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Wendy Myers:            Hello, my name is Wendy Myers Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. My website is myersdetox.com and on this podcast and on my website, we talk about everything related to heavy metal detoxification. The health issues that toxins can cause and the mechanisms and why you have to detox to get better.

Wendy Myers:            Today’s podcast is no exception. We have Scott Forsgren on the show to talk about detoxifying from Lyme disease and mold illness and his 11-step protocol to help people on their way to better health and he’s known as the Better Health Guy and he talks about all these different steps in detail and why we can’t skip any one of them on our road to health and recovery.

Wendy Myers:            And so I was happy to know I was on step 11. Step 11 is removing your cavitations and or addressing dental issues and so for me, that was kind of my last thing that I needed to address and it’s very expensive and it’s … There’s surgery and recovery involved that’s just not fun.

Wendy Myers:            So finally got over that hill and really happy I did. So today on the show, Scott is going to be talking about why mold can be such a big roadblock in healing and recovery and why you must get out of a moldy environment to get better.

Wendy Myers:            You cannot work on your internal terrain when your external environment is still creating problems and wreaking havoc on your system and then he’ll also talk about detoxification versus drainage and why detox is one of the first steps in recovery, I agree and number three, we’ll talk about the typical steps one needs to address to heal which I just mentioned, tips to modulate and calm the immune system and why avoiding high histamine foods plays a big role and this, it’s kind of the first step to just calming the immune system down.

Wendy Myers:            And also, he’ll discuss a system that aids in retraining the nervous system that’s stuck in a sympathetic fight or flight mode. So many people that are sick today are just stuck with their foot on the gas pedal. They’re in this adrenaline rush, cortisol state, fight or flight, they can’t relax, they’re anxious, they can’t sleep because of it and it’s just their bodies have just been trained to be in this fight or flight mode because they’re fighting infections all the time and that can be a big cause of sleep issues.

Wendy Myers:            And we also talk about why fighting Lyme if you have Lyme, maybe one of the last steps in your healing journey and why. So this podcast is just very, very densely packed with information, you’re probably going to have to listen to it a couple times.

Wendy Myers:            I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. It’s so good. Scott is just great. He’s got a fantastic podcast called the BetterHealthGuy, highly recommended, I listen to it myself and I know you guys listening are concerned about your heavy metal load and when should you detox or what’s the first step?

Wendy Myers:            Well, I created a quiz called heavymetalsquiz.com. Go there, take the quiz, you get your results that tell you if you have low, medium or high levels of toxins in your body and then a free video series on the next steps. What should you do? Where do you start? Where do you begin to detox your body?

Wendy Myers:            So go check that out at heavymetalsquiz.com. Our guest today, Scott Forsgren, he is an FDANP like myself and he’s a health coach, a Blogger, a podcaster, a health writer and an advocate.

Wendy Myers:            He helps raise money for kids that have Lyme disease that can’t afford treatment and he is the editor and founder of betterhealthguy.com where he shares his 22-year journey through the world of Lyme disease, mold illness and the myriad other factors that chronic illness often entails.

Wendy Myers:            His podcast BetterHealthGuy Blogcast interviews many of the leaders in the field and it’s available on his website betterhealthguy.com and on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify.

Wendy Myers:            He has been interviewed on numerous podcasts and has lectured on his recovery from chronic illness at conferences and several online summits as well and he has written for the Townsend Letter and other publications as well.

Wendy Myers:            He is the co-founder of the form integrated medicine which hosts an annual conference bringing together some of the top integrative practitioners to share practical tools for treating complex chronic illness.

Wendy Myers:            He serves on the board of directors of Limelight Foundation which provide treatments, grants for children and young adults recovering from Lyme disease.

Wendy Myers:            Today, Scott is grateful for his current state of health and all that he has learned in his life-changing journey through illness. So learn more about him, his journey and his work at Townsend Letter. Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Scott Forsgren:            Oh, thanks so much for having me Wendy. I’ve been looking forward to it.

Wendy Myers:            Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, your personal health journey and your struggles with Lyme.

Scott Forsgren:            So my journey started way back in 1996 here in Northern California. I did have a tick bite and then several months later actually became quite ill. So we’re talking 23 years ago, I did not have any rash. It really started like an extreme flu over the course of a weekend.

Scott Forsgren:            There were certainly times that I wasn’t really sure if I was even going to survive it and there were times that that would have been okay. So lots of crazy symptoms that no one could explain head to toe burning sensations for years was probably the worst, it was more of a neurological pain.

Scott Forsgren:            It felt like a sunburn all over my body around the clock. I couldn’t get up and walk across the room without feeling like I had really used my energy allocation for the day.

Scott Forsgren:            I had balance issues, even trying to just sit in a chair or even lying in bed at night, had to prop up pillows around me so that I didn’t feel like I was going to roll off onto the floor.

