The Pain Factor

TPF #25: Jeff Armine - Chronic illness: Overwhelmed, not broken

• A Project Fourtress Podcast • Season 1 • Episode 25

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Dr. Jess Armine is a functional medicine practitioner with nearly 50 years of clinical experience. He specializes in Long COVID, post-viral syndromes, and complex chronic illness. His work focuses on mitochondrial dysfunction, immune dysregulation, oxidative stress, and nervous system imbalance, helping patients recover when conventional approaches fall short. He’s also a researcher, educator, and podcast host dedicated to translating complex science into practical healing strategies.

In this insightful interview, Dr. Jess Armine shares his extensive experience in functional medicine, focusing on chronic illness, pain management, and the importance of understanding the body's systems. Discover how a holistic, individualized approach can transform health and recovery.

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Learn more about Dr. Armine's work at www.drjessarmine.com.


The Pain Factor is a Project Fourtress podcast.

Project Fourtress is a secular, humanist project, dedicated to find answers to the physical, mental and emotional pain people experience, as well as offer help to deal with these issues. To learn more about Project Fourtress, please visit fourtress.org.

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the fight. Welcome to the pain factor. On this episode of The Pain Factor.

SPEAKER_03

In pain, most people think pain is coming from the body, but it's actually based on signals that the brain's receiving. And the brain, you know, sends out signals that tell you that you have pain. And the driver just mentioned the nervous system, the immune system, and the mitochondrial energy are the things that mitigate that. So your brain is always perceiving the threat. And again, how do you deal with that? Yes, there are root causes, but if you don't take care of the root causes, if you don't look at things from that point of view, the person doesn't get better and they become the other doctor's nightmare case. And I think that people have been allowed to be chronic. Sometimes because it's not recognized, or they believe that if we take care of the wood cause, the body will take care of itself. Pain is pain. Suffering is how you have the pain. Okay? It's some people very stalked and just kind of work with the pain. And that doesn't make anybody else worse. Some people, you know, they suffer. They, you know, they it's dysfunction. It's how the suffering is more dysfunction, and the pain is more, if you will, a response. It's a response to what your nervous system is doing. I'd like people to at least realize that pain is not your enemy. It's information. Try and think of it as information. And when you understand the systems that produce it, you can actually begin to change it. I I want you to know that your present state is not permanent.

SPEAKER_00

Most people think they are broken, but often the body is simply overwhelmed. Anxiety, burnout, brain fog. These are not character flaws. They are signals from a system under stress. If this resonates with you, you are not alone. Our guest today is a functional medicine practitioner with nearly 50 years of clinical experience. He specializes in lit, postviral syndromes, and complex chronic illness. His work focuses on mitochondrial dysfunction, immune dysregulation, oxidative stress, and nervous system imbalance, helping patients recover when conventional approaches fall short. He's also a researcher, educator, and podcast host dedicated to translating complex science into practical healing strategies. Dr. Jess Armine, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to the Pain Factor.

SPEAKER_03

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate this opportunity to share with your audience.

SPEAKER_00

Tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into our talk.

SPEAKER_03

Well, like you said, I have 50 years clinical experience. My journey has been varied. I started out as an AMT uh in uh New York City in 1975. I took the very first paramedic class uh when paramedics were not common. Uh when I um I went to college for nursing and graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. I went into the military for a few years. My concentration was in emergency care and uh caronary care. I used to be head nurse of a carinary intensive care unit. Then I decided I wanted to be a doctor, and I met medical doctors and chiropractors and found out that the medical doctors really didn't like what they were doing. And I decided to go to chiropractic school, which I graduated in 1986 and have been practicing since then. Within the first few years of chiropractic school, I realized that I had a more interest in the wider application of alternative medicine, which at the time was called scam or complementary alternative medicine. It's gone through several several uh iterations throughout the years. Um as I was learning and practicing, um, my middle child uh developed schizophrenia, and um this very intelligent boy who read Dante's Inferno when he was 10 years old and explained it to me, which was kind of scary, uh became a non-entity bill in medications. And um I got very angry and decided that this is not the way he should live, and launched into learning um a whole mess of things really have to be balancing neurotransmitters. You know, I got certified and got the first certification in a subspecialty called neuroendobianology, which is those three systems working together. I was in the big I was in the forefront of the genetic craze that everybody's into right now. So I'm a genetic expert and of all the mitochondrial issues. And over time, you know, I developed a skill set that was very collective, very varied. My son is now a graphic artist. Uh he digitizes, um uh he creates programs uh for embroidery. Uh he's got a full-time job and he's you know very, very good. He's my hero, actually. Um but the accumulation of these uh of these skills that I developed mainly for him, but a lot of it branched out, gave me the ability to look at chronic illness from a different point of view. I was getting more and more patients who were ill, yet all the tests were normal, and they have been waylaid by medical science, which, mind you, I'm I I'm not against medicine. I'm against not thinking about common sense. Uh and I noticed that there was a kind of an ongoing glitch. And it turned it out turned out to be point of view. In anything, chronic pain and any kind of chronic illness, it was looking at the cellular function. Whereas most people were treating from the outside in, they were treating the fibromyalgia, or they were treating the chronic pain, or they were treating the chronic fatigue from or the Hashimoto's or the hypothyroidism or wherever it happens to have been, from the outside in by controlling symptoms, no one was looking at the terrain, at the foundation. So I developed a method of called, like I like to call it foundational treatment, which you may see in the literature as terrain treatment or bioterrain treatment. I I originated it. And I developed a thought paradigm that I named bioindividualized medicine. And the reason I did that was because people weren't being treated individually. Um, what that means is that most of the uh thought patterns in medical science follow along an algorithm, okay? And they have a set of diagnoses, and if they can't fit somebody, they have to fit somebody into those diagnoses rather than twisting the knowledge into a person's individuality. And the individuality came in with their genetic studies, with consideration of the nervous system, the hormone system, and the immune system and how they interact, the mitochondrial function, and the patency of the cell membrane. So, in this particular, it's not a science, it's what we put together, it looked at those points, and we became very successful at resolving chronic illnesses that up until that time haven't been well managed or haven't been even, you know, even gotten any kind of improvement by having the giving the person's cells, their body, the ability to heal again. Uh in pain, most people think pain is coming from the body, but it's actually based on signals that the brain's receiving. And the brain, you know, sends out signals that tell you that you have pain. And the tributes just mentioned, the nervous system, the immune system, and the mitochondrial energy are the things that mitigate that. So your brain is always perceiving a threat. And again, how do you deal with that? Yes, there are root causes, but if you don't take care of the root causes, where they're not identified, or you don't think that they're significant, and you don't take care of what those root causes have done to the body, which is usually robbing it of its ability to heal, and it's usually at the mitochondria, which is how you produce energy. If you don't look at things from that point of view, that person doesn't get better and they become the other doctor's nightmare cases. And often they're told that they're psychiatric conditions, which they're not.

