Complex Health: Is Lyme Your Root Cause?

Today we are discussing the practical aspects and manifestations of Lyme disease, including the importance of understanding traditional Western medicine protocols and bridging them with a functional approach to effectively manage symptoms. We are joined by one of our lead practitioners, Abby. We highlight various symptoms associated with Lyme disease, such as fatigue, GI issues, dizziness, and knee pain, and discuss the interconnectedness of Lyme disease and hormonal health. Listen to learn more about a holistic approach to treating Lyme disease to lead to more significant healing outcomes.

In this episode you will learn about:

• How triggering events, such as pregnancy, infections, and stress, can lead to Lyme disease 
• Lyme disease in children, including symptoms and treatments
• Lyme disease and POTS 
• Hormonal imbalance, chronic infections, and nutrition 
• Lyme disease and autoimmune disorders, including GI issues and testing
• Lyme disease and its impact on clients' lives, including chronic pain, mobility issues, and vision problems

Instagram: @heyheyelizabethmae
Website: www.heyheymae.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 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.

SPEAKER_02: 0:23

Today we're going to talk about Lyme and practice and what does it look like? Last week I kind of gave like a long form, jokingly a graduate level class on Lyme and what it looks like, how it manifests itself. But today we just want to be practical. Like, what does it look like? Could Lyme be a root cause for you or yours? I'm here with Abby, one of our lead practitioners. She is super great, super smart. She's also a pharmacist, so she has skills and understandings of things that I don't. And she really helps bring our team up in that way to understanding kind of your traditional Western medicine protocol that you're already on that's managing a lot of your symptoms. And she bridges that gap with our functional approach and is just really a gift to our clients in that way. And so we're just going to kind of talk about, we've been working with Lyme clients for quite a long time now. And we're just going to talk about where do we see it? Where do we see it happening and showing up? What does it look like? Because it's not just that traditional bedbound presentation. There's a whole lot more to it. So, Abby, thanks for doing this with me. I'm super excited because there's so many things and little miracles we see every week that we can't always necessarily talk about because that's client-private information. But um I think this is a good chance for us to kind of give people a peek into practically what Lyme looks like as a root cause. So I just kind of want to start with like, what was your first interaction with Lyme? How have you experienced it in your own life? And we'll just go from there.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49

Okay. Yes. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to share some information about what we see with our clients. Um, my experience was actually with my son. Um, and I actually was not looking at him as having Lyme. He's been a very healthy child. His uh past health history was, you know, he had some bouts of strep and some ear infections along the way. Um, but other than that, he was a really healthy child up until the point where he actually had to have knee surgery. So knee surgery was what we would consider his triggering event. And after his knee surgery, he did not recover um quickly or well from that. He started to have some symptoms pop up where he was having some extreme fatigue. That was probably the number one. He stopped wanting to go out with friends, um, go to football games. He would rather just come home and go to bed and just rest. And although that was going on because he is an athlete, he wanted to get back to his sports. So he was pushing himself where he could, although he did not feel well. Um, he started having some GI symptoms when he would run. He would start having episodes of vomiting pretty quickly after running. We did some lab work there and realized there was some adrenal stress and some thyroid stuff going on. Um, and that's when we actually decided to do the tick-borne test that we do with clients here. And it did come back that he was Lyme positive via the alternative criteria. And he also had elevated strep and Epstein barr virus on that test. And so when you look at his symptoms, it really matches that picture really well. Um, he started having some dizzy spells too, which can be very much correlated with that Lyme picture. Um, and then the GI stuff can certainly correlate with Lyme, also with strep. And then fatigue can really kind of across the board go with pathogens, but certainly Epstein Barr kind of sticks out there. Um, and then we did the um protocol that we use with clients, and it was about a seven and a half month process. And for him, pretty quickly the fatigue really uh went away. He started uh having more energy right away, being more social, all of that um really healed up quickly. The GI symptoms kind of persisted throughout. And now that he is completed, really all of his symptoms are gone. Um, he, you know, still had some knee pain because there was an actual injury there. Um, and about a month ago, he actually had to have another surgery in which um he has now recovered very well from, and there's no signs or symptoms of any immune dysfunction whatsoever. So um he's he's doing really well and you know gets to go on and do the things he wants to do and kind of live his life. So that was really my first, you know, personal experience with with Lyme.