Scott Forsgren:            So if I look now at the symptoms of Lyme disease and the symptoms of mold illness, which really overlap tremendously. It’s pretty obvious, but back then, there weren’t a lot of people that knew about Lyme disease, mold illness really wasn’t discussed and so it took about eight years and 45 doctors to finally get a diagnosis and so looking at some of the symptoms, blurred vision, floaters, lines, squiggles, lots of neurological issues, cognitive challenges, memory issues, like not being able to remember your own phone number, lots of digestive issues, weird sensations, like crawling sensations where people maybe would say, “Oh, it feels like bugs are crawling under my skin.”

Scott Forsgren:            That’s also a neurological type presentation. Numbness, tingling, muscle twitching, or fasciculations, sensitive to light, sensitive to sound, anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive thoughts and constant worrying and things that really were not things I had experienced previously and so from 1997 when this started to 2005, I went to about 45 doctors.

Scott Forsgren:            Most of them suggesting that it was psychosomatic, I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, with fibromyalgia. I had one practitioner that suggested going to a neurologist to explore MS and then in 2005, I started with another medical doctor who referred me to an acupuncturist that worked at an outlet mall next to a Starbucks and he said, “Go work with her, see what foods she says you’re sensitive to using her electro acupuncture or EAV device, and just don’t eat those things. That’s really the only thing I could imagine could be wrong with you.”

Scott Forsgren:            And so in that conversation over the course of a couple of hours, she said, “I would go tell your doctor to test you for borrelia, babesia, bartonella, Ehrlichia.” Things I had never heard before and I kind of thought, “This probably isn’t where the solution is going to come from.”

Scott Forsgren:            I didn’t take it all that seriously and so she really urged me to continue working with the doctor to do some testing. Ultimately, I did get positive confirmation with traditional blood tests for all of the things she identified and so that was kind of my peaking of my interest into energetic testing.

Scott Forsgren:            It wasn’t something at the time that I really understood or accepted. I was in the high-tech industry here in Silicon Valley in Northern California, but really, energetic testing ended up being my number one tool over the years.

Scott Forsgren:            So it showed me that with these types of conditions, really keeping an open mind is very important when we’re recovering our health and so energetic testing was really what changed my entire course about 14 years ago started then learning from Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt who I know you’ve had on the show as well.

Scott Forsgren:            Tremendous resource not just from the idea of his energetic testing system which I really love and value, but also from the framework, the idea that this is not all about the physical body that we need to look at things like the energy body, the mental emotional body, the spirit body, the intuitive body, those types of thing and that framework is really so important, what he calls the five levels of healing and so fortunately today, I’m doing really well.

Scott Forsgren:            I do still do a lot to take very good care of myself, but I at this point have a very happy, active, productive life and I’m very, very grateful for all of the things that I really learned along the way. There’s been a lot of gifts as well as a lot of the challenges, but today, really happy and grateful for where I am.

Wendy Myers:            That’s great. I mean, and it just sounds like you’ve been through so much. I mean, I can’t even imagine going to 45 doctors and the despair.

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, and that was just to get the diagnosis. I mean, now it’s over a couple hundred practitioners, but I also think that people today just to give some hope, I think there’s more understanding, I think people are much more likely to be able to find someone to lead them in a better direction much faster than 20 years ago with the limited information we really had.

Scott Forsgren:            So it did take a lot of practitioners to really kind of figure out the right direction to move in, but I think there’s a lot of hope, a lot of new information, new treatments that have emerged over the years and so hopefully people experiencing this today, it’s not quite as lengthy of a journey.

Wendy Myers:            So with the 15 years since your diagnosis of Lyme, and shortly thereafter, mold illness, you created a model for recovering your health emerging from your journey. Can you talk about that?

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, so I think first I have to say that really my current understanding of recovering health has really emerged from a number of incredible mentors that I’ve been really blessed to cross paths with so Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, Neil Nathan, Dr. Simon Yu, Raj Patel, so many others.

Scott Forsgren:            And this really is kind of just a generalized approach or maybe how I see it today and then we can dig a little deeper into each one of these areas. It’s not so much a protocol because that’s really something that somebody needs to work through with their doctor and people are certainly going to be different in terms of the priorities the order of the steps, what needs to come first, what might need to be moved up and so on.

Scott Forsgren:            But I think this is kind of the framework that’s in my mind in terms of how we might approach regaining health from a chronic complex health challenge. So I would say first, we always want to start with detoxification and drainage to really improve the terrain.

Scott Forsgren:            I don’t think that the reason that we have these chronic health challenges is entirely because of a bug and I think the bugs are there because we have issues with our terrain and so really looking at detox and drainage.

