Following the Patient Instead of the Paradigm with Dr. Pamela M. Cipriano | The Holistic Pharmacy Podcast

I felt like I could record a whole series of episodes, and still not run out of topics to talk about with today’s guest, and glean her wisdom. Her own story and the health challenges of her loved ones have inspired her to become the kind of practitioner she sought. She and I agree: true healing is about supporting the body's innate ability to recover. Coming from a conventional emergency-care background, she’s built a successful concierge practice showcasing that personalized nutrition, targeted supplementation, and addressing the root causes of illness helps patients achieve lasting wellness. Dr. Pamela M. Cipriano, DNP, APRN, ACNP-BC, is the founder and president of The Practice of Health and Wellness in Thomaston, Connecticut. A board-certified Acute Care Nurse Practitioner with more than 30 years of healthcare experience, she specializes in integrative and functional medicine, helping patients with complex chronic illnesses by combining evidence-informed conventional care with personalized, root-cause approaches. Dr. Cipriano is an international speaker, published researcher, and member of the ILADS (International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society) Membership Committee. She is passionate about educating both patients and healthcare professionals on the interconnected roles of immune dysfunction, chronic infections, nutrition, environmental health, and lifestyle in achieving lasting wellness and restoring hope for those living with complex chronic disease. Connect with Dr. Pamela via:Email: [email protected]: thepracticeofhealthandwellness.comFB: https://www.facebook.com/dr.pamela.ciprianoIG: https://www.instagram.com/practicehealthwellnessYT: https://www.youtube.com/@dr.pamelacipriano1329LI: linkedin.com/in/dr-pamela-m-cipriano-dnp-aprn-673a2224

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:44Speaker 00

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• 1:36Speaker 01

  You are listening to the global network of podcasters dedicated to the pharmacy profession. Welcome to the Pharmacy Podcast Network.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to the Holistic Pharmacy Podcast. I'm your host, Marina Buxav, and I'm a functional medicine pharmacist in New York. I'm also a clinical herbalist and an integrative health coach specializing in mindfulness and empowerment. I'm on a mission to transform the way we approach healthcare by bridging the wisdom of traditional medicine with modern practice. And in this podcast, I will be highlighting guests who do just that. I'm constantly inspired by them, and I know you will be as well. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I'm so excited. I'm here with today's guest, who is Dr.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Pamela Cipriano, and she's the founder and president of the Practice of Health and Wellness in Thomaston, Connecticut. A board-certified acute care nurse practitioner with more than 30 years of healthcare experience, she specializes in integrative and functional medicine, helping patients with complex chronic illnesses by combining evidence-informed conventional care with personalized root cause approaches. Without further ado, welcome, Pam.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I was excited about this podcast.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, there are so many topics we can dive into with everything that you specialize in, but first I really want to get started with a little bit about your background and why you chose the healthcare field.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  I think I came out of my mother's womb knowing I wanted to be a nurse. The nurse practitioner thing didn't come around until I was much older. I realized that I was an ICU nurse, I was an ICU nurse for years, and found that I just wanted something more. And then I went back to school to be a nurse practitioner, and it was really the best decision I ever made, to be honest with you. I think as a nurse, we see the physicians who do a great job and the ones that really don't do such a great job. And so we have a bird's eye view of how we'd like to practice medicine. So I think that that was the biggest part, that I wanted to be able to give back to the community, because I had helped so many patients over the years improve as an ICU nurse.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  My big goal was to try and help them get to a point where they didn't end up in the hospital.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Wow, that is so interesting, because the acute care setting with the ICU intensive care unit, you would think that those kind of cases are like last resort, very kind of dangerous and risky place to be, and then there's not a lot of follow-through that you can have with those patients afterwards to understand what caused the illness or the condition they came in with, or the diagnosis and whatever happened. And then you kind of send them off your way, maybe you do some med reconciliation, like myself as a pharmacist, that's what we might be involved with. But then you kind of hope for the best, right?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  So what made you want to follow these patients further and dig deeper into root causes, which you now practice?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  So as an ICU nurse, it was a lot of education. My first job was in the coronary care unit, so it was a lot of education of why the heart attack happens and how not to have another one occur. When I became a nurse practitioner, I was working as a hospitalist. I kind of put myself through my own residency. So I was working as a medical hospitalist, a surgical hospitalist. I worked in the emergency department, in urgent care, in neurology, in urology. And it wasn't until I took a position in internal medicine in a primary care office, it was a two-physician practice, one of the physicians had retired. I never thought I'd ever take a job in an office like that, and I just found a niche

• 5:49Speaker 03

  where the medications are being used more for a Band-Aid rather than to find the root cause of why the disease process is actually occurring. And when I found that, that's when I went back, I got my doctorate degree, and then after that, I went back to school for functional medicine to try and figure out how to reverse the disease process, get patients off of as much medications as possible, with the understanding that there are certain medications that should never be discontinued. That led me to my own practice. I opened up my own practice in 2016. I was a first nurse practitioner in the state of Connecticut to do so. That had its own issues, because the insurance companies weren't prepared for a nurse practitioner not to have a collaborating physician.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  So I had to hire an attorney to get the insurance companies to credential me. It was a lot. It was more than I can actually say in one podcast what I had to go through. But it did open up the doors for other nurse practitioners in Connecticut to start their own practices as well, and I opened up my doors to them to help them not make the same mistakes that I make. And so now 10 years later, I just started another business of consulting, a consulting business of trying to help other providers, whether you're a physician, nurse practitioner, or a physician assistant, how to open up your own practice. And I find concierge medicine is really the way to go, because we're not strong-armed by the insurance companies.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  We have more ability to treat patients, get to the root cause of why the disease is happening. So a little bit of a background story, I had over 3,000 patients while I was taking insurance, and in the midst of this, I had gotten two very nasty letters from Connecticut Care and Blue Cross and Blue Shield, both berating me for taking too many people off their medications and not prescribing enough meds on my own. And that really upset me, because they clearly either didn't read my notes or didn't care to read my notes. Their problem was the bottom line, I was taking money out of their pocket.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  And so I contacted my attorney, and he had said that I either had to start playing the game and keep people on their meds, or I was going to have to stop taking insurance in a concierge. So I almost sold my practice to Hartford Hospital, that had been coming around at the time, buying up practices, and it was my husband and my kids who really encouraged me to try concierge first before I did that, and I'm so glad I did, because I have been able to help so many people now get back to their state of health and wellness without taking 20, 30 medications every day.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Wow, it sounds like you're a real pioneer and you're the first in your field and in your state building this. And while I really want to get to the clinical topics we had planned for today, I really just want to take a moment and talk about like the scope of practice and the legal challenges and like the way that you had to navigate things in your state with your license and the decisions that you had to make to then build a cash-based business that doesn't take insurance. How do you then consult other people that may be in different jurisdictions with different licenses, different scopes of practice, and different state laws? How do you help them navigate all that?

