Health Longevity Secrets

The Truth About Complex Chronic Illness with Eric Gordon

• Robert Lufkin MD • Episode 200

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This week Dr. Eric Gordon returns to our program to draw back the curtain on chronic complex illness, illuminating the profound yet often overlooked connection between interrupted healing cycles and persistent health problems that conventional medicine struggles to address.

At the heart of conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, and atypical autoimmune disorders lies chronic inflammation—not as a symptom, but as the driving force. Gordon explains that these debilitating conditions manifest when your body fails to complete its natural healing cycle, leaving millions with normal blood tests but life-altering fatigue, pain, and cognitive dysfunction.

The revolutionary "cell danger response" framework reveals why your cells get stuck in defensive postures long after threats have passed. Your mitochondria aren't broken—they've adaptively changed their function, which explains why supplements often disappoint chronic illness sufferers. This three-phase healing cycle (inflammation, rebuilding, and cellular communication restoration) must complete for true recovery, yet medicine focuses almost exclusively on the first phase.

What makes Gordon's perspective particularly valuable is his recognition that feeling safe is fundamental to healing. The nervous system must receive signals that it's appropriate to divert resources toward restoration rather than protection. This explains why stress reduction becomes increasingly crucial the longer someone remains ill—chronic inflammation itself increases anxiety, creating a destructive feedback loop that further impedes recovery.

Medicine's blind spot stems from its overwhelming focus on acute care models. We excel at addressing immediate threats like infections or injuries, but pay minimal attention to the complex, individualized healing process that must follow. This cookbook approach fails because biochemical individuality means each person's body responds uniquely to identical interventions.

Ready to understand why your chronic symptoms persist despite normal tests? Discover how addressing the complete healing cycle might finally unlock the recovery that's eluded you for years.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back to the event. Our guest today will be speaking about complex chronic illness and longevity. You're going to learn why these conditions are so difficult to treat and why Western medicine really struggles with it when you stay to the end. Our presenter for this discussion is Dr Eric Gordon. He's a consulting expert and medical researcher in chronic illness. In addition to 40 years of clinical practice, dr Gordon is engaged in clinical research in chronic fatigue syndrome, lyme disease, autoimmune diseases and autism. He's worked with Dr Robert Nouveau, who's done groundbreaking research into metabolomics, mitochondrial function and chronic inflammatory disease. So let's jump in.

Speaker 2:

Hey, eric, thanks for joining us, thank you. Thank you for having me, robert, it's a pleasure to be here. You're an expert in complex, chronic illness. So what exactly is that and what should our audience know about that?

Speaker 2:

A while you know often, and they often thought they had chronic fatigue or Lyme disease or, or sometimes, ms, or atypical, or I say often atypical autoimmune diseases, which, to me, all all these diseases, the thing they have in common is chronic inflammation underneath them, and which is the same for basically all the illnesses that you talk about so well is the diabetes and heart disease. They're all driven by chronic inflammation. The difference is here is your genes and your environment has created something that now leaves you usually fatigued and in pain, you know, and with brain fog, I guess. So the chronic, complex illnesses that we deal with I think that's kind of the heart of them is they leave people with their lives unable to be lived fully. That's one of the most important things. So they have fatigue and they go to their doctor and their thyroid is normal and they're non-anemic and their B12 is normal. Maybe they check that and after that they're done, their blood count was normal, their basic chemistries were normal and these people are told that they're done. You know, their blood count was normal, their, their basic chemistries were normal, and these people are told that they're, they're fine, not you know. And well, and if the doctor is compassionate, he realized they're not fine. But too often in the past they would just be sent to the uh, a therapist, or the psychiatrist, or put on an antidepressant with the idea that, um, you know, you're depressed, because those are also symptoms. That also can be, many of them can be symptoms of depression.