Scott Forsgren:            The next step or step two in kind of my way of seeing things now is really to improve our external environment. So we’re talking about things like mold, electromagnetic field exposures. Step three, I would say is optimizing sleep, so critical for everything that we do for our healing process.

Scott Forsgren:            Step four, working on our mental and emotional health, emotional traumas, conflicts, those types of things. The next step, step five, rebooting the limbic system and also doing things to what I would say tonify or tone, the parasympathetic nervous system and really calm the body so that it can be in a healing state.

Scott Forsgren:            Step six I would say stabilizing the mast cells, reducing inflammation, working through modulating the immune system so that it’s not hyper reactive, or hyper vigilant. Step seven, optimizing our nutrition, looking at our microbiome, looking at gut health.

Scott Forsgren:            Step eight is really more of the foundational items for me. So things like kryptopyrroluria or KPU, looking at the potential need for adrenal support, looking at the need for mitochondrial support.

Scott Forsgren:            So once we kind of get towards the end, step nine is when I really think, “Okay, now we start thinking about a lot of these microbial overgrowths and the microbial burden in the body.”

Scott Forsgren:            Generally, I think, first of looking at viruses and retroviruses followed then by parasites and dysbiosis or SIBO, those GI-type imbalances. Next, I would look at things like fungal colonization, yeast or Candida, some people say Candida.

Scott Forsgren:            Next, I would then think about things like borrelia, bartonella, babesia, mycoplasma, chlamydia, pneumonia, what are considered Lyme and co-infections, but also some of the opportunistic infections that can become active once we have this microbial burden and then towards the end of kind of that whole process of looking at the microbial overgrowths.

Scott Forsgren:            Do we maybe need to do something to break down biofilms where we maybe have a deeper layer of things that are kind of hidden or protected. The next step I would say step 10 is really looking at the dental contributors.

Scott Forsgren:            Now this one might need to come earlier and we’ll talk more about that for some people, but some people actually do quite well without doing a whole lot in the dental realm and so it’s really working with your practitioner to figure out when is the right place, the right time is the body supportive enough to tolerate potentially significant dental intervention and then step 11, looking at regeneration and restoration.

Scott Forsgren:            So after we’ve had years potentially of a chronic illness, what are some of the things we can do to help regenerate and restore the body?

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, great. And that’s such a comprehensive list and you can’t miss any of those.

Scott Forsgren:            Absolutely.

Wendy Myers:            You have to systematically step-by-step go through all of these things, you can’t miss any of them because one of those could be a big underlying root cause or you have to support these different systems in order to get the whole system on board again and so like, how would you approach this if you had to start over? If you learned about your illness, what would you do differently than going to all these different doctors and the route that you took?

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, I mean, I think this model is kind of my current understanding of how I would probably approach things now. So I would absolutely start with the detoxification and drainage side of things.

Scott Forsgren:            I think that that really is probably the most important aspect of recovery in our protocol. So you’re really the queen of detox Wendy. So we live in a soup of toxins that we’ve never before experienced. So I personally don’t think that we would have a lot of these problems with Lyme and co-infections and all of those things if we didn’t have such a toxic burden.

Scott Forsgren:            So in my mind, detoxification, improving the terrain is the road back. If we look at certain things like Candida or Candida and parasites, I mean, those can be present in the body as a protective mechanism that they’re serving us or concentrating or holding on to heavy metals to protect us from their more damaging effects.

Scott Forsgren:            So the first step I think, in this detoxification and drainage realm really is reducing as many incoming toxins as possible. I think a lot of people forget that. So what are we using from a personal care product perspective?

Scott Forsgren:            What are the scented products that are around us? The laundry products, getting pure air, food and water. If the bucket is already overflowing, stop putting more into it. So conceptually for me, detoxification is primarily about binders.

Scott Forsgren:            Once we have toxins and we move them from the liver into the bile, into the gallbladder, into the small intestine to excrete them, we really need those binders to grab on to them to minimize enterohepatic recirculation of the bile and its associated toxins back into the system.

Scott Forsgren:            So binders are really critical, drainage slightly different. I still think of drainage and detoxification, they go together, but drainage really is about supporting the body’s innate ability to process and excrete toxins.

Scott Forsgren:            So supporting the liver, the kidneys, the lymphatics, the extracellular matrix which is often overlooked. The colon, even the skin, the lungs, we really have to optimize all of the exit routes, making sure that people are pooping.

Scott Forsgren:            If people are constipated, constipation and healing don’t go together. So we don’t want to forget the gallbladder as well. We talked a little about bile. So getting that bile flow moving from the liver to the gallbladder, into the intestines, if we’re not supporting what some call phase 2.5 detox, we then have toxins potentially moving back into the bloodstream, creating a detox reaction or what feels like a Herxheimer Reaction.

