Chronic Illness in America & Your Balanced Immune System

Did you know that 60% of Americans have at least one chronic disease?

Chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and autoimmune conditions, are leading causes of death and significant contributors to healthcare costs in the U.S. In this episode we emphasize the importance of a balanced immune system in preventing and managing chronic illnesses. The episode also covers the role of recurring infections, reactivated dormant infections, and chronic low-level infections in the development of chronic diseases. We also highlight the importance of a root cause approach to addressing chronic illness by focusing on immune system health.

In this episode you will learn about:

• Chronic illnesses, their causes, and their impact on healthcare costs
• Autoimmune diseases and their connections to infections and the immune system
• Recurrent and chronic infections
• Identifying and managing chronic infections as underlying causes of chronic illnesses
• How chronic infections like Epstein Barr can trigger autoimmune diseases like Graves disease
• Chronic illnesses linked to infections and their treatment through immune therapy

Instagram: @heyheyelizabethmae
Website: www.heyheymae.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey, you're gonna be okay. I'm your host, Elizabeth May, and my functional health practice helps people heal when they've exhausted traditional options. When no one can figure your health challenges out, my team helps you resolve symptoms and restores your health. You're listening to my podcast where we'll hear stories of healing chronic illness from a root cause approach. Hey! So excited to be with you guys again. We're gonna talk today about chronic illness. What is chronic illness? And what does chronic illness have to do with an imbalanced or a balanced immune system? You know, there are more and more illnesses popping up all the time. There are honestly more and more diagnoses popping up all the time. Um, according to the CDC, six and ten Americans, so that's 60% of Americans have at least one chronic disease. At least one. We talked last week about how diagnoses often get stacked one on top of the other, and that becomes multiples, right? But chronic diseases are the leading cause of death and disability in the US, um, as opposed to old age being a leading cause of death, which is another option. We also know that chronic disease is a major factor in healthcare costs. So wherever you may be on the political spectrum around health care costs, what we pay for healthcare, how our health care is um functioning, and how it's funded, chronic disease is really a linchpin in that. And so shifting chronic disease is going to be, in my opinion, the way that we can shift our health care costs, our healthcare system. Um, but what is a chronic disease? These are the usual diagnosable conditions. So things like diabetes, cancer, lupus, arthritis, epilepsy, um, chronic kidney, chronic lung disease, heart disease, all of these big giant umbrella terms, pre-diabetes, these are gonna be your chronic illnesses. Other chronic illnesses can be something like getting strep over and over. A child gets strep four, five, six times, has their tonsils and adenoids removed, now they're having strep in their ears, we're having ear infections, so we're gonna get some ear tubes in a child. This would be considered um a chronic infection as well. It doesn't just have to be those diagnostic conditions. Also, a whole nother realm of chronic disease or autoimmune disease. And autoimmune disease cascades. Once one starts, they often trigger others because antibodies are involved. The immune system is protecting the body against something. Um, and that immune system starts to turn on the actual tissue of the body, and we now have autoimmune or immunity itself happening in the body, and those autoimmune diseases also fall in that category of chronic disease. So things like Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Shogrin syndrome, type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease. There are countless, we could go for hours probably listening to autoimmune diseases at this point. But the key there for chronic disease, that is autoimmune nature, is the immune system has now turned on the body and is attacking some part of the tissue for Hashimoto's thyroiditis or Graves disease. In that instance, the immune system is attacking the thyroid. So when we bring an immune-informed root cause approach to the scene, we really start to make progress. So let's just kind of talk through why is that. So the root cause approach, in my opinion, uses the immune system as the linchpin. We want to have a balanced immune system because a balanced immune system will keep out infection, will not attack the body, and we eliminate plenty of chronic disease by taking away these two mechanisms. So I find that roots to chronic disease connect back to infections. If you pull back someone's full health history, we whittle apart when they started having symptoms, when they got their diagnoses, we pull all that back, we're usually able to see a sickness occurred, or I had strep throat many, many times, and that eventually involved into this. Or I was pregnant and I