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Transcript
- 02:01 About Dr. Jess Armine
- 03:15 About Shawn Bean
- 08:11 What is Lyme Disease?
- 14:01 Testing False Negative for Lyme
- 17:47 Symptoms of Lyme
- 35:11 Psychiatric Disorders and Lyme
- 45:26 How you Contract Lyme – it’s not just from ticks
- 49:43 Treating Lyme
- 57:05 Natural Approaches to Eradicate Lyme
- 62:10 Picking a Health Care Practitioner
- 63:38 “Reversing” Lyme
- 68:42 Lyme Testing
- 73:41 Increased Incidence of Lyme
- 78:24 Final Thoughts about Lyme
- 80:32 Where to Find Shawn Bean and Dr. Jess Armine
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find me at myersdetox.com. You can find this video podcast on the YouTube channel at WendyLiveto110. Please go there and subscribe.
Wendy Myers: Today, I have a new format of the podcast I’m going to be doing more often, which are roundtable discussions with experts on various topics. Today, we’re going to be talking about Lyme disease and all the co-infections and all of the issues around misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis of Lyme disease. It’s huge problem.
Our guests today are Dr. Jess Armine and Shawn Bean. They work together as a team. They are such an amazing pair of practitioners. I’ve been training with them over the last several months and consulting with them, mentoring with them. I’m trying to extract everything I can from their brands. They’re such amazing practitioners. I’ve really been blown away by their vast amount of knowledge and their huge hearts and how much they care about getting to the underlying root cause of their patients’ illnesses.
And Lyme disease is a huge factor for anyone that has a chronic disease or illness. We’re going to be talking about why you want to get checked for Lyme if you do in fact have a chronic disease or illness because Lyme disease mimics 300 different diseases and health conditions.
Please keep in mind that this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please contact your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest today on the show.
So our guests today are Dr. Jess Armine and Shawn Bean.
Dr. Jess Armine holds a license as a Doctor of Chiropractic and he’s a registered nurse. And he has been a healthcare provider for 37 years. He has trained in chiropractic, methylation, genetic research, neuroendoimmunology, functional medicine, nutrigenomics, which are your genes, your 23andMe.com profile, applied kinesiology, cranial manipulation and nutritional counseling. He also cracks backs.
Dr. Armine is one of the few specialists in the United States, specializing in correlating genetic SNPs, which are single nucleotide polymorphismsor gene mutations like MTHFR with neuroendoimmunology, acquired mitochondrial dysfunction and cell wall integrity to identify hidden imbalances also known as leaky cells and histamines, things like that.
He develops individualized treatment plans specific to the history and physiology of the individual patient. Hence the name of his clinic is Center for BioIndividualized Medicine.
Our next roundtable guest is Shawn Bean. As engaged under the direct medical supervision of the physicians he serves, Shawn has provided indispensible knowledge and value that considers endocrine, neurological, psychological and immune system disorders. Nutritional and supplemental interventions are formulated into a therapeutic protocol that compliments and enhances the physician’s standard conventions.
Shawn Bean is the Co-Founder for the Center for Bio-Individualized Medicine and Head of the Department of Clinical Nutrition. He also specializes in clinical nutrition, having several years of experience working with challenging medical cases.
He possesses a Bachelor of Science in Exercise Science from West Chester University and has earned numerous certifications from the World Institute of Integrative Health Science. He also has a certification in neuroendoimmunology, NLP, which is neurolinguistic programming and clinical hypnotherapy.
Shawn specializes in alternative medicine including biochemistry and neurology of autism, depression, chronic fatigue, weight loss, nutrition, gastrointestinal imbalances, environmental toxicity, hormones, genetic mutations as well as lifestyle modifications. He also has completed all the certifications in methylation offered by Dr. Ben Lynch. And he’s one of the few specialists in United States specializing in genetic SNPs or single nucleotide polymorphisms.
Wow! That was a mouthful.
Jess, Shawn, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Shawn Bean: It’s our pleasure, Wendy.
Dr. Jess Armine: It’s a pleasure to be with you again.
Wendy Myers: Yes, thank you so much. So we’re going to be talking about Lyme disease because I’m really surprised by how many people suffering from chronic fatigue and other health issues. They’re suffering from these and they’re not being diagnosed by their general practitioners even though when they’ve gone to doctors year after year after year and even decades. They’re not being properly diagnosed and treated.
Why don’t you guys first tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you guys got into consulting about Lyme? Shawn, why don’t you go first?
Shawn Bean: Wendy, I specialize in clinical nutrition. I use metabolic pathways to help with diseases. Since I’m not a doctor, I can’t treat, diagnose or prescribe anything. But I can evaluate people for imbalances in their body.
So many people are treating a specific disease being labeled, but what we need to focus on is we need to treat the person and just not the disease or the label in itself.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And Jess, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background?
Dr. Jess Armine: Sure. I’ve been a healthcare provider for now 39 years. And I started out as an EMT, paramedic in New York City. I also became an RN. Most of my training there was in emergency department nursing and critical care nursing.
In the early 1980s, after being in the army for three years as a captain, I went to chiropractic school, finished chiropractic school in 1986 and I had been a chiropractor since that time.
Alternative medicine has always been an interest of mine. When my son developed schizophrenia, I started becoming very interested in neuropsychiatric diseases and neurology. I started learning neurotransmitter balancing. And subsequently, the Neuroscience Corporation came up with this certification in neuroendoimmunology, from which I got the first certification. Things just burgeoned from there.
Then I met Shawn. He was absolutely brilliant. We started putting ideas together and started including the epigenetics in consideration. He and I created a system of thought that we called bioindividualized medicine that puts epigenetics and neuroendoimmunology and mitochondrial dysfunction.
And so, we’ll integrate them together, so the doctors stop looking at diagnoses and start looking at the various parameters of the body and start fixing that because they were concentrating either on the end result, which they’re calling a diagnosis and they’re treating that. And then, it’s singularly unsuccessful. That’s why people are chronically ill.
Lyme is a perfect example and it can express in a million different ways. It’s how you diagnose it, what your index of suspicion is and do you know what testing to do and how to interpret the testing.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners exactly what is Lyme just for anyone who’s maybe not aware of it?
Dr. Jess Armine: Sure. Borrelia burgdorferi is Lyme. Borrelia is a spirochete. There are lots of Borrelias out there. Borrelia burgdorferi is one of them, Borrelia afzelii if I’m pronouncing it right.
And of course Texas had to have his own Borrelia, so it’s called “Borelia lonestari.” They even have their own tick called “Lone Star tick.” Personally, I think everybody in Texas gathered the ticks and put a little star on the back.
Wendy Myers: I’m from Texas, so I like that.
Dr. Jess Armine: We all know that Texans, there’s a “Lone Star State” for a reason.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Jess Armine: Nevertheless, there are lots of permutations of this particular spirochete.
Now in understanding spirochetal illness, you go back to your basic healthcare training in school and think about syphilis. Syphilis is Treponema pallidum, which is a spirochete and the same life cycle happens. For syphilis, you get the canker sore and then it goes away by itself. And then you get the rash some time or other and it goes by itself. And eventually, it attacks the brain.
Lyme is syphilis’ smarter cousin. It will attack the neural system. It does a really good job of it. It hides very well. It can fool the immune system. And this is why we have so many people with such a varied symptom expressions of Lyme.
And of course we have to talk about the co-infections. Shawn, why don’t you take the co-infections?
Shawn Bean: There are multiple co-infections. There are mycoplasms. There’s ehrlichia. You’ve got rocky mountain spotted fevers. You’ve got parvoviruses, you got EBV, Epstein-Barr virus. Those are just some to name a few. You’ve got [inaudible 00:10:07] in there as well.
What a lot of the practitioners tend to do is they tend to focus on the mind. But in a lot of the cases that we run into, it’s not necessarily Lyme that’s the problem, it’s the co-infections as well. The way I explain it to my clients is when one comes out to party, you always bring out their friends to cause havoc.