SPEAKER_00

Let me because I mean chronic illness is just uh uh a rabbit hole, if you allow me to say that, because it's just yeah, uh it's like uh an onion, it's just uh layers and layers and layers, and of course you know that way better than me. But before submerging ourselves into the world and challenges of chronic illness, tell me just what is pain for you? And you can answer that as a doctor, as a father, as a husband, as a person. Just from any perspective, what is pain?

SPEAKER_03

It's a really it's a really good question. What is pain? Pain is basically how you define it. Okay. There's emotional pain, there's physical pain, there's psychic pain, there's spiritual pain. But the pain we usually deal with is body pain. You know, a discomfort that is at a point that you cannot ignore it, you can't compensate for it, and it interferes with the way that you live. Um we usually rate pain on a scale of one a zero to ten, ten being worst. Uh, and that is sometimes culturally based, sometimes individually based, mostly individually based on how somebody rates that. Uh the way that you utilize it in treatment is to have somebody integrate it at the beginning, however they want to categorize it, and then rate it at intervals so you can see if you're improving. You can build it up to different factors, but pain is essentially how you define it. Okay, it's one of the big mysteries. What is pain? Okay, and it is self-defined.

SPEAKER_00

Fair enough. I have uh received several answers, several several different answers to that question. Um you were uh starting to get into this, but let's uh move forward with people staying sick. Why? I mean it is not an easy question to answer, but I I know that one of the questions you you propose is uh why so many people do stay sick? Why why does that happen? If they are looking for help, if they are being treated, if there is medicine out there that is capable and advanced enough to help them, why do so many people stay sick? What what is chronic illness?

SPEAKER_03

That's a really good question there. I like the way you put it. Why do people stay sick? Well, I'm gonna challenge the word in just a bit. And that's the basic concept is that why do people stay sick? It's almost saying that they are allowing themselves to be sick. Okay. Okay. The reality of it is that some people have symptoms or pain or whatever symptoms that become longer term, hence the word chronic. Now, one mistake people make is that chronic is not permanent. Okay, but it's often treated like you know. Okay. And here and here's the thing even if you have a good generalist, a good doctor who coordinates everything, or most of us don't, and we need to navigate the medical system for your pain or whatever your symptoms are, and you may go to various specialists. Now the specialists are very good at what they do, but sadly the old general practitioner doesn't exist anymore. That general practitioner knew you since you were a baby, knew your family, and was your advocate. So if they sent you to a specialist for any particular reason, the specialist would barely talk to you and say, I'll call your doctor. And then they would call you, your generalist, your GP, and discuss what was going on. Then your GP will call you, your family, and say, This is what's happening, this is what I think we should do.

SPEAKER_00

And you listen to the. Let me clarify something. Sorry, just to be clear. You say that that kind of doctor doesn't exist anymore because of their knowledge or their relationship with their patients.

SPEAKER_03

It's the way the medical system worked. Uh I I I'm old enough to see it to have seen the change. It'd be in the 1960s and before you had the general practitioner who was king. In other words, um they ran the show because they're the ones that control the patients, um, you know, where they went, how they did, what might somebody might call a gatekeeper today. Now we have, and the shift in the 1970s went away from that to specialties. Everybody was going into specialties, and the general practitioner was ostracized as being a lower person, a lower uh knowledgeable person than all these specialists. That faded away in family medicine, believe it or not, Kyle was an afterthought. So what ended up happening was people were the onus of diagnosis and where to go was on the person at least trying to do it, and that's the patient themselves. And I see people who are in that stead all the time. So if you have an abdominal pain, do you go, and if you're a woman, do you go see the gynecologist, the gastroenterologist, the urologist? Okay, who do you see? The internist. You know, and you might go from place to place to place. Even if you have a doctor that is guiding you, you go from these various specialties, and because of the way things work these days, you have to have testing that proves something and so forth and so on. And testing's nowhere near as accurate as you think it is, okay? They go through their algorithms. Now, that's not a bad thing. That's the way they've been taught. And they do everything right, and if they don't get an answer that fits their diagnostic paradigm so they can initiate a pharmaceutical protocol, they basically say, Well, they don't say, I don't know what it is, they say it must be you. Well, if you go to various doctors and eventually, you may get four, five, six, seven doctors saying the same thing, you get labeled as having a psychiatric problem. Then you go to see the psychiatrist, and you know, they start giving you different medications because you may be depressed, or you may be whatever happens to be the thick and the label you as which is inaccurate. Okay. And I think that people have been allowed to be chronic. Sometimes because it's not recognized, or they believe that if we take care of the wound cause causes, the body will take care of itself. There was a uh doctor who, uh Dr. Navio, who's an MD PhD, who wrote a paper in 2013 on something called the cell danger response, which is how a cell reacts to any assault. And he quantified things that injure the cell, and they were divided into toxins, as you might expect, microbes like parasites, viruses, bacteria, yeast, and all the psychological, spiritual, and emotional traumas that we face or have faced, those things will injure a cell in equal measure as the toxins and the microbes. Now, when this first happens, our our cells will do several things to kill off the invader. And then and basically slows down and becomes non-functional. Then after they've killed the invader, they return to normal function. I call it rebooting. And an example of that is let's say you have strep throat, and I'm sure people have had uh infections before, they got antibiotics, and the first few days they feel terrible, and then they start getting a little bit better, but after a little while, after a few days, they turn the corner, so to speak, and they get better rapidly. That's when the cell danger response has resolved. When the either an unrecognized root cause or a chronic root cause, like mold, let's say, okay, or anything that key, or multiple root causes happen in tandem, that cell danger response does not resolve. And the acute care model of I'll take care of the root cause and the body will take care of itself is no longer accurate. So Dr. Navio, again, wrote another paper in 2018, I believe, that showed in the opening paragraph, which I was amazed at an MD wrote this, that the function of acute care is necessary. But the things that you do for acute care applied to chronic care, chronic conditions, is not nearly as successful. Why is that? Well, when the cell danger response, when the cells are injured, what happens downstream is usually chronic inflammation by one mechanism or another. And that chronic inflammation initiates different conditions. And that includes chronic pain, which can be secondary to one of those conditions or primary things. In essence, the longer-term effects of whatever the root causes are cause not necessarily damage, but an exhaust system, like adrenal fatigue, or if you have mood problems and you have a low serotonin, by the time you get symptoms, the storage areas for serotonin in your nerves have been emptied. So if you just stop the stimulation or whatever's causing it, you don't necessarily get better because all of those downstream effects, if you will, are still there. And the indication was, and this is where I picked this up and started looking at it, is that we have to take care of what those root causes did and do it at the cellular level, which is the best way to start. And and certain root causes were not recognized as significant. For instance, Lyme disease. It was a very long time before Lyme disease was recognized as a causation for many different things. Before that, it was ignored. I can't do that.

