Gut - Immune - Bug -- A R3AL3 Integrative Medicine Approach by Lori Gerber D.O.

 

-- Speaker 1 00:00:01 Welcome my outside the box thinkers to the Anti-Aging Unraveled podcast where I am your host, Dr. Lori Gerber. In this podcast we'll explore the fascinating world of personalized anti-aging medicine that considers the whole person inside and out and how all systems are interconnected to each other. In today's world of modern medicine, we often find ourselves like just another number in a system that prioritizes quick fixes over sustainable and more natural solutions. Well, let's get ready for a paradigm shift. In health and beauty, we look far beyond treating symptoms and aim to get to the root cause of our health and cosmetic issues. This podcast is your go-to source for all things natural outside the box and innovative in integrative medicine and cosmetic dermatology. So sit back, relax and get ready to dive deep into the world of functional medicine and aesthetics. With me, Dr. Laurie Gerber, let's take a trip down the Real Skin Revolution Pathway together.
Speaker 1 00:01:05 Hello everybody and welcome to the latest edition of Anti-Aging Unraveled. I'm so glad to bring this to you and I hope to that you like this new format. We're gonna be doing a little introduction to cases and I wanted to go through a patient case that had come into me and talk a little bit about how we're different. We're a program that it strives to put the links back in integrative health, meaning we, we connect the dots, right? So we're trying to make it so that you understand how things are interconnected and how our body systems really don't work isolated. And it's called the Real three method. And we're gonna talk a lot about how we're reviewing your information and we're going through your storyline, your timeline, your results, and how that's different from what your primary care doctor might do for you. So it's really exciting to me to be able to bring this to you in a format that maybe makes a little more sense to you than some of our other formats where we're talking about specific topics.
Speaker 1 00:02:07 So this particular patient that we're gonna talk about this whatever, this podcast this week, I'm gonna try to do these every other week or maybe at least once a month, is a really interesting one. And she came to me basically to do hormones, but when I started talking to her, it was a very different picture. So again, we go back to those three Rs of our real method. We're gonna retrieve your information in the story, we're gonna reconstruct the timeline of events and then we're gonna review data that no one else has looked at before. So that's your R three. And then we're gonna start to, for treatments, eliminate toxins and and exposures. We're gonna add back in nutrients and things that are beneficial to your body. And for our outcome, we're looking at improved longevity and what we'll call reduction of lines and luminosity of the skin.
Speaker 1 00:02:57 So what we've seen is we get longevity and and health longevity, but we also get that skin and aesthetic improvement. So that's really what our, our three method is all about. And we have a new teaching program on Thinkific if you guys are interested as providers, um, if you're listening to this as a provider, I'd love to get you started. Feel free to look us up on uh, think IC or it's on our website@mydrlaurie.com and it is all virtual and I teach you the methods of how to put these pieces together, which is really exciting. I'm so glad to have this as part of our armament of things to be able to offer. So we're first gonna talk about our patient today and go through her history. So her intake, she was born in 1976, right? So she's not very old, she's 43 years old.
Speaker 1 00:03:47 And she comes to me pri as a vet tech, primarily complaining of, and I'll read you her intake here. Weight gain is a four out of five. Anxiety is a four out of five. Depression is a five out of five night sweats, irregular periods, irritability, headaches are a five out of five, mood swings are a four and irritability as well as fluid retention is a four. Fatigue is a three. Arthritis is a three out of five, difficulty with libido and orgasm is a four out of five. Indigestion is a three out of five GI issues or diarrhea. Constipation is a three out five and food sensitivity is a three out five. And her statement on the bottom of the paperwork was just to feel normal again. And she had been feeling unwell for quite some time. She says that --

-- she has allergies, arthritis, asthma, depression, high blood pressure, migraines and quote unquote irritable bowel syndrome.
Speaker 1 00:04:48 And says that she had fertility treatments that ended in 2017. She does smoke and does occasionally and does drink caffeine and is on quite the list of medication and supplements. She was on Cymbalta, Ritalin, propanolol, Wellbutrin, methylfolate, vitamin C, zinc, rose, hips, turmeric, burdock root, magnesium, Zyrtec and Zza. And she said she has seasonal allergies and food sensitivities slash allergies. Again, she was a veterinary technician, five eight, a hundred eighty pounds. So you know, not super overweight but definitely is complaining of weight gain that is not normal for her. So on looking at these symptoms guys, I start to put this picture in my head of a female that's really not super at the age of what I would call menopause. Maybe she's starting to lose her hormones and having what I would call like an early peri perimenopause where her testosterone and her progesterone may have started to decline just based on her history, her low libido, her difficulty with orgasm and her mood can all be related to low progesterone and low testosterone, maybe even a little bit of weight gain because estrogen tends to look dominant at that time in our life.