felt great. I was wonderful during my pregnancy. After my pregnancy, I developed thyroid disorders, or I began to have autoimmune disease issues. Um there are also many chronic infections that are roots to these chronic diseases. So Epstein barr virus, we're familiar with that, mononucleosis. A lot of us got it in junior high, high school, college, commonly called a kissing disease. But that Epstein barr virus is part of the herpes family, and it can be the root cause and often is the root cause of Hashimoto's thyroiditis or Graves' disease. So those EBV cells like to inhabit the liver, the spleen, the thyroid most commonly. And the immune system, in an effort to go clean those out and address that, starts attacking that thyroid tissue. And now we have that autoimmune process at play. But at the root, at the very beginning of that dysregulation, oftentimes we see our clients going through hyper and hypothyroid states, jumping back and forth, back and forth until their body settles. That EBV was the original infection at the root of the chronic disease of Hashimoto's or Graves' disease. There are other diseases or disease processes that can be at the base of those chronic diagnosable conditions. So Lyme disease, for example, the spirochy borrelia is the name of the bacteria that creates Lyme disease, just like Streptococcus creates a strep throat infection. Um, borelia creates Lyme disease. And Lyme can morph to arthritis, to rheumatoid arthritis, to chogrins. Um fun facts about Lyme initially, the big discovery in America, we're familiar with Lyme, Connecticut, where a lot of this began. And it started in, I believe, the 80s. A group of mothers banded together and they noticed that children in their in their neighborhoods were all developing and being diagnosed with juvenile arthritis. This was the start of starting to see how Lyme creates a certain symptom presentation in a group. And then we saw this spread to adults, and we were able to find that Lyme was a root cause of juvenile arthritis, and that's really how Lyme was discovered in that area in that concentration. So when we go back to the origins of an illness or a condition, we often find that there is a pathogen or an infection that imbalanced the immune system. And that has allowed for this chronic disease, chronic illness diagnoses, these layers of diagnoses to begin. You know, a lot of times clients will start with a little dysfunction that moves into a lot of dysfunction, or we have a child that had strep throat, like I said, then we have ear infections, then we have adenoids and tonsils out, but then we have to have ear tubes put in, and then we move to having strep throat symptoms, but we have them lightly without our tonsils and adenoids, and we start to have more of a GI presentation where we're vomiting, where we have lots of bloating, and that's still strep. So what we find is that pathogen starts a cascade in the immune system and it causes the immune system to be imbalanced. So during COVID times and after the pandemic, I started to see in our clients that COVID was something that would really dysregulate their diagnosable conditions or create more. It started a cascade, particularly of a lot of autoimmune diseases. So we started to kind of ask okay, if COVID makes more diagnosable illness happen in a client who's generally caring for their health very well, right? They're in care, they're learning how to do all these things, they're implementing a healthy diet and exercise. Is it COVID or is it the immune system? And over time we've come to find that it's really an imbalanced immune system is at the root of chronic disease. So let's talk about how that immune system works. The big things that we're gonna go through today are just two main arms of the immune system. You have TH1, the killer side of the immune system. This is mediated by your cells. They do the work to attack and kill pathogens, ASAP directly, as soon as a pathogen comes into the body. So you're exposed to strep throat. That TH1 side are gonna send immune cells to kill the pathogen. They may send messages to other immune cells to please come help us attack the strep invading. And they do this when pathogens are even lodged inside of your cells. So TH1, this killer side of the immune system, responds immediately to an invader. It'll surround a splinter with pus. That's a really great example. You get a splinter in your finger, you leave it there, you see inflammation happening on the hand, pus begins to develop. Those are your TH1 killer cells coming to kill any bacteria that splinter carried into your body. So they can neutralize it, get rid of it, and put out that infection potential. This side is also hushed when you're pregnant. So your body won't abort the fetus in your body. A fetus, a baby inside of a mother's body is seen as an invader or non-self, right? That's not themselves. If I have a baby inside of me, that is another being. And then I am myself. The immune system's job, that TH1 side's job, is to monitor all the time for bacteria coming in through a cut on my hand or a splinter. It's gonna go get those. Anything that's not Elizabeth's tissue, it's gonna go get those materials, eat them up and move on. And that helps us have a really nice immunity against new