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Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!
Katie: This episode is sponsored by Just Thrive Health, one of my favorite companies, and especially their new Digestive Bitters. So I’ve been talking about gut health for years before it was so trendy. I love that everybody’s talking about it now, and the one brand that I have continuously used for my gut health is Just Thrive.
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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama. com. And this episode tackles the topic of the Lyme disease epidemic, how common it actually is and solutions for full recovery. And I’m here with someone who literally wrote the book on this topic. Dr. Darin Ingels is a licensed ND, an international speaker, and a leading authority on Lyme disease.
He is a former Lyme patient himself, overcoming a three year battle with Lyme after having failed conventional treatment and becoming increasingly debilitated. And he found the things that led to his own recovery and now has helped thousands of patients go on to recover as well. He literally wrote the book, The Lyme Solution, and he has varied expertise in many areas, but in this episode, we go deep specifically on Lyme disease.
So if you are navigating that, I feel like there’s some very valuable resources in this episode and links to follow up resources that may be additionally helpful. So let’s jump in and learn from Dr. Darin Ingels.
Dr. Darin, welcome. Thank you so much for being here today.
Darin: Oh, well, thank you so much for having me, Katie.
Katie: Well, I’m excited for this conversation because even though it’s not something that I’m aware of that I’ve actually navigated myself, I know I have a lot of personal friends who have and probably a lot of other people listening who may not even know that this could be a missing piece in their health equation.
And that topic is of course Lyme disease, which like I said, many people are aware that they’ve been exposed to or are navigating a battle with. And others may be having some weird symptoms and not realize there could be a Lyme connection. I know there’s a lot to learn on this topic, but to start broadly, can you kind of just define for us what Lyme disease is and how someone might know if they have it?
Darin: Sure. Well, Lyme disease is actually a bacterial infection and was actually named after Lyme, Connecticut. I spent almost 20 years in Connecticut and lived about 30 minutes down the road from Lyme. And back in the late 1970s, there were a bunch of kids that started having this mysterious collection of symptoms of mostly arthritis and headaches, and they couldn’t really figure out what it was. And it took a few years, but Dr. Willie Bergdorfer, who was a researcher for the government, discovered this new bug. And the rule is, when you discover the bug, you get to name it after yourself. So it’s called Borrelia burgdorferi, and that is the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. And when you look at the symptoms of Lyme disease, it’s what we call the great imitator, the great mimic.
There’s over a hundred different symptoms associated with Lyme disease. So more often than not, when people start to get this, again, strange collection of symptoms, it would be very easy to mistake it for any number of other conditions. But the things that are more, we’ll say common and unique to Lyme disease:
One is this thing called a bull’s eye rash or an erythema migrans rash. And where the tick bites you, you’ll see these sort of concentric rings of red and clear and red and clear. It kind of looks like the Target logo and it can be anywhere on your body. But that is very unique to Lyme disease and people start getting joint pain.
And what’s a little bit different is that it will change from joint to joint. One day, my right shoulder hurts. Then it’s my left knee. Then it’s my right ankle. We call that migratory joint pain. But headaches, numbness and tingling, fatigue, again, joint pain is very common. And then you can see, particularly in children, really unusual neuropsychiatric symptoms.
So we can see OCD, anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, mood changes that really kind of come out of the blue and happen fairly quickly. So when I hear about that combination of neurological symptoms and arthritic symptoms, for me, that’s a big red flag and might be related to Lyme disease.
Katie: Got it. Okay. So, I’m also curious how common is Lyme disease? Because like you said, a lot of people assume it’s kind of in a different area or that it might not be something they’ve been exposed to, but based on what we know, how common is it actually?
Darin: Well, according to the CDC, we get about 476,000 new cases every year in the United States alone and about almost 85,000 new cases in Europe. And then that is probably underreported. Unfortunately, the testing out there isn’t very good. It misses more than half the people who have Lyme disease. So we don’t really know what the true number is, but you can do the math.
If we’re getting basically 450,000 new cases every year, in addition to all the people who already have it, we’re talking about millions and millions of people that are living with Lyme disease. And in my practice, I see a lot of people who’ve been to multiple specialists. They’ve done every test under the sun and they never get a diagnosis, but nobody ever bothered to look for Lyme disease. And old school thinking was that Lyme, because it came from Connecticut, New England, and the central part of our country is demic for these ticks. And Lyme disease is mostly spread through deer ticks. They’re called the Ixodes tick.
