood or oxygen through your body that they're speaking metaphorically that through a period of trial and error over thousands of years they said okay well when we press over here and we poke over here we have us we have a result over there so we're going to draw a little line and say there's a connection between this pressure point on your arm and this pressure point in your foot and in your neck or whatever they've got all those not maybe those things don't literally exist maybe there's no metaphysical essence but in practice acting as if is that is the case was can result in the improvement of symptoms that type of thing I would have totally thought was impossible yeah well like other examples of this you know modern people look back at some of these practices and say oh they were they're so crude how could they ever think this would work you know they were so stupid or you know they were so heartless or something like that one of these examples is they used to put psychiatric patients in ice cold baths and you know people look back at that and say oh that's so inhumane but it turns out that you know ice cold baths create these you know this reaction in your body that can be calming to your nervous system and regulate your nervous system better and help with some psychiatric problems so it wasn't like these people were were just kind of shooting darts at you know in the dark it I mean they were making observations and just because we you know wouldn't think of doing that now doesn't mean that there wasn't some benefit it's not like they you know I mean I'm sure there was I mean I know there was a lot of mistreatment of psychiatric patients I think there still is a lot of mistreatment of psychiatric patients I'm not saying that but I'm saying it's it's probably not good to discount all of these old techniques and just discount them as stupid or immoral yeah and how many examples do you need of that phenomena taking place you had an old procedure that was working that people used then we had the enlightened researchers say well there's no peer review double-blind randomized controlled study which say that putting people in a cold bath will improve their mental state so therefore it's superstition and mysticism and then a few decades later oh actually now the researchers are coming around saying oh man maybe there's cold shock proteins that have this systemic reaction and whatever it comes your immune system it's like well hang on so we have established the principle that maybe that procedure was resulting in a positive benefit and the experts that thought it was mysticism were wrong and actually it's probably a good treatment maybe it's better than putting you know sticking lithium in a in a pill and try to tweak your mind should we tell them about the broccoli sprout yes please do oh yes this is a thing a topic I want I want to preface and you gotta give the exam okay so the rabbit hole runs very deep and it's weird for somebody that is that disagrees with the metaphysical presuppositions of the Pythagorean theorem and does have it by the way does have a finiteist corollary of the Pythagorean theorem but anyway skepticism fundamental ideas that everybody thinks are true and yet for some reason when when applied to the medical practice and I'm surprised at how weird my belief system is like oh wow I'm believing those those weird things here's a great example from the skeptics community it's the term detoxing there's this whole community of people the skeptics the detoxing is such a joke there is no such thing oh no no that's just woo woo mysticism that these people speak without an ounce of understanding without an ounce of research because we actually research yes the detoxing is actually a thing like your body does produce toxins metabolic waste just by living your body is producing waste that waste can build up if your systems are functioning properly so do you want so you know why don't you tell them that okay well I think the concept I think at least from my understanding of the skeptic viewpoint is that you have a liver and the liver does its job and that that does detox your body and therefore there is nothing that can improve that function I think that that's the argument I think you have kidneys and liver and they're universally always functioning at a high level and you can never have liver or kidney trouble and result in that working properly so anyway so a few years ago there was a study on broccoli sprout juice so they juiced broccoli sprouts which is the crunchiest thing yeah most like hippie-dippy juicing your broccoli sprouts yeah ronda Patrick would be proud but anyway they juice these broccoli sprouts and a big a big part of this like detoxing industry is juices and I can understand where the skeptics come from where it's like there's no proven double-blind study about these juices so I understand that I get where they're coming from but at the same time no proof and false are two different things so this is no proof according to one particular way of logical criteria which is dubious right yeah well anyway so anyway so I think that's really interesting but anyway so this is a juice and they gave it to I think Chinese participants who had been exposed to airborne toxins from like smog and air pollution in general and some of them received a placebo and some of them received the broccoli sprout juice and they measured the amount of the pollutants coming out in their urine and they measured them before and after giving this juice what they discovered is that more of these pollutants were coming out in the urine of people who are taking the juice so so you could call that