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Do you mean the patient or providers?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  So providers that you're now consulting?

• 9:21Speaker 03

  So the providers I consult with, they predominantly take insurance. So I don't take insurance. Patients pay out of pocket. I have memberships. I've tried every avenue of how to do this the best way for the patient. And at one point, I was, you know, doing per visit. I found it didn't work. Because what was happening was they didn't want to come up with the money to come see me. Then they ended up going to an urgent care center. They were misdiagnosed. They ended up having to come back to see me anyway. Now I had to correct from what an urgent care center did, which was incorrect. Get them on the right medications to treat whatever ailment that they had gone there for. And found that, you know, a monthly fee, you know, we have like this, for functional medicine is $2,500 a

• 10:06Speaker 03

  year. They pay upfront, they get a 10% discount, or they can make monthly payments. We don't charge finance fees or anything like that. For functional medicine, that turned out to be the best way. Because people can come here every day if they had to. And we did have a couple of patients that did that, but it was very few and far between. Most people don't want to live in a doctor's office. But it was good that they knew that they can either, you know, text me, call me, or come in for a visit. My older son was misdiagnosed for 10 years. The whole time he had had Lyme disease. So that sent me off on an entirely different branch of medicine. I ended up getting involved with Lyme disease, joined ILADS, found Dr. Horowitz, went away for training with him and preceptorships. And

• 10:48Speaker 03

  that opened up an entirely different door for me, which, what I didn't know is, you cannot take insurance when you're treating Lyme disease. I found that out the hard way because I was still taking insurance and treating patients for Lyme disease. And I had UnitedHealthcare that dropped me with no explanation and sent a letter out to all my patients that I dropped them. And every time I called to find out what was going on, I could not get a straight answer. So it was my second year with ILADS, and which is the International Lyme and Associated Disease Society. And they had a panel of attorneys there for people who were having issues with insurance companies and things like that. So I decided to go to this, because I was pretty new in the Lyme community. I

• 11:32Speaker 03

  decided to go to this panel just to see what other people were talking about, to see if maybe that was a reason for the insurance company dropping me. And there was this one attorney that was just bigger than life. Like, he should definitely be on one of those, you know, law dramas. But he, you know, asked me how I was charging for visits. And I said, I was charging the insurance company. He just literally got in my face and said, don't you know, there's no such thing as Lyme disease? Don't you know? I mean, he just was like, comically berating me in front of everybody. And he said, that's why they dropped you. And if you go back and try and recoup the money that they never sent you, they'll report

• 12:15Speaker 03

  you to your certifying agency and they will do everything to have you lose your license because they don't want to pay for tick-borne diseases. So that was, I've had so many eye-opening experiences as an practitioner, that was one of many.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So what has been like the most challenging thing that you had to overcome in order to now run a successful concierge practice?

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Wow, that's a really good question. I had so many starts and stops along the way. And I had to learn, you know, so many things along the way, just as an employer, hiring employees. I mean, I feel like I've nailed it now. But in the beginning, I was really hiring the wrong people, you know? They would present themselves so well in person, their resumes, you know, showed how, you know, well, they can do the job. But then when I hired them, they really did not do what they said that they could do. I've had issues with that. I've had issues where I thought, maybe because I can be a little bit more laid back, maybe I need somebody who's a little bit more feisty. That did

• 13:21Speaker 03

  not work out at all well. And I remember, an old boss I had when I was in sales, he had said to me, when you hire somebody, you want to hire somebody who's like you. Because that's when you know that you're gonna, you'll both get along, you'll both mesh. And after making so many blunders, I decided to take that advice. And that has paid off so well for me. So the office now is an exceptionally laid-back environment. Everyone has their own job to do. We all work so well together. I've had a number of office managers that I found it's easier just to do it myself. Because I don't have to pay somebody to do

• 14:04Speaker 03

  nothing, pretty much. I feel like that office manager role went right to their head. And it didn't happen with one, it didn't happen with two. It seemed like it happened with all of them. And so I said, okay, there's no more managers here. I'll be taking care of everything. And now I have assistant managers. So I have an assistant manager for the office side. I have a med spa here as well. That does, we do IV vitamins, we do vitamin injections, we have halotherapy from Himalayan salt, we have an infrared sauna with red light therapy. Couldn't get anybody to walk in the door for those reasons. So I had to go away for training for injecting, you know, fillers and botox, the things that I don't necessarily

• 14:43Speaker 03

  agree with. We actually bought a machine that takes your serum from your blood and makes it into an all-natural filler. That I love much, much better. So it actually, we can use that as a filler. So it has your, your own properties, which helps to improve connective tissue, grow collagen, fill in areas, and it continues to do this for up to a year or two. So those are the things, I try and do things as naturally as possible. But in the beginning, I definitely had to start, you know, using hyaluronic acid fillers and botox, because that's what was bringing people in the door. And then once they saw that we, what we do all naturally, people started to slowly change.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Wow, amazing. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of moving pieces and arms and legs of the businesses. So could you give us a sneak peek into what it looks like on the backend to operate all of that? Like, what your role is and then the people that work with you?

• 15:42Speaker 03

  So I manage everything. I do all the buying, all the purchasing, I do the payroll. I literally take care of all of the, you know, there are certain people we still take insurance for. When I stopped taking insurance, my 80-plus-year-olds, I kept on insurance because a lot of them were my patients for up to 13 years. And I felt terrible to just cut them off because a lot of people don't accept Medicare as it is. And so I kept anybody 80 years of age and up. That was in 2021 when I went concierge. So I manage all of the insurance issues that they, you know, they don't pay the claims, or, you know, they're looking for a refund, I have to submit additional information and things like that.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  That's exceptionally time-consuming. So I have somebody who actually started with me when I opened my, my practice back in 2016. She left for a short time, and then she actually returned recently. And she loves talking to insurance companies. She loves trying to put the pieces of the puzzles together. So she gets all of the ones that are rejected. So she could figure out why were they rejected? Then she gets them back to me, and then I re-submit them. I have another employee who's been with me almost since the day of inception. I opened 10 years ago. It'll be 10 years in November. She started with me nine years ago. So she can literally finish my sentences. She, she was an office manager at one point. She's the only one that didn't go to her head. She did an amazing job. She got married,