And because those parts of the country have a lot of these ticks, the thought was, well you only really get Lyme disease if you live in that part of the country. The reality is, is with climate change and the migration of birds, is these ticks now have moved far out of those areas. So the Eastern and Western seaboards of the United States really pushing inwards now. We start to see these deer ticks emerge and where those ticks are you can potentially get Lyme disease. And of course people travel, so even if you live in an area that’s not necessarily known for having these ticks and Lyme disease, it’s possible you went somewhere else and you could have acquired it there.
Katie: And is as far as we know, is this still only transmitted by ticks or are there other ways it can be transmitted?
Darin: Ticks account for the overwhelming majority of cases. We do have research now that if mom is pregnant and she has Lyme disease, she can pass it on to her baby. So congenital Lyme disease can result in stillborn birth, can result in birth defects, or we can see very serious developmental delays in children who are born to moms that carry Lyme disease. There is a big question mark about whether it can be sexually transmitted. Suprisingly nobody has really done any research in this area. There’s one study, Dr. Ray Stricker up in the Bay Area of California, looked at the semen of men and vaginal secretions of women who had Lyme disease and about the low 20 some percent of each, they were found evidence of Borrelia, but they never actually went forward and did a study to see if it’s sexually transmitted.
So Dr. Richard Horowitz, who’s really one of the big Lyme gurus in this country. He’ll get on stage and say, it’s possible, but not probable. His wife had Lyme disease and he said, no, we have sex all the time, unprotected, I’m not worried. So, I think it’s one of these things that it’s possible, probably not likely. The vaginal pH is very acidic and there’s not too many microbes that survive that pH.
So again, possible, but probably not probable.
Katie: Got it. Okay. What about as far as testing? Is there accurate testing that definitively can tell someone if they do have Lyme disease or not, or how is it diagnosed?
Darin: So ultimately, it’s what we call clinical diagnosis. It’s based on signs and symptoms. The laboratory tests that are available were never designed to be diagnostic. They’re actually designed as a surveillance tool for those people who had known Lyme disease. So the conventional testing is you do a screen test.
It’s a blood test. If that screening test is positive, it flexes over to what’s called a Lyme Western blot, which is a more specific test that look at various antibodies against the Lyme organism. Again, when you look at the research, the sensitivity of the test is only about 43 to 46%, which means it literally misses more than half of the people out there with Lyme disease. So a positive test, there aren’t really very many false positives, false negatives are extremely common.
So if your test comes back positive, you know you’ve had that exposure. If it comes back negative, it doesn’t exclude the possibility of having Lyme disease. Now, there are other labs out there that I think do better testing.
The test kits tend to be a bit more sensitive. So there’s a lab out of New Jersey called Medical Diagnostic Labs that I use a lot of, and another lab called IGENEX in Palo Alto, California. The sensitivity of their test kits seem to be a little bit better. But again, at the end of the day, we’re really looking at someone’s signs and symptoms. And because, again, it looks like so many other things, often we’re doing other types of laboratory testing just to rule out other possibilities, rule out lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, other types of neurological conditions that could be confused for Lyme disease.
Katie: Got it. Okay. So I would love to also now dive into solutions. I know this is going to probably be very nuanced, but I do know people in real life who are still navigating recovery from Lyme, and it seems like this is not necessarily a simple solution that works for everybody in the same way or that there might be a lot of factors that come into play.
So with that caveat and knowing it’s going to be probably quite nuanced, I know this is also one of your areas of expertise. So when it comes to solutions, what are some of the big things that you look at initially? What are some of the things that often get missed and how do you walk people through that journey?
Darin: Yeah, so I’m actually a former Lyme patient myself. I got Lyme disease in 2002 and spent three years recovering my own health. And then I wrote a book called The Lyme Solution. So for someone with acute Lyme disease, this is where antibiotics can actually be very effective. If you catch it early antibiotics can help get the infection under control so it doesn’t progress further. Again, we know from the research that about 20 percent of people who do antibiotic therapy fail that therapy and go on to have persistent Lyme disease. So for most of the people I see in my practice, they fall under that umbrella where they’ve had it for months to years.
And again, looking at the research, antibiotics are less likely to be effective once someone’s gotten probably back that three to six months after you’ve had your initial infection. So I’m a natropathic doctor by training and herbal medicine’s in my wheelhouse. And again, my own experiences, I was on antibiotics for nine months and actually got a lot worse.