SPEAKER_02: 4:57

I love that Max has kind of given us the opportunity to see the difference between that first surgery versus the second surgery and like even just looking at how his body is able to be strong and recover from that major stressor. And also so many people get infections after surgeries and have a hard time with inflammation. You can just see how once that infection was removed from like a normal life activity, right? I think you kind of shared in the beginning of addressing stuff with him that he worked maybe landscaping or kind of outdoor stuff. Like he's a typical teen, athletic, busy. This was just like a normal summer job situation where he probably maybe contracted Lyme and then those co-infections came after. But once those are resolved, that second surgery bounce back, I think is amazing proof and just like further displays how much addressing chronic infections has like a cascade effect. And when we look at kids, we see it like kind of set them free to continue developing normally. And though Max is older and he's a teen, same thing. I mean, to not be debilitated by kind of ongoing inflammation cascade and symptom load is really awesome. And I love too how you shared that the surgery was that original triggering event the first time. The triggering events piece is huge. When you're thinking about Lyme, we're going to kind of talk through like how did those show up. But remember, triggering events can be anything that interfere with your immune system. So good things like pregnancy, um, things like vaccines, acute infections. So you had really bad COVID or really bad stomach bug or really bad food poisoning, antibiotics, um, steroids, immunosuppressants, all those sort of things interact with the immune system and can be the impetus to kind of bring Lyme and co-infections out of dormancy. And then you have all the traditional stressors, things that we know stress out our immune system. Someone dies, we go through a divorce, we have a job loss, we move with our kids. It's like anything that's huge for them that they can't process at the time. It could be a school change, it doesn't have to be something that's outright extreme, but these triggering events really are the start point. When we look at a client history, we can usually map back. So, Abby, where have you seen like the triggering event um principle, if you will, show up for our clients, maybe post-pregnancy or post-things like that? Where are we seeing kind of pop up?

SPEAKER_00: 7:12

Yeah, certainly pregnancy for sure. I feel like that's where, you know, we find that to be a huge um shift in somebody's immune system because they're supposed to, there's actually a natural shift in the immune system. And then when it does not go back, you know, to being more balanced, we definitely see symptoms starting to pop up. And we'll see, you know, autoimmunity with graves and Hashimoto's is pretty common with that. Um, you know, Epstein Barr virus really seems to kind of flare up, you know, after pregnancy. Um we'll start seeing those, you know, neck pains, um, you know, head headaches, those kind of things. Um I definitely see that with triggering events. Um, you know, I've had other clients with um surgeries as well and definitely major life events, divorce is a big one. Um I think, you know, probably the hardest one is just when there's been a long history of chronic stress. And I think, you know, the way we live that, you know, now is, you know, we all are under so much stress. And so it's hard sometimes to find that specific triggering event, but usually there is something in there. And it's, you know, that whole, you know, that whole time of just all the stress building on top of it can definitely cause a shift in the immune system as well.

SPEAKER_02: 8:32

Yeah, I would agree. And I think we probably need to do or would be doing good service to our listeners to do an episode about allostatic load and this idea that like stressors are all kinds, they can actually be good things that we're even excited about, but eventually all those things add up together, and that's kind of like our stress burden, and it can be the thing that really tips the body over where you're just like you've had length. We have so many clients who just for years have had hard things and there hasn't been a break and there haven't been seasons of restoration. And you can kind of think of that even with pregnancies. If you have those, and they're good and wonderful things, and babies are great, but you do have to bounce back. And I think too, when we talk about that pregnancy postpartum thing, um, is like kind of that post-trigger season where we start to see things like graves and hashis and mood disorders. I've seen several clients who have postpartum mood disorders either when I'm seeing them and they have Lyme or they have histories of extreme postpartum mood disorder where they've had to be um put into facility to go through treatment for a few days or to kind of really help stabilize postpartum. And I just think too, postpartum mood disorders in America are huge. They are growing. It's such a big issue, and I don't really think that it's solely from hormone imbalance. I do think that hormone imbalance and the pregnancy itself, the way it interacts with the immune system, is a triggering event. But what hangs out afterwards are very often consequences of um infections. And so with Lyme and mood disorders, what are things that you're seeing? I'm seeing a lot of rage, I'm seeing a lot of irritability, impatients, um, moms who are like, I wasn't like this before I had kids, but now I just cannot with them. And it's so easy to just dismiss it as like mom stress, but there's like a difference between I continually feel this way, or I'm like very close to the edge all the time, and normalcy. So, how are you seeing Lyme and mood stuff show up?

SPEAKER_00: 10:29

Yep, definitely seeing those things show up, also seeing a lot of anxiety. I think I anxiety is probably one of the highest things I see as far as that goes. Um, you know, the anger, the irritability for sure, just like not being able to handle things that they used to be able to handle, um, needing to take, you know, a personal time out to, you know, kind of walk away from things. Um, I definitely see, you know, also the like the memory piece, like poor memory, poor word recollection, um, you know, a lot of brain fog along with um, you know, all of the mood things as well.

