Testing & treating MSIDS/Lyme disease

What makes Lyme disease so challenging to treat?

People’s systems are so stressed and taxed that things like Lyme disease are taking advantage of that weakened immune state, the hyper-inflamed state. Borrelia, Spirochete bacteria, associated co-infections, bacterias, parasites, and viruses are taking advantage of an individual’s terrain that’s in a compromised state, and it starts to grow and manifest. Then the replication process starts getting ahead of the immune system and what it can do to shut that response down. It’s a culmination of the compounding effect of all the toxins, all the exposures, and all the stressors that are happening to people now. It’s creating an environment where some of these latent quiet under the radar type infections are starting to get some teeth and grow.

I think Lyme is something that’s actually fairly easy to diagnose. You have to know what tests to run and how to assess it physiologically and immunologically to determine what’s really going on. And not just base everything off a CDC standard. You have to take the whole clinical picture into consideration with what the patient is presenting with. We run the proper testing, ask the right questions, and look at the clinical picture. Does it check off all these boxes?

The treatment part is where it becomes difficult. It’s figuring out the uniqueness of the patient and what they can tolerate. We’re looking at factors like:

• How long has it been going on?
• Is there a consistent exposure source?
• Is there toxic overload?
• How many other variables are actually contributing to this person’s complication, or concern, or illness other than just these infections hitting them?
• Do they have an overload of environmental toxins?
• Do they have an unhealthy relationship and home life?
• Do they have an extraordinary amount of stress in their life that’s just completely consuming?
• Do they have bad dietary and lifestyle habits?

How it affects each individual person really relies on the Constitution and resiliency of that individual. What are the other contributing pieces to this that are going on with this patient and can we jump right into treating them or do we have to do a lot of prep work in order to get them to the point where we can actually start treating them for their particular situation?

Some people can be incredibly high functioning and not even know they really have Lyme disease but they have weird things that just come on and off every so often, but Lyme disease is raging in them. Then you have the person who’s totally debilitated, almost if not totally bedridden, and their immune system isn’t really responding. So there’s not a lot you can do at this point, and first we have to do a lot of other ground work in order to prepare them to move into that. With the latter case, if we go right into treating things sometimes it’s too much for the system and they can get a lot worse.

There are so many variables to it, that you have to take the person as a whole and the situation as a whole to break it down and figure it out where the starting point is. Start walking them through that process and watching them very closely. It’s not as simple as just – here’s an antibiotic, good luck. It’s just not that simple. I wish it were, but it’s not.

What is SOT Therapy?

This stands for Supportive Oligonucleotide Therapy. With this therapy, we’re sequencing a technology, or a mechanism called an antisense therapy. Once we have identified that there’s an antibody response, or a positive situation with Lyme, meaning Borrelia, Bartonella, Babesia, or any associated infections, then we will draw the person’s blood and send it to a lab in Greece we work with. They search for the RNA structure of that particular infection and then sequence an antisense for each individual infection. When we receive that back from the lab, we infuse it into the patient. The antisense therapy will link or bind to the little portion of that RNA structure and cleave it apart. We now have an inner fragmented RNA structure that the body can clear out, release, and then move to the next RNA strand it’s constantly searching for.

A beautiful thing about this is that it continues to work for about 4-6 months. It’s not a repeated therapy that we’re constantly having to do every week, or every day, or every month. While it’s doing its work, we incorporate additional methods to train the immune system. In about 5-6 months we’ll reassess and see where we’re at with the antibody response, the level of the infection, and the clinical presentation of the patient.

There are a few infections that we’re finding require 2 or 3 different SOTs, like Epstein-Barr (which is another topic) and strains of Borrelia. But everybody’s so individualized it’s hard to say how many SOTs are needed for an individual.
I would consider SOT a big weapon we use to help suppress the replicative process of these infections while we’re training the immune system to deal with it, so we can actually allow the immune system to get ahead of the infection and keep it in remission.

What was your personal experience with Lyme disease?

I’m still battling it. I would consider myself an incredibly high functioning person. I never really put two and two together until this last year when just the right recipe hit me with high amounts of stress, an injury, the insult of a lot of things that were going on in the world at that time, and some genetic predispositions for certain situations. It was enough of an insult in all these different areas that certain things got flipped on and my inflammatory immune response got so suppressed.

Now when I look back on my life and look back through my childhood, specifically probably high school and college years, there were moments where mentally and emotionally I would feel totally fogged and spaced out, but I’d rebound. I was overall pretty healthy. I ate well, took care of myself, and exercised a lot. I was a collegiate athlete, but I was very prone to certain injuries. So as I look back on my life, I check off a lot of the boxes of potentially Lyme Disease kicking in.

But again my Constitution, my terrain was strong enough to suppress it down enough to where I didn’t necessarily connect the dots until just recently. I was forced to start peeling a lot of layers back to say what’s causing my blood clotting issue out of nowhere? What’s causing my inflammatory markers, and other markers to just go through the roof when they’ve never been elevated before? It didn’t make sense as to why this was happening. So when I started peeling layers back, I started looking for infections to see if that was it and that’s when I discovered, holy mackerel, I have multiple Borrelia species, Babesiosis, Streptococcal A, and herpes strains. I had a whole host of different infections that were just hammering me all at once. That really affected my mood. It affected my cognitive abilities at times. My energy is definitely depleted.

This whole inflammatory response situation that I’ve been struggling with, I finally got it quieted down, but it took a minute. I used SOT and homeopathics to help calm this down but it’s a process, it’s not an overnight fix. I can tell you without a doubt the SOT treatments, which I’ve tested by isolating those by themselves, significantly helped get this thing to quiet down pretty quickly. And now using some other strategies has allowed me to fully recover. It’s been a journey. It’s not easy. And the mental piece behind it has certainly been challenging as well. So I can totally empathize with patients who are just spiraling down, spiraling out of control, losing hope. It’s a real deal.