pathogens. The other side of the immune system is the TH2 or antibody side. I like to call this antibodies and inflammation. So this is the side that's responsible for things like allergic reactions, um, inflammation in your body. Maybe you feel inflammation when the weather's a certain way or after you've eaten lots of sugar. This side of the immune system is responsible for food sensitivities. It's responsible too for sometimes chronic and recurrent parasite issues. So this antibody and inflammation arm of the immune system has cells that attack pathogens in a different way than the other side. They're gonna create messages called antibodies that encourage other immune cells to produce more antibodies, more immune cells to go kill whatever it is. So antibodies then attack the pathogen, including virus and bacteria, as well as allergens. So, say molds coming into your body, your body's gonna produce some semi antibodies, and those antibodies signal to other immune cells to go kill that longer-term pathogen. Now, TH2 cells actually don't enter into infected cells. So if a pathogen has come in and it's gotten inside of your cells, they won't do that. When we see this arm of the immune system working too strongly, it actually makes it hard for a body to fight off a virus, bacteria, or fungal pathogen because it becomes really, really busy at things that are normal, like food sensitivities. It will create a lot of um allergic reactions. So we also see inflammation on this side when it's overactive. When TH2 is dominant, we struggle with these issues, we have lots of allergies from the excess antibodies. We can start to see other symptoms too. We start to see an ADHD type presentation, we can see neurological struggles, we can see conditions like pans and pandas, where we have this acute neuropsychiatric symptom load. And it's really because that TH2 antibody side is overactive. We're over-inflaming in the brain tissue. We are overactive trying to combat some sort of pathogen. And a lot of times it's not really a pathogen that is a foe. It's something like a food that you eat, it's something like an allergy that we're exposed to. We're all exposed to pollen, mold, things like this. Our bodies should be able to see those, deal with them, move on. But when TH2 is cranked up and it's overactive and it's dominant in this balance equation of the immune system, we see a lot more of these type reactions. Autoimmunity is also a play. When TH2 is too busy, it's too active, we have a lot of antibodies, we have a lot of inflammation, we have a lot of self-attack by the immune system. And so we see autoimmune disease. What we need is balance aside from being pregnant when the immune system gets heavier on TH2 and calms down that killer side so that the fetus is safe inside of a mother's body, two bodies in one, right? We should have a balanced immune system aside from pregnancy. And after pregnancy, it should go back to balance. So when it doesn't, we'll talk more about this next time. Then we see things like triggering events, pregnancy, causing that immune system to struggle getting back to balance. So we've got an imbalanced immune system at the root of chronic disease. There are two main parts killer and antibody. And what happens is the killer side can shut down and not do anything. An antibody can become overactive. And now we have an imbalanced immune system that can promote allergies, can promote autoimmune disease. And this is what we've come to believe really is at the root of chronic infections and chronic disease, which in the grand scheme of things in America is a huge issue. So when we experience COVID and we got to watch our clients go through that and start to develop more disease after having a triggering event of an acute illness. So COVID being really, really sick, super acute sickness is also a triggering event for an immune system. And we noticed that clients were struggling more. And so let's just kind of talk about two chronic infections. So once that immune system's imbalanced, we have a hard time combating an infection. Infection can be all sorts of things, right? You could have a strep infection, maybe you have mono, that's a viral infection. Maybe you have a fungal infection, you have candida overgrowth in your GI tract, and you have recurrent candida and mold issues internally. All of these things are types of infections. But I kind of want to raise to you that there's three ways that infections are going to activate in the body. So aside from a first exposure, so we have something like reactivated infection. So a simple example is strep. Johnny has strep in October, he does antibiotics. Now it's back in November. Johnny does antibiotics again, and now he's having those tonsil issues. So they do a different antibiotic, and at Christmas, he begins to have ear infections. So now they do the ear tube placement. Maybe they already did that tonsilectomy. And Johnny continues to have chronic strep and continues to struggle with other symptoms that can also be um characteristic of strep. So Johnny starts to have declining handwriting. He regresses at times into baby talk. He will increase in his interrupting and his impulsivity. He may develop anxiety. He might have some eczema. A lot of times these symptoms