Scott Forsgren:            So in the binder realm, a number of tools that I really love and I found helpful, I love Takesumi Supreme from Supreme Nutrition. I like some of the bioactive carbons from Micro Formula, MetChem being one that I really like a lot.

Scott Forsgren:            There’s others beyond balance, it has one called [Toxispine 00:18:43], the zeolites, Bentonite clays, Chlorellas, pectins, all can be helpful and then in the drainage realm, there’s a number of different companies that have homeopathic drainage kits that can be really helpful.

Scott Forsgren:            So Energetix, Pekana, DesBio, Fantastic Tool. I also think beyond the homeopathic tools looking at some herbal support. So things like milk thistle, dandelion, Solidago, red root, those can be great.

Scott Forsgren:            BIORAY is a company that has products that I absolutely love and then making sure that we’re supporting the gallbladder as well. So ideally with something bitter and then I would say another foundation of this whole detoxification process really is the trace minerals.

Scott Forsgren:            So we need trace minerals to kind of keep the body from holding on to a lot of these heavy metals. So silica can be a fantastic tool when we’re talking about detoxification, when we’re talking about things like aluminum.

Scott Forsgren:            There’s lots of things that can be done around heavy metals, but my kind of thought process here is that we want to do things that are kind of broad, in supporting detoxification and then if we need to come back later to specific things like more targeted metal support or more targeted pesticide support, we can do those kinds of things, but I think we want this broad coverage throughout the entire duration of a protocol and then not forgetting things like movement.

Scott Forsgren:            I mean, many people can’t exercise, but walking is enough to really help keep the lymphatic system moving. So just getting out and getting a little bit of movement each day and then there’s a whole host of tools, you’ve talked about many of these on your show that I think are also very important for helping to support detoxification.

Scott Forsgren:            So at the top of my list would be coffee enemas. I think they’re fantastic. When I was really struggling with inflammation and pain, they were really the thing that got me through that. Colon hydrotherapy, foot baths can be great, castor oil packs, oil pooling, medically supervised liver, gallbladder flushes can be helpful as well.

Scott Forsgren:            Sauna therapy. The only caution I have with sauna therapy is I think there’s a place and a time for it and if people aren’t ready for it, if they’re not sweating, if it’s early in the detoxification process, they might need some more support or might need to wait until they’re a little more stable before they really start doing a lot of sauna.

Scott Forsgren:            Certainly, things are coming out in doing a sauna in our sweat, but there’s also a mobilization of things in the body that we need to be prepared for as well. So that’s kind of my foundational step is really detox and drainage and those are some of the tools that I personally find helpful.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, I really like this Pekana. It’s a homeopathic drainage kit. This stuff is awesome. I don’t sell it in my store, I probably should, but this is a great, great product for anybody watching.

Wendy Myers:            P-E-K-N-A for lymphatic drainage. Yeah, because I was using that, I recently had my cavitations are one on the left side of cleaned out my biological dentist that I had a horrific infection which was so heartwarming and so I used the Pekana to help with some lymph drainage and get things moving, but we’ll get to cavitations in a second.

Wendy Myers:            So that was a great synopsis of … To going about detoxification, so important because our Medical Director Dr. Bruce Jones, he says that if you have Lyme, you really can’t address it very effectively unless you detox, you have to detox first and get that immune system on board because heavy metals really dramatically impact immune system functioning, macrophages, and neutrophils and things like that, cadmium, lead, and mercury and arsenic really impact the immune system.

Wendy Myers:            And you have to have the immune system on board to keep the Lyme in check and so really critical step in that and so let’s move on to step two, improving our external environment. So why it is so important? What are some of your tips?

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, so I think that our internal environment is only ever going to be as good as our external environment. So I think the external environment is why so many of us today are sick. It’s become incredibly toxic in ways that we’ve never before experienced.

Scott Forsgren:            And so we can take supplements all day long. If the external environment of our home, our school, our workplace, even our car in some cases, if those are our kryptonite, then we will never again regain our superhero status.

Scott Forsgren:            So first for me is mold. Looking at the soup of stressors from a water damage building which really goes beyond just mold, there’s a number of bacteria, different things that we find, different toxins in water damaged buildings.

Scott Forsgren:            I think, if someone has Lyme disease, mold is often more important than chasing the Lyme microbes and certainly should be done first. I think that most people that have chronic Lyme that’s difficult to treat do have a significant mold exposure somewhere in their history or currently.

Scott Forsgren:            And the challenges there’s not a lot of really great tests. So I think a starting point of someone’s just wanting to do some self exploration, the ERMI or Environmental Relative Moldiness Index from either MicroMetrics or in viral [biomics 00:23:59] can be great.

Scott Forsgren:            A number of people like Dr. Neil Nathan look at plate testing from ImmunoLytics which can provide some additional information and then in many cases, getting an IEP or Indoor Environmental Professional to come out and really inspect the environment and see if there’s potentially a challenge there.