Speaker 2:

So what we have realized is that it's always inflammation underneath and often infection. Not always that infection usually plays a role some viral trigger. Many years ago, so many people who have mono I mean, the EBV is a big thing now because of long COVID, but so many people when they get mono, and especially the ones who got it and were wound up in bed for two, three months and they recover, but then, you know, that's like they're 18 to 20. And then, when they're 30 or 40, or after they've had children or after they've been working too many hours, they start finding that they need to rest on the weekend to catch up, you know. And so that's going down that rabbit hole that can lead to what we call chronic complex illness, where your blood tests are often your standard, blood tests are often normal, but you're still ill.

Speaker 2:

The difference with the autoimmune people is that they have tests that their rheumatologists do that say oh, you're abnormal, you have this disease, and now they have specific medicines that often can interrupt the inflammatory process in the autoimmune diseases, which is very exciting. But at the end of the day, the thing that conventional medicine has to offer people with this whole strain of has to offer people with this whole strain of, you know, illnesses that don't go away. They get better or worse. It's just band-aids Okay, it's what I call band-aid medicine and we all have to use it. There's nothing wrong with band-aids. It's really good when you're bleeding, to stop the bleeding. The first step in anything you got to stop the bleeding, but you then want the healing, and that's what chronic illness is all about. In fact, I probably should have started it. That would have been. The clearest thing to say is that chronic illness is a failure to complete the healing cycle. Okay.

Speaker 1:

That's such an important point and we've been hearing that starting it's starting to be a theme in this, in other words, that we can't just treat the symptoms, which is what a lot of Western medicine does for chronic disease, but we've got to get to the root cause. It's sort of like you've got to mop the floor, but unless you fix the roof, you're going to continue mopping the floor all the time. Going back to what you said about inflammation being fundamental at the root of so many of these diseases, as you mentioned and all we've been hearing on this program about the role of insulin resistance in driving inflammation but I guess what you're saying is there's a subset of people that they may not have significant insulin resistance. Maybe those numbers are normal, and there are these other factors that are often overlooked that drive chronic disease and all chronic illness. And what sort of factors are they? I think you hinted at a couple of them there, and what sort of factors are they?

Speaker 2:

I think you hinted at a couple of them there. Well, as I said, it's basically your genetics, how your immune system responds to the environment or the stressor you know, and let me just bring this back to something more basic is that you're, when you're what, this fellow Very smart man who I say he's my patron saint, this fellow Dr Robert Navio OK, and the reason is my is I had always been amazed by people coming in to see me with shopping bags full of supplements and still nothing was changing them. Supplements and still nothing was changing them. These are the people who you know, I see, with this chronic, complex illnesses and they're trying really hard and they're taking all the antioxidants in the world and all the mitochondrial support stuff and doesn't do much for a lot of them. You know, occasionally it helps, but lots of times they're not getting much bang for their buck helps, but lots of times they're not getting much bang for their buck. And I read a paper of his back in 2013 or something that laid out why that really the reason that you're fatigued isn't because your mitochondria are sick, okay, it's because your mitochondria have changed their function as part of their normal functioning. Okay, and that's really the thing. It's not like that. You know there are very few true mitochondrial diseases a few hundred of them, but they're finally, they're very rare. Okay, almost everybody who's tired, their mitochondria are just doing what they're doing because of the environment that they're living in, because of the metabolites that they're seeing. So, and when I started to understand that, I started to realize why you could give people all the CoQ10 you wanted and it didn't do much. Okay, because their mitochondria were not had decided not to listen to it.

Speaker 2:

This whole thing he has labeled the cell danger response, and this is what your body turns on when you get injured or you get an infection. Okay, but it has to go through a cycle that he has broken up into three phases called CDR1, 2, and 3, which we won't go into the details of, but let's say just basically the CDR1 is that acute inflammation. The CDR2 is when your body's rebuilding tissue, and the CDR3, and this is one thing that's very important is the cells have to learn to communicate again with the ones around them, because just because you build a new liver cell doesn't mean that that liver cell is responding to its environment, because one of the things cells do when they get sick is they shut down, they quiet that, they, they just like. You know, um, in the olden days, when the uh, the castle would be surrounded, they'd burn the crops and retreat into the castle. Well, your cells are doing the same thing, you know.