SPEAKER_02: 11:09

I would say too, like that hyper-vigilance piece when I'm doing clarity calls with moms, especially, and we're talking about a child, but I notice mom's very hyper-vigilant, and there are things that maybe show up in their kids that are flags for me where I'm hearing, oh, this kid definitely has some infection stuff going on. Let me kind of try to tease it apart. But the way that mom is so hyper-vigilant about all the amazing things she's doing for her kids, all the amazing ways she's supporting everyone, how she's exhausted, how she's super fried. And none of those things are bad, right? We've all been there as moms, but it's like a different level, or it doesn't that it's almost like a visceral anxiety. We have our clients fill out like ongoing just update forms before their sessions so we can kind of track symptoms. And that anxiety box, it hangs on till the end. And I have so many clients who have said, I was not anxious before this point. Like as a younger person, I was super chill, and now I'm not. That thing is basically the sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight system being engaged so much from the infection load in the body. The body knows something is there that doesn't belong, and it's just hyper-vigilant all the time, trying to figure it out. And that equates to our clients feeling like very anxious or irritable or buzzy, another client described it as. So absolutely mood disorders are like, and it can be extremes if you listen to Leslie's episode um from earlier on, you know, she had a really like onset of kind of that acute neuropsychiatric disorder. And we see that in kids with pandas too, which I think that's something else that we love to talk about is like we see kids with pandas. Pandas is typically associated with streptococcus infections, but are you seeing that there's more there with your pandas kids or not so much?

SPEAKER_00: 12:53

Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely we're seeing, you know, the pans and pandas picture um with all of the, you know, pathogens um and the rage and just not being able to control their behaviors. Um, you know, I see, I see sometimes I've heard parents also say that they have um just this gray cloud over everything. So this just kind of a negative feeling over everything that they that just kind of looms, and that's kind of where they get stuck as well. Um you know, um tantrums with kids at, you know, maybe an age where it's not necessarily appropriate, um, or they feel they've kind of, you know, should have moved through that um, you know, regression in their behaviors and their moods. We see that um with the infection picture as well.

SPEAKER_02: 13:45

Yeah, yeah. So many different mood pieces and and just kind of moving into kids stuff, we've seen so much um of those penis kids who look like pandas and there's other stuff going on. So a lot of times when there's rage, then we're thinking mold, we're thinking lime. Almost always we're seeing in those penis kids who are stuck, we're seeing other infections like lime and bartonella. So we inherit a lot of kids from earlier practitioners who carry the pandas diagnosis or they're just starting down the pandas road, mom and dad are figuring out what that is, but it's not just stress, it's layers of infections. And so when we're thinking about how Lyme shows up in kids, like other things I know that I'm seeing is so much skin stuff. We see so many kids with severe eczema, rashes in skin. But what other ways are you seeing, you know, that show up in kiddos?

SPEAKER_00: 14:34

Yep. Um, I we have some kids with um seizures, you know, absence seizures going on. So we're we're seeing some of that happen. Um, definitely the eczema, the asthma, the allergies, all of that piece for sure. Um, when I think about kids, I feel like that's kind of what we see. We do see some other things pop in, but a lot of times it's kind of like that shift in the immune system is more, um, we're seeing more of that TH2 side elevated versus, you know, the pathogens aren't necessarily showing all those symptoms yet. Um, but you know, as time goes on, that's where those would start to pop up. So, like when I, you know, with the seizures and stuff, that's more in like, you know, older kids, teens will start to see that. Um definitely see a lot of GI distress. That is one we see a lot with kids. Um, and that's usually, you know, can be where, you know, parents start. It starts there and then they're starting to pull out all of these foods. And why are they allergic to all of these foods or have sensitivities to foods and it seems to shift and not be consistent? It's kind of all over the board. Um, how their body's responding is it's not recognizing what it should be attacking versus, you know, something that's healthy for them and they should be able to enjoy. Um, so we see a lot of that with kids as well.

SPEAKER_02: 15:58

Yeah, and I think too, the eczema and skin piece and the rashes piece is interesting because we learn, well, we don't learn at our dermatologists, our pediatricians, anything past steroids. But a lot of times, remember, a steroid is interacting with the immune system, even though it's topically. And so if it's gonna be helpful to a rash, then that's always a sign for me that, like, hey, we got an immune component going on here. And some of my kids who I've treated, well, we delete the word treated, Alexia. Um, some of the kids that I've seen who have more chronic infection issues, license with their eczema, we've addressed it in a season of healing a couple years ago, and then it comes back. So that kind of like cyclical symptom thing where you like can't get rid of it, or you have seasons where it's a little better, but then it comes back, um, is totally usually a Lyme underlying thing. And I've seen kiddos who we've addressed microbial issues, we've addressed mold in their houses, we've addressed fungal issues in the body, but the severe eczema where it's like rash and bleeding and raging and just like keeping kids up at night and major itching. And these are my kids who have their pajamas on backwards, zipped up to their neck, a little duct tape around the side so that they can't open themselves. And parents are wrapping up their hands so they're not scratching at night. Every single one of those kids that I have seen, they've all had one. So far, of course, there can be other issues. Epstein bar is another big one for rashes that we see, but I think that immune piece, when we talk about you mentioned TH2, the antibody side, that is going to heighten inflammation, right? That immune system gets unbalanced and you've got way more TH2, which means more inflammation, more allergies, more sensitivities, more things like F pies, um, more food allergies, more autoimmune activity, which we'll talk about in a second. And that's the stuff I feel like we see in kids so much. And when a kid comes to us and their mom or dad says, hey, you know, Johnny's been allergic to the walnuts, and then it's sesame, and then he's vomiting eggs, and then he does fine with eggs and something cooked, but then he's for a couple months not doing okay with other tree nuts, but then he can have a peanut, which doesn't make any sense. That's absolutely red flags for us. We're always digging in and thinking about chronic infections at that point. And what we see in these kids when we address the chronic infection, even you know, mentoring the absence seizure part, I kind of want to add to the kid piece too, the ADHD and the ADD. Like, can that be its own diagnosis in a child? Absolutely. Lyme and cous are going to exacerbate that, or they can be the sole route for that. We've gotten to see kids move from not being able to complete a very simple task like get yourself dressed at nine years old to get myself dressed, do my homework by myself, get ready for school by myself, follow directions, A to Z. So those sort of things. And two, I think um that like phobia is an anxiety piece. Have you seen that show up in kids where they also have had Lyme as a root infection?