Sometimes, it’s the Lyme that triggers the co-infections. Sometimes, it’s the co-infections that trigger the Lyme. But a lot of the doctors are not even looking at the co-infections. And they are just as worse if not as bad as the Lyme themselves.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Jess Armine: Lyme…
Shawn Bean: Go ahead, Jess.
Dr. Jess Armine: Okay. Lyme, you can consider it a casual term for vector-borne diseases, things that are given to you by a tick. Unfortunately, what most medical physicians do, they’ll do a screening test. It’s called an ELISA testfor IgG and IgM. They’ll do it for Borrelia burgdorferi. If it’s negative, they say you don’t have Lyme.
But fact is that test is only valid a certain amount of time after the bite to a certain amount of time. Is it three months, Shawn? Is it three week to three months or something to that effect? But there’s a window where those two immunoglobulins will build up and come down. After that, you’re not going to see it, but you have it.
Wendy Myers: Is that also called the Western Blot?
Dr. Jess Armine: The Western Blot is a little more advanced test. For those people who don’t know what western blot looks like, think of those patients on CSI where they would inject the electrophoretic gel and you see all those little lines go up when they are testing DNA.
This test will allow – it’s something similar where they will test for different bands and you’ll see these different weighted bands and they compare it to a control and they see how many bands you can match for IgG and IgM, immunoglobulin G and immunoglobulin M.
The CDC has criteria of how many bands it’s considered Lyme disease, but very often the bands are not seen by the computer because the computer’s logic says, “Well, that band that I’m looking at has to be 60% of the intensity of the control band for me to call it positive.”
So there are loads of people out there that have Lyme that the computer is not seeing. And when the computer doesn’t see it, it reports it as negative. And regardless of your symptomatology or even when your index of suspicion is very high, the medical physician will say, “Well, that’s ruled out.”
Well, it’s not ruled out. History has a lot to do with it. If you happen to be a camper, if you’re an Eagle Scout, if you’re trying to tell that you haven’t been beat by a tick, I don’t want to hear it. You didn’t get a bull’s eye rash? I don’t want to hear it. There are too many people who have been bitten and have this vector-borne diseases and it will express a thousand different ways.
By the way, if you go to look at those maps without Lyme, those are the CDC positive cases that have been reported. You can find Lyme in Antarctica. The emperor penguins have Lyme. The ticks go over by the seabirds. I’m not joking, they have Lyme. They’ve been tested for it.
Lyme is everywhere. So if you have any kind of chronic disease, any kind of chronic disease that has not been positively diagnosed (and I mean the root cause of it found and treated successfully), it is imperative that you start looking for Lyme co-infections and everything that is considered Lyme.
Otherwise, your doctor is not doing their job.
Wendy Myers: Yeah because there are so many false negatives absolutely. Do you have any percentages or statistics on the amount of false negatives that are produced by the typical IgG and IgM tests?
Shawn Bean: Just through clinical experience and stuff, we’re seeing a significant amounts. Just probably the past two or three weeks from the labs we ran, we’ve caught 8 to 10 people out of 12 people that tested negative on Quest or LabCorp, but tested positive with the bands themselves on the MDL labs.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So listeners, if you have a chronic illness and you’ve tested negative for Lyme and your doctor was smart enough to at least test for it and it was negative, don’t rule it out because chances are it’s a factor in your illness.
Wendy Myers: So how does Lyme avoid detection in the body’s immune system?
Shawn Bean: Jess?
Dr. Jess Armine: It does it in a lot of different ways. It will hide in different places. It can make the blood hypercoagulable. There aren’t as many Lyme organisms running around as you might think, which is why sometimes when you do the test, you may not catch it unless it’s there.
How else, Shawn?
Shawn Bean: Sometimes Lyme stuff tends to hide within the brain. So a lot of times, you need to actually have a doctor initiate a brain SPECT. Sometimes you can see it within – sometimes, you can see it with an MRI, but sometimes, the brain SPECT is much better because it shows functionality versus where an MRI would show structure. Jess?
Dr. Jess Armine: The other thing that Lyme does – I’m not exactly sure what the mechanism is. They can go “dormant” for a while. But there is a set of testing out that test for Lyme cytokines and the memory cells.
So when your body reacts to an antigen, it’s going to create memory cells, so that if an antigen shows up, again, it’s going to produce antibodies. There are tests out there that can stimulate the white blood cells with the Lyme antigen and see if there are memory cells there – and not only see if there are memory cells for the various organism, but also – don’t ask me how they do this. They get this little tube, go down to where the cells are, suck out some fluid that tests for cytokines, which are the biomarkers of the immune system and can actually test for the Lyme’s specific cytokines.
So you can make a case that this person has dormant Lyme, has had Lyme or has active Lyme that’s hiding if you correlate the test. That’s the real difficulty, correlating the test and realizing that there are multiple things that can cause neuropsychiatric or neurological expression or whatever the expression is that is calling your chronic disease.
Now mind you, we’re talking about a lot of different things. We’re not talking about your typical joint-swelling, which is ubiquitous with Lyme. We’re talking about old-mannered neuropsychiatric illness. We’re talking about multiple chemical sensitivities, [inaudible 00:17:20] activation disorder, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. We’re talking about all the dysautonomias. We’re talking about all the autoimmune diseases because this can up-regulate the immune system than just regulate the immune system causing the body not to recognize itself. It’s the entire gamut. It’s one of the root causes that allows the body to, if you’ll excuse the scientific expression, discombobulate.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s actually my next question. What are some of the symptoms of Lyme so that people, the listeners can recognize it in themselves? I mean, the list is a mile long, but can you guys go over…
Dr. Jess Armine: Shawn is shaking his head, so let him talk.
Shawn Bean: The way I explain it to my clients, doctors’ patients is there are a couple of different types of Lyme. There’s Lyme from neck up. There’s Lyme from neck down. And there’s Lyme from top to bottom.
Some people who may have come in had symptoms of just plain old fatigue. It’s not being expressed neurologically, but they test positive because it’s where the Lyme tends to hit.
One of the things I found through my years of experience with this is Lyme tends to hit the weakest chink in the armor. If there are preexisting genetic expressions that will probably go after those, which will probably be more likely to – if you have a psych issue, then you are more likely to be neuropsych. If you have joint pains in the past, it may hit the joint pains.
From my own experience stuff with relatives, I know that Lyme migrates. It moves and it shifts. It can start at a general location and then migrate throughout the body.
A close relative of mine was diagnosed with MS, but I know when the diagnosis came in that it was actually Lyme and was actually identified through an alternative method 20 years back that was showing Lyme. And it said it was in the shoulder.
He had all kinds of shoulder pain. And then all of a sudden it migrates into the back, into his spinal cord and they thought it was MS. But MS’ clinical diagnosis is two or more lesions separated by space and time. Unfortunately, the lesions didn’t grow up. So we began to question if it was truly MS or not.
It can manifest as pretty much anything. I’ve had people where they come into my office, they come in there, they’re bike riders, they’re high endurance athletes and they’re sitting here and they have autonomic imbalance to where they’re sitting there talking to you, their ears are going up and down and their eyelids are going this way.
It’s a unique experience because they’re carrying on a conversation and they have this total involuntary control, which is all coming from the neurological aspect of Lyme. But they don’t have depression. They don’t have anxiety. They can fully function in a whole full-time job.
It’s really up to the practitioner to decide the symptoms because they cross over. A lot of times, we may have a person with suspected Lyme, but we’re not going to chase them down the antibiotic avenue because of the fact that listen, we address the person, we address the Lyme or we address the body’s immune system to take care of Lyme itself. Normally in those situations, the person gets better with less drugs, less supplements and they can go on their daily lives.
So symptoms can permeate anyway anyhow. They can express as adrenals, hypothyroid, hypopituitarism all the way to psychosis.
