Undiagnosed Infections Are Silently Causing Chronic Disease | Dr. Richard Horowitz

Living with chronic illness can feel like collecting diagnoses without getting real answers. Symptoms are treated one at a time, but the underlying causes can easily be missed. What if asking a different question is the first step toward feeling better? In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Richard Horowitz, an internationally recognized Lyme disease expert and author of the new book Ending Chronic Illness. After caring for thousands of patients over more than four decades, he explains why many seemingly unrelated conditions share common underlying drivers—and why thinking like a medical detective may help uncover them. We discuss: Why treating the diagnosis isn't always the same as treating the problem—and how to start looking deeper How hidden infections, environmental toxins, gut health, and other overlooked factors can quietly drive chronic illness What new research may reveal about the links between infection, inflammation, and brain health How to begin uncovering what's really driving persistent symptoms Our bodies are constantly communicating with us. The challenge isn't that they're silent—it's that we haven't always known how to listen. Sometimes finding better answers begins with asking different questions. Continue Exploring If you'd like to explore Dr. Horowitz's work further, here are two great places to start: Take his Symptom Assessment Quiz to better understand what may be contributing to your symptoms. Subscribe to his Medical Detective Substack ****for ongoing insights into chronic illness, Lyme disease, and root-cause medicine. Interested in getting tested? Many of the lab tests discussed in this episode are available through Function, making it easier to get a more comprehensive picture of your health. View Show Notes From This Episode Sign up for Dr. Hyman’s Brainshaping Academy to learn how to nourish the biological systems that support your mental, emotional, and cognitive health https://drhyman.com/products/brainshaping?utm_source=dr_hyman_show&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=may_27&utm_content=link Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hymanhttps://drhyman.com/pages/picks?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journalhttps://drhyman.com/pages/longevity?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Join the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Healthhttps://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detox Join the Hyman Hive for Expert Support and Real Resultshttps://drhyman.com/pages/hyman-hive This episode is brought to you by Timeline, Cozy Earth, Seatopia, Perfect Amino, BON CHARGE, and Made In. Support healthy aging and get up to 20% off when you subscribe on top of the new starting price of $79 at timeline.com/drhyman. Upgrade your sleep setup with cozyearth.com and enjoy 20% off with code HYMAN. Find a cleaner source of seafood. Check out seatopia.fish and use code HYMAN for free shipping on your first order. Help fill protein gaps at bodyhealth.com and use code HYMAN20 for 20% off. Explore red light products at boncharge.com/hyman and enjoy 15% off with code HYMAN. Explore kitchen essentials at madeincookware.com and save 10% off your first order with code HYMAN-HIVE. (0:00) Infections and toxins as root causes of chronic illness; Dr. Horowitz's background and journey to functional medicine (5:37) Discovering and treating various infections, toxins, and Dr. Hyman's personal health story (9:16) Root causes of chronic disease, inflammation, and testing for infections and toxins (15:11) Sponsor: Seatopia and PerfectAmino (16:42) Importance of diet, addressing multiple health factors, and autoimmune misdiagnosis (19:26) Role of infections, toxins, microbiome, and leaky gut in autoimmune diseases and inflammation (21:06) Treating underlying causes and neuroinflammation in chronic diseases (24:37) Nutritional deficiencies, COVID-19, and the importance of sleep in chronic illness management (30:19) Plant medicines, supplements, and dapsone in treating neuroinflammation, Lyme, and Alzheimer's (41:30) Use of methylene blue in treatment protocols (44:56) Sponsor: Bon Charge (45:58) Sponsor: Made In (46:43) Evolution of treatment protocols and six principal causes of inflammation (50:18) Importance of adrenal function and hormone treatment in chronic illness (52:17) Differential diagnosis vs. root cause analysis and root cause testing (56:38) Horowitz's questionnaire and protocols for treating chronic infections (58:39) Addressing mold-related health issues and Dr. Hyman's personal experience (1:01:01) Mold testing, detoxification, and controversies in treatment (1:07:47) Insurance challenges and HHS innovation grant for chronic illness research (1:09:04) Importance of root cause medicine and Mark Hyman's upcoming book on longevity (1:11:56) Personalized medicine, reversing Alzheimer's biomarkers, and research funding priorities (1:15:02) Influence of Buddhist principles and personal experiences with chronic illness (1:16:01) Hope for patients, resources for learning, and closing remarks

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At this point, like you, I've seen over 13,000 chronically ill patients who've been to 30, 40 doctors. The most was 100, by the way, who ended up getting better. The key six root causes that I was finding is number one, these infections, a bacterial infections like Lyme, but also one that a lot of people don't know about, which is Bartonella.

• 0:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What you're saying here is that all of these have similar underlying causes. And then if you treat those underlying causes, the downstream effects tend to get better without treating them directly.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Correct. And that's the problem in medicine. The way we were taught is name the disease, throw the drug at it. But you didn't get to the root causes of why they were sick.

• 0:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

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• 1:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

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• 1:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's soft, it's lightweight, and it still feels comfortable even on long, hot days. Sometimes the small things in your life can have a bigger impact on how you feel than most people realize, especially when it comes to comfort, sleep quality. If you're looking to upgrade your daily essentials, head to Cozier.com/hyman and receive 20% off. All right, Dr. Horowitz, Richard, so good to have you on the podcast. We were just chatting a little bit and we've known each other for more than two decades. And we have shared so many patients together. And you and I are those kinds of doctors that people go to after they've seen everybody. I used to work at Canyon Ranch and my joke was it was a health resort and I was the doctor of last resort. I'm a resort doctor.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  That's exactly what they would call me as the doctor of last resort.

• 2:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Resort doctor, yeah. And so I think, I think, you know, we're going to talk about this chronic disease epidemic. You recently wrote a book called Ending Chronic Illness, which is a really important book. We've come to all the same conclusion. Anybody who's really seriously looking at chronic disease, who's looking at root causes, who's trying to understand the body, who's seen 10,000 plus patients knows that what we thought in medical school was not the right map for the body. And that so many of our chronic diseases have very similar underlying root causes and need a very different approach to address the dysfunction, dysfunctions we see in people. And so your book is really kind of a roadmap on how to do that, which is amazing. Cause so many people are struggle and they suffer and they don't need to suffer. Maybe you can kind of take us back to how you're kind of a regular doc. And, you know, you got trained traditional medicine like I did.

• 3:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When did, when did you go, wait a minute, I think we're missing something here. When was that moment for you and you're like, wait, shit, this isn't the whole story?

• 3:31Speaker 00

  For me, what was kind of interesting is it was almost a spiritual path because I did my medical training in Belgium in French for seven years. And I started studying with Tibetan Buddhist Lamas in 1981.

• 3:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  And when I was leaving, I don't know if you knew this story.

• 3:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I do, I do. Yeah. You know, we talked about this. I actually majored in Buddhism in college.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 3:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And Tibetan Buddhism was the same thing. So, yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  So, you know, I'm leaving medical school and I go to my Tibetan teacher and I go to Lama Gyan and I say Lama, what's the most important thing you want me to know as a doc? And he said, Richard, the most important thing is put yourself in people's shoes and do for them what you would want done for yourself. They call it exchanging yourself with others. Basic advice, you know, love, wanting other people to be happy, compassion, wanting other people to be free from suffering. So here I moved to the Hudson Valley, New York after being at Mount Sinai, getting my internal medicine, you know, residency and board certified. And I move into the largest Lyme endemic area in the United States, which is where the Tibetan monastery was for me to continue practicing meditation. And here these Lyme patients are coming in, this is going back now to 1987, right? They're coming in, they're coming in with bullseye rashes. Nobody knows exactly what to do. I start a medical detective journey of like, why these people are sick?

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Cause I sent them to neurologists and rheumatologists and infect, nobody knew what to do. Especially because the infectious disease doctors thought, you know, 30 days of antibiotics, that's it. Except they kept coming back sick. So I started on this journey and ultimately functional medicine came in because as I was discovering root causes of why they were sick, and I'll give you some examples. This woman in a wheelchair comes in, this is early on. She can't walk, she's in a wheelchair for five years and she's sweating bullets, she's got drenchy night sweats. I just got back from a Lyme conference and learned about Babesia, this malaria-like parasite.

• 5:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  It's not supposed to be in the Hudson Valley. I test her for it and I test the ticks, it's positive. I give her mepronazithromax, which I published at the conference the year before. And lo and behold, she starts walking out of a wheelchair after five years. And she was on five years of antibiotics for chronic Lyme. It wasn't until the parasite got treated, another patient then comes in shortly afterwards. She can't speak, she's got dysarthria and I found out it was Bartonella. It was another bacteria. She went to a very famous Boston hospital, said it was a migraine. I treat the Bartonella, she talks for the first time.

• 5:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  So one by one, what started happening is I started discovering these pieces to the puzzle. And mold toxicity started showing up shortly afterwards where these people were getting better from the protocols I've developed for Lyme, but still something was off. And I started discovering other viral infections, long COVID patients were relapsing with Epstein-Barr and herpes virus six. They had candida overgrowth in the gut. They were loaded with heavy metals on top of mold. The microbiome was off, they had leaky gut and intestinal hyperpermeability. So one by one, as these sick patients were coming in, I started discovering these pieces of the puzzle. And that's how the 16-point episode model came to be.

• 6:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I don't know if you know this about me, but I was one of those patients, like really. I was 36, I was really healthy the year before, riding my bike 100 miles a day for three days from Boston, New York on an, like an AIDS ride. And I could, you know, remember 30 patients the end of the day with no problem. And I went from one day to the next, it was like my whole system collapsed. And it was a very long period of recovery, but I ended up having heavy metal poisoning from mercury from living in China. My gut went crazy, I had leaky gut, I developed bacterial overgrowth, like my belly was just bloated, like I couldn't even eat anything. I had severe cognitive impairment, I couldn't sleep, my muscles were aching, my muscle end zones were like 600,

• 6:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  my autoimmune antibodies were high, my white count was low, I had all these like weird things going on. I ended up having Lyme disease, Babesia, I lived in an 1825 building and house.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  There was the mold.

