Episode 40 - The Safest Way to Remove Toxins from the Body with Dr. Garth Nicolson

Professor Emeritus Garth L. Nicolson, PhD, MD  is the Founder, President, Chief Scientific Officer and Emeritus Research Professor of Molecular Pathology at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach, California. He is also a Conjoint Emeritus Professor at the University of Newcastle (Australia). He was previously the David Bruton Jr. Chair in Cancer Research and Professor and Chairman at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and he was Professor of Internal Medicine and Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Texas Medical School, Houston. Professor Nicolson has published over 700 medical and scientific papers, including editing 20 books, and he has served on the Editorial Boards of 30 medical and scientific journals and was Senior Editor of four of these. Professor Nicolson has won many awards, such as the Burroughs Wellcome Medal of the Royal Society of Medicine (United Kingdom), Stephen Paget Award of the Metastasis Research Society, U.S. National Cancer Institute Outstanding
Investigator Award, the Innovative Medicine Award of Canada and the EU Academy of Sciences. He is also a Colonel (O6, Honorary) of the U. S. Army Special Forces and a U.S. Navy SEAL (Honorary) for his work on Armed Forces and veterans’ illnesses.

In this episode, we discuss Mycoplasma, the linking pathogen to chronic illnesses such as Gulf War Syndrome, Lyme, ALS, and Autism. In addition, Dr. Nicolson provides valuable information on how to treat toxin exposures by addressing the mitochondria. 

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Transcript

Kealy Severson: 0:06

Welcome to our podcast where I Kelly Syverson, Eric Johnson and Alicia Swamy are exposing moles. Today we are here with Dr. Nicholson,

Alicia Swamy: 0:15

Professor Emeritus Garth L. Nicholson is the Founder President Chief Scientific Officer and Emeritus research professor of molecular pathology at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach, California. He is also a conjoint emeritus professor at the University of New Castle Australia. He was previously the David Bruton Jr, chair and cancer research and professor and Chairman at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was also professor of Internal Medicine and Professor of pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Texas Medical School, Professor Nicholson has published over 700 medical and scientific papers including editing 20 books, and he has served on the editorial boards of 30 medical and scientific journals and was senior editor of four of these Professor Nicholson has won many awards such as the Burroughs wellcome Medal of the Royal Society of medicine in the UK Stephen PJ award at the metastasis Research Society, US National Cancer Institute outstanding Investigator Award the innovative medicine award of Canada and the EU Academy of Sciences. He is also a colonial oh six honorary of the US Army Special Forces and a US Navy SEAL honorary for his work on the armed forces and veterans illnesses. This podcast is brought to you by Michael Rubino, the mold, medic and all American restoration, the first and only mold remediation company in the country specializing in remediating mold for people with underlying health conditions or mold sensitivities. They quickly become the most recommended remediation company from doctors and mold inspectors nationwide. Check out our show notes to pick up your copy of Michael verbenas book The mold medic an expert guide on mold remediation, or visit all American restoration.com to get your home assessed and get your health back on track today. This podcast is brought to you by my Miko lab. Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired all of the time? Have you gone from doctor to doctor had lots of tests, try many medications, vitamins, supplements and still feel awful. You and many others like you could be suffering from exposure to mold and mycotoxins where you live or where you work. My Miko lab specializes in the most precise form of mycotoxin testing by analyzing a patient's eye G G, and IG antibodies in a blood serum sample producing accurate results you can trust. Visit my Michael lab.com. To order your test today,

Kealy Severson: 3:01

Dr. Nicholson I'm especially interested to hear about your work with Gulf War syndrome because I've been reading up on Gulf War syndrome. And I find that fascinating. Can you share a little bit about your work with us?