Scott Forsgren:            I do also like the urine mycotoxin testing from Great Plains, it’s called the MycoTOX. I think that can be a really helpful tool and then once we identify an exposure, either remediating it or finding a new environment that better supports our health restoration.

Scott Forsgren:            Oftentimes remediation is successful. There may be some people that find they really need to leave an environment if it’s a significant challenge, but with 50 to 70% of buildings in this country, potentially having enough of a mold issue that genetically susceptible people may not be healthy and that environment, sometimes trying to fix the environment that’s already known ends up being a reasonable option and so it’s not an easy process, but oftentimes, we do have to explore this mold piece.

Scott Forsgren:            It ideally comes very early in the recovery process. If someone with Lyme has not explored mold, I really do think they’re doing themselves a great disservice by continuing down the line path without really looking at that and so air filtration devices can be very helpful.

Scott Forsgren:            There’s somewhat of a bandaid, I mean, they’re not the entire solution. So the core source of the exposure needs to be extracted or removed and I kind of think of mold kind of like a cancer that generally if there’s a tumor, you want to remove the tumor before you start doing other types of therapies or chemotherapy or whatever path someone chooses to do.

Scott Forsgren:            And then elimination of the exposure, incorporation of the binders which we talked about in the prior step. For mold specifically, there’s a BioTox product from microbe formulas that’s helpful beyond balance has a TOX-EASE buying product, a product called PROMICO, Takesumi Supreme I find helpful here as well.

Scott Forsgren:            There definitely are people that find Cholestyramine and Welchol to be very helpful and it seems to me that if people are still in an exposure that Cholestyramine or Welchol can be really, really helpful.

Scott Forsgren:            But if they’re out of the exposure, sometimes the natural tools really do seem to be enough to move people forward and then when we get into talking about microbes later, some people might also need to consider if they’ve had long-term exposure to mold and all of these fungal organisms, they potentially could have colonization of those in the sinuses or in the gut where we might be in the cleanest environment, but from our past exposure, we could have our own mycotoxin producing factory inside the body and that may be something we need to specifically address as well.

Scott Forsgren:            So when mold exposure has been ruled out or addressed, I really do think that a significant roadblock to our recovery has been removed and I really cannot stress enough how important it is to explore the external environment.

Scott Forsgren:            It is a significant impedance to progress if we miss that and really can save years in your struggle from recovering from Lyme disease. In my experience, mold was a big player and probably could have gotten well much sooner if I had understood the implications of mold early on.

Scott Forsgren:            I was actually living in a place that had mold growing on the walls, but no one ever talked about that being a health challenge. So the next piece besides the mold, I would say, the electromagnetic fields, I know Wendy you talk about that and had a fantastic show recently about 5G and all of that.

Scott Forsgren:            I think it’s becoming a bigger and bigger issue in our world and I do see EMFs as another toxin that can drain our vitality, can really keep our cells in a sympathetic dominant state which really negates our ability to detoxify.

Scott Forsgren:            So turning off our Wi-Fi, tossing cordless phones, sleeping in a canopy or a Faraday cage in some cases. I’ve actually done that since 2006 considering the electrical stress from the wiring in the wall. Sometimes we think about our Wi-Fi routers and those types of things, but body voltage in the sleep location can be elevated because we have the electrical stress in the wiring, maybe we need to install a demand switch, something like the EMF kill switch or something along those lines and really trying to make sure our body voltage in our sleep location and making sure it’s as low as possible.

Scott Forsgren:            So again, similar to mold, the EMF piece is really critical as part of kind of optimizing our recovery process. I personally eliminated cordless phones, I limit my cell phone use, turn off my Wi-Fi on a schedule, I’ve got Stetzer filters, I do have a demand switch. So when I go to bed at night, I push one button and the circuit breakers in the house that really provide the best sleep environment automatically get turned off.

Scott Forsgren:            And it’s kind of interesting that Dr. Klinghardt has made the connection between EMFs and mold and mycotoxins that in an EMF-rich environment, molds are more aggressive, they produce more mycotoxins and he’s correlated that increase in electromagnetic fields with the increase in mold growth in water damage building.

Scott Forsgren:            So if you ask Dr. Klinghardt what’s the number one thing I need to do to fix my moldy house, he will say, “Turn off your Wi-Fi.” So he’s also talked about EMFs being a trigger for microbes within us that they may be more aggressive and produce more endotoxins because they feel threatened by the external environment.

Scott Forsgren:            So there is no road back to health in the Klinghardt world without reducing EMF exposure. There are lots of meters and whatnot, but you really need several different meters to measure all the different players.

Scott Forsgren:            So I think it is a good idea to hire a building biologist to evaluate your home. I did that even beyond doing some of my own testing and there is also a correlation between EMF sensitivity and the level of heavy metals in the body.