detoxing you could say that they were able to process and excrete those toxins quicker than the other group of people that were receiving the placebo could call it you could call it that however if you look this study up there is an article and a quote from some I'm sure expert with a bunch of letters after his name and like some sort of job that's very prestigious and I think what he said was something along the lines of detoxing is a scam you have a liver that's what it's used for and this is all like this is all bunk don't call this detoxing blah blah blah so but you have to think to yourself okay well okay if he's an expert let's think about that but then you think to yourself well I'm pretty sure both of the groups the placebo and the broccoli sprout juice group both had livers so it's like they both had livers yet the juice made one of them excrete more of the bad stuff out of their body so it's like I don't know what to say there it's the article you're talking about this guy said well okay yeah they were excreting the the toxins at a higher rate but we can't at we can't recommend it right it's unclear whether or not this is something that is like beneficial so it's crazy to recommend that this could be part of the detox process like improving your detoxification pathways yeah that's that to me is very strange so there's a million examples of that and what's there's important points here one is somehow people discovered that juiced broccoli sprouts can detox or help your body process toxins more efficiently or more effectively somehow people discovered that knowledge prior to the randomized control double-blind peer-review study by the experts sometimes somehow they were right there's some working theory where they actually correctly identify these two radically disparate things like juiced broccoli sprouts and toxin processing and they were correct about it despite the evidence I also wanted to add that it's these toxins that we're talking about like we're using the word toxins these are widely accepted as carcinogenic and pollutants and things that you should not ingest and that like people in the mainstream medical community accept is like really bad shit that you don't want in your body so I'm not saying toxins as this woo-woo thing that like you know this innocuous substance that the alternative health community calls a toxin that the mainstream medical establishment doesn't these were toxins so that was interesting yeah it was it was cancer causing stuff yeah I forget exactly which one was yeah yeah but anyway and also I want to add that can you imagine all of the products that actually help with that that you know this is one natural sprout juice substance but think of all of the other things that are actually helping with these things and it's funny to me because a lot of mainstream I actually looked up some of these chemicals that they were talking about the pollutants they were talking about and the pollutants were actually part of of drugs pharmaceutical drugs which I thought was really funny because it was like okay here's you know supposedly this quack alternative health community that's recommending you know juices and and herbs and different natural substances and the mainstream medical community is telling what their quacks telling them that detoxing doesn't exist even with this kind of very clear what I would call a clear study and then the toxins that people are excreting are from pharmaceutical drugs well I'm so it may very well be the case that in many circumstances the medical establishment causes more bodily harm the western medical establishment causes more medical harm than good now that's not saying that's all the time I know they've sailed lots of people's lives I've been saved by antibiotics I'm sure many times when those acute infections that I had I probably would have died well if I couldn't have had an effect but who knows because we don't we didn't have any access to anybody who had any alternative other than antibiotics so who knows that's true but it might be that this is like an economic principle there are unintended consequences yeah okay you took the antibiotics and maybe it saved you from a few extra days of the sinus infection but now you screwed up your gut bacteria and you may be more likely to get depression oh yeah there are a million other side effects that are there that just aren't easily measured now there's another thing I just want to talk about briefly is that there is some new evidence to suggest that taking antibiotics you know obviously affects your gut flora which is now being connected to mental health but there was a study recently talking about the connection between taking antibiotics and an increased risk of anxiety or depression so to me that's really significant and I don't think a doctor when they're prescribing you an antibiotic for a sinus infection or a UTI or anything like that they're saying hey you can take this antibiotic but in fine print let's just make sure we tell you you might have an increased risk of mental illness in the future and who knows what other things there it's affecting the more I learned about the gut and the immune system and the whole body the more I think that the antibiotics that we took before getting sick may have set the stage for us getting an overgrowth of these certain microbes and our body kind of going on this dysfunction dysfunctional path so there are a couple more two more things I want to talk about one is an example well actually okay three more things one is like we could do a whole long series on which is the epistemology of medical knowledge so epistemology is the study of knowledge