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 3:13

Well, I started working on this project after my stepdaughter returned from the Gulf War and became ill. And it turned out a lot of her colleagues were also ill and so we got involved with various Special Forces and airborne units. My daughter served as 100 and first Airborne Division. She was a crew chief on a Blackhawk helicopter and flew deep into Iraq with the deep insurgents during the conflict, and everything was fine until she came back and was in a ward officer school actually. And her health started to fail. And she was training to be a pilot and couldn't pass the physical. So she eventually left the army. It turned out okay for her because we helped her get over her illness, and some of her colleagues as well. And she went on to medical school, and now she's a practicing neurologist in Kansas City. So it worked out for her. But for hundreds of 1000s of other veterans, it didn't work out too well, including 50, or 60,000 died because of the aftermath of the conflict, nIESR numbers that you won't see anywhere. But we took a quite a toll after that war. And so we were studying the illnesses from the from the Gulf War. And we published a few papers on that, because they were really quite diverse. And we were very interested in a subset of those patients whose illness spread to immediate family members. So if the illness spread to immediate family members, it had to be contagious. There's no other way to explain it. At the time, the Department of Defense was trying to write this off as well. They maybe they were exposed to chemicals or something like that brought back environmental hazards. But you really can't do that. When you come back. I mean, there's only really one one way to spread illness to immediate family members. And that's really by a contagious infection. And so we started to look for various infections. And we ended up settling on two or three that we found. And one in particular that we found that about 40 to 45% of sick veterans, which turned out to be a mycoplasma. And to make a long story short, we now feel quite strongly that this mycoplasma was a contaminant in the military vaccines that the troops received during their deployment, because there were a number of incidences where, you know, you could see that this was a real problem, for example, deployed personnel that were vaccinated, they showed a fairly high degree of Gulf War illness, a 15 2% or so of the veterans that were deployed, came down with Gulf War illness, but the ones who were deployed very quickly and didn't get vaccinated didn't become sick at all. And there were other indications. For example, there were some French forces, French officers that were deployed with us units, and they didn't become sick with Gulf War illness. And they were had the same exact exposures that the US forces had, and they didn't show any evidence of Gulf War illness. And then there were other coalition forces, Australians, British, who also received the same type of military vaccines, and they showed very high incidence of Gulf War illness. So what is Gulf War illness? Well, it's a collection of various types of illnesses, and no one event or cause can explain all the illnesses. But again, we were focusing on the illnesses that passed to immediate family members. And the most interesting were the children of these families, because every becoming autistic, a very high frequency, and so they were showing autism spectrum disorders. And so we were very interested to find out what was causing this. So we started studying these families and the veterans first in the family members, and we found that the unifying element of all this was infectious. And the most common infection found was a mycoplasma infection. So when we started studying this, we found that about 40 to 45% of the sick veterans, and certainly most of the immediate family members who became sick, the number was as high as 80% had the same infection. So we thought that this this infection, which turned out to be mycoplasma, unusual, mycoplasma death was something that was not really very well known at the time. And the infection that we found that we traced it down was mycoplasma Fermin tans, which is a very unusual infection, it was mostly worked on by the US Army. They published most of the papers on this type of infection. And in fact, the US Army pathologists held a patent on detecting this infection. So we thought that there was something here that was important, but there was a huge cover up going on at the time. And of course, the VA and the God didn't like our results at all. And we were publishing our studies. And they really hated that, because we had number of peer reviewed publications on this. And so it went on for a number of years. And so we we tried to figure out what was the best way to treat these types of infections, because they were relatively unknown before the Gulf War. And then it started to get very unusual because I was at department Chairman at University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center and a professor at the medical school in Houston. And so I had the resources to actually investigate this further, people were contacting me in Texas, they said, Boy, you know, there are a number of people that have very similar signs and symptoms, what you found in the Gulf War veterans, except they were never in the Gulf, and where are you interested in studying in? They said, well, we're pretty well booked up, but we'll take a look. And it turns out these were state of Texas employees, so I was state of Texas employee, so I felt obligated to investigate this a little further. And it turned out they were all employees of Texas prison, and two or three prisons in particular. And these just happened to be prisons where the Department of Defense was running some clinical trials. And so that was a lead into there. And then our breakthrough was that the assistant Warden on one of the big Texas presidents became sick and his entire family became sick and his shoulder becoming wanted autistic and one was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease that she was a teenager and that's incredibly unusual to have someone that young, get diagnosed with a my atrophic Lateral Sclerosis as what its medical term. And so we started testing these folks and we found out they had actually the same infection that we found in the in the Gulf War veterans and that was really unusual. And the only link here was the Department of Defense, there was no other link. So this became a political disaster for me, because the Department of Defense are putting pressure on my employer to stop this research that we were doing. So they threatened to close down my laboratory and I had to go through various committees that were investigating to see if we've done anything wrong or everything from the budget too. Did we miss spend a penny here a penny there? Did we make any mistakes in our laboratory procedures or safety procedures, or you name it, they were going after me from five or six different directions to try and stop this research and shut it down. But we continued, we continue to publish our results. But it became more and more difficult to do that because the pressures that I was under, and eventually this would result in my resigning my position leaving and for me to nonprofit research institute so we could continue our work because it was just becoming too difficult to get anything done under the pressures that I was under. So we continued on and other folks started testing veterans, and we're finding the same things that we found. So that was good, we, we had some confirmation and they published papers like we did on it, but still, the mainstream science was completely ignoring this and the medical people completely ignored it as well because things like mycoplasma are very unusual infections, and some people don't even consider them pathogenic, but they're clearly pathogenic. And so we started to slowly investigate this in more detail. When we found out that things like mycoplasma, were involved in a number of different infections, usually as co infections, for example, Lyme disease, mycoplasma is the most prominent co infection of Lyme disease. And most people don't even know that. In these sort of pathogenic bacteria are present in a number of other infections, you found them in high frequency. And now for example, chronic fatigue syndrome, and these are people that don't have any link to to the Gulf War, or military personnel at all. It just turns out that these types of infections are very common. And then there was a link that we started pursue because the the children of the Gulf War families who became autistic, were all testing positive for mycoplasma. And so we started a study in Northern California with with some patient groups that I'd made contact with. So these are Autism Spectrum Disorder, support groups. So they supply the number of children that we could test in cooperation with clinical psychologists who would do the confirmation of the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. We did a study which we published in the Journal of neurosciences research, which is a very prominent journal in the neurosciences. We we looked at a number of children and these that these diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorders and we found that mycoplasma was present in the majority of them. And so, these were in particular areas of California. I don't know how widespread This is, but I have a feeling that this is a an infection that's often overlooked. For example, in neurodegenerative diseases, we we did find it in ALS. As I mentioned, we started with this one patient in the Texas prison system, a family member. And so we started to examine a few other patients in particular, we started with Gulf War veterans who came down with ALS. And this is kind of interesting because there was a very spike a very high spike in als in veterans, but they were all Gulf War veterans, they were all deployed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and so on, were present during the during the war. And these veterans 100% of them tested positive for mycoplasma Fermin dance. And we even had a couple of British in one Australian who wrote in his group, who received the military vaccines that came down with ALS, they also had the infection. So we had virtually under percent in the veterans, so we thought, well, we we should really start looking at some civilians. And we found that even in civilians, there was a fairly high frequency of this type of infection. The difference was that in the veterans of the Gulf War, there was only one exception to the fighty that everyone had mycoplasma Fermin dance, and it was one Australian who had mycoplasma genitalium then came down with ALS, it was positive for that infection. But in the civilian population, we saw all kinds of different mycoplasma species, so they weren't limited to mycoplasma fermentations. In fact, mycoplasma pneumonia was the most common infection and that's what you see. In mycoplasma patients worldwide. This is a very common infection. It's seen widely in a typical pneumonia, particularly childhood. A typical pneumonia is very common to find mycoplasma pneumonia. Which is a very common respiratory infection. In fact, a lot of people just carry it as a part of their normal flora. And they don't become sick from it because it's constrained to their oral cavity and really does not get into their blood, which is what we feel is the break point to those people who really become symptomatic and have some sort of disorder, or disease are the ones who the mycoplasma has penetrated into the blood and is spread around the various organs in the body. And that's those are, those are the ones that chose symptoms, if you just have it, near oral cavity, you're you're not going to show symptoms, it's just superficial. So there was a lot of confusion about this, of course, in the literature and a lot of confusion among practitioners who treat patients with chronic illnesses, most of them still don't recognize mycoplasma as a problem. But there are quite a few of them now that do particularly those that treat children know that this is a pathogen that's present in a typical pneumonia patients have very high frequency, and they know it's very serious, and people have died of it. So in the Gulf War veterans that had this they also had chemical exposures and other things that they were quite sick. And many of them went on to die and let's say received treatment for their mycoplasma infections. And so we were able to save a number of those folks from having a lethal course of their disease by treating their mycoplasma. That's not the only problem they had. But that was contributing certainly to their very, very severe disease situations. So the story, I've been retired for a number of years now, and I still am working on problems that are associated with this. In fact, my latest studies are really working with these lipid compounds, which are really visceral phospholipids, which are components of our membranes, all the membranes that are cells in our body. These are a principal component of the matrix of the membrane. So they were absolutely very essential in these glycerophosphate. Lipids are very sensitive to oxidative damage, particularly by free radicals, because they have double bonds. So the carbon carbon double bonds are very sensitive to free radical oxidation. When that happens in membranes. It affects the matrix, the membrane, the fluidity of the membrane, and they take a hit in terms of their function. And we were principally interested in mitochondria because we find that this is a problem. And literally all people that have a chronic illness have mitochondrial function problems. And in aging as well, people as they get older, they lose about half their mitochondrial function. And we can trace a lot of this back to what goes on in the mitochondrial membrane. And the particularly the inability to maintain the inner membrane transmembrane potential of the mitochondria, which is essential for production of ATP. So if you can think of mitochondria as a battery, and you can think of the membranes as the insulation for that battery. If the insulation goes bad, if there's a leak and insulation in the battery runs down, and there's no more energy produced by the battery, we can think of that in terms of mitochondria. If the transmembrane potential of the inner membrane of the mitochondria is compromised in the mitochondria can't produce ATP, because that difference in cross the membrane is used to drive the production of ATP. That's where the energy comes in. Because the electron transport chain and mitochondria is you can think of it as a proton pump that pumps protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane. And then those protons are used to drive back across the membrane to generate ATP to take the high energy and in turn it into ATP. So if the inner membrane of the mitochondria is compromised, that if there's any leakage at all, and the potential goes down, you can't maintain that chemical electrical potential across the membrane, you can't generate ATP. And that's what happens as we age. And it's related to the damage to the lipids and other molecules in the inner membrane, mainly by free radical oxidants. As we age, we actually accumulate this kind of damage and that's why our mitochondria don't function as well when we get older. And also in diseases. Virtually every chronic disease this is a problem that can be traced back to problems. A mitochondrial function is not the only problem. But is a major problem because we can't get better from these chronic illnesses if we don't have the energy Produced by our