SPEAKER_00

Or worse. And it is very difficult to diagnose if I am correct, right? Lyme disease.

SPEAKER_03

Well, it is because of the way the testing is.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_03

Essentially everything is done on history. Okay. Now the corporatization of medicine has pushed the doctors into 10 to 15 minutes or less, okay, to see somebody, because they want productivity, which does not allow them to take a proper history. Well, they do that on paper, but they barely look at the paper. And they're dealing with the chief complaint, which usually is a symptom from a downstream effect, and they've been taught to control that, to manage a chronic illness, not cure it. Now I can get cynical and say there's more money in treating in treating diabetes than curing diabetes. There's more money in treating cancer than it is in curing cancer. And I think that's kind of obvious. And there's more, there's more money in treating autoimmune diseases by using these incredibly dangerous medicines than there is in looking for a reason why it's happening. So those things have been fobbed off as, well, it's a you know, it's a roll of the cosmic dice that you have autoimmune disease. If you have a child with autism, it's a roll of the cosmic dice. Nothing else is causing it. Vaccines don't cause that. Vaccines don't contribute to it. You know, genetic, it's genetic. Well, guess what? In 1970, it was one in 10,000 births, autism. Now it's one in 34. You're not going to tell me that that better diagnosis got that got it that far, and it's been getting worse and worse and worse. Yes, it's environmental. Yes, there's many factors, but it's not a role of the cosmic. Okay? And if you don't accept that and you look for root causes that were up until that time, eh, you know what, that can't do that. That can't happen. Okay, I I do I'll do a lot of lecturing and teaching. I teach courses in functional medicine. And the one phrase that will get you thrown out of my course is that can't happen. It's okay to say, I wonder why that happened, but you say that I that can't happen. Not only will you have an imprint of my boot in your butt, okay, but you've closed off areas of investigation. And Sherlock Holmes always said if you rule out the impossible, whatever's left, however improbable, must be the truth. If somebody Had a dinner with salmon and started getting diarrhea the next day and it has continued for six weeks. And you say, Well, there's a temporal relationship. Don't sit there and say it can't be the meal. Okay? There's probably something that that person ate that caused it. And, you know, it could be salmonella, it could be a whole lot of different things, parasites usually. Nevertheless, many things have been ignored as that can happen. The other side of the coin is they've tested for things, and the tests aren't as accurate as you think, so they don't depend on histamine anymore. They depend on the testing to do the diagnosis. That's been forced on them by the insurance companies who won't allow certain medicines to be given, won't allow certain treatments to be given unless you prove it. Well, guess what? Let's say you have hypothyroidism. Before those tests get to the point where you're really bad, you've had hypothyroidism so clinically for years. And the and the normals or the ranges of the tests are not necessarily good. Okay? And in in thyroid, you know, the TSH, the thyroid syndrome hormones, they wait until it goes over four, which means there's significant dysfunction, and then the thyroid starts failing. If you catch it early, you can correct the parameters that can cause that. You can still treat it when it gets bad, okay, but it's a whole lot different, a whole lot more difficult to do. So the whole system has been set up to allow chronic disease to take root and continue. And then when you're diagnosed with that, the end, you know, downstream effect, they look at it as, well, you have it, it stinks to be you, and don't worry, we'll manage it. But that's the deliver pattern. Okay. What functional medicine does, what I do, is look at it from okay, these things started at a certain point. Okay, this is what it's probably coming from. This is what created the cell danger response and started the inflammation going. I recently had a had a case where this gentleman in his early 30s is basically non-functional, but you know, he's got anxiety, ADD, and so forth. And as I was taking his history, which by the way takes me about an hour and a half, I found that this all started at fourth grade, where he noticed a real difference in the way he felt and started having focus problems, and it just burgeoned from there. So many things happened beyond that. So I went back and said it. And he also said to me that I lost my taste for meat. I'm like, hmm. So I went back to the fourth grader and said, Do you guys do a lot of camping? I said, Oh yeah, we camp all the time. Well, there's a certain type of Lyme disease that will allow you, it's called Alpha Gauss syndrome, that will allow you, make you lose your taste for meat. Even though that may or may not continue, it was an it was an indicator. And what he had after testing is he's got chronic neural Lyme. You have to know how to test, you have to know what test to do, what test to look for, or you can diagnose it on history. In chronic pain, you know, we're talking about the nervous system becoming or sensitive sensitized, bad word, okay, because of chronic inflammation. So they're always the nervous system's always in this heightened state of hypervigilance, if you will. Okay. And what that means is that it doesn't take too much stimulation to create the cascade effect that ends up in pain. And that stimulation can be very, very mild or not even noticeable. And it may be from chronic inflammation in the body of certain areas, okay? But fibromyalgia, that's only telling you that the fibers and the muscles are inflamed or painful. It doesn't tell you why. That's the other problem. Many diagnoses are not diagnoses, because a diagnosis should point at a root cause. So if you have a sore throat, that's a symptom. If you have strepto, now I know why. If you have fibromyalgia, that doesn't tell me anything except you're in pain. It doesn't point cause, and you have to dig.