SPEAKER_00: 18:50

Yeah, definitely see that. Um, see where um separation anxiety is huge, where they're, you know, I have um, you know, some clients where they the kids just can't be in a room by themselves, you know. And as we've kind of progressed through therapy, you know, that's what the parents are saying, yes, he's off playing in his bedroom by himself now and he's doing these things and and just, you know, saying goodbye at daycare is easier um as they kind of move through the process. Uh and we see kids, I feel like kids respond very well to the therapy that we use, the immune therapy. They seem to not have as many um flare-ups through that process, and they just seem to continue to get better. We might see some things go up and down here, but overall they seem to do really well and and tolerate it really well.

SPEAKER_02: 19:41

Yeah, I would agree. I see a lot of kids who are like clingy with one parent, like they become a uniperson with the like they cannot be out of the room with them, they cannot be away from them, they don't want to go anywhere without them, they don't want to do anything without them. We see this even in teens. I have a couple of teens who have chosen a single parent as they're like a security person, and that kind of like sheds off with time, which is really cool. Something else I thought of while you were talking is kids who have pots or adults who have pots. Have you seen that? I've seen little kids who are fainting, who are mentioning that their hearts are racing. How's that shown up where you're where you're seeing with our clients?

SPEAKER_00: 20:17

Yep. I definitely see the dizziness. I see um that uh the passing out, the you know, the confusion between like is something an allergic reaction, or are they just having, you know, that drop in their, you know, blood pressure? I also saw that with my son. Um, he definitely had the dizzy spells. He did pass out a couple times um as well, um, which was nothing he had ever experienced prior to having surgery. Um, so I definitely saw that with him too.

SPEAKER_02: 20:52

I think Max is just like the best example of that kind of stuff, honestly, because it's so bizarre to think like I was talking with a common friend this weekend at a festival where she's developed pot kind of onset and she's done the tilt table test and she passed it, but she's also exercising and then getting weak anytime she's like walking at an incline. She's worked out for years, but like Max is a teen who's like literally running in like high school athletics, and then you have this really kind of quick onset and change where he's like passing out and you're having big kind of blood pressure issues, and it really can be onset like that. We talk about Lyme as like an acute thing or a chronic thing, that's kind of towing the line of both, right? Like the infection gets to a certain point, and then we start to see those like bizarre peculiars that show up where you're like, okay, yeah, we could diagnose this as pots, but my question always is okay, now what? You have a diagnosis of pots, what are we gonna do there? Looking for the root, what's the thing that caused the pots to show up? We're finding that it's lime and cone infections more often than not, and addressing that pulls it out. Like we watch these kids and adults heal. Like through that process of seven to nine-ish months for most people, we just literally watch symptoms shed the whole time because the body is being righted in addressing and not ignoring the infection and those symptoms, those diagnoses fall off, which one of my favorite categories is like Lyme and autoimmune disease. Where are you seeing autoimmune stuff with Lyme? What does it look like as people get better? Talk more about that part.

SPEAKER_00: 22:23

Yeah. I mean, definitely we're seeing it with the, you know, thyroid autoimmunity with the Hashimoto's and graves. Um, seeing that, and I've actually had a client that was testing, um, you know, getting her antibodies tested in in um, you know, on medication. And she's just through the process, she's consistently having to decrease her medication because things are improving along the way. Um, where the doctor had uh indicated that it was going to be about 18 months, and we were about four months in and we're already making a shift in the medication that she needed because she was starting to shift from, you know, that graves picture to more of that hypothyroid. So they were, you know, decreasing it there. So I've definitely seen it there. Um, you know, when we think about the autoimmunity, a lot of people come in with diagnosis and we kind of are like, what are your symptoms? You know, so a lot of the symptoms around autoimmunity is what we're looking at, you know, with um, you know, MS, um, those those kind of symptoms. Um, you know, we'll see like neuropathies, um, you know, the tingling and all of those things that are connected to, you know, an autoimmune disorder. And yet, you know, we can very much link those to Lyme in most cases. Um, and once again, like you said, it's looking at what is the root? You know, here we, you know, people do get hung up, I feel like, on diagnoses. And, you know, like you said, that's what are you going to do once you have that diagnosis? What are we going to do with that? And it's like, what, you know, what is the root? Why did that come on? And like, let's get to that so we can, you know, have some significant healing in someone.