mitochondria, to help ourselves repair and also detoxify all that detoxification repair requires energy without that energy just not going to happen. What are the things I've been working on over the years, it's my background originally was in membranes, the fluid was a membrane, I was the co author on that really landmark publication, which, for the first time, identified the structure of membranes as a fluid lipid matrix with proteins intercalated, into this fluid matrix, and so on. So that became the basis for membranes that I've went on to do a lot of studies on this. And I actually started out when I was a graduate student working on mitochondrial membrane, so goes way, way back to the middle 1960s, actually. So after my long career, working on membranes, and later on working on various diseases associated with membrane damage, as well as infections, and again, we got a ball to the infections, because we were driven by that family event, which is my step daughter coming down with Gulf Oil is, but by and large, we've stuck with membranes. And I've been really fascinated by the ability to repair membranes using various types of crystal phospholipids, which are the backbone of the matrix of the membrane. So we come up with some formulations which require these coastal phospholipids and unsaturated, linked unsaturated fatty acid to provide the structure for the membrane to maintain in the case of mitochondria, transmembrane potential, but also all the other cells as well. And more recently, we've been looking at nerve cell membranes, because they're the transmission potential of the plasma membrane is extremely important in determining whether membrane depolarization and nerve transmission occurs. And so we've been looking at pain for example, which is very dependent upon nerve transmission. And we found that these books are possible liquids will will can be used as a high concentration to to put a dent into pain, particularly chronic pain. And widespread pain is seen in fibromyalgia, because they simply repair the outer plasma membrane and the glycerol fossil lipids complex with some of the membrane channels like the calcium channels are involved in membrane signaling, and help stabilize them. So there's less depolarization. And one of the things we found in a lot of patients with widespread pain is a spontaneous depolarization of their pain receptors, essentially, their nerves are firing, when they shouldn't be firing. And one of the reasons is that they can't maintain the resting potential of the transmembrane potential across the German brain. And so their nerves get triggered very easily and repeatedly. And so by helping stabilize that we can reduce pain. And that's exactly what we see, we're giving these natural supplements. Now, the important thing about these natural supplements, like the membrane supplements is that these are very important molecules. And as humans, we've evolved with a system of transport of these molecules, we, we absolutely save these molecules, we, we try not to let them get destroyed in the gut or the intestine, we complex them, we bring them in, and we transport them to cells, because they're very important to our well being. And what we found in doing our various studies is that if we put enough of these lipids in, they actually get transported as little lipid globules or enlightened proteins or in cells in much higher amounts and would normally be transported. And there's actually a survival reason for this. And it probably goes back to when humans were hunter gatherers, and we'd go out and we needed these molecules, we didn't know we needed them, but in fact, we needed them to survive. And the main source was animal meat. Because you, you'd have to eat so much in a way of wild plant life, for example, you couldn't get enough of these molecules. In doing that. So we went, we would supplement the diet. By eating animals, of course, you'd have to kill the animals to eat them, and they were hard to catch, and so on. So early humans probably only caught animals once every so often. And so the ones that survived, were the ones that were best capable of capturing all these important molecules when they ate those animals. And so they would get a bolus of these lipids all at once. And they'd have to capture as many of those liquids as possible for the long term survival of other species. So we've evolved with this ability to transport large quantities of these events. Secret of getting these into cells and so on, is that when we give these things orally to patients, we used to give several grams at once, for example, and they'll take in at 90 or close to 100% of these lipids, because we've evolved with the capacity to bring these things in, this is all been studied by people who are experts of lipid transport may find that 80 to 90% of these lipids are taken into the small intestine within a few hours after ingestion, after they eat, for example, a high lipid meal. So we know that there's a mechanism to get these things into there's mechanisms to transport them to the cells, and often they go through the liver first. And so there, we have a massive system of taking in these lipids and delivered and put in print re transporting them out to sitting into various tissues and cells that need them. So we have the mechanisms to pick these things up from our guts to transport them to cells where they're needed and in to exchange them with molecules that have been oxidized by free radicals, and so on and need to be replaced, because they're no longer functional. So we have this system built in, and it turns out to operate on what's called a mass action or bulk movement. process. So that means the more you put in, the more it gets to the terminal site where it's needed. And so we've just increased over the years, the amounts that we give to people and they get more and more entity, we see more rapid responses and more rapid recovery of their mitochondrial function and reduction, their signs and symptoms that are associated with mitochondrial function. So that's one of the things that we've been working on quite heavily. So what does this have to do with people that have been exposed to toxic Lee, and I'm working with this right now, in fact, I just finished a small pilot trial with veterans are chemically exposed. And so these are mostly veterans who are exposed to petrochemicals and very high concentrations, they've been sick ever since I can't get rid of these because they're deeply embedded in their system. And they're very, it's very hard to remove these very hydrophobic chemicals that are deeply embedded in in the cells in the tissues and in the organs. But what we found is by using higher concentrations of these glycerol phospholipids, these will actually get in enough concentration in cells to start slowly partitioning out these chemicals. And then there's a slow process, it's a mass action bulk flow process, which slowly brings it out again. And then finally, it's deposited back in the intestines and into the stool, and is eliminated in the stool. So there's a very slow process. So we give these veterans over the span of six months, about five or six grams of glycerophosphate lepas per day, and we can slowly start to move their chemicals out in the process. So as you can imagine, this type of natural medicine is good not only for petrochemicals, but it's good for other hydrophobic molecules, again, embedded deep into membranes and hydrophobic places in cells. And so you can think of things like mold toxins, for example, which are very hydrophobic, and get partitioned into very hydrophobic areas of cells and tissues. And we've then thought about using this for a number of other things as well, people that were damaged not only by chemicals, but also by hydrophobic toxin molecules as well. So there are various things I get are a toxins and mold, toxins, and all kinds of bacterial toxins and other things that fall into this broad category of hydrophobic chemicals that are quite toxic, and get partitioned into membranes and other things of cells. And in cause chronic chronic illness, it's very difficult to remove it very difficult to neutralize when they're in there. So our aim has been not to neutralize or destroy these, but to mobilize them. So if we can easily get in and target them, one of the things we can do naturally, is put enough of these natural membrane lipids in to help mobilize them and then slowly slowly remove them from their, their hydrophobic sites that they're hiding inside ourselves and tissues. And then once they're mobilized, and they get naturally transported back out to the intestines and individually eliminated in the stool. So that's been our working hypothesis that we've been working under, we've been having some success. We started with petrochemical removed from veterans, and now we've decided that this could be used for all sorts of things. The benefit of using this type of natural medicine type of therapy is that it's totally safe. These are molecules that are already present in our cell membranes that are tissues. We're not adding a drug, we're not adding anything new. These are there already, all we're really doing is changing the balance, we're changing the amount. And as these things go into cells, if they're in excess, and they're not needed in the membranes are actually stored in cells in small lipid globules, lipid droplets and other things that are inside the cells. And these are such important molecules that ourselves if you have a ball with a system to retain these molecules, because they're so valuable to cells, what we're simply doing is taking bulk membrane lipids, and putting them into a system and using this as a conveyor belt to slowly remove things like chemicals and hydrophobic molecules through this natural system that we've evolved with, to move toxic molecules. But also to save these important molecules that we need for the function of mitochondria, the function of cells, a bunch of nerds, all these important uses that we need these molecules for. These are very important molecules. And that's why we've evolved with a system to save them store them. And we can utilize that system with this very important limitation is it without this book flow process, we wouldn't have any of this, we just have this natural process that we've evolved with it allows the shuttling of these molecules from, from the gut, into the into small intestines, mainly into the circle of limp and circulatory system and through the liver, sometimes, but into tissues into cells into the organelles of the cells where these molecules are needed. But also there's a system for removal of damaged molecules, and we had this system all along, because that's how our damaged molecules replace in membranes through this process, all we're really doing is trying to game the system, we're trying to increase the concentrations of these molecules to see if we can drive them out, drive the damage ones out in the process, drive into good molecules that are not oxidized, not free radical damage, not turned into ethers and oxygen sitter toxic and remove them when it does happen. So that's the whole purpose behind this. And we've seen this in people, we've seen improvements of mitochondrial function and older folks, for example, that are more than 90 years old start to lose their mitochondrial function. That actually the case slowly with time, but you really see it in people that are 8090 years old, because they've lost about half their mitochondrial function. And their system sort of slow down, and they have a build up of of these damaged membrane molecules that we put into high concentrations of the anti factor lipids, it's a commercial product that's called and this slowly will remove those. And so we've seen mitochondrial function, the 90 year olds return to the levels of middle age. So we could also see that they, their quality of life improves using quality of life indicators, we can actually measure this and people that are older, we can measure their mitochondrial function, if we take a sample of blood, we can measure their leukocytes, we can see that their transmembrane potential is being restored. Whereas normally it was, you know, falling down to a lower lower level that we're getting less ATP generation, now we can up that transmembrane potential and they get mitochondrial function back to producing ATP at the levels that they weren't before. So this has translated into their quality of life, because their activity levels go up, your fatigue levels go down. So they're living better lives. So we think it's a very good anti aging approach. We think it's a good detoxification approach, at least for hydrophobic petrochemicals and natural toxins. And we think it's a good healthy approach for a number of other reasons. For example, in practically every disease process, there's destruction of membranes, and so they had to be repaired, and so on. So this is a good way to naturally replace that damage that's occurred during disease and during trauma, we find that it also improves people in terms of their mental acuity in terms of their short term memory, in terms of a variety of other parameters that people go through when their mitochondrial function goes down in their brains. So there's a lot of potential uses for this. And so we're having a lot of fun played around with this and different types of disabilities in different types of chronic illnesses in different situations. So we've, I've been, primarily my focus has been on Veterans illnesses, but there's so many other things that can be used for and from the veterans, we ended up working with veterans, family members and with a number of other disease problems that they have. So we've ended up working with civilians that have particular illnesses that have chronic pain for example, that have other types of Problems are associated with loss of mitochondrial function. So I think the good news about this is that it's incredibly safe. You can take 50 grams of this per day without showing any adverse symptoms. And that's was a published study, we didn't do this other people have been studying lipids have looked at this, the lipids that we use are all natural membrane lipids, we get a lot of arts from plants, we mix them in with other things, we don't use animal lipids, so there's no chance of animal contamination, viruses and other things. So from our plant sources we make or these products that we have commercially, a couple of companies I consult for, I don't have a company myself, I'm, I'm a retired professor of pathology, Laboratory Medicine and Professor of biochemistry, I don't really deal with those sorts of things. But the companies that sell these products are also having tremendous success in helping their customers with their health problems. So I think it's a tremendous asset to people to take these liquids, I take them daily, myself, my motto manufac, to have it right here, this is what I take every day. It's called the anti factor patented energy. And it's just one of the companies that produces these products. And think that I'm doing better because of it, I think I have better mental issues, I think I'm deteriorating at a slower rate, because so I'm happy with it. But my entire family is on this, and so they're happy with it. Other people that I interact with seem to be quite happy. So there are a number of particularly uses, I think the anti aging uses, is particularly important. Because as we age, we do lose mitochondrial function that goes with all our tissues, but particularly our brains. And our central nervous system decays because of loss of mitochondrial function. So it's very important, they're particularly important there. Again, that's my story, and I'd be glad to answer your questions about it. Yeah,