• 7:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  With the mold in the basement. It was like so moldy. And I had everything, I had heavy metal, I had mold, I had tick infections, I had gut issues, all of it. And my hormones started going wacky, my mitochondria went wacky and all the things that you describe in your book, I experienced as a patient. I only discovered all this because I was desperate to get better for myself.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I started treating me with my, with what I learned from functional and systems medicine. And I started getting better and I started treating my patients and they started getting better. And I was, I was flabbergasted, like you did what and you got better? You just changed your diet and you did this or you did that and you're, you know, your, your migraines are gone or your arthritis is gone. Or like, I was like, sort of stunned as a traditionally trained doctor that these things were working.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Cause no, and I had the same experience. I came on with allergies and asthma.

• 7:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  My father was a surgeon. Every time I was sick, it was like, Harris, give him a shot. And nobody used probiotics right at that point. I had candida overgrowth in my gut, leaky gut with mast cell activation. Until I figured out I had to get off histamine foods, my asthma wouldn't go away. It was, it was interesting. I went to Yeshe Dondin, the Dalai Lama's personal physician at one point.

• 8:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh my.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Because of this connection, he takes my pulse and he goes, oh, trauma at six years old caused asthma. And I went, oh my God, my parents got divorced.

• 8:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Seriously.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  So, you know, the type of experience, so the type of experience you had, I also had leaky gut, intestinal hyperbilum. Metals, I chelated myself for metals for a year and a half. I think the doctors, by the way, like us who do this, who've had the personal experiences, they probably have more compassion for the patients because they've been through this themselves.

• 8:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, because, because these are the patients that the joke in medical school was they have a supertentorial illness, which means it's all in their head. It's like a big fancy word for how doctors sort of basically are pretty, you know, derisive about patients and cynical. And they think that, oh, people are complaining of all these weird and vague things. I didn't really learn about it in medical school, so it's not really real. But it is, and people suffer tremendously. And that's what drives me so much in my work. And I know you too, you work tirelessly and I see so many patients, you've written all these books too. And your last book was Why Can't I Get Better and How Can I Get Better, which was great. So you, you've really been on this path a long time. And what I want to do is sort of get into the details of it because I think people listening really need to understand like, what are the root causes? And then you came up with six things and they're very, it's a very similar thing we come up with in functional medicine. And what are the downstream effects?

• 9:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And at the end of the day, a lot of the suffering that we're seeing in chronic disease is inflammation. And there are many roads to get to inflammation, whether it's metals or mold or ticks or gut or food sensitivities or whatever the list is. But the end result is it has. Harmful effects across every system of the body. So let's talk about like, what are those six principal causes of inflammation that you described? And how do you start thinking about digging around, being a medical detective? Because ultimately, you'd be really good at finding these things.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which, by the way, are things that traditional doctors never look for.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  At this point, like you, I've seen over 13,000 chronically ill patients who've been to 30, 40 doctors, the most was 100, by the way, who ended up getting better. The key six root causes that I was finding is number one, these infections, abacterial infections like Lyme, but also one that a lot of people don't know about, which is Bartonella. Now, there are 18 to 19 different subspecies of Bartonella. So if you try going to LabCorp or Quest to get a Bartonella test, you're going to miss it, right? And a lot of these long COVID patients who come in with VGF, with vascular endothelial growth factor, it's not from spike proteins that are actually inflaming the endovascular issue, it's basically Bartonella. So, you know, we find Bartonella in a lot of these patients, which drives inflammation. Reactivated viruses, definitely Epstein-Barr herpes virus six, especially in the long COVID population.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Parasites like Babesia, very common at this point, and Candida. So it's, you know, it's basically bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. But the second is the environmental toxins.

• 10:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump to that, I want to kind of dive in, because a lot of people, they go into the doctor, I got my test done, you implied that, you know, they miss it. How do you get people tested? What are the ways that the people should think about finding out these things about themselves and these infections?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  If I want to check for Lyme and B, I'll go straight to anigenics immunoblot, their IgM IgG immunoblot, and Bartonella IgM IgG immunoblot, Bartonella fish, which checks for all these different species, or even T-Lab, very good Bartonella fish, Babesia fish. They even do a good Lyme PCR. So I like these specialty labs. It's not that I can't use the local labs with an Eliza or Western Blot, but I find these specialty labs are really needed. And I play a game with people called Lyme Bingo, which means that if you come in and you're tired and you're achy and you have brain fog and you can't fall asleep and you keep waking up and you're depressed and you're anxious and you have chest pain and shortness of breath, right, all the multi systemic symptoms of Lyme, even if you go to a local

• 11:43Speaker 00

  lab and you get back one Borrelia specific band on a Western Blot, 23 out of surface protein C, 31 out of surface protein A, 34 out of surface protein B, 39, very specific, 83, 93. Now, the 31 is a little nonspecific of the Epstein-Barr autoimmune, but if you come in with a disease with good and bad days, where the symptoms come and go with migratory pain, and here's the key, Lyme patients have migratory joint pain, migratory muscle pain, and migratory nerve pain, tingling, numbness, burning, stabbing, vibration, the hallmark of Lyme is migratory pain.

• 12:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  So if you have migratory pain-

• 12:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Meaning it moves around.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Moves around your body and you can't explain why.

• 12:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  And if you have that with even one of these bands that I mentioned on an immunoblot, which is recombinant DNA, you've been exposed to a Borrelia species.

• 12:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're saying you need to go to a specialty lab, like Higienics, that does testing differently than you'd get at a normal lab like Quest or LabCorp?

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Correct. You can still get a Western Blot and an Eliza that-

• 12:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it might miss it.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  The C6 Eliza checks for three strains, Borrelia burgdorferi, Avzela angurinae from Europe, but, and even heart tic relapsing fever, Borrelia miomotoi, which you have a Lyme-like illness, you go to the lab, oh, it's negative, but there's a relapsing fever Borrelia, it's like a cousin of Lyme disease. It's also showing up in 25% of these patients. So that's why you have to kind of understand, we're in the middle of a tick-borne epidemic, we're in the middle of an environmental toxin epidemic. I mean, these infections and toxins together, they're really pushing inflammation.

• 13:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Don't forget mold. So we'll get to that. All right, so we kind of dive into those things, and then the toxins are the next big category, right? Tell us about the way that those are prevalent and how they-

• 13:18Speaker 00

  I tested myself early on, a dentist friend of mine tested himself for heavy metals, was loaded, I tested myself loaded on mercury, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum, myself. I chelated myself for a year and a half to pull them out.

• 13:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  With DMSA?

• 13:30Speaker 00

  With DMSA, generally. And then afterwards, we had mold in our house, like most people do, right, exposed, and I started looking for patients. So it's the same thing, I found it myself, started looking for others, and I didn't realize at the time how important mold was. Mold is a mitochondrial poison, and mold affects your immune system. So here's the problem, you get Lyme and Bartonella, which causes immune deficiency, you get, so it destroys your B cells from the bone marrow that make antibodies. 20% of my patients come in with chronic variable immune deficiency, 85% subclass deficiency. You can't fight infections if you have immune deficiency.

• 14:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's interesting you say that, because I, after seeing so many patients with tick infections, it was like, I was like, this is kind of like AIDS.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  It is.

• 14:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It just screws everything up.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely. People don't realize how badly this affects.

• 14:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You'll die from it, but it screws everything up.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Then you get COVID with T cell exhaustion on top of your B cells, right? So now you can't, your natural killer cells were thrown off, you can't fight viruses and cancer the same way. And they get mold toxins with gliotoxins on top of it, which are immunosuppressive. How can you expect people to get better when their immune system is so profoundly affected by this? So, yes, the mold toxins and heavy metals on top of these other infections, they're really important to go after. And I found that the majority of the chronicle patients where inflammation was driving their illness, it was absolutely the mold, the metals, and these infections at the top of the list of what I call the six rivers of inflammation, which is in any chronic illness.

• 14:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In your book, Any Chronic Illness, you do talk about how it's not just one thing. Like, it's, they sting stack. It's like, everybody has everything almost, to some degree, it's all a whole system collapse, and it's triggered by, and everybody's a little different, some have more mold, some have more ticks, some more metal, but it's usually a combination of the load of everything that just causes this system breakdown. Do you trust the seafood from the supermarket? Well, sadly, I can't anymore. There's just too much mercury and microplastics in the ocean these days. But my clean seafood box from Sea Topia brought back the trust again. It arrives blast frozen in my house, it's lab tested for microplastics and mercury, and it's packed with a variety of seafood, it's full of bioavailable omega-3s. You get the best of seafood's nutritional properties without the side of toxins sadly

• 15:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

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• 16:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

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• 16:42Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And in fact, my wife, Lee, my beloved, had all 16 of these MCID factors that I'm describing, but as an example, we didn't know at the time she had leaky gut, intestinal, and she had mast cell activation. So she's thinking, oh, bone broth is good for me, and I had some chocolate the night before, and a little bit of kimchi with some, you know, fermented vegetables. She wakes up the next morning vomiting on the floor with a migraine. And I didn't, and I said, what did you eat? And she told me, and I went, oh my God, sweetheart, you have mast cell activation. We got her off the histamine foods, she has not had a migraine since. Now, my Sicilian mother-in-law may have played some role in that, that's a separate issue with stress, but the point is, it was the histamine sensitivity.

• 17:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Right? So each time I pulled a nail, I treated the Lyme, she got better. It's like peeling an onion in these people, right? So, yes, the leaky gut and the microbiome issues, also, we, now with the gut-brain axis, what we know about the microbiome, in every-

• 17:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's the other main trigger you're talking about.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, I mean, the interesting part about every disease I looked at, from ADD, ADHD, to autism, to Alzheimer's, to allergies and asthma, to cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, digestive disorders, irritable bowel, inflammatory bowel, immune disorders, autoimmune disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, mood disorders, depression, anxiety, OCD, psychosis, bipolar, all 16 MCID factors showed up in all these diseases. And my wife is one example. I had to go after every one of these, and now she's in perfect, she's eight years in remission since she did the Dapsone protocol for Lyme, it's a nine-week oral protocol, and she's eight years in remission without one symptom.

• 18:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's incredible.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  But she's got to be strict with her diet, right? Staying off Candida, hypoglycemic diet, we both share similar, like, blood sugar swings if we're not careful with our diets.