There was a case that I had where the person had been locked up in a mental institution for psychiatric schizophrenia. And when they’re properly evaluated, they had Lyme the whole time. Three months, this person who was not able to function in society. He’s now back in society functioning normally without any kind of psychiatric meds.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Jess Armine: Brain Fallon – I’m sorry, go ahead.
Shawn Bean: Basically, Lyme is a great mimicker. It can mimic MS. It can mimic ALS. It can mimic all those symptoms. So it’s the skill of the practitioner. The attentiveness of the practitioner to listen to the history. A lot of doctors don’t ask “What do you do for activity?”
Just last week, I had a guy. He goes, “I want you to ship my testing to an alternative address. I’m going on vacation.” I said, “Where are you going?” He goes, “Yellowstone National Park.” I said, “By the way, what do you do for fun?” He goes, “I’m a mountain bike rider. I ride mountain bikes.”
I said, “Well, have you been checked for Lyme?” He goes, “No, I haven’t.” I said, “I think it’s on the radar that we need to further evaluate this to rule out the possibilities because of your high percentage of it occurring.”
Or we get people that have said, “I’ve got tired and sick.” I said, “Where did you live?” “I lived in New York for six years.” New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arkansas, that whole area is Lyme-central. It’s in a Lyme belt. West Virginia, Rhode Island, Connecticut, those are all on the Lyme belt.
You got to look at the history and you got to ask the questions. You’ve got to be a thorough investigator to ask those questions because the symptoms could be, “Well, I just got over a divorce.” Okay, we know stress triggers Lyme. So if you may have not had Lyme before, you may be expressing now.
Dr. Jess Armine: Your immune system will attempt to compensate for as much as it can. When it’s got multiple infections or one massive infection and you see certain testing, you know that the immune system is overcommitted. So it can’t commit as many soldiers if you will to each battle.
For those scientifically minded amongst us, Brian Fallon, MD who’s a psychiatrist at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center did a ton of studies on recalcitrant schizophrenia and took people who are recalcitrant to every antipsychotic medication out there. He tested them for Lyme, treated the Lyme and the schizophrenia went away.
There is a literature out right now positively correlating ALS with Lyme. And somebody will say – during Lou Gehrig’s time, there probably wasn’t a bunch of Lyme around it and it would be correct. It’s a matter of how the person expresses.
As you know, Shawn and I are genetic experts. We’re methylation experts. God forbid I use that term any longer after last night’s podcast. The reality is (and I said this thousand times) that genetics loads the gun, but environment pulls the trigger. It’s what makes the genetic pathways that could be dysfunctional expressed. And Lyme or any other microorganism, virus, bacteria and so forth can take a root and make genetic predisposition expressed. That’s the way it has to be looked at.
Everybody’s looking at methylation. Everybody’s looking [inaudible 00:24:58]. They’re looking at pathways, but they aren’t thinking about the pathways. There wasn’t a problem when they’re a baby. It’s a problem now. Why is it a problem now? Something is filling up those pathways and inflammation. The products of the microorganism’s metabolism and so forth are what’s creating the genetic expressions. And depending on where the glitches are, which are the genetic predispositions, that’s how you’re going to express. And then it goes on from there and it gets worse and worse and worse and it becomes a big cascade of events.
By the time they come see us, we’re sitting and trying to sort it out. The way we do this is by taking a really good history. That’s why our consultations are around two hours because history is everything.
I learned (and so has Shawn) from very old doctors, they always told us that if you listen to your patient, they will tell you what’s wrong. But you have to have high indices of suspicion. Lyme is a big one, Lyme and the co-infections and everything that’s associated with it like Candida. A big one coming up on the outside is toxoplasmosis, the brain parasites. You have to start thinking about them.
They may not be Lyme-related, but if you have Lyme, is that going to compromise your immune system enough to allow these other guys to get in and is that going to compromise your blood brain barrier enough to allow viruses into the brain where it normally wouldn’t be?
And talking about transfer, there are studies out that show that you can transfer Lyme in utero to the baby. You can transmit Lyme sexually with the exchange of fluids. That’s not me making it up. That’s in the literature. And you’re going to how else you can. People are passing Lyme back and forth like they’re passing parasites back and forth. It’s not a horrible thing. It’s called being human.
So this affects your immune system. It makes it less effective, which allows a whole mess of bad boys, if you will, to take root. That’s what’s causing your genetic predisposition to express and then it’s a cascade from there. You get sicker and sicker and sicker.
So the problem is you have to look at it from the base forward and not from the end result backwards. You can’t look at POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome as a standalone problem. You can’t look at KPU, Kryptopyrrolurea as a standalone problem. The oxalates, everybody’s got a high oxalate diet. You need all these inflammation to make those oxalates act like bad boys and create problems for your entire biochemical pathways.
That’s why what we do works, because we think like that.
Wendy Myers: So are you saying that all those people that are doing the ice buckets for ALS are really doing it for Lyme?
Shawn Bean: Here’s an interesting point that maybe people don’t know about. Lou Gehrig actually vacationed at a holiday home in Lyme, Connecticut. That’s a proven fact. And they also did spirochetes. They found spirochetes in the cadavers of ALS people as well.
So the correspondence is there. I’ve had a few ALS cases that actually turned out to be Lyme in disguise. Because of the genetic component involved, it had thrown doctors off and they would say, “It’s ALS. It’s ALS.” I don’t think it’s ALS. And then once they were treated for Lyme and going back to the foundational work, they got better. This person literally flew around the world to get treated and now they’re about 50% or 60% better and functioning.
Remember, what looks as one thing, you have to further evaluate it because it’s going to start off, as just said, a whole cascade of events.
Dr. Jess Armine: The difficulty is we look at diagnosis. So ALS is a syndrome. MS is a syndrome. It’s a collection of symptoms. You have to ask the question, “What can cause ALS?”
If you say in your head, “Well, ALS is Lyme,” I treat the Lyme, but it wasn’t really ALS, what you’re saying is you’re reinforcing in your head that ALS is this “death sentence,” which it’s not. Something or set of things cause amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or create multiple sclerosis. Something causes that.
We’ve been looking at it from the butt-end, if you will, to excuse my expression, by looking at the diagnosis, which is really a syndrome. And a diagnosis should be an estimate of what the problem is. If you have a sore throat, that’s a symptom. If you have a strep throat, now you know why you have a sore throat. If you have MS, ALS or any of the other syndromes out there, CFS, fibromyalgia, they are symptoms. They are collection of symptoms. One has to keep asking why.
Sherlock Holmes had a great saying that it’s a capital mistake to theorize without data because insensibly what you’ll do is twist facts to suit theories instead of twisting theories to suit facts. What we do in today’s medicine is have all these diagnoses and we shove people in them. Then they have algorithms that they can follow.
Now what we’re proposing and what we’ve been practicing is “Okay, you have ALS. Okay, you have MS. That’s not the sentence you think it is. Let’s start looking for why you have it. Where is that inflammation coming from? Why is it attacking the brain? If it’s attacking the brain, it’s probably a vector-borne disease. Have you been checked for this? No? Let’s look.”
Fluoroquinolone toxicity, the floxies, it’s not just fluoroquinolone antibiotics. You’ve seen people with other antibiotics have the same exact problems. We know that genetic base to look at and we say that that raises our index of suspicion. Let’s look here, here and here.
If you put it together, believe it or not, it’s not that hard to get at the root cause. When you have the root cause, that’s great, but you also have to remember that if you treat the root cause, the bugs, Lyme or whatever it is, you have to treat also what that root cause did to the body. That’s the whole foundational work.
In an acute infection like a sore throat, take some antibiotics and a week later, you feel fine. But in a chronic problem, damage has occurred – not permanent damage, damage, acute dysfunction. So, you want to get at what’s raging the fire and you want to fix what the fire did to the body. When you look at it both ways and when you do both things, that’s called healing.