Erik Johnson: 37:07

I read that. Professor Luke monton, a of the pasture Institute, the CO discoverer of HIV, or actually the real discover, if you consider the probably came before Dr. Gal.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 37:20

Yeah, there's a real discovery

Erik Johnson: 37:22

Yeah, he believes that mycoplasma is an enabler for HIV, that without the presence of mycoplasma, that you would probably not progress to full blown AIDS. And just as you mentioned, that it doesn't have to be a particular species of mycoplasma, but there must be a mycoplasma.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 37:43

Yeah, I think I've really, when I, when I started to go through the literature found those papers, that was kind of an aha moment for me, because it is a cofactor. In Lyme disease, for example, and even in COVID-19, one of the things that that we've sort of not published a paper on this recently, it was more of a speculation paper, but I think it's true because now the data is coming out that people that die of COVID-19 are the ones that die quickly and have severe disease and are just deteriorate and die a fairly, fairly rapidly are the ones that have mycoplasma as well. So it's an important co infection in a number of different diseases, and particularly those lethal diseases that we find in neurodegenerative diseases. For example, like Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS, we find it's a very high percentage of mycoplasma as a co infection there. Those patients are the ones that deteriorate and die are the ones that that have mycoplasma and the ones that have a slow course of their disease or that actually, there's a few that recover from it. And we've had some younger patients that have actually recovered from Lou Gehrig's disease, which is highly engineered, and neurologists don't believe it, but it's true, they're the ones that we've conquered the mycoplasma and they can hold the other problems in check that they have, it's causing bodies to progress to lethal form of the disease. So we know that this is important in chronic illnesses and we, there are several acute illnesses that we think it's very important as primarily as a co infection. So if we take an illness like Lyme disease, for example, it has a number of different bacterial infections. The most common co infection Lyme disease is mycoplasma. And both people that treat Lyme disease don't even know that most patients that have Lyme disease don't know that. You have to treat the mycoplasma if you have Lyme disease or you just won't recover from it. And so it's important, and I think a number of these other chronic illnesses would have mycoplasma as a co infection. If you don't treat the mycoplasma, it's our experiences you just won't recover. So it's important to that issue, just as maanteeeca found in AIDS. The HIV is insufficient by itself. And that's why there are plenty of people walking around with HIV virus, they never progress to AIDS. It turns out those people are mycoplasma negative, and they're never going to progress because they need to mycoplasma because full blown AIDS. And so they could be HIV positive and be Leto healthy life normal life. And there's some pretty prominent people that fall in that category. So we know that this is a very important cofactor, or co infection in lethal diseases. And so that's what I kind of want to leave you with, is it there, very important chronic illnesses that have mycoplasma as a co infection. And you need to know about that, because if you have that, you're not going to recover until that's treated, so you're going to continue to be ill. But if you treat that you got a chance to recover at least. So that's really my important message.

