Unveiling the Mysteries of Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue – Insights with Dr. Yusef Saleeby

Discover the hidden intricacies of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue as we're joined by the insightful Dr. Yusef Saleeby. Prepare to have your perspective on these conditions transformed, as we peel back the layers on a range of symptoms and their potential underlying causes. Our enlightening discussion with Dr. Yusef Saleeby, a luminary in integrative and holistic medicine, offers a deeper understanding of how tick-borne illnesses and the lingering aftermath of COVID-19 can mimic these syndromes. We share compelling patient stories that illustrate the complex nature of these conditions, shedding light on the importance of a thorough and tailored approach to diagnosis and treatment.

Venture beyond conventional treatment methods with us, as we examine the migratory pain of Bartonella, the debilitating fatigue of Babesiosis, and the pivotal role of a balanced gut microbiome in maintaining health. The conversation with Dr. Yusef Saleeby pivots to the critique of traditional medication reliance and turns toward the promise of less addictive alternatives like amitriptyline and low-dose naltrexone. Listeners will also gain insight into the benefits of complementary therapies such as acupuncture and herbal medicine, offering hope and expanded treatment options for those grappling with the daily challenges of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to More Than Medicine, where Jesus is more than enough for the ills that plague our culture and our country. Hosted by author and physician, dr Robert Jackson, and his wife Carlotta and daughter Hannah Miller. So listen up, because the doctor is in.

Speaker 2: 0:24

Welcome to More Than Medicine. I'm your host, dr Robert Jackson, bringing to you biblical insights and stories from the country doctor's rusty, dusty scrapbook. Well, I'm privileged today to have Dr Yusuf Salibi as my guest today, yusuf, welcome to More Than Medicine. It's good to be back, robert. Well, I'm delighted to have you. As I was telling you a few moments ago, I still have people giving me positive feedback from our last podcast when we talked about Lyme disease and in fact, just like a week, maybe 10 days ago, I had a patient in the office who was telling me how much she enjoyed that podcast. So today I want us to talk about fibromyalgia and get some insights on that. I have lots of patients who suffer from fibromyalgia and I wanted to bend your ear and let you share some of your expertise about that. But before tell my listening audience a little bit about yourself, maybe about your family and some of your background, so they'll know who you are and where you're coming from.

Speaker 3: 1:33

Right, so well. My medical career started over 30 years ago and I had about a 17-year career in emergency medicine just standard emergency department medicine in the Southeast. I covered hospitals in Georgia, North and South Carolina, and back in the late 90s I realized there was much more to be done than what we were doing in standard medicine. So I went on a long journey that brought me to where I am today, where I practice integrative and holistic medicine and I became Lyme literate. I trained under Dr Richard Horowitz up in New York, one of the premier Lyme doctors in the world, and also in the recent pandemic.

Speaker 3: 2:24

Since the pandemic, I've become COVID-literate as well, and so my practice is predominantly in functional medicine down here in the Charleston South Carolina area. I also have a second office in Merle's Inlet, South Carolina, and I have a training program. I realize that I can't leave this world with the knowledge in my head. I got to pass it on to other folks, so I established a training academy in 2016 where we train other practitioners to do no-transcript what I do. I hear you.

Speaker 2: 3:00

Well, that's a good deal. I like that and I like the idea of a training academy. All right, well, let me begin by telling you about one of my patients who came in the office just well, I'd say maybe three months ago, and he told me that when he was 16, he had mononucleosis. In fact he was still accompanied by his mom and he's 22 years old now.

Speaker 2: 3:26

He has a job and his complaint is that he can barely drag himself through a full workday, but when work is over he comes home and goes straight to bed and he sleeps the rest of the afternoon and all night. He goes to college two days a week when he's not working and he sleeps most of the way through his classes. He has a terrible time staying awake because he's so chronically fatigued, he's just tired all the time. He doesn't really have all the fibromyalgia pains that a lot of my patients have, but he's just tired all the time, and so that's his complaint. And when I evaluated him I did some blood work and, sure enough, his Epstein-Barr virus TIDER was high and it indicated remote infection. So he's just one of many patients that I have that have this fatigue, fibromyalgia type symptomatology. Do you see patients like that a lot, all the time.