SPEAKER_02: 24:07

Yeah. And I so sympathize with someone wanting a diagnosis because that's kind of what we're taught, right? Like, once we know what it is, then we can, but the question for me is then we can what? Because traditional medicine's answer to autoimmune disease is, oh, you're you got it, and this is how it's going to be. And some of the treatment I've seen clients come in, we've seen clients on malaria meds for years after their onset of their autoimmune disease. Well, malaria meds also can address the Lyme Co-infection Babesia. We've seen clients on immune suppressants, so many clients on biologics, things like that. And in those medications, while they do address a diagnosis, they're really still just like squelching symptoms, right? And looking for the infection piece, we can pull out what caused that, and then that that was caused goes away. Um, I think too, in that autoimmune disease category, we're just taught in even functional medicine, which is not wrong, to look through all the contributing factors, look at gut health, look at allergies, remove foods that aren't working for you. And those things are all right and good. But I think our our stance and what we're seeing because clients do heal near completeness when they're done addressing their chronic infections is those are still just band-aids. Those are good and much better band-aids, in my opinion, than a biologic or being on topical steroids for a while because they're doing more. They're taking a burden off the body. But diets and, you know, parasite cleanses, even and different ways that we manage things, AIP diet, um, lots of different herbs, always being on big giant supplement protocols. Like we just find more and more that this idea of addressing your body for a healing season, when you're pulling out the root, which is usually an infection, the season comes to an end and you're not staying on things forever, which I think is the coolest part. Um, and even just working with clients, kind of want to move into GI issues. When you said autoimmune, made me think about two clients, one that had all serious gullides, one that had Crohn's completely reversed, gone, no big deal. The Crohn's person had Crohn's for 30 years. 30 years of most daily diarrhea. We peeled that back. There was Lyme, there was Bartonilla, there were several other Streptococcus, um, several other little co infections kind of hanging out. But where are we seeing the GI issue piece pop up with Lyme? We're used to thinking about Lyme as like pain and bed bound. So GI issues when that was first, well, I experienced it myself, but when that was first kind of brought to our attention, I think more and more we see so much of it. And then we talked a little bit earlier today about testing. So kind of talk about maybe stool testing and how we see that showing up with Lyme and GI issues.

SPEAKER_00: 26:56

Sure. Yep. So yep, in the stool test, you know, we're gonna look at, you know, inflammatory markers in in there. Um, we're gonna also look at immunity within the stool test that we use. We look at strep markers as well. Um, we don't often see Lyme by itself. And so when we see, you know, a lot of strep going on potentially in the um in the stool test, we'll see, you know, sometimes Lyme can be part of that picture too. Um, strep definitely plays a role with GI symptoms for sure. Um, but you know, Lyme, because it can attack every system, truly it can be part of that picture as well. Um, like I said, with my son, we saw a lot of nausea. He had a lot of nausea and very much a decreased appetite, um, which was not consistent with the teenage boy over the years. So we saw that. Um, and sometimes it was extreme pain where he, you know, he'd have some really extreme um GI symptoms, you know, some diarrhea along with that as well. We'll see. Um we'll see, it can be it can also be constipation. It can come, it can be, you know, either way when it comes to like the GI symptoms. Um and um yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 28:14

Gastroparesis, some of these like I don't know what you call higher level GI diagnosis, right? Like IBS, I feel like at this point just around the mill. So many people have it. Lyman Co infections, Bartonella, it can be a huge root of IBS, but more complicated things like chronic gastritis and gastroparesis, um, a lot of hepatic issues, folks who have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and are like, I haven't really eaten that bad. Those sort of things for me are always like, okay, well, what's your liver been filtering out all this time? Has it been dealing with a major infection issue? And when it comes to GI issues, Lyme loves connective tissue, right? It wants to get away from the bloodstream, but as a bacteria, it also needs to eat. It does prefer that like joint tissue that's you know more collagen-rich, but again, it can totally show up in the GI system. And I think too, it's that co-infection species. The streptococcus is there because Lyme is dysregulated. The immune system is kind of like the big umbrella infection causing the most trouble, but all these other infections kind of come after. And two, when you mentioned earlier with Max, I just kind of want to highlight that random vomiting situation. Like he was vomiting with exercise. That's absolutely one thing. But we see children who have this, they're just pukers, they're puking for no reason. And when they're little, they can't always talk about nausea. I talk about that a lot. Some of these kids are like puking every time they get in the car. Okay, well, your 18-month-old can't really tell you they feel nauseated and explain what's going on. But nausea is such a big connected symptom with Lyme and co-infections and just multiple chronic infections that in a little kid who doesn't have that control over their esophagus like an adult would, right? You can drink a little water, you can do some things to keep yourself from throwing up. They don't so much. But even in little babies who've inherited their Lyme from their parents, I'm seeing that that projectile reflex from the get-go is often Lyme hanging out in the body where their body's rejecting mom's milk, other milks, there's a big protein rejection, kind of going back to that. The immune system is trying to figure it out. It's like we don't like a protein. What is the protein? Well, the Borelia spirochete is protein, so is milk from mom. You know, these two things are similar. So we're seeing kind of a lot of that um GI stuff be like, I don't know, I kind of like to call it the extremes, really. Like you can be like extremely miserable with your nausea, extremely miserable with your consummation, extremely miserable with your projectile vomiting of your one-year-old. And all those things can go back to Lyme and co infections. And it's not that you have this Lyme disease state forever that's that bedbound, painful thing. It's just dysregulating lots of body systems. And we kind of have to think about it differently with growing numbers of Lyme. But keeping with this like systems approach and kind of symptom thing, what about hormonal health, menstrual issues, kid hormones? Like, are we seeing it? And how are we seeing it show up there?