Erik Johnson: 40:56

Well, the question that you brought up about Gulf War veterans, coming back and transmitting the illness to their spouses or their significant others to their families, raises the question of just how important of a cofactor is this? Is it absolutely critical in development of Gulf War syndrome?

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 41:17

Well, in that case, I don't think so because there are a number of different Gulf War illnesses, as we like to call them, rather Gulf War syndrome, because they are illnesses in your collection of illnesses. And the problem is that people got thrown into this category of Gulf War syndrome. And there's all these different Gulf War illnesses, I've written reviews on this and if you try to, you know, segment out these partial out these different subsets of patients into various disease categories, some are have chemical exposures or main problems, others have biologic exposures as a main problem. Others may have other issues as well. So it's not a simple sort of problem. And even the diagnosis is not simple. And you've bet these broad diagnostic categories. The reason they're so broad is that there's so many different subsets of patients, I think they fall into this broad category of Gulf War illnesses. But if we just take this portion of the 40 or so percent that have mycoplasma infections, those are ones that we can actually treat. If we treat them mycoplasma infection, and most of those people will recover if the mycoplasma infection is treated, but they won't recover if it's not treated. That's the bottom line. So if you expand that to other types of illnesses, like Lyme disease, for example, in our studies, and other people have found the same thing, co infection with mycoplasma is precedent about 60 to 70% of Lyme patients. Those are the patients that are the most difficult to treat. Those are the most patients, those 60 to 70%, that are mycoplasmas, the ones that have progressive disease, those are the ones that are the sickest, those are the ones that are hardest to treat, hardest, most difficult to get a successful recovery, and so on. So you need to recognize that if they have mycoplasma as part of a collection of infections, you can't ignore it, you have to treat that, along with the other infections. So Lyme is particularly difficult to treat, possibly, because people were not taking a more of a holistic approach on that, considering the number of different types of infections and their different sensitivities to different treatments. So there was no single treatment that was affecting Lyme disease. And again, it goes along with a number of different infections that have different types of treatments, approaches, and so on. And you've got to consider all these factors in in a treatment regimen for Lyme disease. And so people struggle with this, but the ones that that are handled that way where they deal with the different aspects of the disease, and deal with the different types of infections and their treatments are, are much better off than the ones where they just say, well, it's only borrelia borrelia burgdorferi. Well, for one thing, it's not just purely burgdorferi. There are other species of borrelia and Lyme disease as well. But if you just concentrate on borrelia, you're not going to solve the problem. You may solve it for a few patients, but you're not going to solve for the overwhelming majority of patients that have all these other infections as well. So in that case, that's a particularly difficult disease because there's so many different co infections and deal with these, all these co infections means you got to try and balance and go back and forth depending upon what's the major issue in a given patient and how can they be treated, what's the best approach to treatment and so on. It's a real nightmare. But the people that are being carefully managed in all of their different infections are being managed, are the most likely to eventually recover from Lyme disease, the ones that are not then the practitioners are taking a narrow approach to it. They're not going to recover. It's just too many different infections to deal with. So if we look at chronic diseases, General, this is also a problem in chronic diseases in general, because what we found is that people that have severe chronic illness has never recovered from it. In fact, with time they seem to get worse are the ones that collect chronic infections with time, as well as the primary insult that they have started their chronic disease process may have started rolling may have started their downhill process of poor health, they tend to because their immune systems are not operating effectively. And their systems are not operating as effectively they they're susceptible, the more and more of these chronic infections. And as they pick these things up and bring more of these infections on board, they get sicker and sicker. And it's difficult to treat them because they got more infections, they're often not tested for these infections, and so on. So it's a real nightmare for a number of these chronic illness patients. And so I think we have to take a broader view of chronic illness, we can't take too narrow view of this. We have various environmental exposures, we have various infectious exposures, we have other things that are happening as well, nutritional, for example, and other things, we've got to kind of be aware of all these things that are happening, particularly an individual patient, so we're not going to solve the problem of that individual patient. So these, this is a warning sign for practitioners and patients, that if you think you know what's going on with your chronic illness, you may not have the full picture, you may not know the full story, there are other things going on, and you have to be cognizant of those other things going on, you just may not recover. Even if you have a very effective treatment program for a given type of insult, a given type of contamination or given type of infection, that may not be enough, you got to take a broader view of these these illnesses, because you're often very complex, they didn't happen all at once. Usually, these patients may become sicker and sicker over time. And over time, those exposures, those infections, those other things that happen are important, and it's important to find out about them. So that's kind of the story I'd kind of like to leave you with is that these diagnosis categories, particularly with chronic illness are not so black and white, not so simple. There's very shades of gray, there are various other things that can complicate them. And their nutritional problems, their infectious problems, their contamination problems, their problems of environmental toxins, there are all kinds of these different things. And when they get these different various combinations, they are difficult to diagnose. It's difficult to know what's going on an individual patient, and it's very difficult to treat them. Because you can't just treat one thing, you've got to take a broad view and start considering that there are other things going on. And you got to consider those other things that those patients are just not going to recover exactly what

Erik Johnson: 47:57

Dr. Steven Straus at NIH said back in 1986, that we have to take a broad view, cast a wide net, or we might be missing something. And yet, when you look at clusters, when you look at transmission of illness through a community, or in the case of Gulf War syndrome, somebody coming out of the Gulf War theater and managing to transmit that illness to someone else. You can't help but wonder, Well, can we hone in on a primary cause here something that is really making the difference? And it seemed that this had been done with mycoplasma for many times?