SPEAKER_00

All of these things that you're saying, the lack of testing, the like lack of follow-up, uh the proper reading of symptoms, uh the uh less uh say the minors say that uh uh GP has now uh compared to what the case was decades ago. Um that represents pain, that causes pain. That that's that's uh what what I hear. Uh you insist regarding that, regarding that pain approach. You insist that uh people are not broken. Absolutely what they have is an overwhelmed body you also uh uh discuss or you you mention in your website, uh you bring this up for people that are interested in talking to you, uh, especially burnout, brain fog, and chronic fatigue. Those are words that are I think that it would be fair to say we all use. That's burnout. Oh yes, I have a brain fog. Um maybe what you have is chronic fatigue. We just use those words because they are trendy trendy. Yeah, trendy. Or trendy, because for people that are not specialists, that's just a trend. That's it. Right. Uh, because most of the time, again, we do not know what we are talking about. Well, if you are not broken, if uh what I am suffering from, uh, or if what I am experiencing experiencing are the is the results of uh an overwhelming system. How can you explain to me what is happening to my to my body in layman terms? What is good, what is I mean, I know this is not the right word, but not this person. What is wrong with me? And I say wrong because that is what we ask ourselves. What is wrong with me to develop this chronic fatigue, brain fog, burnout?

SPEAKER_03

Yes. The reality is we tend to look at those things as individual entities. You've got brain fog, you've got burnout, you've got chronic fatigue, you've got whatever. And they all come from the same base. Okay. When I say somebody's not broken, what I'm trying to say is that this is not permanent. It's not your fault. It's not anything you did. Okay, it's not a weakness of stop, it's not a weakness of personality. You don't sit there and want to be in pain, you simply are. And what's really happening is imbalances or things in your body that are not working correctly or are hyperactive. There's certain balance is not being created. And your body has difficulty healing itself. Most of that happens right at the mitochondrial level. Mitochondria are those little organelles in your cells that produce your energy. And you can't heal.

SPEAKER_02

They're the energy factory, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_03

Exactly. They they they the whole process has to be a bit complicated, but the end result is very, you know, very simple. If that process that the mitochondria produces your energy is interfered with for one of a number of reasons, your ability to heal, your ability to resolve, if you will, the cell danger responses, your ability to resolve them is very much lessened. And therefore, those nerve endings, those nerve perceptors in the brain, became remain at that high hypervigilance state where it doesn't take too much stimulation to give you pain. Okay?

SPEAKER_00

Is that what you mean when you say that our nervous system gets stuck in survival mode? That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_03

It gets stuck in that hypervigilance survival mode. Okay? Okay. It's all the same thing, you know. Why don't you get better? Well, either there's continued stimulation or the stimulation, that's sensitization, if you will, can't resolve because you don't have enough energy. Along with that, is each cell doesn't have what it needs to work. It also doesn't have the substrate. In other words, you're not digesting and giving it what it needs to go through your biochemical processes that end up giving your body what it needs to restore and replace and get you back to before. It's not just the root causes. Yes, they initiate it, but it's also the way your system is. And once it gets more dysfunctional, once things happen in the chronic condition, because the inflammation continues and the mitochondrial dysfunction continues, unless that's resolved, however you're expressing, whether it's burnout, whether it's fatigue, whether it's pain, will not go away. And that's why people continue in pain. They continue with these other symptoms. And by the way, most people in chronic pain have other symptoms as well. They're tired, they're fatigued, and they're wondering why all this stuff they fob it off to stress, which is not a bad idea, but it's happening at the mitochondrial level, at the cellular level, which can be reversed and can be cured, if you will, can be improved. You can get the body to work by giving it what it needs and basically getting out of the way. Micromanaging does not never work, okay? Umxidative stress does this. Uh, you know, poor tissue will give you poor tissue repair. Yeah, when the energy drops and inflammation rises, the brain amplifies pain. It's a survival signal. It's not damaging and of itself, it's a survival symbol. So you can have severe pain with minimal damage, and you can have significant damage with little pain. Okay, it all depends on the situation. But sometimes the tissue damage doesn't equal the pain.

SPEAKER_00

Sometimes the tissue damage doesn't equal the pain. Okay.

SPEAKER_03

Right. Sometimes you can have minimal tissue damage and significant pain depending on how sensitized the nervous system is. And that's a biochemical thing, as opposed to, you know, you've got major tissue damage and it's creating a pain complex.

SPEAKER_00

Uh can you explain to us what oxidative stress is? I'm sorry, you were saying sorry? Yes, yes, of course. No.