It didn’t help me at all. So once I started using botanical medicine within a month of using herbs, I felt 80, 85 percent better. So the way I think of Lyme disease it’s so easy just to focus on the infection, but you can say this really with any persistent infection, is it really just the bug or is it the terrain? So we focus a lot on the terrain because if we can make your terrain an inhospitable place for that bug to thrive, we have a much better chance of getting over the infection. So it really starts with diet and gut. What you put in your mouth matters. So making sure that people are eating the right foods that are nutrient dense, that are anti inflammatory, that’s critically important.
And I really promote an alkaline diet where the foods you eat really help promote a more alkaline pH because we know from your cell chemistry that most of your cells function best in an alkaline state. With the exception of your skin, your stomach, your bladder, and for women, the vaginal area, that’s very acidic to help protect against outside invaders, but the rest of your body is more or less alkaline.
So again, if we can drive that cellular pH, we help reduce inflammation and help the cell repair at a better rate. And then of course your gut health is critically important because up to 80 percent of your immune function stems from the gut. So for people with chronic constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating, all these things, we need to ensure that the gut’s doing everything it needs to do so that we optimize your immune system.
And once we kind of get those pieces in place, the next step is really targeted herbal therapy. And the good news is we have a lot of herbs out there that are very effective against Lyme. And I should add, if you get bit by a tick that carries Lyme, depending on where you are in the world, there’s a good probability that tick carries something else. So it’s not uncommon that people, when they get Lyme disease, also get a co-infection with something like Bartonella, which is a bacteria that causes cat scratch fever. There’s a bug called Babesia, which is a blood parasite, which is kind of a cousin of malaria. And I swear every time I go to another conference we’ve learned there’s another dozen more things that ticks can carry.
So when we’re testing, we’re usually not just testing for Lyme. We’re testing for this collection of other common co-infections. So when we look at herbs for treatment we’re looking at what targets Lyme disease, what might target some of these co-infections and then we can mix and match them.
And the beauty of herbs, because they’re plants, they have a lot of different constituents, not only do they have things that target the organism, but a lot of these herbs are anti inflammatory. They promote better circulation, they support your immune system or your adrenal glands. So depending on how each person presents, again, we can find that right combination of herbs that works best for them. And so we start people on herbal therapy. And then the next step after that, I think, is really looking at the environment, anything that might be undermining your immune system. Chemicals in your environment, mold, mycotoxins, personal care products, just kind of taking stock of what’s in and around your home, your workplace, your kid’s school, all of that can make a difference in how it affects the immune system. And then kind of the final piece is just looking at that mindset. I’ve seen so many people that have been sick for so long, it’s easy to get discouraged and think you’re never going to get over the hump. And so really kind of working with the mental aspect of a chronic illness and helping shift the mindset so. Your brain is your most powerful healing tool, and if we can gauge that the right way, we can help people get over that hump of Lyme.
Katie: I love that you brought that up and I know we’re going to get to a whole followup conversation that goes deep specifically on the brain as your most powerful tool for healing. And I’m really excited for that conversation because I feel like that’s very far ranging and that applies to anybody navigating any kind of healing or chronic condition.
And I love that you brought up the bug versus terrain theory, because I would guess there’s likely a subset of people who get exposed to something like Lyme disease and don’t go on to develop an infection or chronic disease. And this is probably true with viruses and with a lot of things we’re exposed to, even common colds.
Many people are exposed and don’t get it. So I love that you brought this in. And I’m curious, maybe if you could walk us through some of the biggest needle movers you see for improving the terrain aspect and or preventative things that help us to become more resilient against any infection or anything we might be exposed to.
Darin: I think so much of this is so basic at a fundamental level. And again, I can’t underscore again, how important diet is. I think we saw this during the pandemic with COVID. You looked across the board, there were some people who got COVID and got no symptoms or maybe a little sniffle.
And of course, there were other people who died. And if we agree that at any one point, the virus was relatively the same thing. Why were we seeing such dramatic differences in how people reacted? And again, we could argue that it was really the terrain of the person and the people with the sickest terrain were the ones that were more susceptible. And it’s really kind of the same thing with Lyme disease or any other persistent infection. So what are the things that you do in your daily life that keep you healthy? Diet is important, of course, your sleep is critically important. How you move your body is important. All these sort of very basic things as a human. I think it’s very easy to kind of forget about how important they are in maintaining our health.