• 18:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, it's so true, it's like, you know, you have to go systematically through everything, and it's not what we're trained to do. We're trained to, the model that you talk about in your book, which is a single disease with a single label with a single drug, and that's just not how the body works.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  No.

• 18:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's just not.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  No, and, you know, it's really sad for people, the number of people, and I think you've seen this too, the number of people misdiagnosed, that they would come in with MS, right, because they had demyelination and tingling numbness, they had optic neuritis, their bladder wasn't working, except they were given the ABC drugs, Avonex, Betacere, Copaxone, Rebif, God forbid, Rituximab, their B cells are gone, they weren't getting better. So it's not a question of, do you have MS? It's a question of, where's the demyelination coming from, right? In these patients, we would find chlamydia pneumonia, Bartonella, Lyme, mold, heavy metals, mercury lead, arsenic, microbiome, and when we treated these things, the demyelination got better. And that's why the drugs weren't working. And I found with a lot of these autoimmune illnesses, I had a patient recently with

• 19:19Speaker 00

  rheumatoid arthritis, true rheumatoid, CCP positive rheumatoid factor, but he had migratory joint pain. So that's why the methotrexate wasn't working, is we had to treat his Lyme, and he had drenching night sweats, and he was like 40, and I said, oh, you're in manopause, he didn't get the joke initially, but it's like, it was Babesia, of course, right? We treated it, and now the autoimmune disease was- Much better. So he had a true autoimmune illness, but then had these other people, you said it before, these autoimmune markers. They're showing up. The Lyme is causing antidopamine, nergic antibodies, anti thyroid antibodies, anticardiolipin antibodies, anti myelin antibodies. It's causing this auto. So people come in with these autoimmune illnesses, but it's Lyme causing molecular mimicry.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Your immune system is attacking the bug, right? The flageller and it's causing these auto antibodies. It's not an autoimmune illness. It's the bacteria and the toxins that are combining to cause this type of inflammation.

• 20:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Just for people listening, when you say Lyme, you mean the whole spectrum of tick infections.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is a whole, which is dozen.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Right. It is never Lyme disease anymore. I called it the three Bs, borrelia, babesia, bartonella. That's one of the chapters in the book because these three are showing up in the vast majority of people.

• 20:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So, so the microbiome stuff is a big thing too, and leaky gut and food sensitivities.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  What did you and I know about chuching fatty acid bacteria years ago, right? Driving inflammation. I mean, I take prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics every day. Because I found out that the microbiome is so important from everything from autism to Alzheimer's to autoimmune, right? You can't get around it at this point because of the gut brain axis. So, you know, that's how I support my health. I, you know, do prebiotics and all of this every day.

• 20:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You gotta feed your, you're not just eating for you, you're eating for your microbiome.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 20:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, you, you also said something in this long list of litany of diseases, which I think is worth doubling down on, which is all these conditions. Seem like separate diseases. They all have separate specialties. They all have separate experts that have to manage each one with all their separate cocktail of drugs. But you're saying here is that all of these have similar underlying causes. And then if you treat those underlying causes, the downstream effects tend to get better without treating them directly.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Correct. So.

• 21:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's a big ahah for people.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  And that's the problem in medicine. The way we were taught is name the disease, throw the drug at it, but you didn't get to the root causes of why they were sick. You know, even in autism, I recently had a young patient, 12 years old, the mother had congenital Lyme and no one ever checked. And the boy was living in a very mold toxic environment. So this kid at 12 years old, social problems, connecting, right? We gave him Dapsone combination therapy for treating the Lyme, treating the Bart, pulled out the mold. Mirac, the kid's brain woke up. Now, the kid had been sick for 12 years and everyone had given up with him, you know, regarding that he had autism. There was nothing we could do. So, you know, we clearly need randomized, multi-centered trials and all of these things, right? There's no doubt.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  These are, these are all, you know, anecdotal stories, but this, what the medicine says, what the science says, with over 2,000 references, by the way, you know, in ending chronic illness. Is there are 16 factors underlying the, all of these illnesses. So no matter what you're calling the illness, if you're tired, if you're achy, if you have pain, if you have brain fog, if you have mood disorders. You can't just take SSRIs and say, right? I mean, you know, Bobby Kennedy Jr. Is going after it right now with it to get people off of them. But if you have Lyme and bartonella driving your illness with your mood disorder and mold, it's not going to be enough. You've got to get to these root causes and even trauma. I mean, I have to do vague limbic retraining. I, you probably do this the same. We find that probably at least a third of our population has such severe trauma that even if I address these other causes of inflammation.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  If I don't do limbic retraining with the any hopper dynamic neural retraining or primal trust or Gupta amygdala insular retraining. Using the Apollo neuro or the neuropod, getting their vagal system and everything in order, they will not get better, right? It's, it's like.

• 23:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's resetting the autonomic.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  You've got to reset the autonomic nervous system. It's, so that's why all of these 16 points are so important in these patients.

• 23:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And all the things you're talking about, all these diseases, whether it's dementia or autism or depression or heart disease or cancer or. Many of these chronic fatigue syndromes, all these things, they're all tied to inflammation. So autism is inflammation of the brain. Alzheimer's is inflammation of the brain. I wrote an article years ago, basically about how, you know, autism and Alzheimer's are very similar. If you look at these patients, they have a very similar profile of genes. They have very similar biomarkers that are abnormal. They have like very different manifestations, but it's very, it's very interesting.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  It's funny you say that because I just did a medical detective sub stack on it. The mTOR pathway, right? We're using, people using rapamycin and other things to get to it. It turns out that with autism and Alzheimer's, it's the same biochemical pathway.

• 23:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  Right? So they're, they're, they just don't have enough autophagy. They're, they're not getting rid of their damaged mitochondria. They've got an ongoing inflammatory response. And if you give sulforaphane glucosinolate broccoli seed extract to the autistic population, they did it at John Hopkins. A third of these kids, their brains work and the same thing with the Alzheimer's. So you're right. Autism and Alzheimer's on a spectrum of brain of neuroinflammation. And so instead of naming it, right? Where is the inflammation coming from? And that's the whole point of endocrinism.

• 24:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I think that's what Sid Baker talks about the naming blaming game. We name the disease and then we blame the name for the problem. Or the reason you have joint pain is because you have rheumatoid arthritis. Now that's just a name that we give to people who have that kind of joint pain. It doesn't mean anything about the cause. It could be mold, it could be metal, it could be Lyme, it could be a million things, the leaky gut. You also talk about one of the factors being vitamin and mineral or nutritional deficiencies. Can you talk about that? Cause people think, oh, we know we're, you know, we don't have malnutrition in this country and we're all eating plenty of food and what the big deal.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  No, in the, in the top six root causes of inflammation, what I call the, you know, rivers of inflammation going into an ocean of inflammation. Number five is vitamin mineral deficiencies. And what we're finding because of all the toxin loads is when you do not just serum minerals, and you know this well. I'll check magnesium. You need it for 300 detoxification enzymes. You need copper, superoxide, dismutase. I need zinc for, you know, phase one liver functions and inflammation. When we look intracellularly at the red blood cells, zinc, the red blood cell copper, the red blood cell magnesium, we're finding up to 20% of our patients are deficient. Which means you cannot detoxify properly and deal with inflammation. So, you know, somebody may have, for example, a normal or slightly low B12 level. But their methylmalonic acid level is high. So yeah, we're, we're finding a huge amount of vitamin mineral deficiencies.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  And a lot of this is because you're fighting these infections, you're dealing with all these toxins, you're depleting your system, including depleting glutathione. I don't know if you knew this, but I wrote the first article in the world literature in COVID-19 in April, 2020 on glutathione. And how it helps with COVID and what I didn't know at the time, not one of my patients died from COVID-19, not one. Because I was blocking the first major inflammatory pathway, I discuss in the book, NF kappa B. We were giving all of our patients N-acetylcysteine, alpha lipoic acid, glutathione. I didn't know at the time that the virus needs to lower glutathione to replicate.

• 26:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, amazing.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  And I also didn't know that NEC was blocking von Willebrand factors. So they weren't getting microclots and dying from it. So I was giving them the right treatment. I just didn't know why at the time. And then we were stimulating the NRF2 pathway, opening up detox using curcumin, turmeric, broccoli seed extract, resveratrol, green tea. By simply doing these things with a little bit of vitamin D, you know, some extra zinc, I was giving them immunotics, three, six beta glucan. By simply doing these things with a little bit of low dose naltrexone, one of my favorites also for blocking the third pathway and LRP3 inflammasomes. Not one patient died and only two were in the hospital. And I saw very few long COVID cases in my practice with it.

• 26:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's, it's the nutritional deficiencies are quite significant. And, and I think, you know, with function health, the company I co-founded. We're doing, you know, now we've found over half a million, half a million members, we've done over 100 million lab tests. 70% of people are deficient in one or more nutrient, not at the level you or I would think would be okay, but at the level the lab reference range thinks is okay. Like a vitamin D of 30 or a ferritin of 16 or homocysteine of like 14 or like, so like the, the numbers that are even greater than that. When you look at what the optimal ranges are, it's staggering. And vitamin D, you know, should be over 45, the 30 is their cutoff. So all the, all within their cutoffs on the lab, we're still seeing about 70% of the people deficient in one or more nutrients.

• 27:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're right. And these nutrient deficiencies are so important. And people don't understand that what they do is they, they basically keep the wheels of your biochemistry working. And if, if, if, if they're not adequate, then the system can't run and you get, you know, kind of like, kind of rusting and things just kind of locked down. The last thing you kind of talk about in, in your six principles is sleep, but I'm, I'm wondering why you focus on sleep versus stress. Cause I think, I think of stress and sleeping under stress.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you, you focus just on sleep.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  So it's interesting that I also found with sleep, same thing, the 16 same m6 factors are underlying sleep, but in my population of Lyme, these people don't fall asleep. It takes hours to fall asleep. They keep waking up in the middle of the night. They sometimes have hypers, hypersomnolence. They're sleeping for 16 hours. They're not refreshed. I have patients who came in on Ambi and Lunesta, God knows what, they still could not sleep. So, I mean, you know, when you, when you don't sleep, IL6 and tlucon6 is high, it's driving inflammation. But ultimately we were even finding some of our thin young women had sleep apnea, like something I would never have expected to find. It wasn't just men with BPH, you know, that was causing it. It wasn't just menopause with low estrogen. We were finding multiple factors.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  And of course, stress is one of them, of course, but the problem is we were finding these overlapping factors that until I treated the Lyme and the Bart and the mold. And healed the microbiome, right? And, and dealt with stress. And I have a whole section under Ellis for lifestyle and meditation. I mean, you and I both know, we're living very stressful lifestyles for most people. The sleep, I found that when people couldn't sleep, whether I treated the infections, I detoxed the mold. If the sleep was still off, I was having a tough time getting these patients better, but they were all interrelated, right? Because the mold was causing problems with it. The Lyme and bartonella was causing.