Now we’re doing one or the other. Somebody’s picking one little thing in the middle and saying, “Oh, this is your panacea.” Doctors think in algorithms because that’s the way they were taught from the 1970s. I was there. I saw it happened. I saw them go from being thinking machines to “Let me follow an algorithm that I want you to follow.”
Wendy Myers: And a protocol set out by a board, et cetera, for treatment.
Dr. Jess Armine: Remember that those are considered standards of care. When something is considered a standard of care, breaching a standard of care means that you’re committing malpractice and you want to avoid that like the plague.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Jess Armine: So doctors are being forced not to think. It’s not their fault.
Wendy Myers: No, it’s not.
Dr. Jess Armine: It really isn’t. And the reason that alternative medicine people like us are laughed at is because we’re thinking outside the box.
How much of the stuff that we’ve been promulgating for years is now considered mainstream medicine? Lovaza, fish oils, Niaspan for cholesterol, which is just long-acting niacin. Ten years ago, they would have laughed. Now, it’s a standard of care. I wonder why, because they actually work.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Jess Armine: We have to look at things from both ends. That’s when you’re treating Lyme or whatever, you just have to have your high index of suspicion.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So I want to give the listeners – this is a list of symptoms of Lyme just so anyone can recognize in themselves. Perhaps, they have a number of these symptoms.
Muscle pains, muscle cramps, stiffness, stiffed neck, loss of or poor muscle tone, muscle weakness, unexplained shaking or trembling, pains that come and go, shooting pains, any kind of pain, regular heart beats, severe fatigue, vague discomfort, distractibility, difficulty concentrating, confusion, brain fog, forgetfulness, memory problems, difficulty in speech or finding the right words, sensitivity to light or sound, possibility of outburst, anxiety, depression, moodiness, apathy, irritability, anxiety attacks, compulsive behavior, any kind of psychiatric disorder.
It mimics over 300 different diseases, low frustration tolerance, skin hypersensitivity, sexual dysfunction, erectile dysfunction, low libido, poor sleep, too much sleep, too little sleep, fractured sleep, difficulty in multitasking, unable to sit or lie down or need to sit or lie down, psoriasis, nausea, loss of appetite, neurofunctional abnormalities, swollen lymph glands or nodes, spleen tenderness or swelling, just really lack of stamina, tiredness. It’s a very, very long list of potential symptoms.
Shawn Bean: The fact is if you have any kind of chronic illness and you’re still ill despite a reasonable amount of trials of different types of treatment and everybody’s knocking their heads against the wall, we think Lyme.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Can Lyme damage neurotransmitters so that this will in turn promote psychiatric disorders or depression and anxiety?
Dr. Jess Armine: Just by its nature, it’s going to cause neurotransmitter imbalances, yes.
Wendy Myers: That’s why it’s really good to do a neurotransmitter testing, a urine test because if all of your neurotransmitters are low, it’s a sign that you have immune system dysfunction and potential infections like Lyme and the co-infections. Correct?
Dr. Jess Armine: That is correct.
Shawn Bean: When your neurotransmitters go low, it’s usually an indication that it has been there for a chronic time. And normally, when I see low neurotransmitters and I see confirmation of Lyme, I go back through the history and try to retrace everything to say, “Where is the potential exposure that this may happen?”
One guy I had said, “Listen man. I had this for 10 or 15 years. It has made no point. I was a camper back in the day and stuff. I was always pulling ticks off of me all the time.” Whenever I see a low neurotransmitter pattern, it’s usually a progressively long-standing case.
There are other cases where you can see its active Lyme. When you see the neurotransmitters all in the high side, 9 times out of 10, you can take a couple of different lab results, piece them together and you’ll be able to quantify, “Hey, you know what? You have active Lyme.”
Some of the LMDs and stuff send me their clients, their patients. I look at their labs and stuff, I said, “Run the neurotransmitter test” I said, “Listen, you need to go back to your LMD because your Lyme is active again.” You can tell that just from the neurotransmitter pattern if the Lyme is active or not.
That one case, Jess, I just walked in, hopped in and said she got Lyme and walked out the door. And the next thing you know, not only did the daughter have it, the mother also did have it.
Dr. Jess Armine: There are immune patterns of decompensation. When we teach how to read neurotransmitter tests, we teach them in a dynamic manner, so that people can see it in time order and consider it not just as a snapshot because we’re talking about not only Lyme.
Think about PANDAS, think about strep and think about anything that upregulates the immune system, you’re going to see it and then you’re going to see how the body decompensates over time.
Usually we get people with advanced decompensation. If we get it early, we see it all smacked up. When we completely read everything, then we know what we’re dealing with.
So just remember something like ADD (because I have a lot of kids coming in with ADD), a true ADD is low phenethylamine, low norepinephrine. But your ADD is from hyperactivity disorder. It just means that their mind is moving so fast that they have the attention span of a net. Same symptoms, same syndrome, but you wouldn’t want to treat the person with the upregulated neurological system with amphetamines. It will just blow the back of their head off.
That’s why the medicines work for some and not the others because they use the syndrome as the diagnosis and not the root causes. They release even the downstream effects, so they can use band aids.
And people will laugh at neurotransmitter testing but guess what? It isn’t completely CNS. It’s CNS and peripheral nervous system, but it gives you a pattern and it gives you a biomarker. Guess what, most of the doctors are not using anything. In other words, they’re guessing.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Jess Armine: At least we’re using biomarkers that will say, “Okay. This is what’s going on. I know what direction they’re going.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s amazing to me that psychiatrists do no testing whatsoever and prescribe psychiatric medications, one after another with zero indication of what’s going on. That’s amazing to me.
Dr. Jess Armine: If they knew how to do this type of testing, if they accepted the testing, they could shorten that time, which is essentially going from one thing to another. Depression is not always true at times. An SSRI isn’t always indicated. It can be caused from all manner of difficulty. You can look at a neurotransmitter test and tell what you would prescribe for somebody if you’re using it pharmaceutically.
I had a kid who had depression. His psychiatrist didn’t believe his neurotransmitter test. He gave him Adderall, Wellbutrin and Prozac. He walked around like a zombie for a while. He, of course, stopped taking it.
The next year, he was going to go to see the psychiatrist. I wrote a letter and said, “Please, I know you’re not believing the test. But how about you use one thing at a time? The serotonin looks like it might be it.” She gave him 10 milligrams of Prozac, half the adult dose. In three days, he started feeling better and just stayed there.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Jess Armine: Granted I’m not a great harbinger of that, but it proves the point. That’s what his body needed. And he wasn’t feeling the anxiety and he wasn’t depressed anymore. I don’t know what happened after that.
You can use these guides as indicators. You correlate them with everything and then you know what’s going on. It takes time. It takes experience. That’s why, Wendy, you’re on our list of practitioners because you will take the time and have the expertise to do exactly what it is that we’re doing.
Shawn Bean: One of the things I do want to bring light here is when you are addressing Lyme, there are some cases to where they have to have medical intervention. There are no [inaudible 00:40:49] about it.
Dr. Jess Armine: No questions.
Shawn Bean: When you’re dealing with neurological Lyme, there are some cases to where you can try every natural supplement in the face of the earth, but if it’s the receptors that are the problem, you may need Lexapro or an SSRI – not so much SSNRI, but more an SSRI. They tend to go with a benzodiazepine just to try to give them a temporary relief.
There’s no harm or foul in using medicine to increase quality of life, but you don’t want to use it as a temporary band aid. You want to get to the root cause of the problem.
I deal with a lot of neurological Lyme with the clients and stuff I get from LMDs. They are open-minded enough and they do treat based upon psychiatric evaluations. So they do have their ability to prescribe meds.