come and go. So children will have a recurrent strep infection and they will have eczema for a little bit. And sometimes, actually, when they are sick with something else, parents will report, hey, Johnny has had this recurrent strep thing. We've never been able to get rid of it. He had a stomach bug and he was like an angel. He was riding better, he wasn't anxious, he was really relaxed despite the vomiting. What is that? That again is where we have a recurrent infection, strep throat. The Streptococcus bacteria family is at the root of that, but it can present in lots of different ways. Now, chronic infections can happen in another way where we have a dormant infection reactivating. The best example of this is really chickenpox and shingles. So let's use the example of Ginny. She had this when she was younger. She had chicken pox as a child. Her mom medicated those little itchy dots and it went away in a couple weeks. And now her immune system has kept the chicken pox dormant for years. She's an adult now, she did not have chicken pox again. It was a one and done kind of situation. Now in adulthood, she left a stressful marriage, went through a really tough season in life, and the varicella zoster virus, which is responsible for chickenpox, comes out of dormancy, and Ginny experiences it in adulthood as painful shingles. So we can look at someone and say, you have chicken pox. I can identify that. We can also look at someone and say, you have shingles. These are the same virus that varicella zoster virus in the herpes family is responsible for both of those. These people who have, you know, those shingle episodes pop back up later in life at stressful times, they're having a recurrence of their chicken pox as a child. Same, same thing. So another example of this would be cold source. This is herpes simplex virus one, HSV one. So these sores will pop up maybe right before finals or when it's time for your wedding. Now it's popping up. And after you're strung out from the holidays, putting all those kids through Christmas activities, you now have another cold sore, but you don't have them all the time. This is an example of a reactivated chronic infection. So remember, we have that first one strep can be recurrent where the body just never truly kicks it. With the cold sore example and the chicken pox and shingles later in life, we have a chronic infection that's reactivated. Finally, we can have a chronic low-level infection. So something like Lyme or Bartonella, both vector-borne infections. Um, they can be chronic, low-lying, where the immune system can never really get on top of them. They can't solve it. It's not like we have this big episode like with the strep where we have a strep throat and then we have an ear infection. No, chronic infections just can just kind of lay low. So a lot of times people have been exposed to the Lyme bacteria, borrelia through a tick bite, a mosquito bite fly, lies fully. There's lots of vectors that carry borrelia, the Lyme bacteria at this point. And one person might be bitten and show no response, right? Another person may be bitten and have an immediate emergent issue, or the rash, joint swelling, these sort of things. In this case, we can say the pathogen was here. We address the infection that's that's you know emergent and acute. Um, and now the infection is conquered. But sometimes we have a bite, and over time it slowly builds in the system and the immune system is not able to tackle it. Things like Bartonella and Lyme are stealth infections, we refer to them as because they can either hide in the tissue, Bartonella Lyme disease will burrow deep into connected tissue, and then the immune system doesn't necessarily circulate there regularly and see it. Um, or they can just be low-lying where the immune system kind of gets on top of them for a while, and then we have a flare where we have joint swelling, and then we eat a little healthier for a little while and goes back and forth. So that's a third type of a chronic infection, that chronic low-level infection, whether we have an acute instance where it takes a little bit to get that infection in control, or we have just this ongoing string of symptoms. And I kind of want to raise to you the idea or the concept that it's when we have these low-lying or chronic or reactivated symptoms that what's really happening is that's what our chronic diagnoses are. Maybe you have Schockren's disease or rheumatoid arthritis, and in some seasons it behaves quite well, and in other seasons it does not. We are often finding that chronic infections like Lyme disease are underneath of those two specific things. I love to use the example of neck pain with Epstein Barr virus. So you had mono in high school, and you have a chronic neck pain issue. A lot of times with EBV Epstein bar virus, you have it at the base of your skull and that occipital lobe, you'll have pain there. You may have it down the left shoulder and to the left side of your neck. Um, and we have that recur around stressful seasons. Just my stress, I carry my stress in my neck, I gotta go to the chiropractor, we'll work it out. And it does relieve the pain, but until the stressor is gone, until health is restored, that neck pain truly is just being symptom managed. So, what's