• 29:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Sleep.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it, it, it was all interrelated. It wasn't just, oh, I can't sleep at night, you know, why isn't my Ambi and or Lunesta working at this point in time?

• 29:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you're able to get people who couldn't sleep back to sleeping?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. I mean, once the infections were treated, we detoxed the mold, the microbiome was treated, right? The mineral deficiencies. Once we started dealing with these first six rivers of inflammation, people were able to get to sleep a lot easier. Also, by the way, with the limbic vagal retraining.

• 29:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Right? I mean, that, that was a key point in these people because.

• 29:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I don't want to get too far into it, but I think, you know, I, I did I begin, I talked about it on the, on the show before. It's a, you know, it's an incredible plant medicine that has powerful effects on neuroinflammation. And on mitochondria and epigenetics. And in one study, they, they looked at.

• 29:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  MS and they look at the white matter lesions, which was inflammation in the brain before and after I began and their symptom profile. And there were only two cases in that report, but they both had like a 70% reduction in white matter lesions, which is unheard of. And they were able to get back to much more normal functioning. So I think, you know, there's a lot of really ways to sort of reset the system. It's fascinating that, you know, you know, these plants and these other things like some of the supplements can have these effects.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely. And in fact, you know, I recently published an article in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports. We can get to this just briefly about I reversed for the first time ever in the world, the most sensitive and specific biomarker for Alzheimer's PTW217. So again, we're dealing with neuroinflammation, but where did it come from? In my patient, it was coming from multiple emsids factors. It was Lyme, she had exposure to babesia bartonella, she had heavy metal, she had metabolic syndrome, she had food allergies. We need to treat it all, but interestingly enough, we were finding that when we treated the Lyme disease with the nine weeks of dapsone combination therapy, and she was sick for 15 years, by the way, with positive rheumatoid factors, with joint pain, some cognitive issues, which she didn't think were bad, completely reversed PTW217.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Now, what's interesting is that the Cochrane report, which came out about one week before my article got released, said, hey, we have no good things to treat Alzheimer's at this point. The article comes out one week later, and what I did is I proved the hypothesis, right? We're in the middle of an Alzheimer's epidemic where the NIH said that 42% of people over 55 years old are now going to become demented.

• 31:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  I mean, it is really frightening, especially when they say we don't have answers. So there was always, they looked at autopsy studies of Alzheimer's patients and they would find biofilms, amyloid and phosphorylated tau in the brains. So there was an association, but they couldn't say causation. This is the first time I proved causation by completely reversing this biomarker PTW217 with this nine week protocol. And this woman was, by the way, was sick for 15 years.

• 31:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And the symptoms got better.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Her symptoms, her joint pain got better, rheumatoid factor reversed, because it wasn't rheumatoid arthritis, it was from the Lyme bacteria driving rheumatoid factors.

• 31:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What about her memory? Did it get better?

• 31:58Speaker 00

  It also improved. She thought it was her meditation that was keeping her stable and she noticed after she was done, it's like, oh my God, I'm so much clearer. I, by the way, have a second patient, I just did the same, I haven't published it yet. We reversed his beta amyloid ratios with dapsone. So here, so here we have an Alzheimer's epidemic where I found that all 16 emsids factors are associated with it. The Cochrane report is saying, hey, we don't have anything good out there to treat. And the drugs that are used for it, lecanumab, dinanumab, they lowered phosphorylated tau by 23% in almost seven years. I lowered it by 63% in nine weeks.

• 32:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  And that was because it was the infection driving the amyloid and the phosphorylated tau. And unfortunately, you go to a neurologist, they're not even going to check you for Lyme disease or bartonella mold when you have Alzheimer's disease.

• 32:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's important to find out. I mean, people think, you know, Alzheimer's is one of those things, there's nothing to do for it because of the bad drug, you know, debacle we have in terms of poor drugs and drugs that don't really work based on billions of dollars of research and hundreds and hundreds of studies. But, but what you're saying is using this approach, which is looking at root causes, looking at treating the whole system, peeling all the layers of the onion, you can actually start to see changes in these people. And I've seen the same thing in my practice and Dale Bredesen, who's quoting, quote on your book also has done this. And, you know, for us out there doing it, we sound a little bit like quacks because well, we're reversing Alzheimer's. Well, it isn't really, Alzheimer's is just a symptom.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  It's neuroinflammation.

• 33:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so if you can reduce the load on the brain, it can improve. Same thing with autism or ADD or depression, you know, and Chris Palmer's done this work at Harvard with schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar disease, it's a trial published, I think the other day on ketogenic diets was a randomized controlled trial for bipolar one and schizophrenia and psychosis showing reversal. So the data is really starting to emerge around this and ketogenic diets work by reducing brain inflammation. That's how they work. Your work is so important on this. And I think that I want to kind of double down on what you've been kind of alluding to, which is this dapsone protocol, because it's, you mentioned a few times, Julian, what are you talking about? And what is it, what does this do? And how does it reverse Lyme? How does it reverse Alzheimer's? Like it's, tell us about what it is, how you discovered, because you and I worked together

• 34:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  many patients and often I would say, hey, I got this complicated patient with these three ticks or this thing, what's the best drug protocol? And you'd kind of coach me through it. That's probably started doing that 25 years ago. But this is kind of a newer iteration of your thinking on this, because I think a lot of that, you're a part of the ILLID Society and I was one of the founding members.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  founding members. And, you know, you and I have both seen people who've just been on years of antibiotics, on IV antibiotics, on heavy doses, and often they don't really get that much better. And I really worry about that approach. Yeah, and I do too, by the way. So, and that's why I never use long-term antibiotics anymore. The real key point for me is about 10 years ago, John Hopkins researchers found out that Lyme was a specific type of a bacteria called a biofilm persister bacteria, like tuberculosis and leprosy. We knew that Lyme persisted, at least those of us who've been treating it for a long time, because there's a lot of medical controversies, but it's definitely a persistent infection in many.

• 34:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, meaning the traditional medical establishment doesn't quite buy chronic Lyme disease.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Correct. They call it post-trip and Lyme disease syndrome. We don't know why people are sick. It's like, you should read the 10 articles at this point, well, 10 I published and one by Tufts, where we've shown reversal of all of these symptoms using dapsone combination therapy. So how did I come up with it? So when Hopkins discovered it was a biofilm persister drug, I remembered from Mount Sinai when I was, this is during the HIV epidemic, we would see these people come in with Mycobacterium avii intracellulari and TB. I was used to using INH, rifampin, pyrazinamide. And I said, you know, I wanted an excuse to use these TB type drugs because they were specific for biofilm persister bacteria. I looked at the qualities of dapsone.

• 35:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So tuberculosis is one that's known in traditional medicine to be this, and that's why we use those drugs.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So I looked at dapsone and it was, all right, it gets great penetration into the brain. Maybe I don't have to use IV drugs, which is true. I've never had to use IV drugs anymore since dapsone. It's amazing penetration in the brain. Number two, it blocks NLRP3 inflammasomes in the brain. So with Alzheimer's disease and autism and many of these different diseases, we know that there's an inflammatory pathway in the brain that gets switched on. Dapsone is an inflammasone inhibitor. So in a study by Liadall with like three to 4,000 people over 16 years, he gave them 100 milligrams of dapsone, the rates of Alzheimer's were like this, and the people who didn't take dapsone was six times higher. So it's lowering inflammation in the brain, great penetration, it has antimalarial properties, it hits babesia, not great, but about 25% of the cases.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  It's used for autoimmune diseases. We talked about all the autoimmune manifestations of Lyme, right? And it's a biofilm persister drug, so it checked all the boxes. So I started trying it and I published my first article, 2016, on 100 patients on low dosed dapsone. Fatigue got better, joint pain got better, neuropathy got better, brain fog, headaches, it was the only thing statistically that didn't improve. But as I tweaked the protocol over the last 10 years, I got it down to eight to nine weeks at this point, and it doesn't matter whether you've been sick for 20, 30 years. If you have Lyme without active babesia bartonella, without mold, this protocol will put about half of the people in remission from nine weeks of antibiotics.

• 37:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's not just dapsone, it's a cocktail.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  It's a cocktail of drugs. So we found, and I did a study with Eva Shoppe from the University of New Haven in culture.

• 37:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And by the way, this is a drug that was used for leprosy.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  It is a leprosy drug, right? It's been around for 50, 60 years, right? They also use it, by the way, for Bassetts disease and a severe autoimmune illness. And so what I found is in culture, every time we added a drug, like when we added doxycycline to dapsone, it lowered the biofilm persister. We added rifampin to doxy and dapsone, it lowered the biofilm persisters even more. We added zithromax. So I came up with it because we found this four-drug regimen sufficiently lowered these biofilm persisters. And if you pulse it, you cannot get rid of these persister bacteria by, with chronic antibiotics, it doesn't work. You've got to pulse it. That's how you get rid of them. So we now do a nine-week protocol.

