966: PANDAS/PANS: Understanding and Thriving Through Childhood Neuroimmune Disorders With Dr. Jaban Moore

Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from barbaraoneill.online, and this episode is all about PANS and PANDAS, what they are, and understanding how to thrive through these childhood neuroimmune disorders. And if you’re not familiar with these, Dr. Jaban gives a lot of detail understanding about what they are, what’s connected to them, what causes them, and the very nuanced way to work through treatment to not make things worse. And how full recovery is in fact possible with the right understanding of what’s going on in your particular body.

And Dr. Jaban Moore and his team run the Redefining Wellness Center in Kansas City, Missouri, but and also see clients virtually worldwide. He helps people in all walks of life and with all ranges of conditions, and he specializes in Lyme mold, PANS, and PANDAS, autism, parasitic infections, and environmental toxicities.

As you will immediately hear in this episode, he is an abundance of knowledge and very good at explaining these concepts in easy to understand and key takeaway format. So let’s learn from Dr. Jaban Moore.

Dr. Jaban, welcome back. Thank you for being here again.

Jaban: Oh, thanks for having me. I love it.

Katie: Well, we had an incredible first episode together this time recording all about mold and you explained so brilliantly a multifaceted approach for finding out if there’s been mold issues and treating it and how it relates to so many other things that might be going on in the body. And I will link to that one in the show notes. In this one, I would love to switch gears and tackle another topic that might be really relevant to a lot of parents listening and that some people listening might not even realize how relevant it is to them. And that is the topic of pans and pandas. And I think to start broad, I would guess people have heard those terms, but in case they haven’t, can you define for us what they are and what the key differences are between the two?

Jaban: So pans and pandas is alphabet soup. It’s pediatric neuro onset of a psychiatric disorder caused by strep, so that’s PANDAS. PANS is basically the exact same thing, not caused by strep. So it’s any causation out there. So, what it boils down to, scientifically speaking, is your brain has inflammation happening due to an immune response triggered by something.

So in PANDAS case, it’s triggered by strep. By PANS, it can be caused by mold toxicity, Lyme disease, parasites, viruses, trauma, honestly anything that generates an immune system reaction. So for those listening, if you’ve ever heard of rheumatoid arthritis, MS, Sjogren’s, lupus, any of these autoimmune conditions, it’s thought, and I’ve got a lot of thoughts on this, but it’s thought that your body is attacking a tissue type.

So in rheumatoid arthritis, your bones, and lupus, it could be your skin. And many of these other things, it could be your muscles or anywhere in your body, but your body is attacking itself for, in Western medicine, no known reason. I give that caveat because I oftentimes have found reason and there’s even research on PubMed to suggest many reasons for these types of diagnoses.

And in PANS, PANDAS case, the pediatric piece means the P at the front. It’s kids. If you take away the P, it’s just called ANDA. So it’s an adult version of it. So it can affect anybody. So yeah, that’s the letter soup there for you.

Katie: And I have some personal friends who have had children who were personally affected by this, and I’ve seen how dramatically it can impact someone’s life. What are some of the early warning signs that parents can be aware of and pay attention to, to hopefully if this is something that’s going to become an issue, catch it early on?

Jaban: Yeah, so it’s kind of an interesting one. And I want to give a little background on it. It was discovered in 2012 by Dr. Suito, who was a researcher at NIH for autism. And what happened was, to make the long story short, some kids just didn’t fit all the parameters for what true autism was, but they were definitely dealing with something neurological that was affecting their outward presentation of life.

So eventually studies were done, research was found and they named it PANS or PANDAS, which is the autoimmune encephalitis situation. And it can look very similar to autism of all different varying severities, but it’s motor ticks, movements, verbal ticks, it’s anxiety, whether that be just general anxiety, social anxiety, separation anxiety. It can be a very fast onset.