And I know so many people, they don’t go to bed until one, two in the morning, and they still have to get up early, and they don’t sleep very well. Well, you can look at all the research on sleep deprivation and what it does to your body, what it does to your immune system, what it does to your lymphatic drainage in your brain. And again, you kind of compound over time. And then everybody’s stressed out, and they have busy schedules, and they don’t take the time to really sit down, eat a real meal with good quality food, let your body digest it and absorb it. A lot of us eat on the run. So all these sort of common lifestyle factors add up over time.
And we’re not like back in the old days when we were outdoors a lot. Now, a lot of us are desk jockeys and we sit behind a desk all day and we just don’t move quite the way we used to. And as humans, that’s built into our DNA. We are designed to move and it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go to the gym and lift weights and do that kind of stuff.
But it is about getting up and being active and moving your body on a regular basis. Because again, I think about the lymphatic system, which is such an important part of our detoxification. Your blood has a heart that pushes it and pumps it. Your lymph doesn’t, it requires movement. It means muscle contraction to move that lymphatic fluid out, and the more sedentary we are, the less likely we are to get that fluid moving in the right direction again, which is an important part of our detox pathways. And one of the things I’ve seen with people as a whole with chronic illness is that they’re just not good detoxifiers, and there may be genetics that contributes to a certain part of that. But I think a lot of it, too, is all these other external factors that add to our total load.
Katie: That makes sense, and I want to make sure we also get to hone in on, you mentioned botanical therapy, and I would guess this is the piece that might be new to a lot of people, and something I definitely don’t know a lot about. It makes sense to me that there are herbs and plants in the environment that would be naturally helpful in this, and it sounds like there’s actually the ability to get very targeted with these, and to get results that people like in your case weren’t getting from even conventional medical treatment.
So can you introduce us to the world of botanical therapies, what that means, what are some of the plants and compounds you often use, and what kind of prognosis happens for people when they’re able to integrate this botanical therapy?
Darin: Yeah, I mean, understand herbs have been used for thousands of years as medicine and they’re plants, they’re essentially, think of it kind of like food. And, of course, as time has gone on, we’ve learned to appreciate the chemistry of a lot of these plants and they’ve been researched in different parts of the world.
What’s in the plant? What does it do biochemically? And if you look at indigenous tribes that have used botanical medicine to treat anything from headaches to bladder infections, to arthritis, we have a very long historical use of using these plants. And certainly in the last hundred years, again, we’ve come to appreciate what they do medically. Understand, the overwhelming majority of conventional prescription medicines that are on the market come from plants, that’s where researchers learn about these things. And of course, to make it a drug, you have to take one part of that plant. You have to do something in the lab to make it different because you can’t patent mother nature. So they always tweak it a little bit to make whatever chemicals they’re going to make for that drug.
But a lot of that research comes from herbs. And I think the beauty of nature, if you look at any one plant and the fact that it’s got all these different constituents, obviously, the plant has to have these things so it can survive in nature. It needs to protect itself from insects and bugs and sometimes just either other animals eating it. So, those constituents once we understand what they are, we can start applying it to humans and how we can use it for various medical purposes. And again, we’ve got herbs that you can use for just about anything. We have herbs that are used for cardiovascular disease and for infection and for diabetes and for various brain neurological issues.
So, as we understand more about how plants interact with the body. We’re able to apply them in a very beneficial way. And I think the nice thing about most plants and certainly the plants that we use in our practice, they’re very safe. There are plants out there that can be toxic, that can interact with other medications. And we’re very cautious of that. And either we don’t use them at all or we use them at the appropriate dose for the right person. But if you look at most herbs, the FDA requires them to call it GRAS, which means generally regarded as safe.
And again, the toxicity of a lot of these plants is so high that most people could never get to that point where they’d actually create a problem. And that’s not to say that all plants are a hundred percent safe. That’s not true. In fact, I was just reading an article this morning. There was a study that came out that found there were five different herbal medicines that were associated with liver damage. So again, you can get too much of a good thing if not used appropriately. So. I always recommend if you’re going to, embark on using botanical medicine get in the hands of a Natropathic doctor or a functional medicine doctor who really is trained in this.
Unfortunately, most conventional medical doctors, they never learn about herbal medicine in medical school. And unless they’ve done training outside of that, they’re probably not going to give you very good advice on what you should take and the right dose. But, for a lot of the plants that we use with Lyme disease, Something like cat’s claw. Cat’s claw is very effective against Lyme. It’s also a very potent anti-inflammatory. I use a lot of an herb called Cryptolepis. Cryptolepis is one of the plants that’s been studied at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Zhang and one of our colleagues, Dr. Jacob Leone, have been looking at different plants and how they affect Lyme disease, Babesia, and a lot of these common tick borne illnesses. And Cryptolepis is one of those herbs that kind of works across the board for all of these infections. Japanese knotweed is another very effective herb. Artemisia, they use around the world as a treatment for malaria. It’s a weed that grows quite readily, but it’s very effective against Lyme, and Babesia and Bartonella. Yeah, there’s, we use a lot of one called Bandarol. There’s another one called Kumanda.