Speaker 3: 4:33

Many, many folks have a tick-borne illness that's underlying this. And now, since the pandemic, we're seeing a lot of folks that have been plagued with what we call a spike apathy. The spike protein from the COVID virus can elicit similar symptoms. So there's a lot of gray. There's a lot of overlap between underlying causes. Robert, the way I look at it is, fibromyalgia is a symptom of a deeper underlying cause, and if you kind of stop at that diagnosis and say, okay, we've made the diagnosis because people have disrupted sleep, they're depressed, they have brain fog, they have certain points on their body that are very tender to the touch and okay, now it's time to refer them to rheumatology, because it's kind of a rheumatological disease. And then they get prescribed certain medications, things that can go down the rabbit hole with opiate medications, and they get addicted to them sleeping pills, benzodiazepines all these drugs get pushed on them.

Speaker 3: 5:47

There are other ways to treat. There's energy medicine in the form of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. But what I like to do is start off with seeking an underlying cause, like you did with this young man. You identified Epstein-Barr virus as possibly one not singularly, but one of a couple of issues he may have that caused him this condition. Now some people call it CFS chronic fatigue syndrome or ME myelogic encephalitis, encephalomyelitis and it kind of is taken over from the fibromyalgia sort of diagnosis, but I still think that it's worth investigating further to find a deeper root cause which could be several, several different things, and not just one, but a couple in combination.

Speaker 2: 6:47

Now what are some of the potential causes that you need to be looking for? When a patient comes in my office and they say Dr Jackson, I'm just tired. All the time I have all these achy slash trigger points on my neck and my back and behind my elbows and behind my knees and I can't sleep. I just don't sleep well. And now it's been going on so long. I'm just depressed, I'm not able to work like I used to and now I'm getting blue blah depressed. When I have that patient looking at me, where do I begin to investigate?

Speaker 3: 7:23

Well, the first thing that comes to my mind. The first thing I want to investigate is their viral burden. So this could be Epstein-R, ebv, it could be CMV, it could be the coronavirus that is coming to the surface now as a leading cause for some of these symptoms. And there are other HHV6. There are other viruses and the more you have they sort of accumulate and they become a cumulative problem. It can burden someone down and actually contribute to insomnia, brain fog and fatigue. So that's one of the first things that I would investigate.

Speaker 3: 8:05

Second would be anything tick-borne. So you have Borrelia, which is what causes Lyme disease, but another one that is a tick-borne illness that is as popular these days is Babesia. It causes a condition called Babesiosis which causes extreme fatigue. I mean this kind of condition can cause people to not be able to get out of bed. It's not so much painful. It's another tick-borne called Bartonella which causes a lot of pain, but they sometimes coexist. They call it co-infections. But Babesiosis can cause extreme fatigue. It can cause daytime and nighttime drenching, sweats and air hunger where people have to take in a deep breath. It's not like a yawn, but it's just they feel the need. They have to have more air. So that would be the second part of my work up. The third would be environmental toxins like heavy metals, mycotoxins for mold illness and then even EMF electromagnetic fields things we get from the 5G towers or their cell phones or Wi-Fi routers that can impact people's health.

Speaker 2: 9:22

How do you go about testing for that? Does that just say to them stay away from that, or is there a test for that?

Speaker 3: 9:30

Yeah, so there's not really a biomarker for EMF or RF toxicity. You give them a meter and they test their living quarters, like their bedroom. They check their houses for smart meters. They look at maybe turning off their Wi-Fi routers at night. They remove the cell phone from their bedroom, put it on airplane mode and charge it in some other part of the house and if they discover smart meters then they can have a smart meter cage or a Faraday cage or they get the power company to come and put an analog meter in.

Speaker 3: 10:08

So what the part is is investigating their surroundings, their car, do they drive a hybrid or an all-electric? That gives off tremendous amounts of EMF. Does their microwave leak? So microwave your food, put the food in there and get on the other side of the kitchen because you wouldn't want to be anywhere within five or six feet of a microwave when it's running. Things like that can help reduce the impact of EMF, because there's plenty of literature in the medical literature showing the untoward effects of EMF radiation on human bodies, especially children. So that's one thing you do. Same thing with mold is you kind of do a mold inspection. You can also test people's urine for mold toxins that are excreted in their urine, and then you try to find the source and eliminate it.

Speaker 2: 11:02

Now go back to the babesiosis and bartonella. I have some physicians there in my listening audience. How does a physician test for bartonella and babesiosis if there are physicians in my audience that are listening?

Speaker 3: 11:17

Sure, so most of that is clinical diagnosis. There are certain questions you can ask, like if there's pain associated folks with bartonella, where you usually have painful soles of their feet and migratory pains that can be pretty intense Muscle or joint.

Speaker 2: 11:35

Muscle or joint migratory pain, both Both migratory and joint.