And that’s where the PANS PANDAS diagnoses are given is if you have a illness, or some sort of immune response where a person is sick, and then within about two weeks, you end up having this change. You have these symptoms develop pretty rapidly. Now that’s the criteria for PANS PANDAS. If that’s not what you experienced as a parent or maybe you just didn’t notice because you’re like, Oh, they’re, they’re recovering. They’re feeling better. They’re not all the way there. And you don’t report it quick enough. It could fall into the ANDAS, which is just, AE autoimmune encephalitis. ANDAS as would be the adult version, but AE autoimmune encephalitis category.

And these symptoms can be loss of handwriting. They typically, kids with PANS typically get diagnosed later, more of like the four year old, the eight year old, or even up to 14 year old age range. So you can have loss of handwriting. You can start doing more poorly in school. ODD, ADHD, ADD are all a part of this. Tourette’s, about 25 percent of people tested with Tourette’s ended up with finding inflammation in the brain.

And just to throw a little caveat at that, the Cunningham panel is a test that initially gained ground as being part of that gold standard diagnostics. So besides the symptoms I’ve mentioned, the pattern of it has to happen within two weeks for PANS and PANDAS. But if it’s longer than that, then it’s AE. The Cunningham panel is a antibody test.

It’s five antibodies that are for the brain, that if they’re positive can say, yeah, we have the autoimmune encephalitis happening. There’s been a lot more advancement. There’s a test from Vibrant America called a neural zoomer plus, and it’s got somewhere around 50 markers. And I use this in my clinic all the time where we can run a test to go, okay, is there inflammation happening to the brain due to the immune system, yes or no?

And if it’s a yes, then awesome, let’s go figure out why. So that’s where we run down that rabbit hole of Lyme, mold, parasite, bacteria, et cetera. I mean, if you have these tests positive, then we know that there’s inflammation happening and we now can go, okay, these symptoms that my child is experiencing: depression, irritability, food restriction. These symptoms can actually be correlated back to inflammation in the brain.

It’s not just them. And that’s how they’re differentiating autism from PANS PANDAS. In some regard, is this autoimmune inflammatory brain situation. And the studies are showing even eight, nine years ago, this was one in 200 kids is what they expected. And I think the number is just massively higher than this because most kids that you’ve ever met that are on ADHD meds or have difficulty in school, anxiety or depression, have never had their brain tested. So we just don’t know the real number.

Katie: That makes sense, and it makes sense how this can be such a dramatic impact, especially on kids, and especially you mentioned so quickly. Why, is it more specific to children, or why do infections like strep seem to have this severe neuropsychiatric sort of trigger and symptoms in kids especially? And as a secondary part of that, in your experience, is it possible to overcome this in our kids?

It seems like this is a growing problem. Is it possible to reverse it?

Jaban: Absolutely. It’s, it’s possible to reverse it. I’ll get to that. But the, why is it, why is strep affecting kids more or is it? I don’t really know that it is affecting kids more. I mean, look at the mental health crisis that we’re experiencing in this nation of the United States and much less around the world.

Depression is the second leading cause of people for taking disability. Anxiety seems rampant. I mean, when I ask, I asked a client just yesterday because she’s in my clinic, she came in, she was nearly bedridden, couldn’t work anymore, just debilitating symptoms. And I have people rate zero to 10. So she rated her anxiety, depression, irritability, brain fog, fatigue, digestive, dysfunctional symptoms all around eight or nine when she came in and yesterday she was like two or three.

It’s been, been a while. We’ve been working together for a year, year and a half. And I asked her because I always ask people like, what’s your frame of reference for giving me a two or three as a symptom? She said, well, I just feel like I could be better.

And although that’s very possible, I go, where’s your frame of reference? Go ask your friends. And the funny thing is, is 75 percent of adults over the age of 40 in the United States have some sort of chronic symptom or chronic condition. So she went out and asked her friends. She’s like, oh my gosh, everybody I know is struggling.

Everyone is struggling. She’s like, I almost found no one that wasn’t struggling. So just to say, are infections affecting adults? Absolutely. I think if you just sitting here listening, just go ask your 10 best friends. And since it’s Wellness Mama, I imagine there’s a lot of mamas, a lot of women here.