Scott Forsgren:            So a focus on detoxification, removing these heavy metals, that over time can also help to reduce the symptoms of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and really looking at that detoxification focus that we talked about over the long haul as another strategy for minimizing the effects of the EMFs that we can’t mitigate.

Scott Forsgren:            Really important to mitigate them as much as possible in our sleep environment where we’re restoring and regenerating, but in the daytime, we’re all going to have different exposures. And so as much as possible, the detoxification and focused on heavy metals can help there as well.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, it’s amazing how when you have heavy metals in you, you are almost like an antenna, you’re attracting EMF and you can become more sensitive than the next person to them.

Scott Forsgren:            Absolutely.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah. And so let’s talk about sleep. Sleep is something that is so problematic for so many people and it’s going to get worse with 5G rolling out in city after city. It’s in about 20, 30, 40 cities right now. I forgot exactly how many, but so why does attending to sleep come after rehabbing your external environment?

Scott Forsgren:            Well, I think again that the order of some of these can certainly change. If someone does things to optimize sleep before they address the mold and EMFs and so on, that may be okay for them. The rationale with sleep coming after the EMF piece is because one of the primary causes of insomnia is exposure to electromagnetic field.

Scott Forsgren:            So everyone is going to be a little bit different here, but the EMFs really do play a role and are a key reason that people experience insomnia. Sleep was never an issue for me throughout my entire journey until about a year ago and interestingly, I was listening to your talk and you mentioned that in San Jose, California which is very close to where I am that about a year ago, they started rolling out 5G.

Scott Forsgren:            And so I’ve been working on things for trying to mitigate some of those issues and improve my sleep. There’s a lot of supplements out there, people are familiar with things like melatonin and GABA 5-HTP and so on.

Scott Forsgren:            But also looking at things like blood sugar, is there nocturnal hypoglycemia or a dip in blood sugar while you’re sleeping that then triggers a rise in cortisol in order to get the blood sugar back up?

Scott Forsgren:            There’s a number of tools like weighted blankets, BrainTap from Dr. Patrick Porter is a tool that can really be helpful to help induce some of that delta sleep. There’s Zeez Sleep Pebble that I’m personally just starting to explore and excited to see how that works and so this is an area that I’m currently actively working on.

Scott Forsgren:            I’ve made some progress since about a year ago when I had for the first time in my life some sleep challenges, but I’m tracking it now every night with an Oura Ring and really kind of dialing in, seeing what things are really helping and what things aren’t.

Scott Forsgren:            But in this area, every bit of improvement we have from a sleep perspective will exponentially increase our overall healing potential.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah. I have an Oura Ring also and I just, I love it because you can actually see if what you’re doing is working for you or not and I started using a chiliPAD and I would die without that. It is unbelievable because I’m going through the change, I’m 47 so I started having a little bit of hot flashes and sleeping hot and the chiliPAD keeps me cool so I’m not night waking anymore from being too hot and it’s just been a total game changer for me.

Wendy Myers:            I’m terrified of traveling, and then not having it and CBD oil also works amazing for me also to improve sleep that I’ve noticed and that’s not for everybody. Some people just can’t handle it for various reasons. It’s not right for them, but for me, it works great.

Scott Forsgren:            That’s actually one of the things I did see a shift on the Oura Ring. Chris Shade with Quicksilver Scientific has a new CBD sleep-focused formula and I did actually See some very positive shifts on the Oura Ring with that product.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah. Yeah. It’s so important to attend to sleep and there’s so many things you can do. There’s like an Alpha-Stim, there’s a lot of different things that you can do to work on sleep. I work, I do bioenergetics with people and that can help a lot too, but let’s talk about the emotional and mental component because this is something that even functional medical practitioners don’t address always.

Wendy Myers:            It can be a huge roadblock to healing so does that say that it as many have been told that the problem is in their head and that just angers me when people are ill, and they’re told they need to go see a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

Wendy Myers:            I mean, it’s just, that there are certainly some people with Munchausen syndrome or the hypochondriacs or what have you, but people more so may have emotional trauma and even being sick is emotionally traumatizing too. Can you talk about that?

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, I mean, I remember back in the day having a whole stack of cards to psychiatrists that I had been referred to from all of the other practitioners that were unable to help me. So I know the frustration.

Scott Forsgren:            Many of us have had different emotional traumas and conflicts that might have set the stage for illness, but then as you kind of referred to, many are also very invalidated by the medical community where they say their physical illness itself is not real and so that can lead to an experience that creates an emotional trauma and so even if you didn’t have the things that maybe set the stage for the illness, the process of going through the illness then may make the emotional and mental realm something that we really need to explore to maximize our health outcome.