really going on? Do I have a neck issue? Did I tweak it, or do I have a season where I'm not on top of my health as much or I'm stressed and my Epstein bar chronic infection is showing through more? My immune system's not able to keep it dormant. Great questions, right? So, how do we identify chronic infections? So if I'm saying that chronic infections I find are at the base of chronic diagnosis or chronic illness, well, how do we find a chronic infection? Surely not just by someone being diagnosed as type 1 diabetic. No, we're gonna look at standard lab markers. So very basic things. Your doctors often order a CBC with differential. Your white blood cells give us information, platelet levels, the differential itself. So you have different types of immune cells, neutrophils, basophils, semanocytes, these things. Whether they are high or low and the degree to which they are, is gonna give us insight into whether there are chronic infections. Low ferritin, so those iron stores is another great um insight piece on standard lab markers, as are liver enzymes, kidney function, these sort of things. So looking there, those are places that we look first to say, hmm, could there possibly be a chronic infection at play? Next, we move to specialty labs. So we'll do a full pathogens panel. Sometimes we'll pull individual titers. So mono is a great one. When you have mono in high school or college, they'll look at EBV titers and they're looking for antibody levels. They want to see IgM. So active antibody levels of an active infection. You got mono right now, and you're going to have high IgMs. They're going to look at IgGs. That's going to be the immune arm of your body's building for that pathogen against it. So when people have a chronic infection, we often see elevations in IgGs. And then the last part of identifying chronic infections is the most important. And it is the part that we need to be the most flexible about. And that's symptoms. All pathogens have a specific symptom load. It's very clear to me when someone has a particular pathogen. So in our practice, we look through a detailed health history. I will ask you questions about your birth, about how you were breastfed or not, what your early days look like. Did you have reflux? Did you have issues with your mother's milk? Were you able to stay breastfed? Did you need to move to formula? Did they have to change your formula many times? We're going to look at health history. We're going to look at your health around past pregnancies. We're going to look at your health around illnesses. I'm going to literally map out a timeline of your health. And we're going to try to map symptoms on there too as we talk and interview our practitioners. Do that because that information helps us to start to see patterns. It helps us to start to see when the immune system was waning or stronger. So we'll do that. We'll look at that standard CBC with differential blood tests. We also look at GI mouse tests. We look at full pathogen panels. There's lots of ways that we can do that, but we also use these symptoms. So we do have several questionnaires we'll use that help us to see what pattern your symptoms fall into. So with streptococcus, for example, there's a lot more than just a strep throat or an ear infection, though those constant ENT issues are really important and we're going to take that into consideration with someone's history. We're going to ask about things like stylized and eye. How about canker sores? How about hair loss? Any alopecia issues? Have you had skin issues, rashes, eczema, acne? And while strep isn't always at the root of those things, we can kind of take the sum of all the parts. We can look even at the type of rashes and eczema and identify what is probably at the root of that. And now we have solved, you can hear multiple ADHD symptoms, SIBO, small intestine, bacterial overgrowth, streptococcal family, bacteria is often at the root of that repetitive GI issue, bleeding gums and chronic gingivitis. So now we're moving into the dental world. These are chronic disease issues as well. And they all are going to come back to streptococcus often or they can. We can often see these behavioral symptoms too in children. OCD, obsessive ticks, repetitive movements, repetitive sounds, increased oppositional defiance, all the way to diagnosable oppositional defiance disorder. We've seen children with ODD that truly have an aggressive chronic strep infection at the root of that. You address the strep infection through the immune system, and those issues go away. Urinary frequency, bed wetting, daytime accidents, school performance, a regression in math and science, regression in handwriting, depression, unusual sadness, panic. And then a lot of the GI symptoms associated with strep are going to be more the abdominal distention. You eat veggies, you eat fiber, starches, and sugar, that creates that abdominal distention or bloating. You may have a noisy gut after you have healthy veggies and you're like, I'm just trying to eat healthy. What's the deal? Streptococcus can be at the root of all these things. So we're starting to see that there are symptom patterns for different infections. And we can look at those and look past the diagnosis and see what's under