in the abstract but this would be about how knowledge flows in the medical community because our experiences and people that we've talked with and people and the researchers and the community we're involved with now it's very clear that the information channels between researchers practitioners and patients is completely broken completely broken where the actual effects of drugs let's say are not adequately reported back to practitioners adequate record back to researchers I did a episode a while ago on leviquin which is this thing which supposedly only a tiny fraction of people have joint pain as a side effect but actually I know four people in my life who've taken leviquin all of different bloodlines all of whom had very severe joint pain Julia was one my dad was one almost completely crippled him my prostate doctor the guy that I have a lot of respect where I had to get foot surgery because his foot tendon snapped after taking leviquin so maybe it's the case that the four people that I've talked to who have taken leviquin and had significant side effects just coincidentally were part of the point zero five percent or something exactly or or it's the case that actually the data is not being reported back to the researchers your data was not entered into any books anywhere neither was my dad's neither was the doctor's neither was my sister-in-law so that's a problem that's a huge methodological problem it's the same thing with I think all adverse reactions to all kinds of medical procedures are not entered back into the system you don't find them in the study selves so anyway that's a whole another thing it's it's there are so many methodological problems and errors and the flowing of information that it causes me such significant doubt and the efficacy of Western medical establishment that I actually am very skeptical of the reliability of the procedures and the diagnosis of maybe the majority of medical practice in the West I know like what this this listener who I'm talking about is a practitioner and he's told me that's the horror stories of people over prescribing antibiotics prescribing the Ron antibiotics all the time they don't even say the studies are probably bad studies the practitioners are prescribing the Ron antibiotics they don't read the studies and then the reactions that the people are getting aren't even entered back into the books it's like this whole system is just error upon error upon error that when you get outside of it it's like oh that's not a system I want to be a part of okay then now there's two more things we've narrowed it down to one more thing so as we are researching as Julia is doing most of research not only are we finding sensible theories coming from many alternative medical people not all of them I think there's plenty of quacks out there who have completely wrong theories about how the world works I don't think they know I mean we've had the first alternative doctor that we went to yeah I don't think he knew well I think he was pretty good by the normal standards on TV I don't think he could have fixed us but he's well-intentioned and it's interesting that we've tried two alternative medical doctors and one of them is really helping us so that's fifty percent reliability versus I don't know what's one in fifty two percent yeah so there's actually people out there Susan Humphries is one of them doing interesting research Chris shades doing one of them there's a few like people who are doing real high quality research that are in the alternative health world that are actually know what they're talking about Zach Bush yeah I think that I think that's the minority but the ones that are out there actually we're doing really important work that's high quality okay so anyway we're discovering this that there's alternative theories out there just like there are alternative theories of the foundations of mathematics which when you dive into a perfectly reasonable and explain the phenomena we experience we're also discovering just how crazy and myopic and frankly unforgivably stupid some standard medical practices are in the West unforgivably stupid before we give the best example that I've heard recently let me give you another story that my brother told me in religion this is a this is a great example and it's like a corollary what's of what the medical establishment is has done so my brother has told me this funny story that I get a kick out of and I use as a kind of an example of poor thinking and how silly people are and it's a statue of Moses or multiple statues I guess of Moses Moses the biblical figure apparently in a lot of these statues he's got horns Moses has horns because the sculptors thought well that's in that's in the holy book that Moses has horns so they sculpted him with horns well it turns out that addition of horns comes from a mistranslation of the Bible this is this I don't know if this is correct this might be one of those standard stupid skeptical things that turn out to be wrong but from my understanding it's a mistranslation that Moses doesn't have horns it's supposed to be in Moses is happy or something and they were like they switched some letters around as Moses has horns and so that becomes literally set into stone that Moses has horns because of a mistranslation so that's the corollary of this example that just completely blew my mind in the Western medical birthing process which they think but they think giving birth is like the most risky procedure you can possibly undertake and oh gosh they got to intervene in all these ways you want to tell them yeah so I've been doing a little bit of research into birth and children and