But working in an integrative approach, they notice a much better therapeutic outcome – less drugs, less everything. A lot of the doctors I work with are in the same mentality of “You got to do what you got to do to get the person stabilized.” Once you get the person stabilized, then you want to work on trying to come back around it and try to get them off the drugs as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Especially with benzodiazepine, you got to be incredibly careful with. Benzo withdrawals is huge.
I had a lady the other day. She was on it around the clock. I told her to integrate the precursor phenitropic along with it. She said, “Should I stop my medicine?” “No, you need to work with psychiatrists and stuff along with this process to see if they are onboard and stuff. I’ll be glad to help you change or filter your meds and stuff.”
I just give them heads up saying, “Listen, if you feel this, it’s an indication that you’re not overdosing on the supplement, you’re actually making the med work more effectively. Your psychiatrist needs to understand this and to adjust accordingly.”
Dr. Jess Armine: There’s no dishonor in using a band aid if you’re bleeding. The dishonor occurs when all you do is use the band aid and you don’t try to stop the bleeding.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Jess Armine: When it concerns a neuropsychiatric case or any other kinds of cases, the first criteria is if the person is safe. If they’re not safe – and we had a case this morning exactly like this where the person simply wasn’t safe. I declined to treat them and directed them towards the appropriate resources because alternative medicine takes some time.
Getting the body back to where it belongs takes some time. But if in that time, that person is going to be unsafe, if they’re going to be self-injurious, if they’re going to be dangerous to other people, they need to be under medical supervision. They need to be under probably intensive either outpatient or inpatient psychiatric treatment to keep them safe.
In a perfect world, holistic medicine is the best of allopathic and alternative medicine. Okay. We’re heading there. We’re getting there. We’re the ones putting out the olive branches and working with other doctors.
Believe it or not, more allopathic medical physicians are coming to us and saying, “What is it you’re doing that’s making my patients better?” They’re coming onboard. I like that. It’s coming a little slower than I would like, but it is happening. It is starting to happen.
Remember the use of medicines is not a bad thing. Sometimes you need that. Sometimes, you need to know how to wean. But you have to work with your medical professional. Don’t just stop medicine just because you’re going to take this amino acid.
And if you’re having significant symptoms, never do it on your own. One of my other favorite sayings is, “A doctor who treats himself has got a fool for a patient.” That goes for the patients. Never treat yourself, okay?
Where are you going to get your information? From the Internet? From TV programs? Oh, my gosh! If you have significant symptoms, that’s a bad way to go.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. It takes a long time to develop the vast body of knowledge that health practitioner have to get the full picture of what’s going on.
I agree, intelligent allopathy is important because natural means, supplementation and natural protocols do take time, one, two, three years and even longer to correct the underlying imbalances of the body that are promoting illness.
Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about Lyme and how it’s transmitted. We know that it’s transmitted by ticks, but can it be transmitted by other insects as well?
Shawn Bean: You’re looking at mosquitoes, [inaudible 00:45:37], flies, spiders and humans ourselves. Those are what Jess refers to as vector diseases. Any vector disease can be transmitted by those means.
It’s all about being immunocompromised. They did a study over in Japan (I believe it was) on HIV patients. They noticed that all HIV patients have Lyme because they’re immunocompromised.
Always, the idea of how it’s transmitted is it’s a fluid-to-fluid contact in which you have to break the skin. Kissing, I don’t think it’s transmitted through kissing unless you’re severely immunocompromised. It’s more of a blood or fluid or sexual fluid transfer within one person to the next.
One of the things I’m seeing a lot more of is, I’m seeing when I look at the Lyme cases (because I have a vast spectrum of them), I would say probably about 75% to 85% of them are women. I think women are more vulnerable to sexual transmission than guys are because of the emissions of the transfer.
And women tend to be more creatures of stress than guys are. They have a less [inaudible 00:47:10] genetics just in nature, nature versus nurture. They tend to get stressed more easily. That stress puts them on a higher risk of their immune system being compromised.
Whenever you are immunocompromised, you’re going to have higher increase of either letting the little monster out of its cage, which would be the Lyme (it’s the analogy I use) or the idea of actually having direct transfer and activation from an active Lyme.
Wendy Myers: I think why Lyme is so tricky is because it can lie dormant and then it comes out and rears its ugly head during times of stress. And then, it can go back dormant again and come back out. People are saying, “Oh, I have the flu… Oh, I have some sort of illness,” when really they have a chronic illness.
Shawn Bean: Lyme goes into what’s called a cyst form. The cyst form is the dormant form. A lot of times people think by giving certain antibiotics, they’re doing them good. But little do they know when you look at the studies, if you give doxycycline without Tindamax, you’re actually – yeah, you’re killing Lyme, but you’re also increasing the amount of round bodies in the process, which is not a good thing because you are creating more dormant Lyme than active Lyme.
That’s why LMDs are great at what they do. And a lot of the LMDs I work with are completely research-based because as we know, a lot of doctors and practitioners who are treating Lyme are on the radar all the time.
Wendy Myers: So LMDs are Lyme doctors?
Shawn Bean: LMDs are Lyme medical doctors . Correct. There’s also Lyme-literate MDs as well too that are capable of treating Lyme either medicinally or naturally.
I’m starting to explore this avenue. I’m just not comfortable yet on how to exactly address the Lyme. So, I tend to approach it from addressing a person rather than addressing the Lyme itself because clinically, Dr. Jess, even though he is in DC cannot diagnose Lyme. But we can address the person…
Dr. Jess Armine: No, no, no. I can diagnose Lyme, but I’m not allowed to treat an infectious disease. I can diagnose anything Lyme.
Shawn Bean: But you can’t just treat.
Dr. Jess Armine: Yeah, I can’t treat an infectious disease, the actual Lyme disease.
Shawn Bean: The actual Lyme.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So you work in conjunction with doctors, et cetera?
Dr. Jess Armine: Absolutely!
Wendy Myers: So the conventional treatment for Lyme is antibiotics. Any doctor you go to is just automatically going to give you antibiotics. But there are other ways. How do you naturally eradicate Lyme with supplements and natural antibiotics?
Shawn Bean: The way that I approach Lyme, as I mentioned before, is sometimes, we get lucky and we get the body to take care of itself. We work on the immune system. We do the foundational work and in some cases, we get the person to certain standards where 90% of their symptoms are resolved.
And I let them know. I say, “Listen. You know what you’re dealing with. When you start to fall backward and stuff, you know what your next step is.” That way, they have no rhyme or reason to wonder what’s going on with them 10 to 15 years down the road if anything happens because you let them know. “If this gets worse within the next six months to a year, you need to seek medical attention or actually start addressing the Lyme itself.”
By doing the foundational work, we bolster up the immune system. The way I explain this is very simple. What you want to do is Lyme is like a wild animal that’s got out of its cage. It’s the job of the LMD to identify the Lyme and to put it back into its cage. A lot of times, when it’s put back into its cage, what’s happening is they don’t ever address the lock, which is the problem it got out in the first place.
So what Dr. Jess and I do is we reinforce that lock to keep it into place because there are some people out there who believe they can kill it. But the question is that still remains to be seen because they would have a hard time proving it.
What we found is by increasing the resistance to stress through natural approaches, through foundational work, we find that people who are currently in Lyme treatment tend to respond a lot quicker. The best scenario, which I’m trying to work with a couple of doctors, is having to send their patients to Dr. Jess, myself or practitioners like you, Wendy who had demonstrated incredible skills in very rapidly improving to where we can work with them for anywhere between two to three months and prep their body for work.
Too many people are going into the Lyme not having proper arsenal against themselves through the treatment.
Wendy Myers: And that’s just taking supplements and nourishing the body, so it has the weapons and minerals and has everything that it needs to function.
Shawn Bean: It’s all about minerals, having the enzymes to function. It’s also a mindset too. A lot of times, the mind can have a huge impact on immune system. And working in conjunction with other practitioners, we are starting to see that in regards to food sensitivities. By changing how you approach the problem in a mindset is actually allowing the body to heal. It’s referred to as psyche or “reaching the limbic system.” That’s a whole another show in and of itself.