Speaker 1 00:06:10 We start to lose testosterone first, then progesterone, then the estrogen. So this is something that at times we see as a problem. However, after talking to her, I got a little bit of a different story. This came on pretty acutely and abruptly a couple years ago and she started to continually get migraines and headaches and joint pains and was told that she had arthritis. And she, like I said, she's a veterinary technician and had a really hard time at times even completing her job, which is getting animals on and off a table, often helping out with surgeries and other and other things. So when I did her labs, I decided initially to throw on a bug paddle. And I don't do this with everyone, but I'll tell you when I read, when I listened, I should say to her story between her intake and her in-person story, I really got a feel for that timeline have starting a couple years ago and really just maybe being something a little bit more what I would call acute or causative as opposed to totally a menopausal syndrome.

Speaker 1 00:07:22 So we threw on some bug labs and some inflammatory markers and what we found was a T G F beta, which is inflammatory in nature, right? So we know that TGF beta is like a growth factor and is actually inflammatory. We see this with some cancers but with also bug infections or sometimes we actually see it with mold and allergic responses. And our TGF beta was high, which was one just kind of little inkling that she might have a possible problem that's going on with an underlying infection. If I go to her other labs that were for infection, I check some weird stuff. So I check some what we call like a typhoid grouping of antibodies. I check something called Bartonella. We check for elicia and anaplasma again two other bugs. We check mycoplasma pneumonia and our mycoplasma pmo. Long-term antibodies were significantly high. That should not be the case.

Speaker 1 00:08:20 And usually that bug likes to play with others. It does occasionally play in isolated conditions. But I will tell you upon further questioning, we did find out that she had covid and after covid a lot of this stuff started to progress. Okay, so now we have another bug that gets involved covid and if you already have an underlying infection that will come out in play. If not, sometimes you just get these co-infections that can really take advantage of the situation, which Mycoplasma does very often after covid and creates like a respiratory type syndrome after covid. And we see this with a lot of long haulers. Now another thing that was positive on her labs was something called complement. Complement our cells that fight infection and her C four A, which is a type of complement that is activated complement, it tells me that our immune system is doing something actively, it wants to literally fight something, it's actively fighting.

Speaker 1 00:09:18 And that was in the five thousands range. And that tells me that her body is actively fighting something off. It shouldn't be high for no reason. And then we got to kind of the bottom of my lab work and she actually came up positive as --

-- well for rocky mounted spotted fever. Now she actually came back at a pretty high titer. It was one to 1 28, which the higher that bottom number gets, the more positive the titer. It starts off at like one to 64 and then doubles and triples and quadruples. So, and it's a long-term antibody. So this is telling me it's been in her system for a while. This is not new, this didn't just get here last week, it's at least six to eight weeks old. And what we see in this is that people start to get fevery achy fluid retention, maybe they have respiratory distress, they can't get outta bed.

Speaker 1 00:10:08 And her biggest complaint was not being able to get out of bed and get to work in the morning. And her joints were so icky by the end of the day, sometimes she had to leave early 'cause she couldn't function. Okay? So in that case this was surprising. And guess who gets a call from the Department of Health in this regard? Because she came up positive and they wanted to make sure she went to the ER right away because this can be an acute illness that can be very dangerous. Now, in this case, I like to think of it a little bit more along the lines. Lines of like Lyme, it's a bug that likes to play with Lyme quite frequently. This girl happened to be from Colorado and is a vet tech. Lots of tick exposure, lots of exposure to the West, which is where Rocky Mount and Spotted Fever is most common.

Speaker 1 00:10:52 And while in many parts of our health world, we think of Rocky Mount and Spotted Fever as an acute disease, kind of like some people think about Lyme as a more acute disease, we do see Rocky Mount and Spotted Fever as a more chronic underlying kind of indolent infection like Lyme. So this is not uncommon in my West Coast patients. I do see this, like I said, not unlike Lyme and the fact that we were able to get this on LabCorp testing is really great because we didn't necessarily have to pay for vibrant labs, which is a better lab that we use that is much more sensitive and specific for a lot of these bugs. But we got some answers here and it really gave us an idea that she was fighting off probably more than one, even just these two bugs at any given time.

Speaker 1 00:11:35 So you know, when we look at the rest of her labs, nothing really jumped out at me other than the fact that her inflammation levels were high. She had a high C R P initially, which was in the 4.6 range. We like to see that around a one to a two. And that really just means that her body is being, being like it's inflamed, it's autoimmune right now and it wants to just be, it's basically on fire and we need to get rid of that, right? We need to make sure that that gets down to a lower level. We know that her other inflammatory marker, that TGF beta was high and we knew that that C four A, that compliment level was high as well. And believe it or not, she had really high sugars and high insulin levels despite her eating really healthy and trying to lose weight.