of that nature because you know one of the consequences of being so sick is that we've delayed having a family I've been kind of baby crazy for many years now and I cannot wait to expand our family but we're just not healthy enough yet but I'm looking forward to getting there but anyway I've been doing research into this child birthing and came across some interesting stuff about placentas and and I had heard many women talk about oh delivering the placenta was the worst part your even your mom had talked about that you know delivering the placenta the placenta dangerous come out yeah you know might not come out associated with hemorrhaging a bunch of difficult things happening there so I thought hmm that's really interesting you know I don't feel like animals have as much trouble delivering their placentas or else you know that would be an issue all the time in nature so that doesn't make much sense to me so what's going on weird system flaw was such an important process yeah so I'm did a little research and come to find out there's this thing that we do in the West called cord clamping so what they do is after a baby is born what they will typically do is immediately clamp the cord while the baby is just come out and then wait for the placenta to be delivered through contractions but a lot of the time this is an issue and the placenta doesn't come out very well and there's complications that arise from that come to find out that nature is so extremely intelligent and intricate that this placenta holds about a third of the baby's blood volume and this is to help the baby pass through the vaginal canal make it smaller and then after the baby comes out through the umbilical cord the placenta pulsates and empties the blood that stored in it into the baby with his with a bunch of stem cells and antibodies and all of that and and then as that happens the placenta kind of shrinks and shrivels and then naturally pulls away from the uterus and is then delivered now this happened very naturally up until a certain point when this invention was made and this invention was the umbilical clamp and can I interject here? Sure. Okay so we've got the umbilical clamp and apparently some of the story that's told about the umbilical clamp is it like I guess some nurses believe or maybe the doctor believes that you really got to make sure you clamp that umbilical cord quick otherwise the blood may flow from the baby back into the mother right that's the that's the story that they might give for why you have to make sure you clamp the umbilical cord right well anyway so um so this is this is the story but anyway this happened fairly naturally what happened before this umbilical cord clamp is that the you know the placenta would pulsate the blood would eventually run into the baby the placenta would come out they would cut the cord and everybody would go on their merry way so um back when this was happening um bedsheets were white and and um to preserve the linens um somebody came up with this invention of a cord clamp and what this would do is this would clamp the cord after it had stopped pulsating and the baby had received all the blood to just clamp it so no blood would kind of fall out after you cut it so it would save the bedsheets from getting bloodied um and make them easier to clean um and this is um kind of the the purpose of the clamp to begin with and in the patent for the clamp it has listed there that you know the directions of use for the clamp and in the directions of the use for the clamp is after the placenta stops pulsating clamp and proceed to cut the cord so this this invention that we are all you know the western medical community is using now to you know clamp this placenta and and the cord and creates you know these unseen consequences of doing procedures like this you know you're messing with a very complex procedure that are a very complex natural um action that you that us as humans don't fully understand all the variables going into it unfortunately until after the fact usually when we intervene and where we don't think of the unintended consequences and then something goes wrong and somebody finally analyzes it from you know backwards and goes wait a minute you know something's wrong here yes so this this is just one more example and then there's tons like this but this is I think one of the most clear examples of something that is that was not supposed to be practiced as it is today and results in problems and child birth in general is a whole list of things that you could go into that are problematic with the way the Western child birth is practiced but that's just one of them and didn't even mention that it makes sense that hemorrhaging is a problem when giving birth when you put the clamp on too soon so you have doctors who if you listen to the stories of these poor women yeah if you go into youtube you can hear a huge number of horror stories they'll have the umbilical cord clamped for reasons that the doctor doesn't know why to preserve the bedsheets a hundred years ago they'll have the umbilical cord clamped the placenta is still attached inside the mother because it's got a third of the baby's blood and a bunch of antibodies that it needs to pulse into the child and then after it's done that it'll come out it it can't do it because it's clamped and then they start yanking on the cord well some of them yank on the cord some of them manually they go in past your cervix and pull it off your uterus scrape it out of your uterus and the thing is supposed to be attached there yeah it's just it's an example of the of moses having horns where it's like it's a mistranslate it's to save