Speaker 2:

They're trying're trying to that first stage of CDR1, you have a lot of inflammation being created, okay, and a lot of oxidative stress, and that's on purpose to try to kill the bug. The second stage is you kill the bug and then you've got to, you know, rebuild the tissue. But the third stage, that cell has to begin to respond to the environment again. Because that first stage, it's, it's membrane becomes more, less permeable, the membrane structure changes and it doesn't. The ion channels and the hormone receptors just aren't working as well, okay, and that's why a lot of people, after these illnesses, will have prolonged hormonal issues where their blood tests might look like they have enough hormones but their body isn't acting like it. So that's because some of these cells haven't finished the healing site, this, this, this healing cycle, and completed and returned to normal. So, um, it's, it's the um.

Speaker 2:

So inflammation happens when you get stuck in it, when enough to enough of your tissues get stuck in any one of those cycles. Okay, that's, that's the trick, and you don't need your whole body. You know it's, you know in it at the same time, because we'd probably die if all of our cells were in one of these cycles all at the same time, but parts of ourselves are. So, when you talk about diabetes, like the insulin resistance that we see, we're also seeing in the fat cells inflammation, right, and that's driving the insulin resistance, but it's also creating a lot of inflammatory cells. And when the inflammatory cells are going, they're releasing lots of pro-oxidant things that just keep stressing the system, you know.

Speaker 2:

So it's a round and round, a round and round cycle of inflammation. That, I think, is really is really the critical thing here. And the trick is how do you lower the inflammation? Well, you have to let the body know that it's safe to heal. Okay, because this is the other component of healing that I know you have spoken about many times and it's so important is the body has to feel safe. Okay, we have to do all these chemical stuff and, yes, we need all these interventions that are biochemical or either herbal or medical, but we have to also let the brain know, the nervous system know, that it's safe to heal, and that's where a lot of the other modalities come in.

Speaker 1:

Now, when it's safe to heal. Is that related to stress? Is it a matter of avoiding stress and relaxing safety? Is it the mental feeling of safety, or is it something on a mitochondrial or cellular layer or a?

Speaker 2:

little. As we said. As above, so below. You need that, you need all of it. I mean again, I don't want to. There are plenty of people who will stay stressed and anxious and get better. So we don't want to make absolutes about this. You know we don't have to be perfect, that that is the beauty of the body. You know we don't have to be perfect, that is the beauty of the body. You know, I always tell people I was a mechanic for a short time when I was young and then you had to do it right. The beauty of medicine is we just got to get close. Okay, because the body is a self-healing organism, but it until there's at least enough of the message that it's all safe.

Speaker 2:

When you have chronic illness, this becomes more important. Okay, because this is this is what's so interesting is, when you have an acute disease, you get, you know, acute pneumonia, you break an arm, you know the um. Can you know, like I said, with, especially with a broken arm, you know if, if you, if you get the x-ray and they, they cast it and then they take the x-ray a few weeks later, they tell you oh yes, it's healing, and you, you, you relax around that injury. You know you're not really I mean cause. You have the sense that it's healing and so all this is happening in the background, you know. But if you have an injury that, like six months later, it's still interfering with your life, it's easy to get too much attention, to worry about that area and that worry and that stress begins to build over time, depending how much of your life is is is interfered with. And what we find? That people with chronic inflammation, over time their anxiety goes up, you know. So, even if they're anxious, even if they're calm to begin with, they get a little anxious. If you're, by nature, more anxious, you can get very anxious because you're wondering what's going to happen with your life. You know, if you're, if you're, by nature, more anxious, you can get very anxious because you're wondering what's going to happen with your life if you're in this state. So what's interesting is that chronic inflammation makes everything worse. So you don't have to be perfect to heal. But I just want to emphasize that I'm not talking you don't have to meditate the rest of your life to get well. If you meditate a little bit, it helps, but again, only for some people, because there are some people who, when they meditate, they get more anxious. For those people they're better off maybe doing Tai Chi or painting or using their hands Anybody you know, walking in nature. All these things help give us calming signals and they're important.