But start with the groundwork, start with the foundational work and try to prevent that lock from rusting and to keep it in check.
Even though you identify it, as long as you work from a natural standpoint and from a systematic standpoint, your chances of going down the antibiotic route will actually be lessened. Or if you do go down the antibiotic route, your chances of having herxing, which is just basic term that I found – the number one thing is “Why don’t my clients herx as bad?” That’s because what’s happening is I am increasing their body’s resistance to stress. That’s what’s herxing is. It’s stress.
If the person is in a stressful environment to begin with, you’re adding more stress on top of them. If you resolve the stress they’re currently dealing with, it gives their body a better ability to fight what’s to come. That’s why my clients and also the LMDs I’m working with are seeing huge dramatic change in their patients as well as, I’m sure, Dr. Jess’ relationships with doctors. We’re seeing the same thing.
This integrative approach is going to be the final answer in dealing with the fight for life because if you treat with antibiotics, you’re treating the disease, you’re not treating the person. They relapse. The reason they relapse is because they don’t have their body’s ability to tolerate stress. And then all of a sudden, you get gene expression, you get other factors going on and the whole cascade starts.
Dr. Jess Armine: What people should be careful of is they think by using the herbal approach is to fighting Lyme. I get these different herbal protocols and herbal substances. That’s the same as using antibiotics. That does not take the place of doing the foundation work or what some people call “biological terrain work.” In other words, fixing the body itself.
It’s the same thing in chemotherapy. Whether you’re using chemotherapeutic medications against cancer or you’re using herbal agents against cancer, you’re still treating –
The example I’d like to give is if you have a lake that’s exposed to the sun and it doesn’t have a lot of water flowing, it doesn’t get oxygenated and it starts getting very acidic, that lake is going to produce a lot of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are things like Lyme, cancer and so forth.
You can use nutraceuticals or pharmaceuticals to kill the mosquitoes, but you’re still going to have a lot of them unless you fix that lake, unless you improve the circulation of the lake, oxygenate the lake, thrown some fishing in there and give it some shade. Once that lake becomes healthy, it won’t produce as much mosquitoes and then what you’re using will being to work, whether it’s a pharmaceutical or nutraceutical.
What the middle ground is not to use herbal anti-Lyme agents because they’re just going to do the same thing as the antibiotics. They’re not going to give you any better of a result because you’re still not fixing the base physiology of the body.
Wendy Myers: I love that point because I think physicians and other healthcare practitioners are doing their patients such a disservice when they treat cancer or other diseases and do not strengthen that person’s body with minerals and nutrients that are required for the body to work and to have a healthy immune system so that they don’t get sick again.
That’s why we see the recurrence of cancer in people that have been treated and higher occurrence rates of Lyme and other illnesses because it’s an essential missing component in the treatment protocol. I love that point, Dr. Jess. Thank you.
Dr. Jess Armine: Thank you. It should be very basic. But it doesn’t seem to be…
Wendy Myers: No. That’s very elementary to us, but not to so many of the other healthcare practitioners.
Wendy Myers: What are some of the natural herbals and perhaps colloidal silver and things that you use to eradicate Lyme?
Shawn Bean: Some of the things we use, we use colloidal silver in some people. There’s also NMS out there now. But the new thing is ASEA Water, which just works very good.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Shawn Bean: It’s basically the diluted form of the CDS.A lot of people are getting good results with this.
There are different protocols that are being used. Some, you have to be very, very careful with, especially with Uncula de Gato. Anybody that has high dopamine levels or experiencing anxiety or any kind of imbalance neurologically, basically the gas pedal is down and the breaking system is broke, you want to be extremely careful with Uncula de Gato because it’s a MAO-B inhibitor, which basically means that you can’t break dopamine down because of your gene expression or you just don’t have enough breaking system in place.
Several cases I have worked on, I have seen high dopamine levels. When I look back, they were doing a lot of Uncula de Gato, which is “Cat’s claw.” It’s one of the main components.
So your practitioner should have a good interaction of the herbs, know their pharmaceutical interventions and their pharmaceutical actions because the majority of the drugs that are produced are based upon botanicals and herbs themselves. Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean that it’s safe. That’s one of the things that we have to look at.
There are so many people out there, even taking minerals and stuff, as you know minerals have to be balanced and they have to be balanced very technically. “Too much of this knocks out that.” So you got to be diligent on those.
So you start with the good foundational work in the nutrition. And then – I mean, there’s the Cowden Protocol.
Dr. Jess Armine: Buhner Protocol.
Shawn Bean: Stephen Buhner has got a great book out. It’s one of the best books that I’ve had a chance to glimpse at. I think it tends to be in more suitable stance than other protocols because there’s science based upon it. And it’s one of the avenues that I’m looking to get into in the very near future because it holds a lot of promise with the interjection of what Dr. Jess and I are doing.
Natural-wise, you got colloidal silver. Colloidal silver is very good. It does kill Lyme, but it also boosts your immune system too. And it’s also a great immune system booster. The only problem with colloidal silver is it doesn’t kill parasites. So you have to use an antiparasitic along with it to sweep up those.
Wendy Myers: How long can you take colloidal silver? Is there a max?
Dr. Jess Armine: It depends on the type.
Shawn Bean: Yes, it depends on the type. There has to be a separation between colloidal silver and what home-brewed stuff is. There are actually people that actually are making their own colloidal silver and you’re going to end up turning into Papa Smurf.
Dr. Jess Armine: You don’t want to do your own colloidal silver. You just don’t.
Shawn Bean: You don’t want to do your colloidal silver even though they actually have formulas out there, and they actually have a bakery out there as well.
Dr. Jess Armine: You don’t want to do it. There are certain things you simply don’t want to do. You want to get the colloidal silver that’s got the smallest molecule, the one that’s packaged in glass, not plastic, brown glass that the light photons don’t start messing with it. The fact is, if your colloidal silver is turning a silver color, you’re not getting it.
Other things like – go ahead. [Inaudible 01:01:16] We’re getting more esoteric, the rife machines.
Wendy Myers: I did one of those. They’re interesting. They’re light pulses. Very, very interesting.
Shawn Bean: Zappers and Rife machines, I was very skeptical of. But once I started having people do it, the results have been literally amazing. Two or three weeks, they’re noticing their symptoms, they don’t have much herxing, so to speak.
Wendy Myers: The detox symptoms…
Shawn Bean: The detox symptoms through stress in the system. And even one person who tried everything on the face of the earth was able to tolerate them. So, I think they’re a good way to go. I think they’re relatively very safe as long as they’re used under proper supervision.
Dr. Jess Armine: You have to realize that when you pick out your health care practitioners, you have to pick out somebody who’s got a very large toolbox. There’s an old saying that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So if you have a really large toolbox and a lot of knowledge about various ways of treating, not everybody responds to everything, but you’ll have alternatives.
If you only know one thing, if you go to somebody who practices a protocol, that’s all you’re going to get. You may not get what you actually need. You’re going to get the protocol, which I think is rather silly. You need to go to a –
Do we really need specialists? No, we really need generalists. We need people who have a broad base of knowledge that can bring that all in.
Shawn and I have large toolboxes. So we have [inaudible 01:03:04]. We have lots of opportunities and lots of things that we can go to based on our experience, based on who we know and who we can send them to.
But again, if you go to somebody who just does a protocol, who does one thing, you’re with the wrong practitioner because your body may not respond to what they have. Some people do, and that’s wonderful. But you should go to a practitioner that has a very large toolbox.
Wendy Myers: You mentioned earlier, Shawn, that you may not believe that you can eradicate Lyme. Are there people that you’ve seen that have completely reversed it, or is it just a chronic illness that you constantly have to keep in check and treat occasionally when it pops out due to stress?