Both of these come from the bark of a tree down in the Amazon jungle. And again, they’re very effective again. So what I like about it is that if we start down one pathway with someone and if we don’t find that that herbal is working well we can swap out different herbs. And sometimes it’s the second or the third round before we find the right combination for that person that’s moving the needle in the right direction. But the way I think of it for Lyme is that the herbs can be really effective at controlling the load. With Lyme specifically, we don’t have good testing to measure Lyme directly in the body. We’re looking at the immune response, so it’s an antibody test. As a result we don’t really know if we eradicated 100%.
Do we just knock it down to the point where the immune system controls it? I’m of the opinion, I don’t think we ever completely get rid of Borrelia. Even though it’s a bacteria, it behaves a bit more like a virus. It is truly a shapeshifter, it can hide inside your cells, it can evade the immune system. But I have patients who get to a point where they’re 100 percent symptom free, they do quite well, but somewhere down the line they go through some very stressful event and then they start to relapse and they have symptoms come up. And the best way I can equate it, most people don’t get chicken pox anymore.
But back in the day, if you got chicken pox as a child, you could still get shingles as an adult. It’s the same exact virus that’s been in your body for 40 or 50 years. But when you’re stressed, when your immune system’s compromised, that virus becomes opportunistic and then you start to have problems.
And I think Lyme can behave in the same way. So my goal for each patient is, let’s get you to a point where your terrain is optimized, get you to a point where you’re symptom free. And I think at that point it’s really diet and lifestyle that keeps you healthy and keeps it from coming back.
Katie: That makes sense. And I want to get a little deeper into the diet and lifestyle stuff in just a minute. But I think to highlight what you just said, the fact that there are cautions and like certain plants can even affect the liver in too high of doses really speaks to how powerful they can be, which is really exciting.
And I would guess a lot of people even navigating Lyme, especially if they’ve been through the more conventional treatments haven’t even gotten to experience or try these more botanical therapies yet. And I’m also curious, since some people listening may not have Lyme, are there any that seemingly could be helpful to cycle regularly just to help keep the body resilient and almost in like a more preventative aspect, especially if someone knows they’re in an area where they might encounter Lyme more commonly?
Darin: Well, I don’t really use herbs as a preventive measure for Lyme specifically. Now, there are topical essential oils that I highly recommend, particularly if you live in a Lyme endemic area, that you can spray on your shoes, on your skin, just to help protect against a tick bite, that can be incredibly helpful.
So people are going to be camping or going to, again, if you just live in an area where ticks are around, it’s really smart when you go outside. There’s a product I like called tick talk naturals, which is just a combination of essential oils. I think it’s got eucalyptus oil and clove oil and geranium oil, and you can just spray it over your shoes, spray it over your legs. Understand most people get tick bites from their feet. There’s also some research that if you spray your shoes and socks with a chemical called permethrin. Now, permethrin itself is very toxic when it’s wet. However, when it dries, it’s very non toxic, but if you spray shoes and socks with permethrin, it reduces your risk of a tick bite by over 70%. So I think it’s a good strategy for prevention.
My concern about taking herbs as a preventive, particularly for Lyme disease, if you take something long enough, is it going to have an adverse effect on your gut microbiome, even though these are plants and most of them get absorbed in the first part of your small intestine and most of your gut bugs live in the large intestine? It’s not as likely, but it’s possible if you take it long enough, so I don’t want to ever risk someone’s gut microbiome for that purposes. So, I really try and save the herbs for people who need it in the moment. I mean, there’s a lot of other herbs people take on a regular basis for different purposes that you can take on a long term basis and they’re very safe and they don’t cause any kind of liver issues. It’s kind of interesting when I read this report this morning about liver toxins.
I mean, some of the herbs they mentioned was like curcumin, green tea. Both of these herbs are actually very protective against various diseases. So they didn’t really give any information about how many people and what doses they took. And of course where you source the product also makes a huge difference. I think when you think about supplements as a whole, including herbs, understand they’re not really regulated by the FDA. They’re considered food, not drugs. So making sure that you get your herbs from reliable companies who do third party testing, make sure they don’t have toxic metals, make sure they don’t have pesticides and herbicides. That may be one of the factors for the people who were having these adverse effects, but certainly know the companies that we work with are all professional companies. They do their diligence and do that third party testing and they ensure their product’s clean and safe.