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 48:31

Let me let me just go back and say that was a unique situation, a unique situation, because we had a group of very healthy individuals, primarily young, less than 25 years of age that were completely healthy, didn't have any chronic problems, so they wouldn't have been deployed in the first place. So they went over and yes, they were given contaminated vaccines, and that's probably how they got their mycoplasma permettant. And then because of other exposures, environmental exposures and so on, and and also the stress that they were under stress is an important factor in here that we really haven't talked about. But that can exacerbate all these problems with chronic illness, people are under a lot of stress are the ones that do generally go downhill. So they were under stress, they had these infections already that they were already carrying, when they were over there. They had environmental exposures, they had a number of things. And so when they came back, they slowly became ill. But their primary problem initially, was this, I believe this mycoplasma fermentations. And so by solving that primary problem, at least on the number of patients, we were able to solve that problem, we were able to fully recover, their family members were able to fully recover and so we could stop that in its tracks. But as time goes on, and deal with these veterans now, for the last 20 something years, their illnesses have become more complex. It's not just the mycoplasma And now it's also a number of other factors as well. So if you extrapolate that to the population in general, it has chronic illness, these chronic illnesses didn't happen overnight. These patients develop these chronic illnesses because of a number of different insults over time. Some of them environmental, some of them, for example, chemical, some of the biological, some of them infectious, some of them not, some of them toxin related, some of them not. But as time goes on, we end up with this complex toxic mix of different environmental problems and infectious problems. And these people are the ones that are the sickest, the ones that are most difficult to treat, ones that don't respond to any given treatment at that, well, that's because there's all these other things going on at the same time. And so those are the patients that are really difficult. And we were lucky with the Gulf War veterans, that their primary problem was the mycoplasma once we treated that, if we got it soon enough, those people recovered. But 20 years later, if we got those patients now they had all these other kinds of problems as well. It's not so simple anymore, you can't just give him doxycycline and see them recover. Like when we get with the first veterans that we dealt with. Now they're much sicker, they've got all these other problems, they've got other infections, they've got other environmental exposures and so on to deal with. And so now it's it's much more difficult. So now what I'm dealing with these veterans, they have all these other problems as well, that we have to consider. So it's become much more complex. So now let's let's look at civilians who have really when they come in Finally, if you have a chronic illness, often people wait until they're really sick, before they see a physician that knows what they're doing in terms of environmental illnesses. And by then it's become really complex, it's become really difficult. And often they go to a specialist who specializes in a given area, like biological toxins and like infection to what and they don't consider the other things that are going on. So it's quite difficult to deal with these patients and you have to keep an open mind.

Erik Johnson: 52:09

Well, wasn't the Huntsville Texas Prison Experiment, a clear case of some overwhelming factor moving in and spreading out from just this one particular experiment that was being done?

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 52:22

Yes, it was. And of course, those patients that we've got the antibiotic to recall recovered, and that was a good news even even the these younger patients had had Lou Gehrig's diagnoses and this is fantastic because most neurologists won't believe it, but in fact, the Baylor College of Medicine Department of Neurology proves that these patients were really Lou Gehrig's, or ami tropic Lateral Sclerosis patients, and they had mycoplasma very high levels of mycoplasma Fermin tans in this case, and by training that most of the patients that we deal with recovered fully, they were young, they were healthy, they didn't have a lot of other chronic exposures that were tearing them down. Once we got the mycoplasma under control. They actually recovered from Lou Gehrig's disease, when under the normal lights, and I have a number of different for example, women that that were in teenagers and had this they recovered, they went on to lead normal lives a normal, full term offspring, the children were healthy. They went on they're continuing their lives, they're now middle aged, and they're doing fine, dude, nope, no health problem, no lingering health problems from that experience.

Erik Johnson: 53:32

Right? And I take this protocol was the post Dr. Cycling protocol.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 53:36

Yes, this was both pulse and continuous. Either either one, were successful. It turns out the important thing was to do it long enough. So this because mycoplasma, very slow growing microorganisms, you can't just give a couple weeks treatment and expected to do anything. Yeah, you can see a little improvement in signs and symptoms, but then it comes right back with them with a flurry. They have to be treated long term. They're slow growing intracellular infections that are not very sensitive to begin with. A patient had to be treated long term and a they have to be treated slowly, with antibiotics like doxycycline a zit or myosin and other other antibiotics and, and I've published protocols for doing this over the years. And it's all on my website www.me D dot o RG that's a website for the Institute for Molecular Medicine, which is a nonprofit that I formed after the Gulf board. They help deal with trauma veterans, so people can go on their website, they can look under treatment considerations, they can find various documents concerning content contamination concerning infections concerning generally chronic illnesses basically, and how they might be able to deal with at least Some of the problems associated with them. And of course along with that is membrane lipid replacement, which I'm now working even as retiree I'm working full time on. And this is again, the way to supplement your visceral phospholipids to repair the damage to your mitochondria, your cell membranes, and in the process, decontaminate your body, if you take it long enough at a high enough dose, so these problems have been fun to work on. We've had a lot of success in dealing with chronically ill patients and helping them with their problems and then a good ride, right? So,

Erik Johnson: 55:37

Mycoplasma is an intracellular infection. could this possibly be fooling a lot of doctors into thinking they're looking at a viral disease rather

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 55:46

Well, you know what it was, when some of these species of mycoplasma, like mycoplasma, Fermin, tans were first discovered, they thought that they were dealing with viruses, because they were small, they acted like viruses in terms of their isolation. And it wasn't until I figured out that, hey, these are actually bacteria, they had bacterial genes, they have ribosomes, they have all the things that bacteria have, they must be bacteria, not viruses. So yes, they're small, they are intracellular. They get inside organelles, even in the nucleus, for example, where they cause major havoc by producing reactive oxygen species, it can mutate DNA and so on. So they cause a lot of problems and havoc in cells, in our mitochondria, in other organelles in cells are interfered with because of oxidative free radical damage produced by mycoplasma, so they cause a lot of problems, they're hard to find. detection is is a major problem, because they're inside cells. Because of that, they're hard to find, you can't just take a serum sample invited, you can't. It's very hard, even in a blood sample. To find them, you have to isolate the leukocytes, the white blood cells, you find them inside the white blood cells of a blood sample. And hardly anybody bothers to isolate the leukocytes when they have a sample of blood there they're using to do some diagnostic tests. But we found over the years that these are all important things that you have to do to find it.

Erik Johnson: 57:22

This sounds like it would be an absolute natural explanation for Lyme disease treatment failures.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 57:29

I work with Dr. Horowitz on some of these problems, and he's well aware of the mycoplasma problem. And he's well aware of, you know, failures of why they could happen, they could happen for a number of reasons. This being one of them.

Erik Johnson: 57:40

As I mentioned with Dr. Stephen Strauss, he actually went and investigated the Huntsville prison incident. And for some reason, he didn't attach importance to it. And by failing to attach importance to it sort of set a message that it wasn't important when the circumstances of this incident are still unexplained, and should very much call attention to the potential for this kind of infectious process.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 58:08