Speaker 1 00:12:17 So her insulin was a 21.7 and her glucose was a 100. Now while most doctors would see a glucose of a hundred and a three month sugar number or a hemoglobin a one C of a 5.8 and say, okay, you're mildly, you know, watch out, you're gonna be insulin resistant or diabetic, I see this and I say, wow, your insulins are really high. Why? What is happening in your body that you're not doing well with sugars? And then I get down to a cortisol level, which is your stress hormone and it's non-existent. It's a five cortisol is that wake up and run away from a bear hormone. It should basically be at least a 10 to a 21st thing in the morning. When you don't have that reserve, you can't fight off infection. It means that she's been fighting off an infection for a pretty long time and now her body is basically adrenally deficient or insufficient.

Speaker 1 00:13:11 That will absolutely affect her insulin levels and make that not work as well. And it might be that she has an underlying celiac or food sensitivity that we don't know about as well that really started driving this process way before she even got this bug. Okay? She also has high immune cells that fight allergies basically. So her eosinophils are high as well. So again, we're getting this picture of her being allergic, maybe even a little autoimmune, maybe these food sensitivities with a bug. So we're at this gut immune kind of complex here that we know is driving her to feel not well. --

-- And then we take a look at her hormones and I can tell you her thyroid isn't working on all cylinders. It sits on the low end of normal, her testosterone as well sits low, very low as a matter of fact. But her estrogen and progesterone right now are doing well, although she has no growth hormone, which is the hormone that actually will help regulate that cortisol level.
Speaker 1 00:14:11 So when we put these pieces together, she has a metabolism that's not working. So her thyroid isn't working, her testosterone is declining, probably age appropriate testosterone decline. So she's going through, you know, early, early stages of perimenopause and then she has cortisol that's been fighting off whatever's going on. Maybe it's chronic food sensitivity, maybe the bug's been sitting there or maybe both for quite some time. And then you get covid and then everything can take advantage of a system that's not working. Okay? So now we have this kind of inflammation autoimmune bug picture and a girl that really just thought she was coming in for hormones and now we realize, oh shoot, she's got this underlying chronic infection. So how do we start with someone like this? And what did we do? Well she was actually a really hard case. We initially basically got her off of gluten.
Speaker 1 00:15:02 She knew that she had a gluten sensitivity before we started. We gave her a modified restricted dairy diet and we gave her back some thyroid help, cortisol help with supplementation. And then we actually tried to cut her carbs back at the same time. Not just gluten-free, but low glycemic diet. We wanna get that brain on fire and that gut that's all inflamed down to a level that makes sense. Then we wanna get rid of, we gotta calm the gut inflammation down with some supplementation we said like eczema cream for the stomach like I like to say, and get the gut back in check so that the immune system, once we start treating it, can handle what we're giving at it or giving to it. And what did we do? So we gave her initially a probiotic and a gut calming agent to get her gut in a really good place.
Speaker 1 00:15:55 Then what we did is we started to do silver to try to calm down the bug. Basically it's an anti-inflammatory antibacterial that actually can help get into the any lipid bilayer or like biofilm that is created with this bug. It's almost like a bubble. We also gave her Biocidin liquid, which is a great liquid bilberry, echinacea, garlic, a whole bunch of herbs to kill off again a bug naturally. And we also started her on azithromycin and doxy and we did this initially to try to get her in a place that would get her back to work where she could feel like we got this bug killed off really quickly. And we gave her something called detox binder, which is a charcoal agent to get rid of any of the, the bugs that were killed off that would could possibly build up in her system with a toxic byproduct that would make her feel sick.
Speaker 1 00:16:49 I don't wanna make her feel worse. Before she felt better, well unfortunately she felt worse before she felt better with the protocol that we gave her. We created what's called a, a pretty significant Herxheimer reaction that when we started cowling off these bugs, we started creating a toxic environment that her body was not able to clear. So she was able to tolerate the antibiotics for about 60 days. But I will tell you we had to do a lot of working with her job and her life to get there. And what we ended up doing, uh, towards the end of that 60 days is, is backing off her antibiotic to what we call a pulse dosing where we really just dose it a couple days a week and really upped her, her detox support system. We were doing glutathione injections every couple weeks for her. Trying to get an IV in her has been a challenge.
Speaker 1 00:17:43 So there's a little bit of a, we have a little bit of a hard time doing IV glutathione, but we are getting glutathione into her system and our next step will probably be some hyperbaric oxygen for her to try to start moving things through and some chelation therapy to try to get some of this toxins out of her system. However, she is in a much better place. She is much more functional and making it to work regularly at this point. And now we just need to get rid of some of the rest of her hormonal symptoms and try to get her feeling a little bit better from that perspective. We did put her on testosterone right away --