Katie: That’s such a great point. Those variables that can probably really drastically affect an outcome and that people might not think to check into. And obviously working with someone like you who’s qualified and is doing that screening is also another step that’s even more helpful. And you touched on this briefly, but I’m also curious for people.
I know, like I said, I have personal friends who are navigating Lyme disease and it seems like it can be kind of a long road and quite difficult to fully recover from. You said that you don’t think you can ever fully eradicate it from the body. However, it sounds like people can move to a place where they are fully recovered and or are not experiencing symptoms in daily life.
I would love for you to speak more about that as a kind of a message of hope to anyone in the Lyme disease experience of life right now. And, or what is that prognosis like? How often or how long does it often take for people to start feeling better and then to feel fully resolved?
Darin: Yeah, I think Lyme is one of the most frustrating illnesses to deal with because for most people, it’s a roller coaster. You have those days where you’re feeling a little better and then other days where you feel like you’re regressing and no logical explanation. You didn’t change anything in your diet, your home, your lifestyle.
And I think it probably has more to do with the replication cycle of the organism. Lyme is an incredibly slow growing organism. Understand the most bacteria in your body replicate every 10 to 20 minutes. Lyme replicates every one to 16 days. So when you’re in treatment, this is why you can’t just take a week of antibiotics and get over it because that slow replication cycle, it just takes longer to get at the bug when it’s most vulnerable so that you can kill it. And it’s kind of interesting, if you look at something like tuberculosis, which is a form of mycobacteria. Mycobacteria replicate every 15 to 20 hours, which again is relatively slow, considering most bacteria replicate every 10 or 15 minutes. And they’ll give you three heavy duty antibiotics for nine to 12 months to get rid of TB. But we’re happy to give Lyme patients two to three weeks of doxycycline. It just doesn’t make any biological sense based on the replication cycle of the organism. But because of that slow nature, I tell my patients, six to 18 months of treatment is normal, and there’s going to be a lot of up and down along that way. However, the expectation is that when there is a backslide, it’s not as intense, it doesn’t last as long. You get through it quicker and then eventually get to a point where there’s no backslide anymore. But again, while we’re looking at dealing with Lyme again, we’re also looking at all these other factors.
The best way I think I can think about Lyme too, is if you’re standing on the lake in the morning and it’s a nice quiet lake and a motorboat goes blowing by. The boat can be long gone, but the waves are still rippling in the wake. And so Lyme has this capacity to kind of create this swath of destruction in the body so it can disrupt your hormones and thyroid in particular is susceptible. It can disrupt your immune system. I have people that never had an allergy or sensitivity in their life until they get Lyme and now foods bother them, mold bothers them, pollen bothers them, chemicals bother them. So while we’re looking at targeting the organism. Again, we still have to make sure your hormones are balanced.
We need to make sure that your immune system is balanced. So we do a lot in our practice with immunotherapy to help desensitize people against these things they’ve now become sensitized to. So it’s a much broader scope than just killing the bug. And I think this is where a lot of doctors fail with Lyme disease.
Is they focus so much on killing the bug that they forget there’s all these things going on your body that have been disrupted and certainly that are interfering with your terrain. And if they’re not addressing those, the progress doesn’t move nearly as well as we’d like.
Katie: That makes sense. And I know even we started this conversation talking about like the nuance of that and the individual factors relevant to each person and taking them all into account. And I know you have a lot of resources around this. This is a lot of the work that you do and you’re considered one of the top experts in this realm.
I will, of course, make sure your book is linked in the show notes for anybody who is navigating Lyme disease. But where can people find you and learn more from you and or work with you if they feel like they are just not getting good answers?
Darin: Yeah. Best place is just go to my website. It’s just Darin Ingels ND. com and all of our information’s there about my practice, my book, and we have a lot of other great online information for people struggling with Lyme disease.
Katie: Amazing. Well, Dr. Darin, thank you. I’ve learned a lot. Like I said, I, as far as I’m aware, this is not something I’m navigating, but I know many people near and dear to me who are, and I love that you are taking such a multifaceted approach and helping so many people. Thank you for everything you shared today and for your time for being here.
Darin: Great. Thanks, Katie.
Katie: And thank you for listening. I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
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