Well, I've a ways faced those problems. And lot of it is due to the active misinformation bout these infections, there wa a problem in terms of the myc plasma, it has a kind of checkered history of ma have been originally deve oped as an incapacitating biological warfare agent. And because of that, there's real y a strong impetus in the De artment of Defense and in the NI and other places, to dow play it to actually, if not out ight, hide it to just cr ate enough question about it to whether it's important, ot so that people discount it. And that's the problem I faced all along. Yeah, if we can clear up a little conf sion about mycoplasma from int nse. There was some speculation hat sense, defense pathologist haking low on the patent on t, that he actually invented thi thing, or perhaps done HIV inse tions into it, when, as far as can tell, he simply described i. And what he was describing w s the base for maintenance and not a modified one th t had been developed for biological warfare. That's absolutely correct. And ther's been so much misinformation bout this, and you're one of the few people that can unde stand what possibly happene in there. Because in some of t e Gulf War veterans that we exam ne when we started looking at detail, we were because these eople were coming back and the were some of the not all of th m. Some of them were getting fal e positive HIV tests. And they idn't have HIV. They didn't h ve a virus that was clear. We t ok a few a small number of the e patients and we started lookin at this a detail. And when w looked at the detail, what we found was, well, they didn t have HIV polymerase. They didn t have the other HIV gen s that are absolutely necessary to have an HIV virus. The only thing they had was parts of t e envelope gene. So why would th y have the mycoplasma? So why wo ld this be so important? And one of the things we're thinki g of Well, it's because th y probably spliced in part of t e envelope gene from H V into the mycoplasma to mprove its pathogenicity t prove its ability to enter ells using that receptor, with t e HIV uses the same receptor. So you can get a much easier infectious process for and i also much more pathogenic becau e of that. So that's wh t we think happened. But the e's been a tremendou amount of disinformation a d outright lying, going on to pr tect those facts, because it's ust a very embarrassing difficult question to fa

Erik Johnson: 1:00:54

I think your treatment for addressing mitochondrial dysfunction by strengthening the membrane is probably the most logical approach for these complex illnesses that I've seen so far.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:01:06

Well, the reason it's important is a mitochondrial function goes across all these different aspects of chronic illness. So it's something we have to address, we can't ignore it. Even if we can treat a given cause we still have to deal with that, you still have to deal with the loss of mitochondrial function. And that affects recovery, that affects normal health that affects mental problems, everything across the board, you got to deal with that. So that's one of the things that I realized early on that we had, we had mitochondrial function problems that we had to address and how to do that in so it turns out this was the simplest way to do that was to repair the lipids help restore the transmembrane potential. And because of that, restore the production of ATP and, and help solve some of that problem. It's not the whole thing. But it's an important element of it is important piece of the problem.

Erik Johnson: 1:02:00

It strikes me as being very similar to the reasoning of Dr. Robert Cathcart. The vitamin C enthusiast, who said that high application or taking vitamin C to bowel tolerance, was actually helping the Krebs cycle by replenishing the spent electrons that were depleted by oxidative processes. So this seems to be what you're doing is strengthening the mitochondrial membrane, whereas His goal was to resupply the mitochondria with spent electrons.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:02:33

Yeah, it's a different approach. And I like my approach better because it actually returns function to rather than try to patch it up, it actually repairs it. And there are other functions of mitochondria besides just producing energy. mitochondria are involved in very complex natural immunity functions involved in cell death. They're involved in a whole number of other processes. So if you let mitochondria get out of control, you can turn on death cycles, you can turn on flama zones, you can turn on all kinds of other problems that mitochondria are central to. And so we're not only dealing with energy problems, here, we're dealing with a host of problems that mitochondria have evolved in our system. And we've incorporated a bid to deal with a number of other issues, including natural immunity, including cell death, including, you know, other issues as well. So the nice thing about preparing mitochondrial membranes is you could deal with all that with just once you return the membrane function to a normal state, you can return those mitochondria to normal function. Fantastic. And

Erik Johnson: 1:03:41

thank you very much for your work.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:03:43

Well, I appreciate the comments and we're still still trying to convince people but more and more people to take the anti factor lipids, the easier it is.

Alicia Swamy: 1:03:52

So you mentioned earlier about a mycoplasma actually being involved in the COVID process.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:03:59

There's a probably a small number of patients overall, but it's a sizable amount, it progressed very rapidly, to die very quickly of COVID. And they have extreme inflammatory responses, they have all the other problems. And when you think about it, mycoplasma caused those same responses in patients and they also if they get in there, they interfere with a biocontrol function. And there are all kinds of other secondary events that are important to survival that are intertwined with with that so we've seen this in a number of different illnesses, not only COVID but in cases of lethal chronic fatigue syndrome, for example, there are some cases of chronic fatigue syndrome that go to through a lethal degenerative process. And we've looked at a few of those patients and 100% of them have mycoplasma so it's it's important there and by myalgia patients, for example, it's important. These are patients that have some of the highest frequencies of mycoplasma infections that we've seen in any chronic illness patient. So people with widespread pain tend to have these infections. And they tend to have mitochondrial function problems and nerves are going nuts because of it. And so these are issues that we think we have solutions for, but they're not simple solutions. They're difficult problems. They're hard to work with, but they can be solved glycerophosphate Lipman's fantastic. help you with long COVID. That's what I'm interested in, by the way. Oh, wow. That's great. Long COVID involves damage to your nerves and damage to your cells. And it's one of the one of the things that happens is that your membranes get damaged to the excess free radicals that happened during the acute illness phases. There's a lot of free radicals, there's a lot of damage to very sensitive membrane structures. And so you got to repair that. So that's that should be an important part of anybody's long COVID. therapy.

Alicia Swamy: 1:06:12

Yes, absolutely. I take my my high dose phosphatidylcholine and my cod liver, take about four tablespoons per day. And that that seemed to really get me out of COVID. Along with Well,

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:06:23

that's important. Those are important sources, as well as the glycerophosphate lipids. And, again, I'm not trying to push any given product, we just happened to do clinical trials using this particular product. Yeah, no, no. Not that we couldn't do anything.

Alicia Swamy: 1:06:41

Oh, I just had a question in your in your trading journey. So you add the phospholipids. It seems like you do the post doxycycline. Do you add in any other factors like enzymes to destroy the cell wall? And also why, why doxy and not an antifungal?