• 37:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which is not every day.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Well, it's nine weeks continuously, but they're on four probiotics with 500 billion of these different probiotics twice a day, right? With niestatin, very low carb diet. We don't see, I haven't, by the way, seen a case of CDIF on this in years, no candida as long as you're staying. And basically all the lab abnormalities of anemia and methemoglobin, they reverse within six to eight weeks off the protocol. So right now I applied for a randomized NIH trial with a double-blind placebo multi-center trial. Unfortunately, it was turned down. So I now have to reapply. I know Bobby Kennedy Jr. is big about Lyme. He wants to do something, but whoever the reviewers were, but I'm so confident I submitted an R34 NIH grant because I know it's working at this point. But yes, it's a cocktail of drugs,

• 38:38Speaker 00

  but the beauty is all generic because I realized this is a worldwide epidemic where BMG Global Health said one out of seven people in the world have now been exposed to Lyme, right? So we're dealing with a massive epidemic of Lyme, and by the way, same time massive epidemic of Alzheimer's, and nobody has put these two together at this point.

• 38:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that's true. I mean, nobody's connecting the dots on that, but, but it's not that Alzheimer's is always this.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  No, no, of course.

• 39:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I think that's, you know, you kind of hinted in your book and I, in my first book, I wrote, just because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you, right? Alzheimer's is a syndrome.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 39:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's got many causes and maybe a good cohort of those is ticks, but could be mold, it could be insulin resistance.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  Right. And, and look, even some of these drugs that are used out there, the anti amyloid drugs, there may even be a place for them. But first, let's get rid of whatever the reversible causes of inflammation are. And that's not what the neurologists are doing, right? They're giving ariceptin, amenda and anti amyloid drugs. It's, we've got to get to the root causes of where the neuroinflammation is coming from. And, and that's what I'm highlighting.

• 39:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you treat all, take patients with that same combination?

• 39:40Speaker 00

  I do.

• 39:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it doesn't matter what the infection?

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Well, the beauty, the beauty of-

• 39:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before it used to be this regimen for this one, this one for that one. Now you're saying that everybody should get the same.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Well, so if it's bartonella, bartonella requires a minimum of four two week pulses of dapsone, but it's only six days of dapsone. We found with bartonella, bartonella is actually much more difficult to treat than Lyme. If you don't have bart, I can generally get you better, much easier within this nine weeks, but bart requires about two to three months apart, just two weeks of antibiotics, short pulse, actually 13 days.

• 40:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Separate.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Separately. If you have babesia, mapronazithromax isn't working. The old drugs aren't working. So I have in my new book, under the three Bs, tefeniquin. Tefeniquin is a newer drug for babesia. We mix it with mallarone and herbs like artemisinin, Chinese skullcap, Japanese knotwood, acornia. We find that when we mix these herbs with tefeniquin and mallarone, we're getting much better results for babesia. So you do have to treat some of these infections, you know, differently and separately. But the beauty is, is we do have now some cutting edge approaches that are getting much patient, many of the patients better.

• 40:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you also use, in addition to the dapsone, doxycycline, amitocycline, fampin, hydroxychloroquine, which is-

• 40:47Speaker 00

  And the, the reason for plaquenil, by the way, is it alkalizes the intracellular compartments. So these antibiotics are more effective, helps with the autoimmune manifestations, even hits the cystic forms of Lyme, another form of the bacteria that exists. So it took me a long time looking at the biochemistry of the bug and the science and the biology to figure this out. And, and 10 years later, you know, I've, I published 10 studies, Tufts, by the way, published one that showed that this combination of rifampin dapsone cures Lyme in the animal model. So now I have a culture study, we have animal studies, and I have 10 published studies where there are 375 patients retrospectively, all statistically significant, fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, muscle pain, nerve pain, day sweats, night sweats, neuropathy, it all gets better from the protocol.

• 41:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you also use methylene blue, which I thought-

• 41:32Speaker 00

  I do.

• 41:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  To tell us about that, because I think people hear about it and people think, oh, they take these lozenges, their mouth gets blue.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Well, they're using it for Alzheimer, right? I mean, they're using like low dose methylene blue as a mitochondrial supplement for Alzheimer's. So one of the side effects of dapsone is elevated methemoglobin. It's where you don't carry oxygen well into blood. So we started adding methylene blue because many of our patients, about 90% have bartonella. John Hopkins, again, they published that if you do for six days in culture rifampin zithromax and methylene blue, it kills bart. So when I was designing the protocol, I realized I needed methylene blue to not only hit the bartonella, but to lower the side effects of dapsone.

• 42:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Interesting.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  And it's got mitochondrial regeneration properties at the same time. And we do a mitochondrial regeneration when we're done with the protocol anyway, for all the free radical oxidative stress. So yeah, the methylene blue is an, is an integral part of the protocol and we slowly go up to make sure people tolerate it.

• 42:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's also anti infectious.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  It is anti infectious. They use it in the blood supply, by the way, to kill, I don't know if you knew this.

• 42:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  The blood plasma supply, when they're treating for all the red blood cells they're storing.

• 42:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Really?

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Methylene blue is what's used to kill all the infectious agents that's in our blood supply.

• 42:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, that's fascinating. So it's an anti infectious. It protects, protects against the side effects of the dapsone, helps mitochondrial function, energy production.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  And it's hitting bartonella at the same, you know, when, again, when I designed it, I was looking at all of these factors at the same point. And, and again, I've been doing this for 42 years, right? With all these thousands, it took a while to figure this out.

• 42:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  You know, we're kind of there.

• 42:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I know. It's pretty, pretty crazy. I think it's, and you, you outline all these protocols in your book, right?

• 43:01Speaker 00

  So what I do in ending chronic illness, a lot of people, I, I did it like a cookbook. In, in the chapter under the three Bs, I do this literally week by week. These are the medications. These are the lab tests you need to do. This is when you need an electrocardiogram to make sure your QT interval is good. It is written out literally like a cookbook that anyone can take ending chronic illness to their doctor and they can just do it step by step. So they know exactly the protocol. And I, I even put in here a low dose dapsone protocol for people that are sensitive, because many people get Herzimer reactions where you're killing off the bacteria, the inflammatory response is huge. I, I told people how to do it much lower and slower for those people who, and as an example, my wife, when we didn't know the dosage, we gave her dapsone 50 milligrams per year, repeated

• 43:46Speaker 00

  her test, PCR positive in the blood. I gave her 100 of dapsone for six months, relapsed within a month or two. A patient came in, by the way, this is how I discovered the dose. A patient came in who was sick for seven years, came in, he was third month, fourth month on dapsone. He comes in and says, doc, I'm feeling terrible. I said, oh, what are you taking? Well, I'm taking, you know, doxy twice a day, rifampin twice a day and dapsone twice a day. I said, oh my God, you're taking too much. You're taking 100 twice a day. I said, stop it, come back in a month. He's been sick for seven years. He comes back in a month and goes, doc, I feel great. I have no symptoms. I went, what? I said, stop, don't take anything else. Just come back in three months. Comes back in three months, no symptoms, comes back and sick. So I said to my wife, would you like to be a medical guinea pig? This guy took a double dose of dapsone, 100 twice

• 44:31Speaker 00

  a day for one month, and he doesn't have symptoms.

• 44:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And he felt sick because of the side effects of it?

• 44:35Speaker 00

  He was herxing badly when he did it. My wife did it for one month. She's eight years in remission. I had to figure out, it's not long-term antibiotics. It, it took me years to figure out the dose and how to combine the medications in a way that it was a very short-term effect of protocol. And my wife was one of the first people actually who got better from it.

• 44:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's quite amazing. That's quite amazing. Most of us are walking around in a state of chronic stimulation. Your cortisol is elevated, your nervous system is stuck in go mode, and we wonder why we can't sleep or focus. And one thing I've been using that I generally look forward to at the end of the day is the infrared PMF wrap from Bone Charge. PEMF, otherwise known as post electromagnetic field therapy, delivers gentle electromagnetic frequencies into the body that mimic what you naturally absorb spending time on the earth. Combined with red and near infrared light, it's one of the few recovery tools that works while you're absolutely doing nothing. I throw it on for 30 minutes on reading or winding down, and I notice I sleep

• 45:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  better on the nights I use it. It's lightweight, it's low EMF, it's free shipping, HSA and FSA eligible. And honestly, one of the simplest things I've added to my evening routine. So head to boncharge.com/hyman and use the code HYMAN for 15% off. That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com/hyman and you'll get 15% off. Often say that food is medicine, but there's another part of the conversation we don't talk about enough. How we prepare our food matters too. The warmer months are actually a great time to reset your habits. People are cooking more with fresh meals, they're grilling, they're eating lighter, focusing on feeling better day to day. And one small but meaningful upgrade is paying attention to the cookware you use regularly. I've been impressed with Made In stainless cloud collection because

• 46:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  it's designed without chemical coatings and built for durability, for heat control, and for everyday cooking. Their five ply stainless steel heats evenly, handles high temperatures beautifully, and is trusted by professional chefs at some of the best restaurants in the world. But what I like most is that it makes cooking real food at home easier and more enjoyable, which is one of the foundations of long-term health. If you're looking to upgrade your cookware, go to madeinware.com and use the code HYMAN-5 for 10% off your first order. Again, I've been following you for a long time and tracking all the different iterations of your thinking. And this is, this is definitely an evolution and it seems more elegant and it answers a lot of the questions that I have around these long-term antibiotic patients who just don't get better.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  I, I do not do long, I don't believe long-term antibiotics should be given to anyone because you know the effect of the microbiome on the gut and it doesn't kill the Lyme.

• 47:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  It's suppressing the bacteria, right? By the way, they've even shown in some of these, you get more biofilm formation if, if you do this. So we need an entirely new approach, which is pulsing, short-term, while supporting the microbiome, and then using these biofilm persistent drugs like dapsone. And, and I do believe, by the way, even in Alzheimer's, because dapsone inhibits this pathway in the brain, antilarptic, or inflammasomes, I don't know why anyone has not taken dapsone like they did in the study from South Korea. 4,000 people, their Alzheimer's rates were like this. Use low dose dapsone.

• 47:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they used it for what there?

• 47:36Speaker 00

  They were using phleprosy. But they found when they looked at the Alzheimer's cases, dapsone was stopping people from getting Alzheimer's disease. And it's 4,000 people over 15 years that they looked at this.