• 17:08Speaker 03

  she had a baby, she was going to be moving to North Carolina. And so she actually found somebody to replace her before she left, which was incredible. Sadly, exceptionally sadly, her, her baby was only three months old, and her husband died unexpectedly. He was only in his 30s. She came home and found him dead in the bedroom. And that was, when I say devastating, that doesn't even cut how devastating it was. Because I knew him almost as long as I knew her. And she never did move to North Carolina. She ended up taking, you know, obviously additional time off. And then when she returned, she's only, she only works two days a week right now. Her daughter just turned two years old. So

• 17:52Speaker 03

  those two days a week she's here, she's literally doing the work of an entire week's worth. Because she just knows, she knows what she's doing. She knows everything, you know, when, you know, when her whole world got, you know, taken away from her. She was trying to just do anything to stay busy. So she was working for a friend who owned a florist. She was working for someplace else. And then she was just like, I really don't, I'm like, I love working here. Because she just knew what she was doing. And so, and you know, she came back for those two days. She's, she's, she's a duplicate of me, is what she really is.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Wow. Well, thank you so much for sharing that and my heart goes out to her. And it sounds like the people that you did end up hiring and taking on are really passionate, much like they're interested in solving the pieces of the puzzle when it comes to insurance claims and organizing and all of that. It sounds like it's similar to how you are as a clinician, really looking to problem solve and not being afraid to roll up your sleeves and get new degrees and certifications and qualifications to help your patients. So, sounds amazing. And now let's go a little bit to the front end. So say somebody gets interested in either the wellness side of the business or like the beauty side and the beauty spa, or you know,

• 19:11Speaker 02

  somebody wants to become a patient. So walk us through like the client journey of that.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  So two different businesses. When you walk in the front door, it's the office, the medical office. Off to the right is an entirely different area. That's the IV lounge and med spa. And a lot of times what we'll do is they'll still be patients on both sides. So if you're a patient on the medical side, you, there are some of the memberships that include the IVs, the vitamin injections, the halo therapy and the infrared sauna. We don't have anything that includes the beautification part. That's entirely separate. We do all natural weight loss. We've won a number of reader choice awards for the medical office

• 20:01Speaker 03

  as well as the med spa. People like that I try not to prescribe meds if I don't have to. They like that I try and get them off their medications. So like I had a patient that, you know, came to me, she was literally a hot mess. And I think the problem is, is that when providers prescribe a medication, they're not really paying attention to how long they're prescribing it for. So she was on a PPI for over 25 years. You know, her pH in her stomach was too high. She's not, she's not, the nutrients that she's eating are not getting absorbed. She, you know, she ended up with candida throughout her entire GI tract.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  She had a doctor who was giving her dexamethasone to rinse out her mouth to try and decrease the amount of oral sores she had. The oral sores were because of the dry mouth and the candida. So the dexamethasone was actually increasing the candida. She was a hot mess. And so it was, you know, trying to get her off of one medication at a time. Like what we really focused on was what were the top meds she was taking that were causing the dry mouth? We got her off of those. A lot of them she really didn't need and a lot of them were able to be replaced with supplements. She wasn't drinking the right amount of water. So we got her water intake up. So she drinks half of her body weight in ounces of water

• 21:24Speaker 03

  now. Her mouth was so dry, she couldn't eat any longer because she had no saliva to break down the food. These are the patients I get, you know, and they're going, she had to have had eight different doctors, you know, that were actually seeing her. You know, she had had a enormous panic attack five years earlier while she was in Florida visiting her daughter. Ends up in Afib. They put her on Zeraltto and Deltazem. She never had another round of Afib. She, she went, she converted right back into a sinus rhythm, but they kept her on these medications for the past five years. So I wanted to prescribe her idroconazole for the candida and her GI tract, but I couldn't do that because of Zeraltto. Got in touch with

• 22:06Speaker 03

  the cardiologist to try and get her off of the Zeraltto and the Deltazem. I actually did a halter monitor for two weeks. She never went into Afib. She actually has cardiac, actually she doesn't have cardiac. It's on her Apple Watch. She's able to get a reading of what her heart rhythm is on a minute by minute basis. And he absolutely refused to take her off those medications. So there's a lot of old thinking, old thought processes too. You know, a younger provider would have been more up on, well, the research shows, you know, he kept saying her Chad score was two. Well, her Chad score was two because she, she was over the age of 65. So there's one point right there. The other point was

• 22:46Speaker 03

  because she was female. That doesn't tell me. She's gonna have another Afib. You know what I mean? Like some of the things that I deal with are ludicrous. You know, so it's, it's a lot of taking on more than I ever thought I would take on. And it's hard to refer patients out when I know they're gonna, I'm gonna be referring them to a doctor like that. You know, somebody with old school ideas. Nothing that's newer and, you know, cutting edge, we'll put it that way. But she's never gone back into Afib. All of the problems she had are reversing themselves. She's no longer bleeding out. Like it was, it was, this poor lady was a hot disaster. She really was. So I'm so happy when she comes in now and she still feels like, you know, she's not where she wants to be. Well, she only

• 23:30Speaker 03

  started seeing me in October. It's not even a year yet. You know, I have to keep reminding her where she started from. And then she kind of, like, then she's like, okay, I get it. I'm like, it didn't take you, you know, nine months to get here. It took you decades to get to where you are now. It's not gonna take you decades to get better, but it's gonna take you longer than you think it will.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And as a pharmacist, I am absolutely appalled at the amount of polypharmacy that goes on. And in the retail setting, when I'm out there dispensing meds, I'm just like, how can people be prescribed so many things? And like you said, so many different providers, following the old guidelines and the algorithms, but not really cross communicating. And then really, I find that the pharmacist is the gatekeeper. And I say this all the time. So we actually should be educating and advocating for de-prescribing whenever possible. But of course, because it hurts the retail's bottom line, that doesn't

• 24:32Speaker 02

  really happen. And then we have MTM services now that are supposed to do that. But they tend to also err on the side of, well, let's over-medicate rather than under-medicate. And so it just is a vicious cycle. And I'm so glad that there's providers like yourself that are willing to go the extra mile and communicate and contact the providers and educate. And who knows, maybe if enough of us do that, the providers will then look at the research and reevaluate. Because really, it's, it's on an individual basis and we can't start to lump people together without actually looking at what the risks are for

• 25:12Speaker 02

  this individual patient of staying on a medication or discontinuing the medication. So I'm really, really happy to hear that people like yourself are doing the work and doing the advocacy for their patients. And like you said, it's really much more beneficial for the person to be able to function without that band-aid so that their biology can then kick in and the feedback loops and the biochemistry that we have and using food as medicine, maybe using some supplements, some lifestyle things that they can do on a regular basis instead of having to rely on a system that has a lot of side effects in that one medication