SPEAKER_03

Oxidative stress is also is chronic inflammation. Goes by a lot of different names. You know, people talk about reactive oxygen species, reactive nitrogen species, oxidative stress. It's oxidating compounds. Don't worry about it. Chronic inflammation is oxidative stress. And the more inflammation you have, the more oxidative stress you have. Again, those are equivalent terms, they're just different ways of describing the same thing. Okay. That interferes with your bodily functions by blocking your immune systems doing its job, uh making your ability to utilize what goes into your body to your body's best benefit, and it uses up your energy just fighting the inflammation rather than repairing. Where that happens again is at the cellular/slash mitochondrial level. I'll tell you how important that is. We have 30 trillion cells in our body. And I'm going to estimate there's 200 to 2,000 mitochondria per cell. You do the math. That's a lot of stuff to fix. It also took a while to get there. Sometimes it can be one thing that starts it off, and most times it's an accumulation of things over time. Exposure to different toxins, exposure to different microbes, you know, many um uh uh emotional scars, uh, you know, spiritual traumas, uh psychological traumas, okay, they start adding up. And in this time frame, since the pandemic, what has been put in place is the spike protein from COVID, which has been identified as a toxin, which has made everything worse because it really interferes with mitochondrial function. So if you had an issue before the pandemic and it got worse during the pandemic, but you never returned to normal, you never returned back to your baseline, what's causing that is the spike protein from the virus. If you weren't ill and you became ill and you never got back to normal, meaning that your energy wasn't the the same, you maybe started getting more colds, you maybe started getting um well, you know, maybe some heart problems that you know just wasn't right for you. Lots of other things that can happen from this particular toxic. That's the issue. Now they're gonna call it they're calling it long COVID, which unfortunately is being fashioned as another chronic illness that has no cause and no cure, and they're going to manage. You'll see in a few years when as after people are suffering for a while, that they'll come out with medications to manage it. I wrote a paper on this and there are ways of resolving that. Okay, and that was published in the Journal of Um Public Health and Nutrition, which is a scientific peer-reviewed journal. Um, but you know, then then you get into the politics uh what's being allowed to become chronic. Okay, because they're making more money by treating the results, the fatigue, the burnout, the you know, they'll give you adderall, you know, so you can function or whatever it happens to be, you know, which ends up turning your twinkles out more. Am I answering your question?

SPEAKER_00

Yes, you are. Yes, you are, yes, you are. Um I was just thinking about long COVID because my youngest daughter has been, I wouldn't say diagnosed, but she has been told that she might quote unquote suffer from long COVID. Uh she lost her sense of taste and smell when she had COVID. It took her a long time to get back to kind of normal. But something that has persisted, or something that was not there and now is that she has uh an irregular, an abnormally, abnormally high uh heart rate. She can be sitting down, uh studying, and her heart rate can be at 120, 130. She has had her heart checked, she has seen a cardiologist, and they keep telling her that nothing is wrong, that everything is fine. Um I have to take uh I have to I have to uh press her to get that solved.

SPEAKER_03

But um uh what that is what that is is disordernomia. Okay, here's disorder anomalia is a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, and it shows up with things that you usually don't have physical control over, like your heart rate, um, like your blood pressure. Some people have POTS, postular orthostatic, tachycardiosy and they sit up and they faint. Okay, and often they have to be treated with um go to the emergency room treated with normal saline and stuff like that. That's an end result of a lot of inflammation. Let's talk leaky gut for a half second, okay? When you have leaky gut syndrome, you start having those antigens from your from your gut into beyond the membrane that protects you. Then the immune system starts working on it. A lot of antigens go in, the antibodies attack it, and that's inflammation. Well, the first thing you usually see is food intolerances, then immune system abnormalities as the inflammation goes up, then autoimmunity and neural autoimmune. And kind of the end result of that, when you have a lot of inflammation, is dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system. But those things are treated like a separate entity. If it happened after the pandemic, treatment of the spike protein is indicated. And I'll tell you why it's you know, I always pick my treatments to have a good risk-benefit factor. If there's no risk and a probability of great benefit, you go with it. That's not true if you'll watch TV with some of those commercials for the drugs, just close your eyes and listen. Okay? You close your eyes and listen, you're going to hear things like you know, people have died in the trials, people even have lost their left toe and stuff like that. They're dangerous things, okay? Um talking about something like augmented NAC and acetylcysteine, okay? It is what denatures the spike protein, especially that particular product. Okay. And not only does it pull its spike protein apart and pull it off the receptors, it creates a lot of glutathione, which is your master antioxidant. It improves your detoxification pathways, and um, it also binds glutamate, which is something that usually makes people very anxious and it's very prevalent. So it does multiple things without hurting anybody. Okay? So even if I were wrong about the spike protein, somebody with a chronic illness has got a lot of oxidative stress by definition, and you want to produce a lot of glutathione. Why do I use that instead of just giving somebody glutathione? Well, when you create glutathione, okay, in the pathway, there's a feedback mechanism that controls how much you produce by your body. Giving somebody glutathione, number one, it breaks down very quickly, and if you're using not all of it, it will release things like glutamine and actually make you more excitable, which makes any kind of pain worse. So the safer way is to use the other pathway. You still have to give the body what it needs to work, like the cofactors, vitamins, and minerals. What has been ignored or not recognized, mind you, I'm not disparaging anyone. I'm giving you the benefit of what I've seen over the years. What has been not recognized, especially in supplements, is absorption. Medications must do bioavailability studies. In other words, they give people medicines, they take blood tests, they have to prove to whomever that what you take is absorbed. Supplement companies are not under the same constraints. They can make a tablet that barely gets broken down. They can give you forms of things that don't get absorbed, like rust, and you're getting iron, or calcium carbonate, which is a common cheap form of calcium that when it hits your hydrochloric acid actually becomes the bicarbonate iron, which usualizes acid, and limestone, calcium chloride, it's a rock. You don't get a lot of ionic calcium in absorption. Okay, but they can do that stuff and they're not lying. Okay. So if you're not absorbing it, if you have any kind of gut problems, remember it's got to be broken down in the stomach, absorbed, go through the liver, get into circulation, and then get into the cells. That's a lot, okay, for it to do. A lot. I usually use liposomal vitamins. Not everybody can afford IVs, they're expensive. Okay? But the liposomal vitamins. That's a whole different issue.

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. But anyway, that's what you know. You also have to give body to what it needs to work. That's all.