Women are much better to communicate with than men. Men are just like, I’m fine. So, all the women. Go ask 10 of your friends, are you struggling with something? And if they open up to you, the answer is likely going to be yes. I had one girl ask, 9 out of 10 of her friends had a digestive issue. This woman said 10 out of 10 of her friends were having mental health struggles.

I mean, that’s incredibly high prevalence. So, I think it’s happening to adults and children. We have understood it in children more because you put 30 little kids in a room with an adult and they’re struggling and they’re acting out and you’re more likely to not be able to handle a classroom. A lot of teachers are now putting up those red flags if something’s not right and then telling the parents to figure it out.

So, I think it’s being called on a lot more than maybe as an adult where you have the cognitive capacity to really just step back and say, I still got to go to work, still got to pay the bills, still got to get up on my own responsibility. Whereas kids, when a kid tells you that they are having intrusive thoughts, and they don’t want to exist anymore or they want to harm themselves.

I think that throws up a lot more red flag than an adult who knows that if you say that in society, it might not be taken nearly as well. And so a lot of times it’s hidden. I’m not giving the excuse that we shouldn’t tell people. We should, and we should get help. We should not have to be having intrusive thoughts.

But I think kids, they just say things, they just act certain ways and it’s more honest. Adults are hiding a lot more from my experience. Cause many of the people I work with, you know, they put off a front and nobody around them knows nearly what they’re experiencing. But also, kids don’t have a blood brain barrier that is as developed. So when we are below the age of 24, our brain is still developing. Our protective mechanism around our brain is still developing. So I think that these things do potentially happen a little faster and it’s possible to happen more often, but I think that’s outweighed by adults, just having more insults to their immune system, more toxins, and more stress.

So I feel like they probably happen at similar rates just for different reasons. So when your brain is more vulnerable, cause we don’t have that protective mechanism. We also, for men don’t have the same amount of testosterone and testosterone seems to improve the immune system’s ability to respond. So they say, Oh, you’re going to grow out of this. Potentially when puberty hits, males will have that increased anabolic nature and may see reduction in symptoms. But if they don’t, they’re also bigger, faster, stronger, and mental health wise, not good. And we also see suicide rates going up. We see aggression going up.

So I’ve worked with kids where, at extreme levels, and this is not the normal, but the extreme levels, they’re aggressive. They’re physically aggressive. They actually blackout because they have this inflammatory response in their brain. They do not remember what’s happening. And they’ve thrown their father through a wall because they’re 17 and 200 pounds.

So in extreme levels, this can become very, very problematic. Or I’ve got a 17 year old girl I was just working with who won’t leave the house. I’ve got a 24 year old girl that I just actually met in person in California. And she’s dealing with very extreme symptoms with positive testing for brain inflammation.

So when the blood brain barrier is open, infections can get there easier, toxin can get in there easier, and until it’s closed, the brain is a little more vulnerable. So I’d say that was a really long winded explanation of yeah, there’s a reason why kids might have more vulnerability. However, adults damage that same barrier by drinking alcohol, inhaling mold, putting on toxins onto their tissues and their skin, trauma, overworking, under sleeping.

So I’m not really sure how much more vulnerable kids really are.

Katie: That makes sense. And it also speaks to yeah, I think adults are capable of hiding a lot more. And of course the inner work and the trauma side is a whole nother piece that could be many episodes all on its own and was a big missing piece for me as well. But you explained really well the immune dysregulation and inflammation side of this, and how, just like when we talked about mold, like so many things seemingly are overlapping and connected when it comes to something as nuanced as PANS or PANDAS.

I would love to shift into talking about, where is even the starting point for addressing this? I feel like it gave a lot of hope that you said, yes, this can be overcome. And I would guess it’s not a simple, one approach, one supplement, one answer, to fix it, but I would love to delve into the recovery side a little bit as well.

And what are some of the ways we can support kids who have PANS or PANDAS and what does that recovery road look like?