Speaker 3: 11:41

I'm sorry, muscle and joint pain, but it tends to be migratory. Unlike some rheumatological conditions where it settles in certain joints, this one moves around, they can have rages. Bartonella is very often associated with personality, behavioral changes in people. And then finally there's these called bartonella stria, which kind of looks like a stretch mark, but it's in the wrong place for a stretch mark and I see it most often in young men, adolescents, teenagers, young men on their back and they can be pretty wide. It can be a centimeter so wide and several centimeters long and it looks like a tiger scratched their back and after treatment those will go away. So when you get remission of bartonella those will go away. So that's bartonella.

Speaker 3: 12:35

The BC osis is usually extreme fatigue and in worst cases an anemia, because the intracellular parasite will lyse those cells and cause a pretty bad anemia that may require blood transfusions. So hopefully you get it before they get to that stage, very hard to diagnose even on a blood smear. So there are specialty labs that will run clinical what they call co-infection panels, not only for Lyme, which is Borellia Bondorfii, but also Babesia microti and bartonella and other co-infections. There's actually a tick can actually give you about 18 different organisms that can be transmitted. So you have to keep an eye. You've got to have your radar on to look for things like tularemia and Rocky Mountain spotted fever and rickettsial infections and there's a whole combination including some viruses.

Speaker 3: 13:42

But once you can isolate that and if you treat the BC osis properly and it can be kind of tricky some of their symptoms of fibromyalgia may ameliorate. So it's important to identify the root causes of all these. Now I talked about infectious diseases of good bit and EMF radiation and things like that. But you have to also remember the gut. If you don't have a well-balanced microbiome in your intestines, it's hard to maintain a healthy life and it could be as simple as some food allergies and some dysbiosis, which means an abnormal microbiome. That can actually cause somebody to present like they have fibromyalgia.

Speaker 2: 14:30

I got you, I got you. Now, is that just as simple as putting them on a probiotic to repair that, or what are you talking about there? Well, I'd say probably a rabbit.

Speaker 3: 14:42

About 20 years ago it was kind of grab a probiotic off the shelf and we've come to realize in the last five to 10 years that there's a lot to it. Lactobacillus, bifidobiphydom and several other microbes in their subspecies are rather important in the right balance. So the first thing you want to do is you want to map out somebody's GI tract. So you take a stool sample and you run cultures on it and there are some other tests. You can run Flammatory markers, secretory IgA, cow protectin, lactoferrin. There's some other things that you can check. But basically what you're looking for is the footprint of what their microbes look like and in what capacity, what prevalence they're there, and then you can look for holes. Now, when somebody has a lot of holes in their GI tract, as far as low counts of bifidobacterium and lactobacillus, there are opportunistic microbes that take over and those are the ones that can cause complications. If there are too many in number, they become pathological. So what you want to do is then go after those microbes. Provide them things like achromacea. You can provide them bifidobacterium and lactobacillus, so you can select probiotics. Now there's a lot to select. There are some companies out there that that's all they do is they research the microbiome and they can provide a variety of different dietary supplements, probiotics that are weighted a certain way that will achieve better health. So it's not a simple fact to go into the grocery store and pick in something off the shelf Maybe it's a tick-borne or maybe it's a viral load and then you sort of go after those and treat those, maybe straighten up the microbiome in the gut. Well, what do you do for the symptoms?

Speaker 3: 16:44

Well, I think traditional medicine still uses a lot of prescription medications that can be habit-forming, like certain painkillers or the opiate or central nervous system acting types, things like hydrocodone, oxycodone, and that seems to escalate to more powerful drugs like fentanyl and things like that in worst case scenarios. Also, things like gabapentin are used, simbalta, actually FDA approved for fibromyalgia and there's some other drugs. Dillera, I believe, is one, and you know that's not the path I take, because those are sort of dead end. They always have to escalate the dose. People become dependent or addicted to those medications and often they're all scheduled and you have to be concerned about that.

Speaker 3: 17:48

I tend to use pain modifiers like amitriptyline, which is an old-timey antidepressant. We don't use it for that much, we use it as a pain modulator, and tracidone also. That's very effective for sleep and people do not get addicted to those things. And then I usually take a path of using things like low-dose naltrexone, split dosing very low-dose naltrexone twice daily for pain control, and then a whole plethora of herbals and botanicals, things like curcumin, resveratrol, corcitin as anti-inflammatories, ginger root extract, Boswellia, serata. Usually Boswellia and curcumin in combination are very good for alleviating pain. And probably, robert, the only prescription drug for pain that I would use that's scheduled is Ultram or Ultraset.

Speaker 3: 18:49

I got you, which is the generic name, is Tramadol. That's about it, because I don't want to see my patients become addicted to certain prescription medications.