• 25:53Speaker 02

  that we were able to discontinue. So amazing to hear that. And I would love to also know what kind of diagnoses or like what kind of specialty areas you've had to become an expert in to serve your clients.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  So when COVID hit, a lot of practices closed down or consolidated. And so to try and get somebody in with a specialist, you're looking at months. Like I have, I have a patient right now. I can't get her to GI until January. There's certain things I can't do. I can't do colonoscopies. I can't do endoscopies. You know, I can do other things, but if they're having, you know, physical issues that I'm concerned about, it's just a different world right now. It's so difficult. But I've had to really take over with endocrinology. Oh my gosh. I took over all the thyroid because I found that endocrinologists do not know how to manage thyroid disease at all. Their guidelines are backwards. You know, the T3

• 26:57Speaker 03

  is the active form of thyroid, but they follow the T4 or the TSH, which makes zero sense to me. So years ago, I had thyroid cancer. It was an incidental finding. I had severe thyroid disease. My TSH was about 5.3, but my symptoms were astronomical. You would think my TSH was closer to 90. That's how bad I was. I could, I could gain and lose about 20 pounds in a week. I was, my, my emotions were all over the place. Anxiety attacks, panic attacks. It was totally not me. Like there was nothing about this that was me.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Losing my hair, losing my eyebrows, heart palpitations, just from folding clothes. My heart rate would go into an SVT into the 150s. You know, doctor after doctor after doctor. You know, two and a half years of this and nobody is even putting their hands on my thyroid. You know, no thyroid ultrasounds, nothing like that. And it wasn't until, I kept, and I was coughing, like that was a big thing. I was, I had such dyspnea and such, this chronic cough that at one point I'm telling them, I'm coughing up tissue. Like there is a, there's something I'm coughing up that is a, is an organ in my body is coming out

• 28:17Speaker 03

  of my, it was the craziest thing ever. And nothing. I went to the pulmonologist. He had me walk around his office with pulse oximeter to do an exercise pulse oximetry test. And my heart rate just walking was in the 160s. My stats went down to this, stats went down to 60s. I have blue lips and he diagnosed me with an anxiety disorder.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  I'm female, of course I have an anxiety disorder, don't we all? So it was just like, I have like, I have, I am not impressed with the medical community at all. Based on what happened to me and all the patients I see. And I think that that experience made me the provider that I am today because I don't let things go. I am like a pit bull and I will figure it out. You're not going to leave my office without me figuring it out. Like I am that dedicated to my patients and they know it, they know it.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  But yeah, I finally passed out and my 13 year old, he's now 38. He was 13 years old at the time, found me in the shower, passed out, called 911. And at that point, I thought I had a pulmonary emboli because I really couldn't breathe. They got me to the hospital, they did a CAT scan, which they should have done two years ago. And it was my thyroid that was actually growing in and blocking off my trachea. And that was the tissue that I was coughing up. And so they took out my thyroid along with it came an itty bitty tiny little cancer. So my TSH is always suppressed now.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  But I had to walk into my endocrinologist's office. She was an integrative endocrinologist and I really, really liked her. She studied under T. popchopra. She was fantastic when I first started seeing her. Brought in a box of research on T3. She finally, half-heartedly started me on Cytomel and that was a missing piece. So my TSH was great, my T4 looked great, but my T3 was low. I wasn't converting. And it's not in the guidelines, like the endocrinology guidelines, it's just not there. And so she finally got me on Cytomel and my, everything changed. I felt like I was back to my normal self. But then, the medical community must have given her a bite because she turned into every other doctor I had, I had been seeing. You know, she wasn't listening to me anymore.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  She was exceptionally good at listening to me. She started dropping my thyroid medications because of my age. She was worried about osteoporosis.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  I'll deal with osteoporosis. I can't deal with the brain fog, the constipation, the hair loss again because you're changing my thyroid medications, you know? So I stopped seeing her and I saw a nurse practitioner that I'd known for years. And I pretty much run my own labs, you know, I, you know, tell her what medications to change for me. I lost a lot of weight when I changed, that's an entirely different story about thermography. But the thermography was showing that I was developing, I could develop breast cancer in about 10 years from now. And it was because of silly things. It was, you know, I was cooking on aluminum foil. I don't eat meat, so I was eating more fish. The fish had a lot of mercury, so a lot of heavy metals.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Storing food in plastic containers, drinking from plastic water bottles. I got rid of all those things, including non-stick pans and not knowing those things were causing

• 31:39Speaker 03

  a hormonal imbalance in my body. And I lost 30 pounds. So this is my normal weight. But for years I had gained 30 pounds, especially after my thyroid was gone. And so I just figured that was my new, my new metabolic rate was my, my, my weight was 30 pounds heavier than this. It wasn't because of that, it was because of the things that I was ingesting and it wasn't the food, it was the other stuff. So I got rid of all of that and dropped the 30 pounds. My energy level skyrocketed. My son found that the, the breast thermography wasn't changing. He said, it's going to be your well water. And I said, we have the house's filters. He said, you can't filter out heavy metals. And sure enough, he was right. I started using a distiller and we actually bought a distiller. He actually was a woman with Lyme disease, my older son.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  He had done a lot of research on distilled water. And he bought me the same one that I had bought him years ago. And within two months, I went back for my next thermography appointment and my breast tissue went back to normal. It's just amazing that we don't realize what's going on inside the body. And I think what disturbed me the most was that this thermography showed things that mammograms, MRIs and ultrasounds cannot show. It's FDA approved, it's been FDA approved since the 1950s, but there's no money in it. It's a camera, an infrared camera that takes pictures of your body, your entire body or, you know, just body parts. But you don't need these big bells and whistles. There's no insurance involved, it costs $300.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Like, you know, our medical system is literally broken. It is so broken. Everything is about making money and nothing about helping the patient.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're speaking to how disjointed each part of the medical system is and how all the providers, even the specialist, they're all specializing in a tiny piece of that puzzle. And nobody's coming together and putting the whole thing under like a functional medicine lens or a root cause or just a unifying theory. Like I think I heard us saying that there's not enough generalists anymore. Everybody's a specialist because it's a higher qualification, they're more respected, they're paid higher. You know, and they're valued more overall. So everybody's going into the specialty areas and going on residencies and fellowships and training, over training.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  But then you kind of miss the big picture when you're focusing in on the tiny little piece of it.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  You said a mouthful. You really said a mouthful.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  You know, there are physicians who go to medical school nowadays. These medical schools are owned by the pharmaceutical companies. They graduate not even realizing that the entire body is connected. And everything is going to affect everything else. But you, you know, you have a gastroenterologist and you have a neurologist, you have an endocrinologist, you have a rheumatologist. It's one body. You know, and if you can have that one provider who can see the entire body and how everything is connected and be able to fix what needs to be fixed, the entire body gets helped. Not just the gut or the skin or the eyes or the, you know what I mean?