• 47:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's incredible. Wow. So let's kind of back up. We, we talked about all these six principal causes, the rivers of inflammation, creating ocean inflammation, right? The infections, the toxins, the microbiome, the leaky gut, food sensitivities, vitamin mineral deficiencies, and sleep. And then you talk about the 10 downstream secondary effects. And this is really when you have all these insults and you don't have enough of the right inputs. There's a cascading effect of dysfunction throughout the body that echoes. And it's all the systems of the body. It's basically a network and all the different ones are connected. Hormones, gut, immune, mitochondria, then detox are all, they're all kind of connected. And, and so this is how we think about things in functional medicine, but it's, you came to this through a different pathway and ended up in the same place.

• 48:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I'd love you to sort of unpack the sort of the things that tend to go wrong because you can treat those directly, but if you don't treat the root causes, the six rivers, you're, those things are, you're, my people have moved the needle a little bit, but they're going to kind of not really get better.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Sure. I mean, and as an example, so one of the 10 downstream effects is mitochondrial dysfunction. If you have ongoing inflammation in your body, the mitochondria have nothing to protect them against all this free radical oxidative stress, right? It's not like the DNA that assists those surrounding it. So that's why we do a mitochondrial regeneration protocol after we do these treatments. But if you're somebody taking ATP360 and CoQ10 and yourlithin A and, you know, mito NR and the things I'm taking myself, because I'm doing my own biohacking, it's not going to work. You may say, hey, I'm doing everything right. I'm exercising, I'm on a low carb diet, I'm getting enough sleep, I'm doing mitochondrial. Why isn't it working? Well, you didn't get to the first root causes of where the inflammation is coming from, right? But also in this inflammation, it affects your hormones because the inflammation is affecting the hypothalamic pituitary axis.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  So men come in with low testosterone in their twenties with 100 to 200 testosterone and they're getting beta HCG shots and they're getting, you know, testosterone. It's like, hold on, it's the Lyme that's causing your low testosterone, right? And the adrenals are shot. Close to 100% of my patients have low adrenal function on a DHEA cortisol. And again, if you treat these six rivers of inflammation, but you don't treat the adrenals, they're not going to get better. I have, I have a person, this guy was treating years ago, he was sick for about eight years. We found Lyme Babesia Bart, we started looking for it and we found low adrenals. And before I even had a chance to treat the Lyme, and this was going through his hospital records, his cortisols were really low. And I said, all right, I'm going to have to treat all this, but I said, let me give

• 50:09Speaker 00

  you some hydrocortisone for the, I mean, it was really low, literally Addisonian type low cortisol. He said, I don't want to do it. They gave me prednisone in the hospital. I never want to take steroids. I gave him an adrenal glandular. Now, this guy had multiple MCIS factors making him sick, Lyme, Babesia, Bart, the rest. Within a week of taking an adrenal glandular, he said, doc, I'm eating 90% better. So personalized precision medicine, you know this the way I do. Even if you have eight or nine MCIS factors on your list, it might be one factor that's keeping you ill. And in a lot of the patients, it's adrenal. We do the mitochondrial, but you've got to definitely get the hormones balanced. But the other downstream effects is immune dysfunction. Many doctors don't check immunoglobulins, subclasses, they don't check natural killer cells, they don't do CD4, CD8.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Well, if this is in, you know, how do you check your immune system? Or they have autoimmune disease.

• 50:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  People don't really realize that you can actually test your immune.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Right. So, and same thing, we check the autoimmune markers, one of the downstream effects, where you get neurological issues with brain fog and you're going from doctor to doctor and understanding why your memory is off, right? And you've got amyloid and PTO, now maybe from other sources, right? Or psychological factors, trauma, where you need the limbic retraining. And then you're deconditioned, right? And a lot of people also, and you know this, have fatty liver. One third of the world's population has non-alcoholics, they have hepatitis or fatty liver.

• 51:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now they're called metabolic.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Metabolic, right.

• 51:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They changed the name.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  And it, just like PCOS is now PMOS, right? It was the same thing. But it, it causes insulin spikes with metabolic syndrome. And it's a silent factor for cirrhosis and for liver cancer. And you could go to a doctor with normal lab tests, your liver functions are normal, but you're overweight, the doctor doesn't check an ultrasound and there's the fatty liver. We were finding it. So these 10 downstream effects is, again, the liver, the immune system, autoimmune, mitochondrial, hormonal dysfunction, deconditioning, neurological issues, psychological issues, POTS, and POTS disautonomia. People come in with long COVID to my practice, right? They're tired, they've tried everything. Nobody did sitting and standing, blood pressure and pulse rates to find out if they had POTS disautonomia. And so POTS disautonomia is not treated with antibiotics, right?

• 52:13Speaker 00

  It's salt fluids, it's midadren, it's vagal retraining, it's limbic retraining. Because it causes fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, palpitations, right? POTS disautonomia has a lot of the same symptoms as Lyme and Bartonella and mold. So that's why a differential diagnosis is so important in these patients. And, and disautonomia shows up in 40 to 50% of our patients at this point.

• 52:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm going to, I'm going to push back a little on the differential diagnosis because that in medical speak, that's what doctors do is they, they, they try to winnow down what your story is to one single diagnosis. But you're really talking about a true differential diagnosis, which is thinking through past the diagnosis. Okay, what is actually the root cause? What are the systems that are out of balance? How do I treat all those, you know, six causes and 10 downstream factors? And, you know, you, you come upon the same framework that I have, which is that you have to deal with the root causes, but you have to also deal with the train wreck that happened as a result of those root causes, which is adrenal dysfunction or hormonal dysfunction or gut issues. You have to kind of clean up the mess. It's like, yeah, you have to put the, if the train's off the tracks, you got to fix the tracks, but then the train also went off the tracks and created damage everywhere. So you got to clean that up.

• 53:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, but if you, if you did the cleanup first and you don't deal with the root causes, people tend not to get better. That's the kind of trick. If people go, oh, and a lot of people out there are doing this, they're, they're giving hormones or they're giving, you know, gut stuff or they're giving different treatments, but they're not actually getting to the things that matter, like the mold, the tick.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  I was surprised that when men come in in their twenties and thirties with low T and their testosterone is off, for some reason, a lot of the doctors didn't know that Lyme and Bartonella, because of inflammation in the brain, cause low testosterone. And I will give them a little bit of Clomid, Clomiphene, 25 milligrams, two or three times a week with Arimidex to stop aromatization. And I'll get their testosterone from 100 to 600 without beta HCG, without shots, resetting the hypothalamic pituitary system, getting the hormones back in balance. So, you know, I have all of these tricks in the H is for hormone chapter, you know, in ending chronic illness, because if you're a man and you want to have kids growing older, you can't be getting these shot, these testosterone shots are shrinking your testicles by 15% and stopping your own hormone production. So yes, it's, it's always about the root causes, but I find that, you know, even the

• 54:18Speaker 00

  functional medicine community, you see a complex patient that you're with them for hours. The beauty of the 16-point MCIS model, it's a checklist, right? It's just make sure you've just gone through these things, just to make sure you're not missing anything. And I, I find, you know, you can get caught up, you know, in these, in these very complex patients where you might forget to check the mold or do the adrenals or, because the patients are, you know, you're the first doctor really listening to them and taking the time to listen to them.

• 54:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're right. I mean, it is, it is a checklist and I, and I do go through that mental checklist, you know, and I, I often have the, the echo of Sid Baker, who's my mentor in my head. He says, have you done everything you can for this patient? Which means, what haven't I thought of? Like, what am I missing? Like, not what did I find, but actually what, what am I missing? And, and when you go hunting, you find stuff. And it may be the thing, or may not be the thing, but you, you have to actually go hunting. And I think most doctors don't know how to hunt. They don't know how to hunt for the root cause. They don't know how to test for mold, they don't know how to test for metals, they don't know how to test for ticks, they don't know how to test for the gut microbiome, they don't know how to test for leaky gut, for food sensitivity, they don't know how to test for hormonal dysregulation, the whole gamut of things that you and I deal with every single day with our patients and that gets these people who are literally incurable cured.

• 55:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's not rocket science, it's, it's just good science.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  But you know, you've got to teach doc, I, I had a mentor, just like you did with Sid Baker, my mentor was Dr. Rosenek. He was the most brilliant internist I ever met in medical school. He's the one who influenced me like Sid Baker did for you. And what he taught me is also to keep getting underneath to the root causes. But, you know, what, what I did in ending chronic illness regarding that is I have, starting around page 30, if you have symptoms, like let's say you have neuropathy and you've been to all these doctors, you're on Lyrica and you're on gabapentum and you're on Elevil, you still have neuropathy. Maybe somebody's not checked you for Lyme and Bartonella and mold and heavy metal toxins that cause neuropathy. And what I find is, I, and I did this in the book, I list the disease, right? The lab testing for it, right? And how you do the differential diagnosis so that people can actually work with their

• 56:12Speaker 00

  healthcare providers, so they don't miss anything at this point. And the Horowitz MCIS questionnaire, which is on my website, cangetbetter.com. If you take this questionnaire, it will give you a probability of tick-borne, but also you bring it to your doctor, there's 38 items on there. You might forget to tell your doctor you have drenching night sweats intermittently, which was the Babesia, the parasite hiding in the background. So the beauty of the questionnaire is we validated it in 1,600 people. It's an easy questionnaire to bring to your doctor, so nothing is missed, right? And, and so that's why.

• 56:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is that available in the book?

• 56:44Speaker 00

  The questionnaire is in the book as well as these, these different, it's online also in, under cangetbetter.com, you can just download the questionnaire.

• 56:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cangetbetter.com.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Cangetbetter.com.

• 56:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And, and you know, people have been referring to MCIS, what it stands for is multiple systemic

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Infectious disease syndrome.

• 57:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Just to, just to ask about that, what if it's not always infectious? Like what if, what if it's just mold or heavy metal? It may not be Lyme, right? How, how does, how do you have the eye in there?