Speaker 2: 18:59

I hear you, and that's pretty much my pattern as well. Well, all that's very, very interesting. Well, do you have any patient examples that you could share with us?

Speaker 3: 19:13

Well, yeah, sure there are several. In general I get folks that have been to about five or six different doctors, or even 15. I've had patients say well, I've seen 15 different physicians and nobody came up with an answer for me. Or they did, they made a sort of a superficial diagnosis of fibromyalgia and then didn't know how to properly treat them, and then either the therapies didn't work or they got in trouble with those therapies and now they've been addicted to a couple of painkillers and want to get off of it. So they tend to mostly be females, a few males, but it's predominantly females that come in with these conditions and transitioning away from things like Simbalta and SSRIs, antidepressants and then some of the drugs they can get addicted to. You see benzodiazepines, used very frequently for sleep. Some patients are on multiple benzos and that's kind of contraindicated.

Speaker 2: 20:16

See it all the time.

Speaker 3: 20:17

And it's kind of a struggle getting them off. It may take up to a year to get some people off of some of these medications because you can't stop them cold turkey, and we kind of replace them with safer modalities, even with things like acupuncture or stretching exercises, work on their lifestyle, lifestyle management and diet all very important.

Speaker 2: 20:45

Yeah, and I tell all my patients right up front. I tell them that there's a lot of medications that people will prescribe for this. But in the end you're going to find out that walking, exercise and the natural endorphins that that produces, is going to be the one thing that's going to help you the most. And I've had patients come back to me after years of being around the neighborhood seeing lots of doctors for their fibromyalgia.

Speaker 2: 21:14

And they'll forget that. I told them that, but they'll come back to me years later. And so you know, dr Jackson, really the only thing that helps my fibromyalgia is getting a good night's sleep and a good, good, fast walking plan three to four days a week and I laugh and I won't tell them that I told them that three or four years ago. But truly that fast walk and the endorphins that it produces is the one thing that helps most of my fibromyalgia patients.

Speaker 3: 21:43

All right. I have to warn folks in the audience that a quick fix for many doctors is to write when they get the history that I am so tired, doc, I can't even get out of bed. I can't do a daily chore without having to go take a two hour power nap. Their reactive, like knee jerk reflex is to prescribe something called vivants. Now, that's basically like an amphetamine and you highly addictive and well, yeah, they'll feel better. I mean you're giving them a jolt of a methamphetamine. They're going to be able to have their energy back, but it's a dead end road. I mean they're never going to be able to come off of it if that's all they're going to use to treat their fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue with. So you know we have to caution folks not to go down that slippery slope and it's very difficult. Once somebody is on that medication it's kind of feel good medicine. It is just a temporary bandaid, if you will. It's not a definitive fix for their condition.

Speaker 2: 22:48

You're exactly right. Well, now are you and your associates taking patients down there in Mount Pleasant, murrell's Inlet.

Speaker 3: 22:57

Yeah, so we serve the whole state of South Carolina and get into North Carolina. We have a way, by using a special private membership association, to actually see patients outside of our state even so. But yeah, we have, we are training a new provider and we are actively taking on patients. We do good bit of telemedicine we do. About 70% of our encounters are via telemedicine technology.

Speaker 2: 23:28

How about that? How do folks get in touch with you and your practice?

Speaker 3: 23:32

Well, they can look me up on carolinaholisticmedicinecom. 800-965-8482 is our toll free number, so either of those two ways.

Speaker 2: 23:44

All right, and that's Dr Yusuf Salibi, carolina Holistic Medicine and Dr Salibi, I'm just delighted to have you on More Than Medicine for a second time and I hope maybe you can come back again in the future and we can have another discussion.

Speaker 3: 24:02

I'd love to Robert All right.

Speaker 2: 24:04

Well, thank you, sir. You're mighty kind and I appreciate you. I know you're a busy man and I appreciate you taking time to be with us again.

Speaker 3: 24:12

It's my pleasure.

Speaker 2: 24:13

All right, thanks for listening to More Than Medicine. I'm your host, dr Robert Jackson. My guest today is Dr Yusuf Salibi with Carolina Holistic Medicine, and we'll be back again next week.

Speaker 1: 24:27

Thank you for listening to this edition of More Than Medicine. For more information about the Jackson Family Ministry, dr Jackson's book, for the schedule of speaking engagements, go to their Facebook page, instagram or their webpage at JacksonFamilyMinistrycom. This podcast is produced by Bobslaw and Audio Production at Bobslawcom.