SPEAKER_00

Um let's talk a little bit about recovery. Sure. Um what are the biggest mistakes we make trying to recover from chronic illness? I was thinking that many times we are looking for big answers or the big culprit. And I just keep hearing you talking about details. You are not mentioning the word details, but uh you are pointing to so many things that uh just are not taken into consideration. So uh for me that is a confirmation of one of my fears as a as a as a person, as a father, as a husband, that we think about chronic pain, we think about chronic illness, and we are always looking for the big thing. There has to be something causing this, and many times it's not some the something is not the one thing, it's just a bunch of smaller things. But you you you tell me, what what are the most common mistakes? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

The biggest mistake, if you will, if you want to call it a mistake, is not looking at the entire system. Is exactly what you said, looking at different factors. Because you get frustrated, by the way. Okay? When you get frustrated, you start saying, okay, it must be this. Because you're going to You get upset. Right. And where do you go? You go to Dr. Google, my nemesis. Okay? Dr. Google is definitely my nemesis because it's very hard to differentiate who's selling something and sounding really good and what good information is out there. It's very difficult to differentiate it. And everybody who wants to sell something will use very sexy terms like you know, burnout and this. This is what's good for that. We have been trained to look at one thing and say, hey, look for your burnout, take this. You know, and I remember the Excedron commercial in the 60s. Take this for your daily headaches. You shouldn't have daily headaches, but they told you that you should by giving you something to take. So they slowly told you that this is okay. By not looking at everything and how they interact. Essentially, that is the end result of going down very. Various rabbit holes and saying it must be this, and you follow this and you find that it's not that because when you fix one thing, it affects other systems. And one of the things I tell people is that listen, you gotta come out of the rabbit hole because when you're down the rabbit hole, you get into what I like to call analysis paralysis. You get stuck on one thing, and there's no there's no magic bullet. Think of it this way: if you have an older car, okay, and the water pump goes and your mechanic changes the water pump, it doesn't change all the hoses. Now this water pump is you know fresh and it's pumping that great stuff, things are gonna start breaking because those hoses were used to the lower pressure of the water pump. Okay, and once they start expanding on boom, boom, boom. So when you correct one thing, if you if you were a methylation person and you start getting somebody methylfoly, and that's all you do, it's gonna affect other systems. And either more dis or either further dysregulate them or create a dysregulation, but you need to look at the whole picture. Now, that's hard to do when you're talking about yourself. It's real hard to do. Or someone you love. Or someone you love, exactly. Because you're you're ex you're living it minute by minute. I saw this with my son. I'm the, you know, I just like any other dad, I sat at the night like this, wondering what the heck was going on. On my knees praying to, you know, please give me some insight. He doesn't need to suffer. He hasn't done anything. You know, take me. I mean, the whole, yeah, everything. Um, but what it took was looking at the bigger picture. What else could, you know, not what else could be. Look at the big picture. How do you do that? Well, if you're a good practitioner, you take a good history, you'll find you'll see where the where the deviations order, where the probabilities are, which lets you hone in on it. And realize that it's not just the root causes that are contributing to your pain. They may be the initial cause of evasion. But when it's been there a while, all the other systems that have decompensated, have had the ability to compensate, are now going to stay in that state unless you deal with that as well. And it's a quagmire. It's a quagmire. Honestly, it's very difficult to look at yourself or a loved one. And my favorite joke is a doctor who takes who treats himself as got a fool for a patient, because you can't. You can look at your loved one and be objective. So it's helpful if you work with someone that knows your thing, or at least back up and look at the big picture, look at the timeline and see where the actual deviations were. What does this do? It gives you a fresh look at things, and you know, when you're sitting in maybe this, maybe that, maybe this, maybe that. Well, if you see a relationship, hey, we went on, we went down to Nicaragua, came back, we have travelers' diarrhea, and haven't been the same since. Parasites. It's the first thing you should think of. Okay, but you not make that relationship. Where the biggest problem was was breast implant illness causing pain and dysfunction and so forth. Because the breast implants, even the saline ones, the body's the immune systems work on that all the time. And it takes five or six years for the symptoms to show up a lot of times. So if you don't even ask, okay, you don't even know that that is a possibility. And often it's a it's not even a diagnosis of exclusion. That's a real good reason for ongoing symptoms, even everything even though everything else is normal or negative. Okay, and that's a routine question that I ask because you know I'll look at the time frame and you know, and even now they're saying with the breast implants that they should be changed every 10 years. I wonder why. Okay? Because they know it's happening. You know, it's terrible. It really is.

SPEAKER_00

And we won't even get into that kind of stuff because having them having them changed uh would tell you should tell you enough uh to make you not take that decision. But again, yeah, let's look at the example of genome.

SPEAKER_03

You have to look at the history and give yourself, you know, that gives you the idea of what may have gone wrong. And then when you take it from there, you can look at what has done to the body and treat from both ends.

SPEAKER_00

Needless to say, you do believe that recovery from chronic illness is possible. Um but how does it look like when you're recovering, what changes do you see? Or you what changes should you expect Well, let's talk chronic pain, since this is our subject.

SPEAKER_03

Uh pain is usually resolves in one of a couple of ways. Either so in frequency duration frequency duration and um and intensity. Okay, sometimes the frequency lessens as the pain um intensity lowers. Sometimes you have people who have exacerbations of pain or they have the same level of pain, but not the same frequency. They go from frequent to occasional to rare, but it's the same intensity. Okay? Um what you should see is not only a reduction in pain, but improvement in your energy levels. When you see improvement in your energy levels, you know the mitochondria are working better, and you're gonna have a positive experience. Um other things may get better. Uh if you're having mood problems, your neurotransmitter balance may get better. If you're having other hormone problems, low testosterone, uh, estrogen dominance if you're still cycling, uh a reduction of um menopausal issues, okay, an improvement of thyroid function. You might find that your thyroid medicine is beginning to work better because your thyroid is now resolving a bit. Okay, it's uh it's a little bit, you know, you may have uh somewhat reversal of adrenal fatigue. But you start seeing things like that because in this kind of stuff, what causes your pain is affecting multiple systems. So all of a sudden, what you've gotten used to as this is your life, things start improving. You know, you know, you can go out for a night, you can, you know, you can take a walk, you can participate in life without paying for it in pain or fatigue. Is it sudden? No. Not by any means. It does take work. Okay, and it does take patience. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Okay, you've been, if you've had chronic pain, you've had it for a while, and you evaluate it if you want to try, you know, like a holistic program. When I mean holistic, I mean treating your whole person. Remember, you've got a lot of cells that have to be fixed. And yes, you may have to concentrate on certain things, but it's gonna take a bit of time. Okay, not because you're bad, not because anybody doesn't know what they're doing, but because you've had damage, but reversible damage. Is it possible to reverse a chronic illness? I will tell you it's probable.