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:07:00

Well, for one thing, it's they're very responsive to doxycycline. So that's important. There are fungal issues with with things like chronic fatigue syndrome. And I discussed that in some of my treatment materials as well, because those fungal issues can keep people sick, they won't recover, let's say to address that. The same thing that people that are treating only their fungal diseases and things like mycoplasma, they're not going to recover unless they deal with the mycoplasma. So as I was saying before, you've got these number of different issues, and you can't just deal with one of them, you've got to deal with all the issues that are causing toxic events to occur yourselves. And unless you do that, the chances of recovering are reduced. And they keep going down further and further and further, the more of these issues you have. I know it sounds complicated. I know it sounds because you're dealing with your GP or family physician, and they don't want to hear about it. They want to know, okay, if there's one thing if there's one prescription, that's what they want to deal with, or give you that one prescription, but they will deal with all this other stuff, it's too complicated, too complex, you just don't want to deal with that. So we've tried to inform patients that they Okay, they don't want to deal with it, you're going to have to deal with it, you're going to have to take things in your own hand to recover. So if you look on my website, and you look under treatment considerations, there's some documents there that go through a whole thing, everything from immunomodulators, to antifungals, to, to membrane lipid replacement to antibiotics to nutrition. By the way, I don't want to pass over nutrition, because this is the one thing you're using. And we tell patients look until you correct your nutrition, you're not going to recover period. Even if you could temporarily recover, you're going to fall right back again, you got to deal with the nutritional problems that you have as a patient. And so we deal with nutrition, and I've written articles just on nutrition alone, and so on. And so there's all sorts of things, vitamins or minerals, or supplements, there's all sorts of different things to deal with. And you have to put those all in perspective, you had to begin to think about all these different multiple things that you have to deal with, with a chronic ailments. Because your illness is complex, and until you take a multi faceted approach, you just aren't going to recover. And that's sort of what we've seen in a lot of the patients that are really sick. Of course it comes in a number of different forms. But the ones that are really sick of require, you know, pretty high doses, we generally go to the powder because the powder is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and you just put a few scoops of the anti factor in any food or any supplement other supplements that you're taking. And it's very easy to take that way it doesn't interfere with anything else that you're taking. So for patients that are really sick, we recommend going to the powder because they are they can take the Four to six grams per day that's necessary for their particular illness. So for patients, for example, a chemical exposed, or environmental toxin exposure, this could be mold toxin exposure, for example, if they want to do something about that, you've got to really jam their system up with the anti factor lipin. So they've got to really take use of this bulk flow concept to remove slowly, those toxic molecules. By the way, there's a real advantage of slowly removing toxic molecules like mold toxins or bacterial toxins. Because if you remove them too quickly, people get severely sick, there really shows severe symptoms of poisoning, whether it's mold poisoning, or bacterial toxin poisoning. So how do you get around that you do it slowly. So we've had patients, for example, that it's taken a year for them to slowly deplete toxic molecules from the body, but during that year period, they've not experienced the sicknesses or severe symptoms that they get if they tried to remove them too quickly. So slows better. That's what we try and tell people want to slowly recover from these illnesses, you don't want to try and quickly recover. Because if you quickly recover, you're going to rebound right back again.

Kealy Severson: 1:11:14

Dr. Nicholson I have I do have a couple of questions for you. But my first question is, does your stepdaughter still currently have any symptoms of Gulf War syndrome or no residual chemical sensitivities? No. Okay. And the other question I had is, you mentioned that some mycoplasma are naturally occurring in the body, could that extend to other forms of mycoplasma? Or is it is it definite that that some are completely foreign and not natural to the body? Because the reason I asked that question is I want to know if this can indicate that a weakened immune system is letting mycoplasma that might naturally occur?

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:11:52

Well look, but now consider that there are some 100 150 different species of mycoplasma. So there's a small number that are known proven pathogens in humans, the half dozen or 10, maybe, that are known to be pathogenic in humans. And generally, these are also pathogenic in animals. Although in animals there seem to be a wider spread of different mycoplasma species that are pathogenic. So if you look at a given animal, like a pig, for example, there's certain species of mycoplasma that cause disease in pigs. And, you know, when you look at the types of mycoplasma infections, generally again, you're down to less than a half a dozen that are primarily important in the pig, but they're different species from what we have in humans. There's some overlap. But in general, the ones that are the most pathogenic and pigs are not the species that are most pathogenic in humans. And the same thing is true with cattle. So you look at cows and mycoplasma is a major problem in things like pigs and cows and horses and so on. But you look at cows. Again, there's certain species that are predominant pathogens and calt. They're not the species that are predominant pathogens in humans. So I'm in humans, we have this six or six or eight species, primarily things like mycoplasma pneumoniae, mycoplasma, fermentations, mycoplasma, genitalium, so on and so forth. These are the ones that are pathogenic than humans. They can be pathogenic in animals, generally, at the pathogenic in animals, we find them in pets of humans, who are sick with the mycoplasma. So we can pass the back and forth between our pets in us, the species that are predominantly pathogenic in humans. And so we've seen this in pets, and can pets become sick? Yeah, they can. Or they not. They can carry the human pathogen without even showing symptoms, and then spread it back to another human. So this is some of the complications of dealing with with this. We don't know for example, about the provenance of mycoplasma species of pigs, for example, if they can infect humans, I think it may in rare cases happens but generally, it doesn't happen. So if you look at the oral cavity of humans, are there mycoplasma? Yes, there are, you can find species of mycoplasma in the oral cavity of humans part of our normal flora, that do these cause disease in humans? No, they don't seem to be. And so we can have benign species of mycoplasma that don't cause disease, or we can have pathogenic species of mycoplasma that cause disease, but only when they penetrate into the blood and get into ourselves and get into our tissue. We can have even those pathogenic forms superficially, you know, oral cavities, and not be sick. So this is one of the confusing things that abuses practitioners to know in. So

Kealy Severson: 1:14:53

It sounds like it depends on whether or not it crosses the blood brain barrier.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:14:58

At least a blood barrier. If it crosses the blood brain barrier, which I can do, that's an added difficulty and added problem. But generally these things start by crossing the blood barrier, either in the lymphatics and cross into the blood, for example, or directly because of a wound or whatever. And when they're the blood, they're susceptible to being picked up by just normal leukocytes and monocytes in the blood will pick them up and eventually destroy them do their own hydrogen peroxide systems for destroying pathogens like this. But if they get in the high enough content, you know, they can escape is naked by the way that cells get engulfed into cells. And there they can slowly but surely cause problems that can slowly divide, maybe take over mitochondria take over other organelles in the cell, and cause real problems. So these infections occur quickly. Although certain illnesses like childhood atypical pneumonia can occur pretty quickly. In general, they're slow. So you get the illness slowly, you get the signs and symptoms develop slowly. And when they're treated. They, if they're treated successfully, they slowly go away. They don't just go away overnight. So it's a long, slow process.

Kealy Severson: 1:16:15

Thank you, Dr. Nicholson. The last question I have is just in terms of treatments for mycoplasma that might extend outside of the category of antibacterials and I'm just or antibiotics. I'm just wondering if you have any insights or opinions on the use of maybe like herbal medicines that are antibacterial for Miko, plasma, or even something that's a mainstream pharmaceutical, like an ion channel medication?

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:16:39

Yeah, sure, in fact, I published this review that covers all the alternative and conventional therapies of mycoplasma, you can go on our website and you can download it. It's published in the International Journal of Clinical medicine. And it's a pretty comprehensive review on all the what we consider to be conventional approaches like antibiotics, for example, or other approaches using drugs or unconventional using different herbs, for example, herbal approaches and other things. So what's covered there as well as support systems like membrane lipid replacement is a support system, which will be used for any type of infectious process. These are thought sorts of things were covered in in the review, where people can download that you can find it very easily on our website.

Kealy Severson: 1:17:28

Thank you for explaining that. We will get a copy of that and we will post it with this episode that so that people can draw.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:17:37

I have an op n access publication so you'r free to use it.

Kealy Severson: 1:17:41

Thank you so much. Thank you for your time, Dr. Nicholson.

Dr. Garth Nicolson: 1:17:44

Okay. Good luck.

Alicia Swamy: 1:17:46

Thank you everyone for joining us today. It was a wonderful conversation with Dr. Garth Nicholson on mycoplasma and how mycoplasma are also involved in a lot of other common infections that we're seeing these days like Lyme disease, autism, ALS, very, very interesting and as he also mentioned, COVID COVID can also have a mycoplasma component. please like share comment on our content also support our podcast by donating to our GoFundMe and patreon page. Thank you so much. We'll see you next time.