Jaban: Well the first thing is identification. You have to figure out what’s going on. So find a provider because this is, it’s extremely nuanced and there’s a high risk that as you go through treatment, there are going to be some ups and downs. So whatever symptoms you’re seeing, if you don’t deal with the problem, are going to get worse on their own doing nothing.

But if you are dealing with the problem, when you, let’s say, go after strep, it is going to release endotoxins. It’s going to create a higher immune flare, and you may increase symptoms short term. And whether you’re dealing with an adult or a child dealing with this, you need to mitigate a lot of those side effects because we’re dealing with that nervous system, immune system response. And if you just simply say, let’s go, we’re going to white knuckle our way through this, we can handle it. You’re actually going to put the body into a tailspin that sometimes is really hard to get out because you force it further into fight or flight triggering bigger, longer potentially, and I don’t want to use the word permanent as in forever, but what will seem permanent because it makes it last longer.

So longer lasting symptom problems. So no, do not just Herx and go through it. Do not just white knuckle your way through this. Do not find a provider who is just like, take these high doses of whatever that is, antibiotics, IVIG, plasmapheresis, herbal cocktails of cleanses, detoxes, and eventually we’re going to get to the other side, it’s going to be okay. Don’t do that. So figure out what the problem is, do the testing. How much inflammation do we have in the brain? What infections and toxins are we dealing with? How suppressed is the mitochondria?

How depleted are we with nutrients? Step one for me, oftentimes, is get all that information and create a roadmap. My roadmaps look like this: there’s the starter category. So let’s, figure out what nutrients we can bring in. Are we depleted of sodium, potassium? Refer back to my mold talk on the way that this is important, but if you don’t have sodium and potassium, detoxification, movement of toxins out of your body is going to be hard. Make sure your mitochondria are healthy.

So go to that organic acid test, because a lot of times with kids, if their mitochondria are suppressed, you go into cell danger response, which is a… I don’t know when this was discovered probably the last 20 years. It’s where your body’s immune system goes into, I’m in danger, attack everything. And eventually it can lead to apoptosis, which is cell death.

So instead of that cell allowing itself to, to get infected with viruses or turn into a cancer cell, it’s supposed to cause itself to die. While this is happening, right before it, it’s kind of attack everything, release cytokine storms, and inflammatory responses and your body feels miserable as you’re going through this. So we need to figure out how not to push the body into that and how to mitigate the body from what level of that it’s in. And oftentimes with kids we are trying to use things like quercetic, stinging nettle, Chinese skullcap, Japanese knotweed.

We’re bringing these calming immune modulating herbs in. We can also use homeopathics. And for those in higher, more extreme cases, we can bring in medications like low dose naltrexone. We can use antihistamine diet to homeopathic, to herb, to medication as necessary, depending upon what’s going to be working for that person.

So we have to modulate the immune system after we figure out, so test don’t guess. Modulate the immune system so that we can get the body under control to stop having more reactions. Create a safe environment. And that doesn’t just mean, you know, we’re not getting shot at. That means the toxins from mold, VOCs from the house, water that we drink, which 170 million Americans are drinking radioactive water.

So we’ve got to fix that, for those who are dealing with that. So if you live in Miami, most of California, Chicago, and a lot of other places, water’s radioactive. So we got to fix that. Make sure that the food we’re eating isn’t putting more toxins and harm and stress. Which is yes, pesticides and organophosphates and all that, but it’s also histamine foods that are going to generate more immune response because you’re fueling more histamines. Which the histamines then go to the brain and cause more flares, more inflammation.

So stop fueling the immune system with more particulates that can create more irritation. So after we have a safe environment, then we have to go to the nervous system and we have to go, do you feel stressed out? Even though now we’ve created a safe environment. And most of the time the pattern is set and the answer is yes.

So that’s where we do somatic and limbic and vagal nerve exercise, which adults is basically physical therapy for the brain. For kids it’s harder because if they’re below 14, getting them to do meditation, breath work, eye exercises, thought pattern recognition and retraining is going to be very difficult.