there, what's at the root of this SIBO, this recurrent GI issue. And once we are able to address what's at the root, that strep infection, then we see a direction. We see a person heal. We see a person revert back to their health status from before everything got bad, before their health changed. So if your symptoms have a theme, if everything changed at a linchpin point, if there's a turning point, if your labs look beautiful, but you still feel terrible, or you got a diagnosis like lupus is my favorite, that doesn't quite fit right. Often practitioners will even say, you don't quite meet the diagnostic for criteria for lupus. You're pretty close. So we're just going to start there. Um, if your diagnosis maybe has psychiatric components that were onset and physical components, you notice, hey, I didn't have these psych issues till I had these physical issues. We want to explore chronic infections there. So there are many infections, they can work stealthily to hijack your immune system. And I think it's important to kind of just like take a quick peek at a couple studies. So on one study, we see that a virus COVID can reactivate another virus. So we're seeing this in research that COVID can reactivate Epstein Barr, commonly known as mono, and it can masquerade, is what Americans have come to know as long COVID. So this study is showing us COVID started it. It reactivated Epstein Bar. And symptom-wise, we now have a long COVID presentation that also looks like these Epstein Barr symptoms. Another study shows us how Epstein Barr virus triggers the body to make thy trophin receptor antibodies. Well, what are those? Those are antibodies involved with the thyroid. This is what we measure when we're diagnosing Graves disease. If you go to your endocrinologist, they're going to look for thyrotrophin receptor antibodies if they suspect that you have Graves disease. So in this study, it shows us how Epstein Barr will trigger the body to begin to make those antibodies, which ends you at a diagnosis of Graves disease. And with Graves, the recommendation is usually thyroid removal or iodine radiation of the thyroid, and then you're on medication for the rest of your life. But our approach is to look and say, hey, you have a Graves diagnosis right now, or you have some thyrophine receptor antibodies, or your body is moving from hyper to hypothyroid. Let us dig in and see if symptom-wise we hear the things that would add up to an Epstein bar virus reactivation. And if they do, then we move into labs and we say, on paper, does this person have elevated antibodies? And every single time that we find them, we address the infection, the Epstein bar, viral overgrowth. The thyroid, more often than not, settles down. A lot of times we can get those antibodies completely eliminated. Graves is no longer an issue. The thyroidectomy is no longer an option because we don't have that grace diagnosis anymore. We remove the root of this situation, you see. So this study shows us how EBV triggers that. And I love seeing research that is backing what we're seeing in practice. And honestly, thank goodness in some bizarre way for COVID, because it really has opened a lot of eyes in the functional community to see that when the immune system gets greatly dysregulated, then we have dysfunction. So let's just use a quick little case study. That is why I am doing this podcast because I get to see this every day in my office, in our practice with our practitioners. But you guys are going to get to hear more of how it really, it really pans out. So we're going to talk about a mom um who came to me with PCOS. She had a history of infertility. She had had one child in her younger years and went through about 10 years of infertility and had a surprise baby later on. She had been diagnosed with ADHD. She started those ADHD symptoms after that second child. She was suffering with confusion, brain fog, really, really extreme, really, to the point that postpartum she moved into taking a medication for the ADHD. She had to take a leave of absence from work and she was already working at home. So it really was disrupting her life quite a bit, those brain symptoms post-baby. Now with the PCOS, she's always had hormone imbalance. She struggled with lots of those typical symptoms. It looks like you have a cyst, but we're not seeing cysts on scans. We have um weight gain, irregular hair growth, discomfort with periods, heavy periods, all these typical PCOS symptoms. And she's actually someone I talked to many years ago. And that was kind of the presenting issue. And over time, the symptoms have continued to build. That infertility continued, surprise baby. Um, there was a gallbladder removal in there. She's had years of dental work issues. And the more and more we talk, the more and more I'm hearing all sorts of categories. If you think in traditional medicine terms, well, gosh, she has to go see uh she has to go see a dentist now. She has to go see a GI doctor for her gallbladder, she'll need to go see an endocrinologist for her infertility or maybe a fertility specialist. Um, she'll need to go see a psychiatrist for her ADHD symptoms. She might need to go have an evaluation with a psychologist. Um, and we started to talk more about history and maybe when did these