• 34:59Speaker 03

  It's the whole, and that's what I do. I see things that other providers just don't see. And it's because, you know, I think it's because of my, my personal experience with what happened to me with my thyroid. My son was misdiagnosed for 10 years and the whole time he had Lyme disease. And nobody was really looking at the whole picture. Everybody was just piecemealing everything together, you know? I remember being in the hospital, you know, when I passed out and it was before they did the CAT scan. And my doctor came in and told me this was my asthma. So I'd been treated for asthma because of the coughing, the shortness of breath, the whole bit. I never had asthma. I do now because he destroyed my lungs with all of the steroids they gave me.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  So now I definitely have to use it before I go for a run or something like that. And now I, I've developed exercise-induced asthma, but never had it before that. And I remember him coming into my, my hospital room, they put me in the ICU and he said, this is going to be your asthma. And my exact words to him were, if this is my asthma, you might as well bury me now because I'm not going to survive this. You know what I mean? Like I, with all the prednisone I was on, the steroid inhaler, inhalers I was on, the rescue inhalers I was on, I was not going to survive this if this was my asthma. It never was asthma, you know? But nobody, nobody looked at my thyroid. So I'm exceptionally good. I'm a very good diagnostician.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  I'm very good at diagnosing what's going on with a person, but I'm also very good at treating the entire body and not just a piece of it.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, my philosophy is that we should really adhere to the Hippocratic oath and first do no harm. But unfortunately, it seems like there's so many iatrogenic caused like exacerbations and problems that are caused with polypharmacy and drugs and things like that. So, you know, I think we really need to reevaluate as a system and also as a participant in that system and communicate that to our providers, our preferences and our willingness to make lifestyle changes and dietary changes and other kinds of things and, and ask those questions or look for providers like yourself that will offer alternatives.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  And, you know, I don't even like the word alternatives anymore because it's kind of painted as a less than. But I think everybody should have choice, you know, to, to be autonomous and to make a decision based on the facts provided and not just an outdated guideline that the research shows is not the only way anymore. So, you know, I think education is the first step. And like, since I have you on here, I'd love to hear from your clinical practice, what you see as the biggest root causes that are underlying some of these disease processes

• 37:50Speaker 02

  that we've been describing, like chronic inflammation and, you know, bacterial or other kinds of microbial overgrowths. You know, anything that like you feel is unifying or exacerbating these disease processes?

• 38:07Speaker 03

  It's diet. Diet is the most important thing that you can focus on in your body. It is, it is the one thing that's going to either make you very healthy or very sick, and there's really no in-between. So, the American diet in other countries, we're known as a junk food country because our diet is nothing but junk food. You have to work very hard to live in this country and eat healthy. Very hard. You cannot just go into a grocery store and buy something off the shelf and think it's going to be healthy for you because most likely it's not. If you're not shopping the outskirts of the grocery store and going through the aisles, you're really going to get yourself sick. So I see that people are exceptionally dehydrated. They're not drinking enough water.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  They have to pay attention to the water that they are drinking. That's why I like distilled water. Um, there's times when my urine is just clear. If there's no color to it, I'll, I'll actually add, um, Celtic salt, the, the gray salts, if they're larger granules, just to try and give me some electrolytes. I have an electrolyte drink every single day to make sure I'm getting everything that I need. My diet is exceptionally healthy. Um, anybody who comes to my office gets an anti-inflammatory diet that I put together. It started with my doctorate degree. Um, it was more for, for preventing the progression from pre-diabetes to diabetes. That's what my research was on. And it was statistically significant just from diet alone. Outside the research, because there's inclusion, exclusion criteria, I had patients who were

• 39:35Speaker 03

  so diabetic that they were going to be needing to start on insulin. Like this, this one man, he was a truck driver. I'll never forget him. You know, his, his A1C was 15. And I said to him, you're going to start losing, you know, body parts if we don't get this under control. And being a truck driver, he's, he's eating in the truck, not being able to make meals. So his diet was absolutely god awful, not exercising the whole bit. And, uh, he had said, if I started him on insulin, he was going to lose his job. They said, he said, they'll find a way to fire me because there's such a big risk of, um, somebody on insulin not having enough sugar in their body and going into insulin shock. And, uh, I gave him six months. I gave him the diet that I gave to everybody else.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  And in six months, his A1C went from 15 to 5.4. He lost almost 100 pounds just from changing his diet. That's how bad his diet was. In six months, he reversed everything, you know? And, and the medical community said for decades that you cannot reverse diabetes. It's a metabolic issue. Once you have it, you have it forever. My, I was 15 years old and my dad was diagnosed with diabetes. His whole family was diagnosed with adult onset, him, his six sisters and his mother. And I remember saying to my, my dad, you know, if you didn't drink so much, we're Italian, if you didn't drink so much red wine, you know, maybe cut back on some of the bread and the pastas, I'll bet you that this, because he wasn't a sweet person, a

• 41:00Speaker 03

  sweet eating person, you know, maybe this would all reverse itself. And he thought it was so cute to be this concerned about him. He said, you know, I talked this over with my doctor and he said that it's, diabetes is irreversible. Well, guess what? The GLP-1s come out. Soon as the pharmaceutical company can make money on it. Now, yes, you can reverse diabetes with diet alone as long as you have a GLP-1 on board. Because think about the GLP-1s, there's no insulin involved. There's nothing on there that decreases your blood sugar. You know, it works in the brain to decrease those cravings of food. It works in the gut by decreasing gastric emptying. So you feel fuller for a longer period of time. But other than that, I mean, you know, semaglutide is semaglutide is semaglutide, whether it's

• 41:45Speaker 03

  being sold as Ozempic or Wegovy, it's the exact same medication and pretty much the same dosing as well, whether it's diabetes or you're looking, using it for weight loss. And people are reversing their diabetes. So, yeah, I'm not a fan of the medical community at all. And I've, I've, I've lost so much faith and trust in it. And it's mostly because, you know, people go to work for, you know, an institution, they have to go by what that medical director says. And I honestly, I'd probably get fired now if I had to work for somebody else because

• 42:19Speaker 03

  I'm sorry if you don't agree with that, but I'm still going to do it my way.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  My way works. You know, I reverse the disease process. I get patients on a healthy diet. I increase the amount of water they're drinking and guess what? All of their medical problems go away, you know? So, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't last long. We'll put it that way.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's quite ironic that the people that are getting great results for people reversing disease processes, getting people to de-prescribe their meds are the ones being villainized sometimes. What world are we living in? Isn't that the goal of health?