the bedsheets and now it's become standard practice and you're harming people like it's just a that's just one example not many yeah and and it's a great invention for the use of of uh you know not having any you know extra blood spillage i suppose except in hindsight the man has probably caused an untold number of damage i'm sure whoever you are who created the umbilical clamp i'm sure you did not intend for all of this to happen right you are probably dead but i'm sorry right so it's just a fundamental error and uh lots more to say lots more to talk about but this has been quite a long and good cathartic experience to talk to share this and i hope you guys find our experience is helpful if you've got a chronic illness that you can't figure out you're not alone there's actually a huge amount of people that are going through similar problems they're also being failed by the same medical establishment doesn't understand what the heck they're talking about will dismiss you um and it's scary you're talking to about i was extremely skeptical getting into this alternative health community still am because there really is a lot of i think there's a lot of nonsense you got to be super careful in listening to people especially their theoretical claims about how the world works but um we have just empirically found in keeping an open mind we have had 10 000 times greater success going down this alternative health route and dealing with the thing called Lyme disease that is probably more complex than Lyme disease it's more complex than that that has not even been diagnosed or even acknowledged after six years with over 50 doctors yeah and i just want to add piggy back on to that um that throughout this process i felt a lot of discouragement and felt like there wasn't a lot of hope left and um i would just encourage anybody who's dealing with a chronic health issue that you feel is not really being addressed at the fundamental level to you know go try an alternative doctor um i would recommend specifically getting f like an alternative md because to me that signifies somebody that went with the mainstream medical establishment and was unsatisfied with their ability to help people and that's the story i hear over and over and over again so those are really not that if you know there are tons of practitioners that are not mds that haven't invested you know like eight years and you know hundreds of thousands of dollars into um this career path but to me that signifies like a really big dedication to helping people that there was there was this huge commitment that they made into their education into their career only to find out that when they got there they couldn't help people as much as they wanted to and they went into an alternative route which is inherently way more risky financially and socially and a bunch of other things you could and if depending on how you treat your patients you could even get your license pulled right depending on yeah it's a it's a bunch of really crazy stuff but i you know i it just as a word of advice for us i think that was the best decision that we made was going to see an you know alternative in quotation marks um md um and i will say and i don't want to tell you that oh the first mguc the alternative mguc is going to be the one i would say you know try to do your research beforehand a lot of the initial appointments are long and expensive and the treatments are long and expensive and usually not covered by insurance um but when you've been as unhealthy as we have for as long as we have you know we'd probably cut off an arm you know we definitely would cut off an arm so um i would say it's worth the investment i know i i know a lot of people are struggling and there's a lot of people in my life that i know um that are struggling and i'm kind of conflicted on you know what to tell them or you know i feel kind of morally obligated to at least try to say something but it's also kind of arrogant i feel in some sense to try to say i bet you're not getting the help that you actually need i feel like it's arrogant and i but at the same time i i feel like okay if they think i'm arrogant that's okay but i just want to try try well especially when there's mal malpractice being had on people you love and you care about like yeah you know there you might end up losing organs that you otherwise need because you're listening to the stories of people with with white coats on that actually don't know what the heck they're talking about so it's it's hard to look at that and be outside of it now after being in it way too long but looking at it from the outside and going oh my gosh what it this is just a scandal and it and the thing is it's not just purely intellectual it really deeply affects people's lives yeah and it affects their because it affects their lives it affects their kids lives the people around them you know health is just such a big deal i mean and and also just try to think about things kind of um for me i always kind of go back to like should this be the case so like should it be the case that you know it seems ubiquitous across developed nations that people are having less sex and should it be the case that people are you know having more infertility more degenerative diseases more of all these different things yeah yeah should that be the case and if you can't really reconcile that in your brain which i didn't reconcile for me maybe it's time to go see somebody who has some answers on a more fundamental reason of why these things are happening so that's just what i would say great note to end on darlin yeah thanks guys hope you found that helpful all right all right