So sometimes it’s more emotional freedom technique. It’s more of the vagus nerve exercises, which can be some breath work, holding breath, cold shower, those sorts of things, which getting a young kid to do some of these is a little harder. So then we can go into neural feedback. And then from there, I actually haven’t delved into this, but this past weekend I got a neural therapy session with a naturopath, Clement Lee in LA, which are injections of procaine around ganglia of nerves in my body.

And by doing this, it helped to reset, just like turning your computer on and off your autonomic nervous system. Which is basically saying, you’ve been stuck in fight or flight for a long time because you, let’s say you lived in a moldy house or you had a traumatic marriage, or you had a childhood that was traumatic.

Well, let’s say you’re now safe from all that, but your body may not know it yet. It may still be stuck in that fight, flight or freeze pattern. This is how you go in and reset it using a very short half life 20 minute anesthesia that calms the nervous system and just gives you that reset. And honestly, for me, I didn’t have a great reason to do this besides to say to my clients, I’ve done it, I’ve experienced it, I can tell you what the procedure feels like.

But after leaving, I was pretty nervous system wise balanced. I’ve gone through primal trust and some other things. I’ve actually lost like four pounds in like four days. So I’m like, wow, my body probably had some subconscious level of stress that was keeping cortisol and water retention elevated. And by no means am I mad that I’ve lost four or five pounds in four days.

So getting the nervous system under control. So we’ve gone from test, to let’s make sure that we have the appropriate environment, the proper nervous system, immune modulation. Those are our four steps I’ve gotten so far. Anything you want to ask questions on before I keep going?

Katie: No, keep going. I’m making notes though.

Jaban: All right. So, we get into the next phase of this, which now is we’ve got the tests, we’ve got the environment, we’ve got the nervous system, got the immune modulation. Now we’ve got to go into actually dealing with whatever we found. So in many cases, the order that I’m gonna go, and this is based off of what we found for you.

If you had everything, it would be this: parasite, bacteria, colonizing mold, and then mold toxins that are just inside your body, environmental toxicities, heavy metals, viruses, and then fungus. So those are the categories of infections and toxins I’m going to go through in that order based off of your body’s needs.

So that’s a common order, not necessarily the order your body will have. It does not work for everybody, but about 70 percent of the time, that’s what I would go on with the ones that you have. So if you don’t have heavy metal, then I’m just going to skip that step and then keep going down the list. So that would be the order that we’re going to go in.

But with people that have immune system issues. So if you’re autoimmune yourself, if you have PANS, PANDAS, if you have AE autoimmune encephalitis, then your body, when I go in to press it to detox or to deal with infections, it’s going to flare up. So that’s where that initial immune modulation piece came into play.

And it’s also where we have to go at the pace your body can let us. So for me, if I’m going to take para three from cell core, I’m going to do 30 drops three times a day as my standard adult dose. You may not be able to handle that. Because your body is more reactive because the immune system is more in that fight or flight state. Even with all the work we’ve already done, all these things are still inside you creating that fight or flight.

So we may have to, for you, start at 10 drops three times and build up slowly. So if you have an increase of your symptoms due to any phase of the work that we’re doing, more than 20 percent increase, I’m going to stop us or pivot us or bring in something to support your body because hermetic stresses have been studied.

So good stress going to the gym. It’s good for us, right? Except for when we work out too hard and we end up with rhabdomyolysis, which means we worked out too hard. Same thing with detoxing. If you have a 20 percent increase, that’s probably par for the course. So if your symptoms previously were a 5 out of 10 on fatigue and now we go to 6, it takes a little energy to detox, I’m okay with that.

If you go to a 9, not okay. We’ve got to do something different. So that’s why recording our symptoms once a month for me and we actually document that every month to make sure that we’re moving in the right direction and we’re not going too hard. If we ever have it flare up too far, then that’s where we go, okay.

What’s going on? Is the body not handling this? Do we need to bring more immune modulation? Do we need to do more detox support? Do we need to just go slower for this body because we don’t have the energy to handle it? So we have to go in there and figure out what your body is needing and we move through each phase of what I’ve talked about on my roadmap until we get to the end. And ideally in the end of this, because I told you there’s the starters and then we get to the stressors, which is what we’ve been talking about now.