• 42:54Speaker 03

  Yep, so true. And like that doctor that wouldn't take my patient off of the Zeralto, um, and Deltazem, when she know, never, I mean, she had Afib once. And I've had that happen to a lot of people during COVID. They would go into an Afib rhythm and then never again, you know, the flu will do that to you. Anything that's gonna, you know, um, irritate the SA node in the heart can throw you into Afib. Doesn't mean it's going to be permanent, but you get put on these medications, you're on them forever. And so she's explaining to him, she, she practices functional medicine. So she's been slowly getting me off the medications I don't need. And he said to her, I don't believe in functional medicine. And when she ever said that to me, I couldn't, I, I laughed out loud.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  I said, so he doesn't believe in Hippocrates? Hippocrates was clearly a functional medicine doctor who said, like, food is medicine. Like if you prescribe medication for your patient, you're doing them a disservice. So he doesn't believe in the father of medicine. That, I found so funny. I don't believe in functional medicine. What does he even think it is? Like, that's what was so funny. We're reversing the disease process by giving the person the right foods to eat, the right amount of water to drink, you know, exercise, all the things the body's supposed to do. And you reverse the diseases and you get them off the medications. But a doctor doesn't believe in that. That was just comical.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I hear that sentiment too. And it also makes me ponder, well, what do you think it even means? How, how can you disagree with something before you know the facts about it?

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, yep, exactly.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Well, besides food, which is clearly a number one thing that we need to look at, what are the other pillars that you find are necessary or helpful so that people are working towards reversal and repair?

• 44:44Speaker 03

  So we talked about water. We talked about the proper type of foods to eat. We didn't go into detail. And if, if anybody wants to know that, I can always post it on my website, the diet that I offer to my patients. Um, it's all inclusive. It's just very healthy options. Um, I even have snacks listed that you can eat. Um, vitamin D, huge misunderstood vitamin for real. So, you know, we were all taught that it's a fat soluble vitamin. Now we know it's actually a hormone. If you don't take it, your levels are going to drop immediately. Fat soluble vitamins will generally stay in your body for a longer period of time. And if you're overweight or have an abundance of fat cells, it's going to stay in your body even longer. We know that's no longer true with vitamin D.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Um, another thing is the, the levels that it should be at optimally, it should be between 60 and 80. In fact, 55 is that magic number. If your vitamin D level isn't at least 55, you're not going to get all the benefits that it offers. So vitamin D starts the, the levels for the lab starts at 30 to 100. 100 is a little bit too high. It's going to increase your calcium levels. You're not really going to become toxic, but you can't have too much calcium in your body, which is going to cause some neurological, um, changes in your body. So you want to keep those, make sure that you're getting your vitamin D levels checked. 30 to 50 is going to be good for your bones, but that's it. Once you get into the 60 to 80, now it's going to be covering good bone health, but

• 46:06Speaker 03

  it also helps reduce your risk of Alzheimer's disease, ALS, Parkinson's, MS, cancers. In fact, there was research done during COVID to find out why certain people who either should have died from COVID or at least ended up in the hospital and didn't, and what they found it was their vitamin D levels were close to 80. That's how important vitamin D is. In fact, if your vitamin D level is too low, it actually contributes to autoimmune diseases, including MS. So it's one of the most important vitamins that you can take. Probiotics is another one. Probiotics are so essential. They really are. I was in second grade when I had strep throat for an entire year and we didn't know anything about probiotics back then because I'm, I'm 63 now. So that was 50 something years ago.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  They didn't know anything about, um, probiotics back then. And starting in third grade, I started gaining weight, which be normal, you know? They give animals livestock antibiotics to help them to get bigger, quicker, gain weight faster, so they can go to slaughter so much earlier and make more money off of them. So antibiotics are going to cause weight gain. So I'm, I'm on penicillin orally and getting injections of penicillin, which hurt a lot. I remember that.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Finally had to have my tonsils out when I was 10 years old, but that really set me up for failure for years to follow. Um, I ended up with autoimmune diseases because my, my gut microbiome was so diseased from being on these antibiotics for so long without the proper probiotics. So as I got older, you know, my diet was exceptionally healthy. Um, I would gain weight a lot, lot quicker than my friends would, but it was all because of the microbiome, you know, learn more and more about, um, probiotics, got myself on the right probiotics and that alone changed my whole life. Like I'm, I was healthier in my 40s, 50s and 60s than I was in my teenage years, 20s and 30s, which is sad if you think about it.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that is such a huge topic as well with how much we're depending on these antibiotics, especially for children. And as soon as they go to school or to daycare or any public settings, they are gonna come down with some viral and bacterial illnesses. And then we just first line, throw a bunch of antibiotics to them. And then any sign of fever, we give them antipyretics. And then we wonder what's going on with their gut and why are they continuing to get ill?

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  And it's a problem. And now we're like noticing that there is such a thing as bacterial resistance mechanisms. And now we have to be careful and we have to practice antimicrobial stewardship. And it's so, so challenging because now we've created all of these mutant strains that we don't know what to do with anymore.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. So true. And a lot of it too is especially in primary care, when you don't really know what the antibiotic does, you know? So like azithromycin, for example, was just so overused because it was given for everything. And then when you really need it, it no longer works, you know? So that was like, that was a big one. So like for, I treat a lot of tick-borne diseases and there are certain antibiotics for each different tick-borne disease. But for Bartonella, you need azithromycin. You also need rifampin and you need, you know, one of the doxycyclines. I haven't had any issues. And some of these patients are on antibiotics for quite a while. Like my son was on antibiotics for three and a half years before I finally got it under