SPEAKER_00: 31:09

Yeah, we're definitely seeing it with some um painful periods for sure, lots of pain. We're seeing heavy periods, we can see, you know, just overall um, you know, a you know, irregular cycles um happening. Um we see in kids, we kind of we can see um early onset of puberty um happening with kids. We can, you know, sometimes we can even see a delay in that where, you know, a teen, you know, you would expect to have started a cycle, has not yet. Um, you know, it can it really definitely can, you know, affect the you know, libido, um, just the hormones that are being produced, you know, all of that can be affected by Lyme.

SPEAKER_02: 31:58

Yeah. And on that hormone note, too, we see a lot of blood sugar dysregulation, whether that's someone who had an onset of type 1 diabetes earlier in life and then everything changed after that. Um, often that can be something that has viral roots. I think of a client that who had that onset after a multi-tick experience. Um, also, urinary issues is a big thing that we kind of in with the reproductive organs, we see so much, like in kids, they're bed wetting, or there's so much urgency, or there's um like a chronic UTI presentation, but the UTI is not always there when they go to test, or there's just like pain, or at its worst, interstitial society is kind of moving into that like diagnoses territory. Um, I know I've seen too in some male clients where they're having testicular pain that's not really explained by anything. So back on that hormone side, also think of a client who had a 22-pound growth removed from her female organs. And we, you know, did tick-borne testing because she had so many other blood pressure issues, um, pain sensation in her head, and pressure issues. And she had toxoplasmosa, a lime coinfection that's a parasite, Babesia, Bartanella, um, borrelia, so she had lime, Epstein Bar, which is notorious for encouraging hormonal growth and even cancers. You can get into a lot of that research. Um, and it's really fascinating. But that urinary piece, I feel like we see a lot. Um I think too with menstrual issues, the pain piece and the heavy periods, those are the two things that I think I see the most. And the pain can be like severe PMS, it can be severe pain at ovulation, it can be pain where you're like, I know I have a cyst, and you go in and you get an ultrasound and they're like, You have the tiniest cyst. It's it's not really a problem. We've had clients passing out at ovulation and when their periods start. So the menstrual issues and like the hormone involvement, I think the big thing is just hormones get dysregulated. And we see so much blood sugar stuff too. That's still just hormones. Like heavy insulin is still insulin's still a hormone, but it's part of blood sugar and it's just dysregulated from kind of that chronic infection piece. But um, I think the big thing that people are familiar with, kind of talking about okay, like these are all ways that we see Lyme showing up day to day. What's the traditional picture of Lyme? Where do you see it showing up traditionally with the body pain, bedbound fatigue, neurological? Like, what's that look like for you with clients?

SPEAKER_00: 34:41

Um, I definitely see pain. Pain is probably, you know, one of the hardest ones too, even just to manage because it is so all over the place. They it it usually is migrating with Lyme. So we'll see, you know, like one day it's the shoulder and one day it's the hip and knees. Lyme has an affinity for the knees. So knees are usually kind of one of those more consistent kind of pains that you'll see. Um, it can also not necessarily be in a joint, it can just be all over kind of muscle pain that we'll see um, you know, cramping. Um, we'll see muscle cramping, especially in the calves and feet. Those kind of things can happen as far as like the pain picture goes. Um and just, you know, overall just not feeling well. I mean, I think, you know, we see just that overall, you know, there's just this extra stress and burden on the body where they just never, you know, usually once they reach that point, especially if if it's been around for a while, um, it's hard for them to remember when they actually did feel well. And so, you know, they might have days where they're a little bit better, but not always, you know. But we also, you know, as we've kind of discussed, we see we really see it all over the board. It, you know, Lyme doesn't have a clear-cut picture, like you're saying, you know, what we traditionally see. Um, you know, everybody that comes kind of comes with a different story and a different picture of what it looks like. Um, you know, when there's a huge symptom burden, I would definitely recommend, you know, getting tested and see what's going on because very likely it is part of that picture.