SPEAKER_00

Beyond that, I've seen that that that that's that's honest. Sure. Okay. Uh, you know that I uh one of the things that have repeated the most, the ideas or concepts that I have heard the most during this podcast, and having talked to professionals like you or trauma survivors, uh people that have recovered from rape, assault, uh, and several other tremendous challenges, is that they always say the same. It is not one thing. It is not one thing. It is never about that thing that is going to change the rest. It's a trickle, there is a trickle-down effect. It's there's a domino effect. Absolutely. And you were talking about the uh how a car functions, and you can just fix the part, and you are going to think that okay, I am fixed. And there's another thing that we got wrong. We are not fixed, we were not broken, and there's another thing that I one uh uh uh guest that I had here uh about two months ago, uh Dr. Lin. She's a psychologist, and I she was talking about being broken, kind of in the way that you are, but from a different scientific perspective because she's a psychologist. And I was telling her that I I I was okay with the word broken. I didn't have a problem with it. Uh, because uh feeling that I was broken did not limit me. So, why was there a problem in using the word broken? And the answer she gave me, and I will never forget it, was because if you think that you're broken, you need that you need you think that you need to be fixed. And that changes the whole approach. Right. That is the problem. And it it still amazes me, and maybe just me, but it amazes me that I'm talking to a different professional in a different um uh field of medicine, but that person is telling me the same thing. If you want, if you want to believe that you're if you believe that you are broken, you are going to believe that you need fixing. And there, I mean, your whole future, uh any any hope or expectations of recovery you might have will go away because it's it is the wrong the wrong approach. Um when you are working with people with your patients with chronic illness, what makes you feel positive about their future? That's I don't know if that question makes sense.

SPEAKER_02

No, no, it does. It does. In other words, you know, how do I how do I know in my heart that this person has a core problem? Because you were saying that it's probable, right? And probability is a big word. Probability is anything above 50%.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, that's what they're criteria of probability is. And there's too much, there's a lot of factors that go into healing. Uh patient compliance, patient availability of of um of you know whatever it is you need, uh, the ongoing contribution of the environment, ongoing contribution of whatever the root causes are. It's a big mishmash, okay? Uh, and of course, your commitment to staying the course, okay, because nobody gets better like that. It's always up and down. Up and down. But it's better. If you're over here, and then a few months later you'd be over here, even though you're going up and down. Okay. And some people remember, we're we've been trained for with a pill for the ill, and you should get better quickly. I still have people who come to me and want to be better in two weeks. Sorry, you've had it for 20 years. You know, I can't you decide to take time to to um to you know rebuild you, okay, if you will, at the six million dollar band. Uh repeat your question, please, because I think I went off.

SPEAKER_00

I was telling you what makes you feel positive about a passion.

SPEAKER_03

Yes, thank you.

SPEAKER_00

Or their future. What makes you feel positive?

SPEAKER_03

When I um I offer like a 30-minute complimentary discovery session, what I do there is we discuss the issue and I'll get a feeling, I'll, you know, I'll know because I've dealt with cases like that before. I can ask them and find out what has worked and what hasn't. Um and we see if we get along, you know, if we're a good fit. When I do a long history, when I do a proper history, what I'm doing is not only getting a timeline, but in with that, I'm noting all the treatments they've had, what worked, what hasn't. Okay, and what that does is hone in a small set of things that haven't been attended to, a small set of things that have to be diagnosed or have to be discovered. And that's why I can be, if I if I can look at that and get a real good feeling of, okay, it must be this, must be that, you know, from that's been crossed out, this has been crossed out, okay, I can go back and say, hmm, I know how to deal with this and I know how it should go. And as long as we work together for a while, uh, it will be, you know, you'll your physiology will come back. If you're sitting up looking at me, your body wants to heal. Okay. There's very few people, and I and I've seen them where I've had to send them off to you know emergency medical work. Uh your body wants to heal. I usually get people in that stage that these systems are exhausted or dysfunctional, but reversible. And I know what to look for. What makes me feel good is when I see things and what has been done, and lots of times what doesn't work or what medicines work, tell me what's going on physiologically. Okay, then I know what I can correct and how I can correct it. That's what makes me feel good. By the way, you know, generally speaking, if people have been here, there and everywhere, you know, and they end up coming to see me, it's usually in my court.

SPEAKER_00

Is there a difference between pain and suffering?

SPEAKER_03

Pain is pain. Suffering is how you handle pain. Okay. It's some people are very stoic and just kind of work with the pain. And that doesn't make anybody else worse. Some people, you know, they suffer. They, you know, they it's dysfunction. It's how the suffering is more dysfunction, and the pain is more, if you will, a response. It's a response to what your nervous system is doing. So suffering is more subjective and maybe cultural, maybe individual, but it's through dysfunction.

SPEAKER_00

Uh this pod This podcast is called the pain factor, and I like to uh ask my guest uh by the end of the interview what their pain factor is. And when I ask that, I am talking about a specific challenge, a specific situation that even today, after all you have learned, after your experience, after all your challenges, victories, defeats, failures, uh still get to you. Something that even today just maybe not take control of you, but overpowers you uh maybe for an hour, maybe for a day, maybe for a week. So, what what is your pain factor?