Shawn Bean: In that situation, I agree with the third one. You always have to keep in the back of your mind because working with LMD’s and stuff, we do see relapses. That’s just something you can’t prevent. You get a cold, you get sick, grand mom dies. That’s when it tends to pop its ugly head again.
But the thing is at least you know what you’re dealing with. That’s the peace of mind because a lot of the clients and patients that I see from doctors, the best thing they know is living with peace of mind, knowing what they’re dealing with. So they’re not chasing their tails all over the internet trying to find out what’s going on the next time it arises. At least you can address when it comes up.
Many times, people come back to me, “Shawn, I’m having this symptom and this symptom.”
And I’m like, “What did you do?”
“I cut my oxalates down by 50%, too much. I got to dump.”
I said, “Well, since you’re dealing with infections and stuff, you may have also awoken the sleeping giant again.”
As long as you have a game plan, as long as you have a clinical diagnosis from a doctor, then it’s going to leave you with a peace of mind.
One of the cases I worked on, 20 years, she was chasing her tail, not knowing what’s going on. I knew it was Lyme, but it wasn’t until the final diagnosis came in that it truly wasn’t Lyme. It was a co-infection she was dealing with, chlamydia pneumoniae. She had it for 15, 20 years. But the thing was is that the treatment was the same things for Lyme. And now, she’s doing much, much better.
But the thing is, she has a peace of mind after all these years that it’s not all in her head. And that’s what we want to emphasize.
Dr. Jess Armine: I want to somewhat disagree with Shawn in just a couple of points. Number one, I do think you can get rid of the microorganisms and kill them all, but you can get re-infected.
Number two, I think that whatever the bug does to the body, if that’s not treated, there are things called facilitated pathways. Let’s say you have all this damage and all this cascade effect, something else can stimulate the body, and you’re going to get the same symptomatology and it’s going to look like you have Lyme, but it’s being caused by a different problem.
You see this with migraines all the time. You cannot cure a migraine. You can treat a migraine, but if you want to cure a migraine, you want to control all the triggers. If you control the triggers, the less migraines you have, the less tendency you’re going to have, but you still can get a certain amount of stressors that will set off the same, exact migraine you’ve had because that’s the facilitated pathway. It will follow the same cascade and give you the same set of symptoms.
So there’s a possibility that what you’re dealing with is a lack of improving or fixing the body rather than a chronic exacerbation of Lyme. It’s just another probability.
Shawn Bean: That’s a good point, Jess. And that’s why when anything like that arises, I always want to go back and look at the quantitative evidence to say, “Hey, have you have an MDL Lab re-tested on it? Have you looked at your neurotransmitter pathways?” That way, it just reinforces. “Do you see a drop in DHEA?” So you look at patterns diagnostically to see if the probability of it is there.
But it’s always proper evaluation, it’s always proper history. Most people [inaudible 01:08:03] it’s always re-infection.
Dr. Jess Armine: You have to realize, if you treat somebody just the way we do, if we’re treating a whole biological train, then my entire argument goes out the window because that’s not going to be what the problem is. The problem is going to be re-infection or an exacerbation of an existing infection.
For most people who haven’t had the biological train treated, that may be one of the reasons why even small things are setting off Lyme-like symptoms.
So the takeaway was (and I know you already know this) treat the biological train. Treat it foundationally, and you’re going to get rid of 90% of the ills that you’re being faced with.
Wendy Myers: You guys do testing for Lyme, I do testing for Lyme. We like MDL Labs, one of the best labs in the country for viruses and other microorganisms. That’s all they do. They specialize in that. What are some of the best tests to do for Lyme, including the co-infections?
Shawn Bean: MDL’s got a really – we actually have a customized panel that we use. It works very well. It’s very, very affordable. Another mechanism is Igenix. They have an incredible test, the antiobiotic challenge to actually force the Lyme out. They have a urine test which is very, very good.
To check for further bartonella, you got Galaxy Labs, which is also very good. So there are other specialty labs when you need to go further.
But just the generalization on MDL Labs, I guess we’ve picked up 10, 12 people in the past few weeks that slipped through by looking at the details of the bands and stuff. And even though that you do get a faxed copy, you really don’t see the reality until you look at it on a blown up computer screen. That’s when the reality comes when you see the PDF file.
Dr. Jess Armine: To answer your question, we’re looking at babesia, bartonella, rocky mountain spotted fever, HME, borrelia burgdoferi, and we’re getting a Western Blot, plus we’re looking at toxoplasmosis, candida parvo virus. That’s within our vector-borne panel. So we’re getting a really good view of Lyme and the co-infections and we’re able to visually inspect the Western Blot.
Shawn will tell you that we just went over a test where the computer saw several bands, but didn’t report it on top and the accumulation of the IgG/IgM was in the positive range. But unless you read the Western Blot itself, you wouldn’t get the impression this person had Lyme and they had Lyme. It’s easy to point it out.
And yeah, there are other labs you can use for confirmatory, but they tend to get expensive. And again, it’s a matter of who’s interpreting it.
Wendy Myers: You need a human to interpret computerized test. You always go back to human.
Shawn Bean: Absolutely!
Dr. Jess Armine: Absolutely! And your history and index suspicion has to be high. That’s how it’s done. You have to couple the testing with a good, unbiased expert interpretation.
Wendy Myers: So many people, they test negative for Lyme, negative Western Blot, negative IgG/IgM, but they have all these co-infections. Is that where you suspect the dormant Lyme that they do possibly, in fact, have Lyme?
Dr. Jess Armine: As I’ve said, as I’ve indicated before that if we consider Lyme, all of these things together (because that’s the way the public thinks about it) if we look at the Lyme and the co-infections and everything else as Lyme, that’s what I’m saying we should think everything else. If you’re looking for the actual Lyme organism, borrelia burgdorferi, then you’re talking about one microorganism. But in a vector-borne diseases, which is what you’re really talking about, what most people consider Lyme is all these things together and have to be all checked.
The problem with testing is that they may test just for borrelia burgdorferi instead of testing for borrelia lonestari and the WA1 and the various other co-infections, which is what should be standard. I don’t understand why it’s not. It should be standard for people to look at it. But what they do is they do one test for one microorganism, it’s a very limited test and it’s only valid at a very small period of time, so they say it’s all negative.
You also have to realize some of the politics involved. In Australia, the diagnosis of Lyme does not exist. They’re saying that Lyme doesn’t exist. I don’t know that the ticks over-shuttle Australia.
Here, in the United States, the Infectious Disease Guides say that chronic Lyme doesn’t exist. I remember arguing with one guy and having him up against the wall like Darth Vader saying, “Are you trying to tell me that borrelia burgdorferi is the only microorganism on the planet that can only give you an acute condition, but not a chronic condition? So what does it have, a suicide gene?”
And in most of the countries that have nationalized healthcare, they’ll get positive tests from Igenix, do their own tests and they’ll always come out negative.
So you have to wonder about the politics involved in who’s paying for it and are they setting things up so they don’t have to pay for the treatment?
Wendy Myers: So why has the incidence of Lyme increased so much? Because you’re saying there was much less Lyme before, but now we’re seeing this explosion of Lyme. Why is that?
Dr. Jess Armine: Part of it is better diagnosis. Part of it is worldwide travel. We’re no longer just going over the mountains on donkeys anymore. We have worldwide travels, so things can spread. The awareness is up.
I’m not sure – Shawn, do you think that Lyme is just becoming more diversified?
Shawn Bean: What I think is happening is I think a lot of people are carriers of it and they don’t know it. And because of the gene expressions and the change in the environment and our inability to tolerate stress, electromagnetic fields – electromagnetic field is one of the biggest ones. Low frequency electromagnetic fields have been show to increase bio replication significantly.
I had several cases of people who had Lyme and when I went in and looked at their electromagnetic sensitivity, worked on the adrenal glands, as well as addressed the EMF protection at night, with no change in supplementation, with no change in meds or anything, their Lyme load count dropped back into the normal range.