SPEAKER_02: 36:26

Yeah, the testing piece is important. And I would also just reiterate that like Lyme is a clinical diagnosis, right? That means that we, when that diagnosis is made, it's from what your symptoms look like, what your day-to-day looks like, what your health history looks like, and also what your testing looks like. So your provider should be looking at all parts of that. We've seen clients come back with very weak levels, just enough to show us that a Borelli infection is there, but we also see them presenting with like a really weak immune system in general. And so we can kind of group all that together and say, okay, Lyme is here, it's dysregulated the immune system to where it's weak. We need to address it. The other thing I love is that like when you're working with someone who understands and has good success with Lyme, they can hear it, right? When I hand off a client to you after their clarity call, it doesn't take long for you before I tell you what labs I suggested for them for you to be like, okay, so infections, okay, so Lyme. So I hear Bartonella, like those things are so easy. And I think with Bartonola and Lyme, really understanding that both of those create such an inflammation cascade, more so than any of the other infections we see. Sometimes mycoplasma, we do see a pretty good inflammation cascade respiratory-wise. That's what I think of when I think of our kids with major asthma. And a lot of times that's one of their big roots for asthma and severe asthma. But Bartonola and Lyme really create this inflammatory process that just like keeps going. It keeps triggering other systems and other body parts. And that's how you end up with this big, you know, pain and exhaustion and that kind of stuff. And it made me think of two clients, one that I've seen and one that you've seen. The first one I've seen her a long time ago, super healthy. Mama four, um, she's just kind of come in for just maintenance. Like, let's just be preventative and tune me up before I have another baby, like, takes great care of herself, healthy life, healthy marriage, things are good. She had another baby. Um, and she kind of went a year before her husband was like, Okay, this is enough. You need to call Elizabeth. She was having chronic headaches, nausea. She was having a lack of energy. Her thyroid was wonky all over the place, up, down. And she'd seen a functional doctor and they were making little progress. But the chronic headaches, sleeping 10 plus hours every single night, feeling like garbage, feeling like she's losing her mind. There were a couple of times early on in our calls, like she's a cheery, easygoing. I've seen her in professional environments, like amazing lady. She was like, I can't do life. Like, I can't, I'm in bed sometimes for three days, dead with a fever. And then once my period starts, I'm okay. But when my ovulation day comes back, I'm back in the bed with a fever and I have a headache. Okay, we would look at that. If you're talking to your girlfriends, they'd be like, girl, you got hormonal stuff going on. Yes, she did, but also the chronic headaches, the nausea, the major sleep. She was having the mood stuff for her, it was like a big one because she was just like toting those four kids around happy as could be. Earnestly, homeschooling, like just happy. Anxiety, panic attacks showed up for her, something she never experienced before. All of those things together to me were not just hormone dysregulation. There was EBV, there was Lyme, there were other coinfections, and it really could have been an easy thing where you go to a functional practitioner and you're like, oh, your thyroid numbers are funky, oh, you got a little GI stuff, let's do a GI map. Oh, you're kind of moods down. Well, that could be your thyroid. But when you're trained and you understand and hear these things, and someone's really complex, especially someone who had a shift, we've got to be thinking about these chronic infections at the root of this. She did, and she went to that functional doctor and had some improvement bringing thyroid medicine in, working a little bit on some gut stuff, bringing in some herbs, but it didn't stick. And eventually things cycle back to where it was too much. And she had to kind of dig deeper. And that presentation, I feel like we see a lot where they're super um keen in the functional space, or they already feed their families really well. That's probably my other favorite, most constant. We get so many clients, Abby, where their food journals are beautiful, aren't they? Like they eat better than we do, they're making everything themselves, they're growing everything in their yard, and they're like, we are immaculate and perfect. Could there be mold in our house? And we go through that and we're like, we don't really hear any mold possibility. But familially, multiple people in the family have Lyme, and that's why they're symptomatic and they're very sensitive. And so that really healthy diet helps like bring them up, but at some point the body can't anymore and it kind of crashes. And I think about the client that you've seen, where she's seen specialists forever and ever. She has chronic pain, she has trouble moving and walking, just major mobility issues. She does not um have children, she's not married, she doesn't have a lot of like life obligation, life is good for her. You know, her feet wouldn't flex. She told me in her clarity call that she can't walk across the yard because it's uneven. She feels like if you took a mold, she told me if you took a mold of my foot and you filled it with marbles, it feels like that's what's going on. There's stuff coming up from underneath of it, my balance isn't there, the marbles kind of move around and hurt me. Um, she'd been to rheumatologists, she'd been on Humira, she'd been down the road of all that kind of solve all these body pains, TMJ, jaw neck pain. She'd done CAT scans and MRIs and blood work. And that's the client we see a lot. The the vision piece for her, too. I want you to kind of talk about that. The eyes get involved. It's multi-system, so it's kind of bizarre because we're like functional nutritionists supporting bodies, looking at root cause healing, eyes. We don't usually think of as related. I think eyes and teeth are two areas where people are like, they don't deal with that. But no. So how are we seeing it show up in the vision space?