things start? And we started to piece together the history of her life. So the dental work issues went back. There was gingivitis, gums were always bleeding, cavities all the time. So that gave me a little ding-ding-ding. Streptococcus is a child many times. She had the typical strep throat presentation multiple times. And many of us are familiar. There's a count. Your doctor will have four or five episodes, and your tonsils are done. Well, she headed for the hospital, have her tonsils out, and happened to have a fever on the day of surgery. And we start talking, and and recurrent fevers are a regular symptom of hers. She also will have um just a low resting body temperature. But on that day, she had a fever as a child and they would not operate. So she actually got to keep her tonsils and the strep abated, and and she moved on. But she did continue to have earnose throat issues throughout her high school or her college adulthood years. So physical pain was something that would come on. She said it used to only happen when she was sick. She always knew something was going to happen or she was about to get sick because she would have neck pain. Now, moving into working through her therapy, she says, My neck hurts. And sometimes turning will bring stiffness. And I and she remembered I used to have a stiff neck sometimes. I would have random pains. Everything would feel very, very tight. People would always say to her, you know, you need to like, don't be stressed out, just lower your shoulders. Like, why your shoulders and your ears are all the time like crunched up? And she would say, I like physically can't. My neck and my shoulders are just chronically tight. Um, we started talking more, and she had had mono four times. She could point out for me the years and the times that she had had it. She knew that she had recurrent Epstein bar. And so we kept talking more and more. And I said, you know, there's a lot of symptoms here that we're coming out with. Let's hop into a symptom questionnaire. I want to hear more, and I want you to be able to think through everything because in our short call, we've already gone through so much, and there certainly could be more. And so I'm gonna read for you a lot of the symptoms that she was experiencing and had experienced through her lifetime. So she'd had a lupus diagnosis at one point that didn't set right with her. She didn't feel like that was all of it or that explained everything. She had a lot of poor memory issues, drenching night sweats, asked if she had been bit by a tick ever before. And of course, she had multiple times as a child, nothing crazy. She lived in the Northeast, which we know is where, like I said, Lyme, Connecticut, where Lyme originated, but we now know that it's present in every single of the 50 states, and there are more concentrated areas than just the Northeast. She had a history of motion sickness, she had a blood clotting episode, um, a blood cut in her leg. She was seeing floaters in her eyes, she was having pulse skips, she had pelvic pain along with her PCOS. Her skin would be hypersensitive to material, to allergens. Couldn't do certain fabrics. Um, she had an irritable bladder. Sometimes it would feel like a UTI, but it wouldn't be a UTI. And that's a that's a classic barelia lime or Bartanella symptom. It likes to go in and infect and settle into that connective tissue of the bladder and kidneys and cause issue there. And she had joint cracking. She would describe to me later that she would feel woozy sometimes where she just like had to sit down. She felt like she's gonna kind of blast off, just felt kind of like not with it, kind of bleh. And if she would rest, things would get better. Time to time, she would have difficulty with her speech. Sometimes her handwriting would regress, was kind of a joke in her household. Like, there will be no reading her handwriting anymore, just no one can. Um, she did have episodes in in her mental health history of SIM paranoia, and she said no, all the time. After she had that baby, she had some hallucination episodes. Um, nothing wild, but just enough to say, is that postpartum something really? It's kind of weird. I feel like I just saw something, maybe I didn't, and well, I don't know. I'm tired and I just had a baby and I move on. So we kept talking more of that muscle weakness. She had the liver gallbladder issues. We talked and she had had elevated liver enzymes in the past. She'd been given a Hashimoto's diagnosis, and those antibodies were beginning. Um, but her thyroid panel looked pretty good otherwise. She had a swollen neck. I could observe. She had flushing in her cheeks and some puffy eyelids for sure. Um, she talked about how from time to time she knows that her monoinfection could come back again. Remember, she'd had it four times. She knew by her sore throat, she would get chills from time to time. She she expressed like a vibrating or a trembling sensation, sometimes in her chest or on her skin. She had shin pain. She at times would have ear ringing or ear buzzing. And you might be listening to us, like, this is incredible that one person can have this. But sometimes, if you think over your last five to ten years, those of us having babies, your health is shifting, those of us