Scott Forsgren:            So we’ve all got emotional baggage, all have things to work through, accepting that doesn’t mean that your illness is all in your head, but the mental emotional health aspect this does play a role in the development of physical illnesses.

Scott Forsgren:            So my observation over the years has been that many people in the Lyme community, a kind of common pattern is type A plus, overachiever, perfectionist, many not feeling they deserve to be well, I like to say now that I’m a Type A minus personality that that’s been my journey through this whole thing.

Scott Forsgren:            But really cultivating healthy relationships, eliminating toxic people, experiencing joy as much as possible. We also don’t want to become our illness. So not identifying with the illness. It is a part of us, but it is not us in our entirety and so if we look at Dr. Klinghardt’s Five Levels of Healing, this really is the third level and shifts here are much more powerful than shifts at the physical level.

Scott Forsgren:            So in this realm, tools like EMDR, applied psychoneurobiology, psychokinesiology, family constellation work, a lot of people really find a lot of value with EFT or some of the tapping techniques, emotion code can be really helpful and a good friend of mine, Amy Shear has a fantastic book in this arena.

Scott Forsgren:            She herself went through very serious Lyme disease and now is a therapist that works in the energetic and emotional realm and has a fantastic book called How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can and so I think that’s a good resource for people, but definitely doing some work in the mental emotional realm I find also very important in terms of optimizing all of the other things that we’re doing to recover health.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, I 100% agree because I’ve had clients that they’ve done everything and trying to address things on a physical realm and for them, addressing emotional trauma is what moved the needle for them and got them moving in that direction of healing.

Wendy Myers:            So don’t overlook that. So let’s talk about step five which is rebooting the limbic system and tonifying the parasympathetic nervous system. So that’s so important because like you mentioned, so many of us are stuck in sympathetic dominance, we’re just in this fight or flight. EMF has a big role in that, but so does our modern lifestyles, but talk about why we need to address this.

Scott Forsgren:            So I think this step is one that potentially could be moved earlier in some cases and potentially needs to be moved later in others. So if we look at the limbic system, we’re talking about the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cingulate cortex, it’s really the feeling and reacting brain.

Scott Forsgren:            It’s what we also think of in terms of assessing our level of safety in terms of things that we might smell, see, hear, taste or feel and so I think of the limbic system as the alarm center, the anxiety switch, it really impacts the function of so many things, the immune system, the endocrine system, the autonomic nervous system which is responsible for things like our blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, digestion and so on.

Scott Forsgren:            And there are a number of different things that can be triggers for limbic system impairment. So that could be exposure to mold in a water damage building. It could be chemicals, pesticides, bacteria, viruses, it could be other microbial overgrowths.

Scott Forsgren:            It can also be physical, mental, or emotional traumas, so many different things that can trigger this limbic system loop essentially and if we think of a threat like mold or Lyme disease, initially maybe was a tiger and it was actually a threat you were living in a water damage building or you hadn’t addressed anything with your Lyme disease, I think at that point, you don’t necessarily want to do a lot with the limbic system.

Scott Forsgren:            So tools like DNRS, Dynamic Neural Retraining System is the one I know personally the best and have done personally for seven months last year. So you don’t necessarily want to do those things when your tiger is still present.

Scott Forsgren:            You want to address the issue as much as possible so that mold for example is largely resolved and has essentially become the kitten walking outside the window in your life, but your limbic system still sees that kitten as a tiger and so in that case, once you’ve addressed the threat, you then can use something like DNRS to reboot the limbic system so that it’s now sensing of the threat is more equivalent to the actual threat and that’s really important because when we get into these loops, we can overreact to something that we don’t need to anymore.

Scott Forsgren:            And when we have this inappropriate response to the limbic system, we can continue to negatively impact our immune function, our endocrine function, the autonomic nervous system and keep the body expressing a whole array of different symptoms.

Scott Forsgren:            So again, I wouldn’t necessarily do DNRS if someone’s still living in their moldy house. When it comes to really where this comes into play in the healing program I think it’s when you’ve done the work to shift whatever your tiger was into more of a kitten, and then working to kind of reboot to make that limbic system response more appropriate.

Scott Forsgren:            I also think that some people think of DNRS as another mental emotional tool, but I don’t see it that way. It can certainly help with PTSDs and things of that nature, but it is a physical biochemical response of the limbic system that leads to this kind of loop and of all the tools that I’ve seen DNRS, if there was one tool that I’ve seen really catapult people forward in their healing journey, DNRS has been the single tool that’s done that in these more complex chronic conditions.

Scott Forsgren:            I’ve been really amazed. It’s not something I would have even believed in personally. So again, I’m trying to really be open-minded about the things that can potentially help people, but I’ve been amazed to see the results of people that have really gone through this process, particularly if they have food sensitivities, if they’re sent reactive to detergents, the laundry aisle, dryer sheets, those types of things.