All the stressors, the infections, the toxins, the traumas. Then we go to the effects. So at the end of all the stressors being dealt with the effects, which is going to be Mitochondrial dysfunction, neurotransmitter dysfunction, and every symptom you gave me when we got started, those things should be improved.

So I’m not doing western medicine where I’m going, let’s attack this pure infection, or let’s attack this diagnostic criteria. I’m saying let’s optimize your body to the best of its possible outcome, remove anything that’s stressing it. Empty out the backpack of stress, trauma, infections, toxins. I call them all little boulders or all little books that you’re carrying around. Empty the backpack of all that.

And you’ll feel a ton lighter and your symptoms are going to fade out.

Katie: Wow, that was so comprehensive. And I love that you even address things like the limbic, somatic, and vagal nerve side. I feel like I was a very slow learner on the importance of those pieces and the importance of addressing trauma. And I’ve talked before about how it was actually when I dove into those pieces that all the physical stuff I had been doing for years actually started really having an effect.

And so I feel like this is a not talked about enough piece that is seemingly connected to all aspects of our health. And on my own journey, I had autoimmune thyroid issues. So I had Hashimoto’s years ago, and now it is fully resolved. My most recent test had no detectable antibodies. So it’s not just even in remission, but it’s not present in my body at this moment.

So I have tremendous faith in the body’s ability to heal. And it sounds like you have such a beautiful detailed approach for working with each individual body in moving toward healing. And I’m curious, kind of two things. Are there any supportive dietary and lifestyle factors that people can do and implement immediately if they’re dealing with something like PANS or PANDAS? And in light of  my own Hashimoto’s example, is this something that can fully resolve or is this more of like ongoing management? Like, do you see complete improvement in people with this long term?

Jaban: Yeah. So, yes, it can resolve. Yes, it can go away. I’ve got, like I was talking about that kid earlier, you know, he’s in college now. So tons of symptom resolution a decade later. I’ve got other kids that I get pictures from their parents of, you know, they were nine when we ended our active care.

And although I’ll still see the parent come in and tweak things here and there for just optimized living. Symptomatically speaking, they’re just like, we’re good. So it can absolutely resolve. If you remove the reasons why the body is stressed, it’s no longer stressed, right? If you, if you remove a job from your life that’s a ton of stress and you get a job you like, you feel a lot better. The old one doesn’t come back.

As far as diets, I’m a little bit, I’ve got an opinion on diets. I don’t love talking diets and part of that is outside of eating a organic, whole food, macro balanced, meaning somewhere around 30 to 40 percent of whatever macro you like the best of each one, you should be fairly healthy.

So I like to put together something that people really can do for a lifetime, not something people are going to do for a short period of time when I talk about outcomes. However, when I’m in a sticky situation with clients and they have immune issues, PANS, PANDAS, I’m looking at, do we have oxalates, which can in kids get to the brain very easily.

Oxalates are a byproduct of mold, yeast or diet. So I do put people on an oxalate free diet or low diet if we found oxalates in their organic acid test, to decrease the amount of immune irritation and blood vessel and just simply inflammation generation that oxalates are going to cause. And you can see kids see positive response from that fairly quickly.

So that can take a bit of an edge off. And the other one is a histamine diet. So decreasing histamines when you have an autoimmune condition is going to decrease that overall immune response. The problem is I hate restricting people’s diets. And when you do both of those diets combined, which I do have a diet guide for that, it’s pretty restrictive.

So this is not something I want to do long term. This is something that can be done for a few months as we’re getting things under control. But I do not want people to hear me saying, go oxalate free or diet a histamine free diet long term, because it is not a way of life that is longterm going to be beneficial.

It is going to end up creating problems of its own, just like any diet, carnivore, keto, vegan. None of these are meant to be done for a lifetime. They are not balanced in 99 percent of cases. There’s always that. And there’s going to be that influencers that’s going to come and scold me and say, I’ve been this way forever and I’m good.