• 57:10Speaker 00

  The way I'd now look at chronic illnesses after finding that these 16 factors are underlying literally autism, Alzheimer's, chronic fatigue, is it, you don't have to have Lyme making you ill, absolutely not. But it could be, for example, chronic fatigue syndrome, MCIS, meaning you don't have Lyme that's causing it, but you may have Bartonella, you may have mold. I, I was surprised when I did the research on this book. Fibromyalgia, I didn't learn in medical school that mold toxins are showing up in 70 to 80% of fibromyalgia patients. They're, they're getting drugs from their doctors for the pain and the, without understanding that the mold was driving the inflammation. I didn't know this, by the way, until I did my own research for the book. So these diseases for me are now kind of like Alzheimer's, MCIS, chronic fatigue, meaning absolutely you may not have Lyme, you may not have Bartonella, but you could have mold

• 57:55Speaker 00

  and heavy metals, you could have microbiome disruption, adrenal dysfunction. The point being, you just go through the root causes and it's just a simple way of making sure that nothing is being missed, because both you and I have seen the miraculous results in getting people better with this. Yeah, with this type of protocol.

• 58:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So we, we kind of dove into a little bit about the protocol for treating these infections, which is just for people listening, it's not what your traditional doctor will be doing or offering you, I promise, but it probably is what you should be doing. And, and the book, Ending Chronic Illness is a great resource for that. Metals, we talked about chelation, that's a little more straightforward, fixing the gut. I've done a lot of podcasts about that, that, that's, that's not that hard. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a process and it requires the five hour program we talked about in functional medicine, which is to rebuild your gut. The mold thing is a bit, a bit of a can of worms. So I, I want to kind of double click on the mold thing because you, you keep mentioning it and it is a persistent thing. And then there's 50% of buildings are water damaged. In fact, I'm in my house now, every year I have a guy come in and inspect just because I got so sick from mold and almost died from it.

• 58:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I paranoid about it. So every year I have it checked, anything wrong, I fix immediately. But I, you know, I, I, I don't know if you know this either, but about 10 years ago, I had a series of things happen where I lived in an old barn in New England, not too far from where you have a place in Hudson Valley. It was a 18, I think 98 barn. So it was like 125 years old, you know? Uh, and in, in, in there was mold in the basement. And, and I thought, I didn't realize that there was, one of the windows had opened and leaked in and kind of come back. I didn't really smell it, but I started having this cough and I, and I was, you know, running around, writing book, giving talks, trying to change the world, the usual stuff. And I was like coughing, I'm like, that's going to go away. Yeah, it's going to go away. And it didn't go away for a year.

• 59:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then I was like, I think it's probably my house. So like I had it checked, my house checking was terrible. So I had moved out of my house, started renovating my house. And that was a whole project. And then I, I took an antibiotic for a dental and like a root canal that was infected. And I had a tooth pulled, but I took clindamycin. And then I fell and broke my arm riding a horse in New Zealand. It was like boom, boom, boom, boom. And I saw the lung doctor at Cleveland Clinic and I got prednisone for 10 days, which basically cured my cough, which was great. But then I just, my whole system collapsed and I got colitis, I got C. diff. Uh, I end up just having this sort of cascading inflammatory problem.

• 1:00:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And my whole gut was inflamed from basically my stomach all the way to my butt. And I developed ulcerative colitis. I was in bed. I lost 30 pounds. The mold was just devastating me.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I, even though I kind of cleaned up the mold, I was, I was still, my system was in total breakdown. And I thought I was going to die. I literally thought I was going to die. I couldn't work my months.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Mold illness is a lot more serious than people realize.

• 1:00:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's so bad. Like, and it just, it, there was a cascading effect in my case, but I want people to understand this is a real thing.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  And, and by the way, you can't just pick it up on doing a stacky doctor's tighter through, you know, Quest or lab.

• 1:00:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, no.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  So we mainly use real time labs. Neil Nathan has been one of my mentors on this with Jill Krista.

• 1:01:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  And they're mentioned by the way, in the book. But I use real time labs from doing glutathione, getting people in saunas to mobilize the toxins. And finding that up to 90% of my patients are showing up with aflatoxins, gliotoxins, tricotamines.

• 1:01:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, mine were just so high.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the problem is, is that they're mitochondrial poisons and they, you know, they're affecting your immune system and they cause fatigue, brain fog, um, pain, neuropathy. They cause all the symptoms you see with Lyme disease, right? So I didn't, initially I was battling with Neil going, come on Neil, it's mostly tick bone. And then I realized over time, no, no, it's a combination of factors. So, you know, so we did real time labs and, and I found a protocol and I have it into, I think it's under the Ellis for lifestyle chapter, with an oral protocol, because I want people to be able to use things that are generic oral that anyone can get. So we're using oral, you know, phosphatidylcholine. Um, I'm using one from Othomolecular or Zymogen's phospholine four to one. We're using Bio PC Pro.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  Um, we're using a whole host and even GI detox from Bio Botanical Research with Bensonite Clay and Charcoal. And so I created a protocol and the protocol is written out also like a textbook, you know, a cookbook in the book, where people understand exactly when you take these supplements with NAC, alpha lipoic acid, glutathione, phosphatidylcholine, when you take your GI detox, you know, how you do this. And we do get rid of the vast majority of these mold toxins doing oral protocols. Now, some people will do IV phosphatidylcholine, patricicane protocols. My goal in doing this book was something that was accessible for the average person, just oral generic that anyone could do. And so that's why I wrote it out this.

• 1:02:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I think, I think, I think the orals can work quite well. I found, you know, um, for myself, what rescued me was getting ozone therapy and hyperbaric oxygen together. Uh, it sounds like a crazy treatment, but I was desperate and I did it. And I was better within a couple of days, starting to kind of recover. Um, I also, um, I also did the, the intravenous phosphatidylcholine protocol, which I think is one of the most effective things that personally I've ever done to recess, secrete my own mitochondria and get rid of toxins. And it gets rid of not just the mold, but it gets rid of a lot of cellular toxins. And it reboots your cell membranes and your mitochondria says, is, you can do it orally. Some people have a little trouble tolerating the high doses of phosphocoline because it's like, it kind of makes you have diarrhea sometimes.

• 1:03:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it, but it's, it's actually, um, important to recognize that this is a real thing, that it has medical treatment, even though your traditional doctors are not hearing about it or knowing about it. That the testing, you know, want to kind of dive a little bit more on that. You talked about this real time lab, which measures urine mycotoxins. And I've heard some controversy that that might actually pick up, you know, food mycotoxins that aren't actually.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  It's possible. There are food mycotoxins, about 25% are probably coming from foods also. Yeah.

• 1:03:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes, it may not just be what's in your system, but these are low molecular weight circulating mycotoxins or toxins that come from the mold. They keep getting recirculated over and over, even if you've removed yourself from the mold environment, they stay persistent in your system and you have to get rid of them. So that's kind of what the binders and other things you're talking.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:04:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What about the other lab tests you use for, for assessing this? Like the SIRS, the whole concept of chronic inflammatory response syndrome. It's almost like you're, you're kind of MCN syndrome similar, but it's really, this is like a mold. There's specific lab tests. Do you find those helpful, like the C4H, G F beta one, MSH, M M P nine?

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  What I, what I did again, I have a specific chapter on inflammation, how to use these biomarkers. And it's, I did it as like a three level biomarker, like the first level might be do a CRP, do a CED rate, do a C4A, look at VGF, astral endothelial growth factor. So like there's a first set, I have 10 biomarkers I start with. The next level I do, for example, uh, looking at functional medicine labs, like what's your free radical oxidative stress with lipid peroxides, eight hydroxy deguanine for DNA damage, protein carbons, T bars. And the third level, which I think people now need to get is get your Alzheimer's biomarkers done. And these are, these are from Quest. Like you can get a P tau 181, P tau 217, neuro filament light and beta amyloid 4240 ratio from Quest laboratories, and it is completely covered.

• 1:05:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, we do that. We do that with function health. We now, you, yes, yeah, we have all the whole brain biomarkers on function. And it's amazing. We're seeing people using them and then able to.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  I mean, I was shocked that 50% of my patients were showing up with these Alzheimer's biomarkers. Right? And I just thought, oh, it's Lyme and Bart causing it. And then I, as I said earlier, it's like, oh, if you went to a neurologist with this, you're going to be treated for Alzheimer's without finding out where the inflammation was coming from. So yeah, so I, I, I listed out these level biomarkers, which you've been doing actually for, of course, for years. Um, you know, but the problem is they're not all specific in certain areas, right? I mean, VEGF we see with long COVID, but we see it with Bartonella. You'll see with cancer. You just have to know. Yeah, they're not, because you have to know how to interpret.

• 1:05:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Pattern that they form.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:05:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I think we're looking for patterns because any one biomarker is not going to tell you the whole story.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Right. Like somebody might have Lyme joint pain and their M M P nine is high. The, the matrix butel protens is high. It's like, okay, that confirms that the Lyme is affecting your joints, right? The M M, you, you always have to clinically kind of put it together.

• 1:05:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. When I, when I, when I first kind of got the aha about mold was probably close to 30 years ago. I had a patient and her daughter who came to see me and the, the mother had chronic fatigue and the daughter had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. And they were sleeping in separate bedrooms. And I kind of, kind of took a history and I got that there was some mold issue and I started digging around. Turned out that I had their house checked and they had different molds in each of the rooms who are different. And then I did the lab test, which is not available anymore. It was, it was, uh, immunosciences, which is, Iristo Vajdani was.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  I remember it. I remember it well.

• 1:06:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And on that lab test, he, you could measure mycotoxin antibodies. So not just antibodies to the mold, which you could get, but also to the antibodies, to the mycotoxins. And I, and I could see which molds they had in each, each the mother and the daughter, and they were different. And they matched the molds that were in their room. And the, because of this lab test and what we found with them, there was a lawsuit where they got to recover, you know, to get their house redone for the insurance. Insurance companies did not like this and that the.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  No, in general, the insurance companies do not like a lot of the, uh, a lot of the things we do as functional.

• 1:07:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, the insurance companies that paid for the house to be rebuilt. And so that apparently, I, I don't know if it's true or not, I heard rumor that the, the lab was shut down by the, by the sort of authorities in California, because, because it was a California lab, because of some of the, the pressure from the insurance companies.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  Well, right now, I mean, there are labs like Vibrant Laboratories and Great Plains. I mean, there are other ones that now do, you know, some of these antibodies, but you're right, that was a very comprehensive protocol.