Speaker 2:

The sicker you are, the longer you are, the more hard you have to work. If you've only been mildly ill, you can go back to being as neurotic as you want to be and probably get along. You know, I compare this to, like you know, having a basically a curve in the spine or your head's forward all the. There are lots of people whose heads are forward all the time and you see them at meetings. They're 80 years old and they're like this and they've been that way for 40 and they're fine, okay. But I see lots of people who are like that when they're 30 and they're a mess, are like that when they're 30 and they're a mess, and this head forward position is is stressing their um, their vagal system, okay, and the tight muscles are not letting their brain drain and so they have constant head pressure. Now look, one guy's been doing this for 80 years. The other person's been doing this for only 10, but what's the difference? The person one of them is, is inflamed, is chronically inflamed at a bigger level, so they have less room for the for not being perfect beings.

Speaker 2:

When you get, the sicker you get, or the longer you stay ill often, the more you have to pay attention to being healthy.

Speaker 2:

It's just like the patients. Many of the people who I know, who watch many of the things that you produce, are people who want to stay healthy. Okay, and they realize, in order to really stay robust through their lives and increase the odds that they're going to be really healthy when they're in their 70s and 80s, they have to work a little harder at it. If they're just going to sit on the couch and watch television, they might live to 80, but they're going to have trouble getting out of the chair. So they have to make a choice how much they're going to do, and when you're really ill, you unfortunately have to usually have to work a bit harder to get well. You know it's. I wish it wasn't that way, but that that that seems to be how it works. You know you have to do the things that would keep you healthy. You have to go, you have to find the things that would have kept you healthy and do them, but it's hard to do because you don't have the energy, and that's a big issue.

Speaker 1:

Now, if this chronic condition is at the foundation of chronic inflammation, is at the foundation of so many of these chronic illnesses, why is this such a blind spot for our traditional healthcare system? Why aren't they on top of this?

Speaker 2:

Well, because they had a model that worked. It's the model of acute disease. Acute disease something happens to you, you get an infection, and if we can kill that infection, your body then heals. Remember, your body still has to do the healing, as we saw in cancer patients. If they have no white blood cells, it doesn't matter how many antibiotics you gave them. The outcome usually wasn't good and it's the same thing. But that was the model of medicine, is acute care and it's the same thing. So, but that was the model of medicine, is acute care and it's based on warfare. Really, I mean, medicine has made this biggest leaps and bounds in the last hundred years because we keep killing each other and we work really hard at fixing the soldiers over by a car now and be mangled and they can put you back together. I mean it's really one amazing things we can do.

Speaker 2:

The problem is that medicine hasn't paid attention to this black box of healing. You know what happens between when we make the intervention and what your body has to do for itself. Okay, so we're really good at removing the stressor, the external the arrow. If you will, we can pull that out of you, but then you have to heal. We can sew the wound up, but all the it still has to heal. Okay. And that healing is when that healing is misguided or when that healing gets stuck in one of those phases of Dr Navio's three stages of the cell danger response. Okay, that's healing. Okay, so that that CDR describes the healing cycle. Okay. And if you get stuck in that healing cycle, you then have chronic disease and medicine has paid little attention to this because we are focused Unfortunately, you know, we have become hyper focused on can I find a drug or a single intervention that is going to change somebody? Okay, money has gone, is, and we and we cause we're, we think like engineers, you know, and engineers have, I mean, amazing, do amazing things, but when it comes to biological systems, they don't always get us where we need to go because they're looking for um direct connections that a causes B. Okay, and in in the body, a causes a hundred things and a hundred things feedback on A. You know it's, it's, it's a.

Speaker 2:

We learn details in medicine. One of the things I like love about medicine is I learn one little fact and then I take that fact and I try to use it to help somebody, you know, but the reality is that it's like when people take supplements or take these days, everybody's probiotics. You know, we have this probiotic that does that one thing, but it's interacting with a system that's going to do a thousand or a million things and we just hope that we get the piece that we want out of that, and the other million things that it does kind of doesn't make enough ripples in the pond to really disturb us, you know. But, um, we don't understand at all how this body works. You know, I mean, look at immunology. Every week they're coming up with new, new subclasses of, you know, of cells, of t cells, b cells, macrophages, I mean it's endless um and that's and so. But we like to simplify things. So we, we think simply and we like simple problems.