unknown

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00

What challenges you what challenges me personally? Exactly, because um let me let me rephrase the question. Um I I uh usually ask my my guests what their pain factor is, and sometimes they believe I'm asking uh for them to give me a number on a scale of one to ten. My pain factor is an eight because I am extremely stressed these days because of a family situation, for example. Other people say, well, my pain factor is uh the well-being of my kids because even though they are adults, I just get worried sick about them every single time. And that just overpowers me. That uh I I have been trying to be better and and do better, but I cannot control that stress. So that that that is what I mean about the pain factor. What is your pain factor? What is something that and again you can give a number from an once, but I don't have what is something that just challenged that overpowers you? Well, if there is one.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, there is, yeah. You know, my children, of course, um, because my son with uh the schizophrenia is well, let's put it this way, he um I'm dad, I'm not the doctor. So he only seems to me so much. Okay. And um sadly, uh, you know, it's not even though he worked through everything, it's not totally resolved and he doesn't do the things I'd recommended. Uh not because no, because I'm dead, okay? It's simple as that. Um and worrying about my children and my youngest who has um was some issues, and uh I did a test on him and looked at his entire energy pathway, and it was bottomed out, and he won't do the things that I'm asking him to, even though I know that this is gonna correct his product fatigue and his focus and so forth. I do worry about them because I love them and I want them to be in my job as a dad, as a father. Remember, there's a difference between being a father and a dad, okay? Being a dad is to have them jump off my shoulders. I don't want them to do what I did, I want them to do what they're happy with. But I also want them to be healthy and have a good life, okay? Uh it's a goal of any parent. Um the other thing that um that is my challenge is um sometimes I do too many things at once. Like presently I'm writing papers, I'm doing videos for um the some of the long COVID and mitochondrial people I'm lecturing and taking care of my patients, and putting that all into perspective and not and giving everybody what they need, especially my patients, uh can be daunting at times. And not having that life balance, that's the biggest issue I have, is not having a life balance. Um, you know, work, play, you know, spirit, so forth, you know, just having that kind of balance. Um it's hard to achieve because I have a worldwide practice and it varies. You know, but I'm an old I'm an old emergency nurse, so I I I used to love having a lot changing around. But I'm almost 70 years old, so it's it's getting a little daunting, you know. But those are the things that affect me the most. You know, my inability, if I have an inability to meet my commitments, especially to my patients, because they're giving me their most valuable possession, their bodies or the body of their loved one. And I take that as a sacred trust.

SPEAKER_00

And I asked this question because uh I really it is very important for me that the people listening and watching realize that the guests uh on this podcast are human beings. They don't have all the answers. No question. They are not perfect, and they they they also struggle because to me, having someone being having the possibility to talk to someone that I consider unequal as a human makes all the difference. Um is there something that uh we have left aside that you would like to discuss? Some questions maybe that I didn't ask you or any additional comments that you'd like to make?

SPEAKER_03

I'd like people to at least realize that pain is not your enemy, it's information. Try and think of it as information. And when you understand the systems that produce it, you can actually begin to change it. I I want you to know that your present state is not permanent. Even if you've had horrible surgeries and stuff, or even if you're um I've had children with genetic uh you know additions or deletions, they can still live a phenomenally good life if we take care of one of the things that can happen. You don't have to be like this. And what is to what is this important? What should you do? Step back, try and look at yourself from a third person point of view. And if all you're doing is compensating for the pain, maybe rethink everything. You don't have to be like this. Pain is a signal if we go after at the cellular level, like mitochondrial function, which is all put together what you would do to, you know, when you work to fix the cell, you're fixing the mitochondria, it's all inclusive. Um that things can change. Things can change for the better. I've seen it happen.

SPEAKER_00

I I really love that you mentioned your current state is not your future, because it's just so extremely difficult. Almost it feels almost impossible to accept that this will change. Sometimes you say, Well, this will this be forever. Right. And I'm I I I am really grateful that you mentioned that.

SPEAKER_02

Seems that way. I'm sorry? It seems that way when you've been in pain before. It seems that way, a hundred percent. Absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00

But you And that's why you have to take that step back. Right.

SPEAKER_03

Or just take a step back and realize, just start with the realization that it can change. Okay, that maybe you just need to look at it from a different point of view.

SPEAKER_00

That's all and also that you need to be accountable. Uh you you you need to be consistent and you need to do your your part. Uh how can we yes, yes, absolutely. Yes. Uh how do we follow you? How do people learn more about your work? What are we up to in the near future?

SPEAKER_03

Here's the thing. If you want to know, if you want have you'd like to learn stuff, if you go to my YouTube channel, which is Dr. Jess Online, just one word, okay. I've done videos over the many years of different subjects. I've just started on Instagram, which is Dr. Jess Online724, which is my perfect. Okay, that's where I am on Instagram. You can go to my website, which is drjessonline.com, okay, and read a little bit about me. But there's a there's a button you can press to access my scheduler, so you can avail yourself of that 30-minute discovery session. I am the least predatory person you'll ever meet. I don't show on people. I'm serious. You know, I don't show people. I've never been like that. Um, and you can, you know, have that 30 minutes and we can talk for a while, see if we're a good fit. If not, I can give you a little bit of direction. I'd be very happy to do that. I love working with people. I absolutely adore it. I will give you a piece of advice that will serve you well. When looking at functional medicine for people, doctors, whatever, be wary of the person who wants you to do a significant amount of lab work before you see them. That is a practice management technique, not a necessity. I'll tell you why. They don't know what you need, they don't know you. Okay. So be careful of that, because once you spend a lot of money on that, that brings you into their practice. Now you want to, you know, be able to follow what they say, even as inane as they may be. Okay, so be careful of that.

SPEAKER_00

That is good to know, and I will keep that in mind. We will add all your contact information in under the notes for this episode. Thank you. Dr. Jay Z Armine, thank you so much. Uh I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your work, and it's been a privilege to have you here uh in the pain factor.

SPEAKER_03

It's been my honor. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you so much, and for everybody out there watching and listening, we will see you next time when we continue to explore the pain factor. Ciao ciao. The Pain Factory is a Project Fortress podcast. Project Fortress is a secular humanist project dedicated to find answers to the physical, mental, and emotional pain people experience as well as offer help to deal with these issues. To learn more about Project Fortress, please visit Fortress.org. That is F-O-U-R-T-R-E-S-S.org. I, Gustavo Varela, I'm not a licensed medical professional, nor am I a nutritionist or hold a degree in exercise or sports medicine. All of the advice given on this podcast is what I have learned from my own experiences and mistakes, navigating through depression, anxiety, and chronic physical pain. Project Fortress is not responsible for any actions that may occur as a result of your listening to and implementing the advice we provide. Use all of the information that we give at your own risk.