SPEAKER_00: 42:13

Yeah, we're seeing uh floaters. We see a lot of floaters, um, blurriness, vision changes. Um, you know, we can see vision, um, you know, it can go back and forth, but it can just also be, you know, getting worse. We see that happening. Um I would say those are probably the primary ones. And actually, I was gonna say on the client you were just talking about, you know, she's she's not even very far into her therapy and she's showing, you know, improvement already. And when you say she couldn't even walk in her backyard, she's now mowing her her lawn like all by herself. Like, yeah. And so, you know, it's really amazing the results that people get. And you know, sometimes we see things happen really quickly, which is really nice.

SPEAKER_02: 42:57

So yeah, I really do love sometimes clients. We go through the intense process at the beginning of intake and going through testing and kind of laying things out and getting them into these really heavy protocols. And right when they kind of look like they're starting to feel overwhelmed with everything they walk through, they send us a message and they're like, Um, I don't want to tell you this because I'm scared it's gonna go away. But I honestly feel better than I felt in 10 years, or I've never felt this good before. I feel like it's kind of a trick. And then we're like, that's cool, you know, like you might ebb and flow somewhere. But a lot of times those folks who are really severe and really complex, they just keep rocking and rolling. I think about one client who you're seeing where she's like not been able to keep her grandchildren, she's not been able to really do a whole lot of like normal grandma stuff. And she's one who we brought on for a nine month committed package because it was so complex. I kind of told her, like, hey, we can't take you unless we can support you in this intensive way. And what I think you know who I'm talking about, but what is what does her life look like right now?

SPEAKER_00: 43:55

Her life looks really good. She's definitely had a lot of progress. already. She is now, you know, where she could barely, you know, go outside and get anything done for even a few minutes, let alone an hour. She's spending half the day in her garden enjoying what she loves to do, um, talking about how beautiful her yard looks. She, you know, was able to have a wedding at her house and like you said, have her, you know, granddaughter stay with her where she didn't feel like she had the capacity to do that before. So like she's really just, you know, um just can continues to improve. And every time, you know, we have a call, I keep waiting to hear, you know, like, okay, what's you know, is something, you know, something, are you struggling with anything? And it just seems like things keep moving in a positive direction for her. Um, you know, which is really beautiful, really amazing. And yeah, she's just doing really well.

SPEAKER_02: 44:47

I love that. And I really like, really love to hate Lyme because it sucks. And I'll tell you, it is not a fun experience. It is really miserable. Headaches can be insane. Your whole body can hurt. Like so many of your systems can get dysregulated. But Lyme is pretty dang cool when you have extreme complex illness and you've been to so many doctors or you're just trying to figure out why your kids not functioning like its siblings or its peers and we unearth Lyme and co-infections, once we're able to address that, life literally starts to come back into view as like normal, it's attainable. The body sorts stuff out instead of attacking the body's self and those autoimmune conditions, it gets it together and attacks the infections. And it's really, really beautiful how this really crappy overwhelming thing that's like sounds like an awful you know when you hear somebody has Lyme disease, you're like, oh gosh, I feel bad for her. Like I guess that's it. Like she's just going to have a miserable life here on and out. And it's really not that way. Like it is remarkable to us the progress that our clients are seeing once we identify their root causes and we go to pull them out and we recalculate the body so the body knows hey these infections you have to deal with. You can't just leave them here. The body really changes. So I really appreciate you taking the time today to kind of like walk through and think through all of your clients that you're seeing here and for us to just kind of give like a practical presentation because my nerdy brain absolutely wants to teach and I love to have all the information. And so if you're like me, the episode before this is great. It really maps out Lyme, its complexities, how it works, how it shows up but I think this is really helpful for us to see like where it could be a part of our health story where we don't have to go to bazillion specialists because there's something underneath all these migrating bizarre peculiar symptoms and also there's hope. I think when we share people's testing with them and show them what's there, I usually check in and I know you do too and most of the time I ask you like how are you feeling overwhelmed I honestly feel so validated and so hopeful. Which as a person who experienced Lyme infection acutely it brings me great joy to hear someone say that after hearing the words Lyme and Burelia infection because um we've been able to see how do we get that in dormancy, how do we move a body forward in healing so that Lyme isn't something that our clients have to carry forward. So thanks for your time this was great. Hopefully it helps people a lot um and that's all I hope you're leaving encouraged curious and hopeful.

SPEAKER_01: 47:31

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 I teach lots on Instagram and answer questions each Monday. My Instagram handle is at heyhey elisabeth may and my cookbook Heyhey Everyday is available on heyhey maybe