Speaker 2:

And chronic illness is not a simple problem and it requires your body to do the healing. And here's the biggest problem. Okay, it's a problem of the individual, when, when you shoot people with bullets, we all act kind of the same. Okay, and the repairing that process you can do that on, you know, a thousand soldiers and it's going to work. Probably 990 times, maybe even a thousand out of a thousand, okay, you're going to get pretty decent results. Now, when that person has to complete the healing, okay, so you're going to get the, you know, the blood to stop, you're going to, you know, save the organ, the body, the guy's going to walk out of the hospital, fine. But then talk to them a year later.

Speaker 2:

Out of that thousand people, probably several hundred of them still aren't feeling quite right enough, and even with something simple as a bullet wound, you'll find that they feel differently. They have some of them it's going to be a little sore, some of them the skin is going to be a little abnormal, some of them are going to have a reduced range of motion. All with the same injury because it depends on how their body has reacted to that. Now, that's a simple thing a bullet wound, relatively. But when you have a more complex interaction, like an infection or toxins, or even a better example, because some of us have no problems dealing with a tremendous amount of toxins or our liver, we just have the pathways to get rid of a lot of stuff, and other people don't do well at all with them. So it's their biochemical individuality that comes into play, and so you have all these variables.

Speaker 2:

Medicine has gotten less good at dealing with variables because it's cookbook. You go to your, you know you go to your doctor and they have, they have, like you know, six to nine medicines and out of those six to nine, really probably only four really different medicines and six different variations on the same drug for a problem high blood pressure. You know they've got, you know they're, they're, you know four or five categories with, like you know, six to 10 medicines in each one and they'll pick one. And you know you, god forbid, you have pain, you know they, they. Again, they have a few classes and you just like work through them. Antidepressants is the same thing, but it's all cookbook and there's very little thinking about your body involved.

Speaker 2:

And the idea of precision medicine is kind of cool but it's still not going to answer the whole thing because detail, detail, very large group of things to do. So we need precision medicine. I'm all in favor of that. I think the more details we have, the better it is. But people have to understand there's a gestalt of the human and that's where the doctor is important and the doctor used to be so important because the doctors actually knew people. And that's kind of losing it because the flavor of who you are as a human being can have a lot to do with what you need to find health, not just to have the absence of something that's making you um, not just to make your numbers look better, because that's what medicine is today is is treat the numbers and not that human being in front of you. I'm sorry, we sort of rambled off your subject.

Speaker 1:

No, no, that's very, very good. Well, this is. This has been a great conversation. How can people find you? Maybe your website and social media find out about your practice as well. Maybe you could tell them.

Speaker 2:

Okay, we're just at gordonmedicalscom. I think we probably are on Facebook and Instagram, but I don't pay much attention to social media, I must admit, but that's where we can be found and you know, this is the kind of medicine we do we look at. You know, people talk about root causes and it's multiple things. You know, I wish there was one root cause. When people have become chronically ill, it's multiple, but luckily you don't have to fix everything because the body will heal itself.

Speaker 1:

Great. Well, thank you so much, Eric, for spending the time with us today and thanks for all the great work you're doing in this space.

Speaker 2:

Thank you A pleasure. Pleasure, robert, and thank you for your work.

Speaker 1:

Well, we covered a lot of information about chronic fatigue syndrome and the challenge of inflammation and being at the root of so many diseases that many of our conventional practitioners miss in our healthcare system. I want to thank Dr Eric Gordon for joining us today and sharing his amazing knowledge. Remember that Dr Gordon is giving a bonus to our VIP Pass members, so if you haven't claimed your VIP Pass to access the recordings, transcripts, mp3s and our must-have bonus, you can get it now by clicking the button on this page upgrade before it's too late. No-transcript.