• 49:40Speaker 03

  control because he had had it for so long. He got bit by a tick at six. He had a bull's eye rash on his calf. He had no symptoms whatsoever. If he didn't have that bull's eye rash, I would have never known he had, he got bit by a tick. So his pediatrician put him on 10 to 14 days of an antibiotic. And I can't remember which one it was, but it wasn't a penicillin because he's allergic to penicillin. So I'm not really sure what it was at this, at this point. 13 years later, he had a hernia and he's on the table having the hernia repaired. And the surgeon left the OR to talk to me to find out if he had a connective tissue disorder that I neglected to tell him about. And I said, no, he was a very healthy 19-year-old kid, like no issues at all.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  And they described his abdominal wall to look like Swiss cheese. So I completely forgot at that moment that he had had Lyme disease when he was younger. He reminded me after the fact that he had Lyme disease because we couldn't figure out what is going on with this connective tissue, just like I had no idea why. You know, he had one, he had pain in his left lower quadrant, one little area, the tiniest hernia you can find, never expected him to have his entire abdominal wall needing mesh for everything to try and, you know, enclose all of the hernias, which was just frightening. And it was after the surgery, all hell broke loose. So whenever you have a chronic form of these tick-borne diseases, there's a trigger. So they'll, they'll stay pretty dormant for a while. They'll reside in biofilm.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  The immune system can't penetrate this biofilm. Antibiotics can't penetrate this biofilm. They're happy-go-lucky staying in there until you have some type of a traumatic event, whether it's an illness, a surgery, an accident, a death of a loved one. There's a trigger that just drops your immune system. The biofilm breaks open and now your body is infiltrated with all this bacteria. And so it was after the surgery that he started with the brain fog and the joint pain and the muscle pain. And I mean, it was just like, it was a nightmare, you know? Four years into this, he could no longer urinate. He had so much inflammation. He was trying to push the urine, not telling us at this point, he's not even telling his father or me. It wasn't until he was 26, he couldn't urinate at all because he had built up his, his pelvic

• 51:55Speaker 03

  floor so much that it was blocking his ability to urinate. His prostate was fine, like we went through so many urologists. And I was working as a hospitalist at the time. And fortunately, the, the urologist met us Easter Sunday morning to show my son how to self-catheterize himself. It was an absolute nightmare. It really, really was. And he was the only one, my son had seen probably four to six doctors in this period of time from 19 to 29. He was the only one that actually tested him for Lyme disease twice. But he tested him through local channels. So it was either Quest or LabCorp, which is CDC guidelines. So you do the ELISA. If the ELISA is negative, you never get tested for Lyme disease. So his ELISA was always negative, so he never actually got tested.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  So now he's 29, a month away from turning 30. And I, for 10 years, I did nothing but research and trying to figure out what is going on with my kid because he's getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And I found one research article on the Journal of Urology and it was a case study about a man who had walked into this urologist's office with these exact symptoms. So I called my son and I said, I know what this is. You have Lyme disease. And he, I could cry when I say this. He said, no, mom, they told me it's all in my head. That is a terrible thing to say to anybody. Like if you don't know what it is, then you don't know what it is. It doesn't mean that their symptoms are made up or, you know, an effigment of their imagination or anything else like that.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  It means that you don't know, not there's something wrong with their brain, you know? So that really upset me. And I just feel like if you tell a patient that their symptoms are all in their head, you need to find a different way to earn a living because you should not be a doctor. You should not be a provider. You should not be treating patients. Because if your ego is that big that you can't say to yourself, wow, I am missing something here, maybe refer to it with somebody else who might know what's going on? Get out of the medical profession, seriously. That's my own personal, very strong belief. So now I, you know, test him through Igenix, which is, you know, the world-class lab for tick-borne diseases. And he was negative. And I'm like, nope, this is impossible.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  So I'd send his blood off to Armin Labs in Germany. He was negative. And I'm like, nope, he has to be positive. It was the only thing that made sense at this point. So now I'm a part of ILADS. I contacted the researcher. He was the one that told me about ILADS. And I joined ILADS. I find Dr. Horowitz, a Lyme expert. I do all my training with him, my preceptorships with him. And I'm going back in the conferences. So they have all their conferences on the website that I can review for a price. I had to pay a lot of money to go through all of these conferences. And it was Dr. Bariscano, who now I know all these doctors so well, was Dr. Bariscano who was talking about the natural killer cells.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  That when you have a chronic form of these diseases, it'll, it will whittle away these natural killer cells. And the test is going to come back a false negative because your immune system isn't strong enough to produce a positive antibody. And so I checked my son's, it's called an HNK1 through LabCorp. I tested him. Normal, normal values are 60 to 360. His was 10. That's why he was never coming back positive. It wasn't until he was on antibiotics for three years that his 10 turned into a 59 and the Lyme test came back indeterminate. Once I got him up to the 70s, it came back positive. So it was like, I saw, I saw it in real time, how this actually works.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  So now what I do is if I have a patient who, you know, either has a history of a tick bite or Lyme disease from years ago, the first thing I do is get an HNK1. Because if their Lyme test is going to be negative, I know it's going to be a false negative because if that number is so low. But I've never had anybody with a 10. I did have one person with an 11 and it did take a while for me to get rid of her Lyme disease as well. Because it's just, the longer you've had it, the longer it takes to get rid of. So it's, it's so important to get the tick off of you as quick as possible. That 24 to 48 hour thing is ridiculous. As soon as you get bit by the tick, you're getting bacteria. But the longer it stays on you, the more bacteria it's putting into your system. So as soon as you get bit by a tick, you should get treatment for it.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  I put people on a month's worth of doxycycline.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  You know, I did, I did a program for the Connecticut APRN Society and we were talking about doxycycline because according to CDC and IDSA, two weeks, two weeks of doxyc is fine. If you have pimples, you could stay on doxyc for two years. But for a tick-borne disease that can change your life forever, two weeks. Like it makes no sense to me whatsoever at all. So there is another Lyme vaccine that's coming to market in 2027. Right now, the research isn't promising, but I'm sure they'll do things to try and get it so that, you know, it'll be probably more like 90% effective instead of 60 to 70% effective. So I'm looking, very looking forward to what's going to happen with all these naysayers

• 57:07Speaker 03

  that Lyme doesn't exist or you don't have to worry about it when this vaccine is going to be, you know? It's through Pfizer. They're a big pharmaceutical company with a great sales force. So you know that government is going to be pushing this vaccine. And I think people should know that, you know, get it or not, it's only going to cover Lyme disease. There's 18 different bacterias, viruses that a tick can carry and parasites. Lyme is only one of them.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Wow, yes. I mean, these are complex issues that you're navigating. And I think the fact that you personally had gone through the medical system and were very disappointed and disillusioned and then healed yourself. And then now with your son's journey and Lyme disease. I mean, there's, there's a lot of pain and suffering and it's very challenging for sure to navigate all that. And at the same time, it taught you compassion and tenacity and to dig deeper. And now you can turn around and serve so many other people through those lessons.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  So it's just really inspiring to hear you and to know that you've built this thriving practice. And I really want to have you back for like 10 more sessions and episodes so we can talk about parasites and like all these other different things that you deal with and when, what your approach is. But we are coming to the end of the episode. So if you have one more minute, I'd love to do a fire rapid round with you.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Okay. So what's your number one advice to help somebody improve their quality of life right now?