And I’m going to say, great. 99 percent of people should not be on these restrictive diets long term. Whether that’s for their mental health, their nutrient absorption health, their genetic absorption and processing health, or simply just best physical outcomes. So yes, histamine and oxalate can show fast change results, but you have to be doing the other stuff too.

Katie: I think that’s such important caveat to understand. And I also was on a very restrictive autoimmune diet for a while and eventually realized my goal was not to feel good and to thrive when eating this very narrow range of foods and being in a very structured lifestyle where I was doing all these things every day. The ultimate goal was actually to use those things as tools and to move toward healing so that my body was more resilient and could handle whatever inputs I would put in it.

Even I still choose whenever possible, like really healthy inputs. However, to be able to thrive and not have huge negative symptoms, if I eat something out at a restaurant and I don’t know the sourcing, or if I am exposed to something in my environment, and that was a long journey for me. And I feel like it’s been so worthwhile.

And I love that you said, you know, this is not a lifetime long term thing. These are like tools that can be used. It seems like often we can get stuck in the restriction and then that feels so limiting long term. And I love how both of our topics we got to cover there’s so much personalization. And it sounds like you really do a tremendous amount of detailed analysis and testing to help people figure out their very specific pieces. For somebody who’s going through any of the things we’ve talked about, where can they find you? I know you have a ton of informational resources and that you work with people directly. So where can people find you and learn from you?

Jaban: Yeah, I want to reinforce what you said. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people, and I see it all the time. I’m at conferences, I’m speaking, I’m teaching, I’m at dinner and the influencers, the speakers, the doctors, live a extreme restrictive lifestyle. So they are preaching what they’re doing. So I appreciate that they are connected to what they’re doing and what they’re saying and they are congruent.

But if you say I’m in remission resolved and it’s over and it’s gone and I’ve healed yet you’re living this extreme restrictive lifestyle, no, it’s not. You have a bandaid on it. You stop the bleeding, which is a step of it. I’ve got many clients that are, that’s where they are at in their journey. They, they’ve gotten to the point where as long as they do a few things, they’re feeling pretty good, but there’s more to go to get to freedom.

And I admit something on purpose on these podcasts on calls so that people know that yes, I still eat organic food and I still eat a healthy diet. I still work out six days a week. I have a air doctor in my home, I got four of them. I drink distilled or reverse osmosis water, depending upon where I’m at.

I do a lot of these things that I think are just long term health needs. But if I’m out at a restaurant, and I’m with friends, I enjoy having a cocktail sometimes. Alcohol is bad for you. It is a toxin. It is going to flare your body up, and it will create inflammation. So hear me out. I know that. Sometimes I enjoy the taste of it.

And my body has no long term side effects. And it can adapt to that stress. So if you cannot step away from your habits without having a major crash, you might have a little bit more to go. And I just wanted to reinforce that for people and say, increase your resilience to where it can adapt to stress, whatever that stress is that you want to do.

Is it run a marathon? Cause that’s stressful. Is it have a glass of wine with your friends? Is it eat a burger and French fries? Whatever it is, it may not be good for you, but your mental health is also important and massively restrictive lifestyles will break most people eventually and do just as much damage as my cocktail.

So I’m not suggesting you should go drink. I’m just saying, do not get stuck in a rut where you are so restrictive that it eventually will cause likely more stress on your nervous system. And you can find me if after all of that, you still want to see me, you can find me at Dr. Jaban Moore.  Come to our website. You can see us virtually across the world, or my Instagram. We’re educating all the time.

Katie: And I will link to those. I think both of our episodes have really highlighted that healing is absolutely possible when you understand how to support the body in all of the ways it’s requesting to be supported through your symptoms. And I love how detailed your approach is and how personalized you get. It’s been a pleasure to know you as a friend and to see how many people you’ve helped and in such tremendous ways. Thank you so much for your time today. You’re an absolute wealth of knowledge and I’m so grateful for everything you’ve shared.

Jaban: Thanks for having me.

Katie: And thank you, as always, for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.