• 1:07:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And I was like, wow, that, and now it's, you know, it's, it's important to look because when you start looking, you'll find stuff. And I think that, you know, the sad thing is insurance often doesn't cover things for these patients. And it's, and sometimes the labs you're talking about are covered by traditional insurance, sometimes they're not. And I think, you know, people, it's unfortunate where, you know, the, I don't know if you're aware of this, but you might, you might even want to apply for this. But there's a, there's a grant that was established through them. The HHS Innovation Department at Medicare Center for Medicare Medicaid Innovation for a hundred million dollars to study functional and lifestyle medicine for chronic illness.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't know about this.

• 1:08:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So there's a big pot of money. They're looking for centers to study. So if you're

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  See, what I would like to do is take the 16-point MCIS model and look at autism, ADHD, Alzheimer's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic Lyme disease, long COVID. Look at all of these diseases that are making people tired and achy with brain fog. We already know they're associated to 16 points, but how much is the causality, right? So just like I now reverse the Alzheimer's biomarker for the first time, but we need a randomized multi-center trial. I'd love to see that hundred million dollars used that you take all of these major diseases affecting Americans.

• 1:08:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It'd be a great study.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, look, 60% of Americans have one chronic illness, 25% have two or more, 86% of our healthcare costs and 70% is chronic disease and our GDP is about to go to 20%.

• 1:08:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that's why Medicare is starting to go, wait a minute, we're not getting this right.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  No, it's got to be root cause medicine is the only way this is going to be fixing what's going on right now. It's not what they're teaching in medical school of name the disease, show the drugs at it. You've got to get to the underlying inflammatory factors.

• 1:09:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's true. My daughter just graduated medical school and she went into orthopedic surgery because

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  Oh, congratulations.

• 1:09:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because, you know, regular medicine is kind of screwed. This book should really be a textbook for doctors, honestly. I mean, it really should be. And I think, you know, for anybody who's struggling with chronic illness, who's hitting a dead end, who's gone to 30 doctors or 20 doctors or five doctors or 100 doctors, there are answers. And I think that's what drives you and I, I mean, we're probably, what, you're in your 60s now?

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  I'm 70. I just turned 70.

• 1:09:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, congratulations. I'm catching up soon. I'm going to be 67 this year. And, you know, we're still going at it because we just see the desperation out there in people and we so, we so feel the suffering.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  I mean, the most rewarding thing you could do, which I think you know at this point, is getting these chronically ill patients better that have been to so many doctors. It's like, what gives you greater joy than getting these patients better who've been through, you know, the mill for years and years and years without answers. And I really learned this over time, the thing that gives me the greatest joy, it's always getting a chronically ill patient better. And that's why I wrote this book, is I needed to get this information out for people so people would have it.

• 1:10:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm working on a book now, which is similar. It's not, it's not, it's not called Ending Chronic Illness, but it's called like How to Live 100 Other Years, essentially, which is a similar idea, but it's like, here's how the body actually works. Well, your, well, your book really puts out there is this thesis that the map we had, that the constructs we developed in medical school to diagnose people according to specialties and diseases is really outdated and that it's helpful to a point, but it doesn't really help you navigate this chronic landscape. I mean, this landscape of chronic disease, it doesn't help you navigate these patients who come in, who've struggled with vague symptoms that people often dismiss, or the doctors dismiss, or the relatives dismiss as, you know, they're just in awe of their head, or this kind of way we kind of dismiss stuff

• 1:10:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  that we don't understand. There is, there is a map and I'm so grateful that you took the time and this is a very long book.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  It's 640 pages with over 2,000 scientific references.

• 1:11:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The references are not even

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  The references are, no, in fact, the references are on my website, cangetbetter.com. If you want to see the references, go on cangetbetter.com and look on the bottom.

• 1:11:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I got the same problem. My book's like 800 pages and I'm like, and like I've got thousands of references and I have to put them on the website, otherwise the book will be even 100 page longer. I think you and I are part of a group, a larger group of physicians who recognize that the way we think about chronic disease is just flawed and that there is a, there's actually an emerging framework of systems thinking, of root cause thinking, of looking at personalized healthcare, personalized medicine. No two of you all have the same disease, no two of you have the same causes, no two of you have the same treatments. It's very personalized and that requires, you know, a level of focus and understanding that, you know, most doctors just don't know how to do. And the framework you have is really, it's really powerful and it's essentially what I do. I don't actually

• 1:11:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  have the same labels. There's a lot of this, it's overlapping almost entirely because it's just the body. But I think I have, I have to wonder, you know, in terms of where you're going next with all this in terms of the, the Alzheimer's work, because that paper you published, I want to sort of dive into a little bit, you know, just to help people understand. You know, you had a patient who had Alzheimer's, who had elevated biomarkers of Alzheimer's and who also had tick infections. And then you treated the tick infections and their symptoms got better.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  Alzheimer's biomarkers reversed. And it's the first time in the world it's ever been done. I didn't realize that, by the way, when I published the paper. It's in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports, April 2026. So anyone can read it. But what, what astonished me is this P tau 217, which most neurologists consider to be the most sensitive and specific biomarker for Alzheimer's. I reversed it completely to normal by 63% in nine weeks with an oral antibiotic regimen. But here's the beauty is Dapsone Combination Therapy, the number one effect it always had was improving people's memory statistically in these 375 patients. But what I didn't have years ago, we couldn't get these Alzheimer's biomarkers. They didn't exist. Now that I started testing people, it's like, oh my God, I possibly could reverse some of it. So that this is kind of big news.

• 1:12:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's big news. It's almost like measuring a blood sugar for diabetes. You can see if it goes up, you can see if it goes down, it can be reversed, it can get worse, depending on what you're doing.

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  And also that Alzheimer's is not just, you know, an end stage. There are 16 factors underlying it. And I proved the amyloid P tau infection hypothesis that everyone's been talking for years, like chlamydia pneumonia can cause it, viruses can cause it, but none of the studies they've done ever made a difference. That's what the Cochrane Report was saying. So this is really the first study that gives people a glimmer of hope to say, if you were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, go through the model, right? Go through A is for, you know, ADHD, autism, out, go through the book, go through these 16 points and work with your doctor and then see if you do have any of these Lyme bands, like we talked about for Lyme, or even Bartonella, you need to be treating this because it may do it. Now, again, we need a randomized multi-center control trial.

• 1:13:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The case study.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  We need, this is one case study. I have a second case study. I recently did it also. I, in fact, I kept him in my practice longer because he had it and he was getting divorced and I felt bad for him. He was, you know, with me for like 30 years and I said, all right, I'll do my best. And lo and behold, the amyloid ratio, it reversed after he finished Dapsone Protocol. Again, it's two case studies at this point, but it means this is where the money needs to go. Right now, we should be putting our research monies into this.

• 1:14:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's the thing, you know, when you think about it, like, you know, we spend billions of dollars on the wrong thing. And even a few million in the right thing can make a massive difference. But the problem is, like you said, these drugs are off label. They're not, I mean, they're not, they're not necessarily making people money because they're all generic.

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  Well, that's why I'm giving them to people so that, you know, they are generic and people can afford them, right? But yes.

• 1:14:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's, the drug companies aren't putting millions of dollars into these research studies because the government has to.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

  Right. But the top people at our government should really be looking at this because if almost 20% of our GDP is chronic disease healthcare costs, we're going to break the bank in this country if we don't do something about it, apart from all the suffering from people who have these chronic illnesses.

• 1:14:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  True. And I love that you, you came at this in a similar way that I did through the Buddhist lens of like, understanding that, you know, being in service to people and helping relieve suffering and compassion is like, it's a good way to live your life, you know?

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  You know, I like to think of myself as a good person, right? That I would have done this. But the truth is, is I really do think my Tibetan teachers had a huge influence on, that I wouldn't give up. Like I kept putting myself in people's shoes, going, oh, you're not better. What else is it? What can I, like, I just would not give up.

• 1:15:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Stubborn like me.

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  And 42 years later, it's like, all right, I've got these 13,000 people. We got better, right? We're explaining it. Yeah. So it's, I think that motivation of, you know, loving kindness, compassion, and just not giving up, always trying to get people better. If, you have to have this as a physician. If you don't have this, you're just not going to go the full, you know, the full

• 1:15:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you also forsake yourself. So you understand it. That's the thing. You know, not that we wish all doctors get sick so that it can be better doctors, but it does help.

• 1:15:43Speaker 00

  And my wife, my beloved, you know, had all 16 factors made her ill and she's now eight years without one symptom.

• 1:15:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing. That's amazing. Wow. Well, thank you for writing this book. Thank you for the decades of persistent hard work, being a medical detective, figuring all the puzzles out of the body and helping people understand what they can do to actually get better.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  Now, this, you know, the beauty of this, this should give people hope that if you're someone suffering from chronic fatigue or aches and pains and neuropathy, brain fog, memory concentration, mood disorders, there is hope for you. It's not like you just have to take drugs for the rest of your life or live with it. I basically broke down how you do the differential, how you look at the disease, right? What are the lab tests you need to do? What are the potential? And it's what I've done over 42 years to get people better. And every story, by the way, in Ending Chronic Illness, are personal patients I have treated for, with autism, with, you know, Alzheimer, whatever it was, these are personal patients I've treated myself.

• 1:16:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's true. It's quite, it's quite a career you've had. And people want to learn more, they can go to cangetbetter.com.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  Cangetbetter.com and my medical detective substacks that are free to sign up. Every week I do one. I did one today on heat stress and heat strokes because of the heat wave, the heat dome. People, you know, don't realize like, if you have cardiovascular risks and you're taking Xylitol in your diet, which has now been linked right to strokes, right? That, and now you have heat stress, that you are more at risk for certain strokes than you might've been from the past. So I actually did a substack today on it, just because of the, what's going on now in our country with heat. But yeah, so the medical detective substack, cangetbetter.com. I have Facebook, Dr. Period, Richard Horowitz. People can follow me.

• 1:17:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And lots of books, lots of books. Ending Chronic Illness is the new one. It's great. Everybody should get a copy. It's out now and I'm, thank God I got my copy. I definitely have thought of you over the years as one of my mentors and I, it's so great to have you on the podcast.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  Mark, it's so great to see you again. It's been, it's been too long.

• 1:17:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical

• 1:18:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening. When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with

• 1:19:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D R H Y M A N dot com.