-- and that did help with her energy levels, especially initially before she started the antibiotics and we started her on something called pregnenolone. Pregnenolone is a supplement to help stimulate progesterone.
Speaker 1 00:18:32 While her progesterone levels were great, they fluctuate and she had a really good peak progesterone, which I always think of it like a seesaw. If you look at the high level in your middle of your month of progesterone versus the low level, when you get your period, there's, if there's a big differential, your brain is gonna feel that pregnenolone helps to force a little bit of your hormones to go towards a little bit of extra progesterone and stabilizes that brain effect usually. So that mood, that anxiety, the sleeplessness sometimes and irritability, we can help with a little bit of pregnenolone. Our next step for her is probably to put some progesterone on board at least two weeks out of her month as needed. But in the meantime I'm trying to get the rest of this bug out of her and get her detox system working on all cylinders, which is a, is a really difficult thing to do 'cause she's just got a poor clearance mechanism. Speaker 1 00:19:28 So we're working on supporting her mitochondria, cellular detoxification, her lymphatic system and like I said, we're gonna start doing some hyperbaric oxygen slash um, maybe even some ozone therapy and chelation therapy to start binding up some of this stuff. Giving her extra oxygen to her tissues and helping her get better. A little bit more quickly, but let's kind of back up. If we look at the E in elimination, we're eliminating food exposures that are toxic to her. We're eliminating bugs that are toxic to her and we're putting her in a situation where her system's not gonna be as overburdened the A we're adding back in nutrients. So we're adding back in B 12 for her B 12 deficiency, which she has, we're adding thyroid support for her low thyroid and we're adding back in something to balance out her hormones and adrenals as well as healing up that gut lining.

Speaker 1 00:20:24 We're adding something to really heal up the stomach, that eczema irritation that goes on on the inside and then those lss. So our goal is really to bring back some life and longevity. There's so many Ls that we could throw in here, but so that she feels like herself, again, we, if I could make the L life, we wanna give her zest and bigger for life back. And then obviously last but not least, we wanna have increased luminosity and decreased laxity of her skin and fine lines. But right now for her case, we're talking about a really significant gut immune or immune inflammation patient that came to me for hormones, but really her problem was much deeper than that. So I want you to kind of see how we work through these patients, how we really listen and make a timeline. This real three system protocol is meant to make it easy, right?

Speaker 1 00:21:18 Listen to the patient, put the timeline together, review everything in one piece so that we really can come up with a connection or a link between your, your integrative health pathways and show you how these links are really making you sick and more toxic and basically back away one of these systems at a time so that we can really get you feeling better. And I see a lot of companies and a lot of doctors that do this as what I would call a one trick pony or they just do hormones or they just do detox. And I think it's, it's really important to one, know your limitations, but two, to know that you don't have the answers to everything, nor do I and which is I don't do hyperbaric oxygen. She'll be going somewhere to get that. And I think that's really important to offer your patients, not just the protocols that I am bringing to the table, but what other people bring to the table as well.

Speaker 1 00:22:11 So we went through my My story, which I call like the founding patient or patient number one. And I wanted to bring to the table a different case, a different story, how we can help you. So if this case or story resonates with you, if it resonates with someone, you know, feel free to shoot them our information. It's my doctor lori.com. They can sign up and intake online. We treat patients all over the country and virtually and I do have a team of nurses and staff that are more than happy to get you started. And while you're waiting for lab work and all of these things, we try to make sure w --

-- We walk you through this process pretty seamlessly. And if you're not sure if you wanna go that in depth at this point, we have a Rapid RX online as well. You can fill out that intake and I'll give you recommendations on supplementation.
Speaker 1 00:23:01 And it's not always my supplementation, sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. If I think that you need something more in depth, I'll give you some recommendations and then suggest that we do the labs. And I'll tell you it's not, I don't do that for everyone. So don't think you can't do a rapid RX intake with us as well. And if you're a provider that's interested in, in bringing this into your aesthetic or family practice office, I'd be more than happy to show you how to get started in our real three method online provider protocols. And that is on, like I said, it's on Thinkific, but you can also get to that on my dr laurie.com and we'd be happy to help you get started. It is all virtual and online and it's a program that I think everyone should go through at least once in their medical lifetime to really get your eyes uncovered even just to the information that we're missing in primary care.

Speaker 1 00:23:53 So I thank you guys for listening. We will have a couple of new formats coming up. I'm gonna bring on some guests, which I'm really excited to have guests on my podcast and I'm bringing on some patients that will talk candidly about their experiences with the Real three method and with our team, how they're feeling and kind of, uh, really just open your eyes to what we can do for you as an integrative health provider. So I look forward to seeing you guys soon. So join me for the next installment of Anti-Aging Unraveled and I hope that you guys like this re three method and we're gonna bring you more cases. All right, have a great day guys.

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