aging, going through menopause, those of us in puberty where life changes, symptoms can change. We take care of our health differently. And and we just kept talking more and more. And she mentioned, you know, insomnia episodes, but not all the time, sometimes for a couple weeks, and it would go away. And she would go through phases where she would wake up really early. She mentioned she had a child that was always a 5, 6 a.m. or always into teenage years. Um, she would have blurring vision episodes sometimes. She would she go to the eye doctor. There wouldn't be a diagnosis or necessarily a change, though her vision was getting worse over time. She would feel like she just needed to clear her eyes all the time. For me, that's a Bartonella symptom. She had calf cramping, Bartonella and Borrelia. She had a lot of chills, a lot of nausea, and she had reduced appetite at times, she had difficult and labored breathing. I would see this on calls sometimes, and that's Babesia, coinfection of Lyme. So you can start to see even more and more those dental issues. She had your current strep as a child. She had um bleeding gums, she had gingivitis, multiple cavities. She also had TMJ. Anytime she had a dental issue or a surgery, the recovery was slow and long and much more difficult than her peers. So together that says to me, Babesia, barelia, streptococcus can be present here. And sure enough, there are more and more issues. But I think the other piece is probably the ADHD issue is really important. Sensory issues that developed after that second pregnancy. So tendencies toward ADHD for many years, but it really ramped up after the second baby. Hyperactivity at times and feeling like almost bipolar, like I've been so depressed and slow and low. And then all of a sudden I have this energy and I become hyperactive with the side of impulsivity. Again, there's our Streptococcus. Um lots of bloating after eating, bothered by light and texture at times. So when I start looking at her symptom load, this page for those of my video watchers is a ton of stuff. But it also pans out very clearly to me with patterns of symptom load. And so what we do is we move into testing. Some clients, it's very clear, but we almost always use testing. And testing revealed for her that she had EBV, Epstein Barr, she had Streptococcal A, overgrowth infection, if you will, um, testing suggested Bartonella as well as borelia, abeisia. And there was some anaplasma involved. So lots and lots of things, and even parvovirus, which we tend to think is only um restricted to dogs, but we talked about that flushing that I saw on her face, and that is um typical of parvo, and humans create something called fist disease, and the flushing of the face in the red color is typical of that. So on her testing, it really confirmed and aligned with all of these little organized symptom patterns that we've come to know these chronic infections for, just like we have organized symptom patterns to create diagnoses. So you're starting to see the connection. Chronic infections are at the root of chronic disease. So all these chronic diseases and diagnoses that we receive, and these, you know, chronic kidney infection, chronic lung disease, mycoplasma, often at the root of so much bronchitis. Learning about the immune system and its ability to regulate chronic infections has changed everything. In our practice, we address infections specifically through an immune therapy process. And I want to leave you guys not with the overwhelm of this list of symptoms, but of the excitement that I have that I get to share with you of so many clients that come to us like this and leave with their health restored to some measure of before they got sick. I love it when a client messages me and says, today is the first day that I've seen a window back into my 18-year-old self. I don't know if I felt like this in 10 years. For now, I want to leave you with the sweet hope of restoration that I found in my own severe battle illness turned into health, that we see this every week with clients, that it's not gonna be this long list of symptoms that continues to compound over time. We use pathogen-specific therapies. We look at functional health. How is the body functioning to restore a deeper healing? This work brought to me a deeper healing than I've experienced in 10 years of being sick. I can confidently 100% say that my health is back to before everything with my health changed. I share with you my own story of EBB and my health decline after my second child and leaving a destructive marriage and lots of trauma. But after working through a root cause approach, my health is back to before everything with my health changed. And that is completely possible for you and for yours. And I'm so excited to continue sharing more with you all. I hope you're leaving encouraged, curious, and hopeful. If you learned something, I'd love for you to share this episode with a friend. Hey, we're all healing together. You can learn more about my practice, our team, and what it's like to work with us at heyhey may.com. I teach lots on Instagram and answer questions each Monday. My Instagram handle is at Hey Hey Elizabeth May. And my cookbook, Hey Hey Everyday, is available on heyhey may.com and Amazon. Happy healing.