Dr. Jess Armine: Our society is getting sicker. Our society is getting sicker. When I was a kid, on Sunday, only two things were open, the church and the bakery. And the TV was shut off at midnight. It wasn’t just shut off, they just stopped broadcasting.
Now, we live in a 24/7 highly-stimulatory society, which I like to call exitotoxic. We’re not adapted to it. We’re not adapted to this fight or flight that happens. The fight or flight syndrome, we’re adapted once every six weeks, not four, five, six times a day like you’re listening to your news radio station. We’re not adapted to all the stressors and I think that our immune systems are showing it, and that’s what’s opening us up for so many things.
We’re not going to get into the glyphosates and the GMO foods that’s hurting people initially with their guts. We’re not getting into immunizations that they’re starting at babies who don’t even have organized immune systems and they’re giving them three injections before they leave the hospital. By the time the MMR hits, they’ve had 15 to 21 immunizations where when I was a child, maybe you had three by that time. I’m paraphrasing. It’s probably a little bit more than that.
When I went into the army, I walked down the line and they gave me injections in each arm. But my body could handle it at that time, not as an infant.
So we’re living in an exitotoxic society and a toxic society and our bodies simply have not had the time to adapt to it. So we have to do things upfront. We have to be proactive in treating this. Otherwise, people are going to get –
I’m noticing and Shawn’s noticing, and I’m sure you are, people are getting sicker earlier. I’m looking at neurotransmitter patterns of complete exhaustion in 11-year-olds. You used to see that in 65-year-olds. What’s happening? The society is getting more ill. So that makes us susceptible to everything. And I think that’s the base of it.
Wendy Myers: Also, selenium deficiency. Selenium prevents viral replication. So if you have a selenium deficiency, that will also promote the proliferation of viruses and other microorganisms as well.
Dr. Jess Armine: Absolutely, absolutely.
Wendy Myers: Just a little mineral trip.
Dr. Jess Armine: That’s wonderful. There are so many avenues of healing the body. That’s why doing it together, doing it holistically is the best way to go. It’s taking all of our expertise.
What I mentioned in my podcast last night, “What does it take to do what we do?” It takes research, it takes study, but it takes collaboration. It takes us not holding our knowledge like a dog with a bone. It takes collaboration. You have your expertise, Shawn has his expertise, I have my expertise. Ours, we share it amongst one another. And that’s better for the greater whole.
A candle doesn’t lose any light by lighting another candle. Collaboration is a thing. If we’re going to heal the planet, if we’re going to change the face of health care on the planet, we have to collaborate.
Wendy Myers: Is there anything else that Jess or Shawn that you would like to add to our conversation about Lyme?
Shawn Bean: Just as you’ve mentioned before, if you’re having these unknown illnesses and you’re just wondering around – because I see it on forums all the time. I’m like Lyme, Lyme, Lyme. And you can pretty much pinpoint it out because of the symptoms. And also, I even go in to look at what city they’re at. You can do it demographically.
And there are different ways. There’s is a technique that I’ve used, which is a whole another story, on diagnostic evaluations of Lyme. You don’t look for Lyme direction, you look for the footprints it leaves by looking at the neurotransmitter pattern, by looking at the cortisol patterns, by looking at the D8ga levels, by looking at the ECP, the [inaudible 01:19:23] growth factor.
Vitamin D 125 or 25 ratio is the biggest indicator that I find that is the major driving force to say, “Listen, pathogen or environmental exposure.” And then you have to start playing detective or Sherlock Holmes, and try to find which one it is because Lyme, the micro toxins are very, very closely related and they mimic each other very, very closely.
So you have to look. And people will tell you, “I had a mold in the house the other year.” They will know it. So looking at the history, not just the diagnostic tools, is really going to be the overall determining factor of whether the person potentially has Lyme or not.
And a lot of times and stuff, I will not chase the rabbit down the hole, but put it on the backburner because if everything else I’m doing isn’t working, then that’s one of the avenues I will further explore.
Wendy Myers: Thank you, guys, so much. This is such an engaging conversation. I know it’s going to be so educational for any of you guys out there that have been suffering for a really long time. You need to look at Lyme. And so I hope we got that point across today.
So why don’t you guys tell the listeners where they can find you and perhaps get testing with you for Lyme?
Dr. Jess Armine: Basically, we’re at www.MethylationSupport.com. We can be reached at [email protected] by e-mail. Our telephone number is 610-449-9716. You can get an appointment with either Shawn or I through any of those methods.
We do have Lyme testing and a special interpretive session where you can get your testing done. Have an appointment with one of us to just do interpretation, not be pushed into any other kind of treatment. If you look like you have Lyme, we would inform you of the proper treatment resources.
I think what’s needed and necessary these days is proper testing and proper unbiased expert interpretation and then someone to say, “Okay, these are your options,” without that feeling of, “This person is trying to sell me and trying to get me into their particular set of treatment.”
That’s not what we do in this kind of cases. We diagnose it and then say, “Okay, here are your treatment options and this is what you can take to the bank.” That’s the most important thing.
Wendy Myers: Do you have a location where people can go as well?
Dr. Jess Armine: We’re in Upper Darby in Pennsylvania, which is right outside of Philadelphia. We’re in a location where I usually take an extra 10% off if you can find us. Hopefully, we’re joining forces with another doctor pretty soon for a different office.
But yeah, we have a nice office and we’re at 8420 West Chester Pike in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Like I said, right outside the western portion of Philadelphia.
Wendy Myers: So I take that you’re not cracking backs anymore?
Dr. Jess Armine: Oh, I do. I do. I haven’t given up my practice. I don’t have the volume I used to. I just take care of my old patients. There’s a chiropractor downstairs that if new patients come in or if somebody needs a lot of care, I’ll send him down to him only because I simply don’t have the time. And this is my passion.
Wendy Myers: This is more fun. This is much more fun.
Dr. Jess Armine: I love chiropractic, I really do. It’s just that this is much more fun.
Wendy Myers: And you have a podcast as well, correct?
Dr. Jess Armine: Every Monday night.
Wendy Myers: You have an excellent podcast. It’s one of my favorites. And I think it should be much, much more popular. It’s on Blog Talk Radio, correct?
Dr. Jess Armine: Yes, it is.
Wendy Myers: Just go on BlogTalkRadio.com, search for Jess Armine and you will find him.
Dr. Jess Armine: I will be there with a big, old grin on my face.
Wendy Myers: And Shawn, tell us about you
Shawn Bean: I’m at the same office as Jess is at. You can contact me through the information that he provided. Just notify that you’d like to set up an appointment with myself or him. We’re there to collaborate together.
We try to keep everything in-house because that way, between the both of us, I don’t think there’s really anything that we can’t conquer or actually have – we have run up against walls and stuff, but we have network of hundreds of practitioners, specialists in every field that we have access to. The best way I can explain this is it’s not just a one-man show. It’s a team effort, not only on the part of the medical professionals, but also the collaboration with the patient themselves.
Wendy Myers: That is so important. I feel the same way. I put together an elite team of consultants including yourselves because no one practitioner has all the answers. You need help from multiple disciplines to be able to crack the code, so to speak, to figure out what is wrong with the client in your care.
Dr. Jess Armine: And that’s what they’re looking for. Unfortunately, these days the onus on treating and advocating is on the patient themselves. And that, we have to take back because that’s our responsibility and give them the best service. And collaborating and not having an ego is the only way to go about this.
Wendy Myers: Well, guys, thank you so much for such a fantastic podcast. I so much appreciate you taking the time to do this and educate people and my listeners on the topic of Lyme. Thank you so much.
Dr. Jess Armine: Thank you so much.
Wendy Myers: So listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com. You can learn about my healing and detox program, MineralPower.com, where we do that foundational work, mineralizing your body and detoxing it from heavy metals and chemicals. And you can also learn about my online health program, BodyBioRehab.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