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Stop eating anything that's processed or preserved. Stop eating anything that comes from a box or a package. Start getting back to basics. Start making your own food. If you're going to eat meat, I never tell people not to eat meat. Make sure it's organic. Make sure the eggs you're buying are organic and pasteurized. Make sure the... I don't eat any bread from this country. I buy flour from Italy. I make my own bread. It's the only bread that doesn't cause bloating, throat pain, brain fog, all the stuff that the gluten in our country causes because it's grown in poor soil. It's over-processed and it just changes the whole dynamics of the bread. Drink half your body weight in ounces of water unless you have heart failure or kidney disease.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  But it's really going to be diet is going to be the most important thing. And start moving. You really have to exercise every single day. None of this three times a week or, you know, four times a week. Exercise every single day. If you want to do, you know, treadmill three or four times a week, that's great. The other week should be strength training. You should definitely be moving every single day. Because as soon as you start sitting still, all the disease processes start coming to life. Every time I hear somebody is going to retire, I don't get joyful for them. I get anxious for them. Because when people retire and they don't have a plan of how they're going to get up every day, have a routine every day, you know, get to the gym every day, things like that.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  They think they worked their whole lives, they're exhausted. They just want to relax and sleep. Say hello to death because that's what's going to happen next. Everything that has been just on the surface is going to start growing and you're going to be in the ground before you want to. And that is a real blunt way of saying it, but it is a God's honest truth. I have never seen a retired person who didn't get up and move every day, live a long life. If they lived a long life, it was in a nursing home, unfortunately.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, really, really great tips there. So if there is one overlooked tip that you can give somebody that's looking to improve their life outside of diet and exercise, what would that be? And maybe it's overlooked in both the conventional and perhaps even the functional spaces.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  It's going to be make sure you're in a happy and healthy relationship. Because stress alone will eat away at your entire body. It really, really well. Stress really is a number one killer. It causes a host of problems, including heart disease and cancer. And, you know, my first marriage was a very unhealthy marriage. I had more health problems in my first marriage than you can possibly imagine. Once I got divorced and got myself into therapy, that I honestly kicked and screamed over. I did not think I needed a therapist. And thank God, my sister just sat on me until I finally started to go to one. Changed my life. You have to get the right one. You have to get somebody who's like you. You know, another, just like you're going to hire employees that are like you.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  You want to find a therapist who's like you. Because you'll be able to communicate a lot better. But I found one that literally, she didn't take insurance. At the time, I had two small kids. I couldn't afford $150 an hour. I went to see her twice and I had my first visit. She asked me to write down 11 positive qualities about me and I could not think of one. This is how much self-esteem he took from me. Like, you know, for years I heard how I couldn't cook right. I couldn't iron right. I honestly couldn't breathe right. I couldn't do anything right. And it stays with you. You don't realize how that negativity can really affect your body.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  But once I got divorced and went for therapy and, you know, really delved into myself, I even, you know, joined a women's group. It was called Women Against Domestic Violence. I did so much to get myself healthy that, I mean, I can pick out a red flag now immediately. Before that, I didn't see red. I swear, I just did not see the red flags. You know, I had an excuse for every reaction or every, you know, personality flaw. There was always a reason for it. Well, that's great, there's a reason for it. It doesn't need to be my reason. It doesn't have to be my problem. It doesn't have to be my issue. I get to walk away and live my life the way I want to live it. So my husband now is an absolute gem.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  I don't even know, I can't say enough wonderful things about him. He's not only a great husband, he's just a great person. He treats everybody the same, everybody with respect. I, he's just a, I'm so grateful that I met him. I really am.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Wow, what a powerful story of transformation and how much changed, literally like physically on a health level from that spiritual, emotional support that the relationship now gives you. So last question. What advice would you give to an earlier version of yourself?

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Wow, don't marry your father.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  All right, awesome. We'll keep it at that. So please tell everybody, Pam, how they can get in touch with you, learn more about your work. Do you take new patients? Are you online as well as in person? Give us all the deets.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  I am. So I actually treat people around the world. I have patients in Italy, I have patients in Puerto Rico, in Australia right now. And I have them all over the country. I have to see you for me to prescribe medications for you, especially in the country. I have to see you once a year in Connecticut. And then I can prescribe anywhere. I do a lot of tele-visits for people who live, you know, in other areas, including in Connecticut. Because Connecticut is a pretty small state, but it's still, certain areas will take about two hours to get to me. So as long as I see you that one time, once a year. I try and do all the testing. We draw blood while you're here. I encourage people to do the Igenix testing. It's the one that I use. It's called the 401B panel.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  So it's $12.99, $1,299. I don't want people to think it's $12.99. Medicare is the only insurance company that will cover this test. Generally Medicare sets the standard and the other insurance companies follow suit. This is the only one they've never followed suit because they don't want to have anything to do with tick-borne diseases. But Igenix will give you the vast majority. I only test for Lyme, Bartonella, Babesia and tick-borne relapsing fever. All of the other tick-borne diseases are pretty accurate through LabCorp or Quest.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Bartonella is a funny one. If you have it for any length of time, it can get into your nervous system and so it's no longer going to be in the bloodstream. That's when I'll go to Galaxy Labs for $500. And that's when I'll usually do a second test through them to see if a person has Bartonella. But I've gotten to a point where I can identify what tick-borne disease you have based on your clinical symptoms.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  So we treat, you know, parasitic infections, which do exist in this country, believe it or not, chronic inflammatory infections, autoimmune diseases. A lot of these autoimmune diseases are brought on by bacterial infections. Once you get rid of the infection, you get rid of the autoimmune disease. So I've just, I've learned so much in the 10 years I've been on my own. It's been an absolute journey for sure. But it's been a pretty positive experience for me. I'm located in Thomasville, Connecticut. You could find me on the internet. It's the Practice of Health and Wellness, all spelled out, dot com.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  And our phone number is 860-880-2525. Or on Instagram, or on Facebook. And I have a YouTube channel. It's Dr. Pamela Cipriano 1329.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  All right, beautiful. I'll have all that info in the show notes so people can reach you. Thank you again so much, Pamela, for coming on, sharing your wisdom. And I look forward to staying in touch.

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  Thank you for tuning into another episode of the Holistic Pharmacy Podcast. And I truly hope you enjoyed the show. If you learned something useful in this episode, please consider giving the show a five-star rating and a sincere review so that more people can find it or share it with a friend directly. To get in touch with me, you can find me on social media by looking up my name, Marina Booksov, or email me at [email protected]. Take good care and see you soon.