Scott Forsgren:            If they have chemical sensitivities, often the progress is much more obvious at the beginning. It is hard work though, it’s an hour a day commitment. I personally found that it is in many cases worth the hour a day, but not everybody is able to integrate that into their routine.

Scott Forsgren:            There’s other tools like brain tap again from Dr. Patrick Porter, frequency specific microcurrent from Carolyn McMakin is another tool that can kind of help in this limbic system realm and kind of rebooting the system supporting the parasympathetic response for resting, digesting and what we often forget is also for detoxing.

Scott Forsgren:            So we really need to be in that parasympathetic state in order to effectively detoxify some of the ionic foot baths that are out there like the ion cleanse, they’re in the frequencies that they’re using also supporting the parasympathetic nervous system which is really genius to get the body into a state that it can then better detoxify and we really cannot heal when we’re in this fight, flight or freeze kind of state.

Scott Forsgren:            So really looking at tools in this realm, even some people really benefit from essential oils that can really help calm the nervous system and really tone and up regulate the parasympathetics, vibrant blue oils has a parasympathetic blend that a lot of people have found helpful and really thinking about what can we do to calm the nervous system in support of our healing journey.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, I love that so much. This is really what’s resonating for me right now is retraining my nervous system from being reactive and stressing out over every little thing because when you’re living in a stress state, I was living in a moldy home.

Wendy Myers:            I sold my home, I had mold, and then I had a lot of stress and then I couldn’t find a new home so I had to move into a temporary home that had a mold problem and it just set my nervous system in this very reactive stress sympathetic dominant state and when you’re in that state long enough, you have to … It just is like this neural pathway that is just reinforced and reinforced.

Wendy Myers:            And you have to retrain that it’s not like, “Oh, I don’t have the mold anymore.” Or, “I’m not sick anymore. Great, everything’s fantastic.” Your nervous system is still set in that sympathetic dominant mode. It’s amazing that you have this type of program to retrain it.

Scott Forsgren:            Absolutely. I agree. It’s so critical.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, and then let’s talk about mast cell syndrome and so I recently did a podcast about this. It hasn’t been released yet, but this is a big, big problem with people that have these overreacted immune systems that are being impacted by toxins and stress and other commingling factors.

Wendy Myers:            So let’s talk about stabilizing mast cells, reducing inflammation and modulating the immune system response. What can be done in that regard?

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, so it’s interesting in the mast cell realm. I mean, I was aware of mass cells from the autism world years ago, but it wasn’t until probably three, maybe four years ago that we started hearing about this in the Lyme disease and mold world.

Scott Forsgren:            I think getting healthy is not about killing bugs. It’s not the bug that makes the disease. It’s the host response to the bug that makes the disease so if we have an immune system that’s hyperactive, super vigilant, overactive, responding in an autoimmune fashion, that’s likely what creates a lot of our symptoms because it’s creating inflammation in the body.

Scott Forsgren:            So what we think of as disease could be a hyperactive immune system and you hear people all the time saying, “Oh, I just need to take something to boost my immune system.” No, that’s probably not appropriate for many people in this realm.

Scott Forsgren:            Sometimes boosting the immune system if you have a hyper vigilant immune response isn’t what you want to do, you really want to modulate it. So a lot of the inflammation in my observation and experience in these conditions is driven by mast cells.

Scott Forsgren:            They are part of our defense mechanism, but if they’re over-producing histamine and a host of other mediators and cytokines and so on can lead to a lot of inflammation. So in this realm, I think a primary trigger for mast cell activation is mold exposure, but there’s a whole list of triggers.

Scott Forsgren:            So parasites, Lyme disease, environmental toxins, medications, foods are a big trigger, supplements, changes in temperature, hot or cold, physical, emotional stress, those can be big issues, electromagnetic fields. I really feel like electromagnetic fields will eventually be one of the largest players in this realm because we’re seeing more and more of these mass cell conversations, we’re also seeing more and more of these EMFs and so, if you listen to Dr. Theo Theoharides, he’s talked about mast cells being 10 times more activated in the presence of a cell phone, which really surprised even me and I was aware of these issues, but 10 times more activated in the presence of a cell phone really, really shocking.

Scott Forsgren:            So another reason that we need to minimize a lot of these external exposures to calm the mast cells and really calm the system so that we can heal. I do think that many people benefit from a low histamine diet.

Scott Forsgren:            So there’s a lot of different lists out there. I tend to guide people to the low histamine diet that was put together by Dr. Raj Patel and Dr. Thalia Farshchian. It’s on their website medical options for wellness.net.

Scott Forsgren:            People are often very surprised the things that we thought were healthy five years ago can really be problems for people with these conditions and for mast cell activation. Kombucha, I personally would never drink it.

Scott Forsgren:            Avocados, bone broth, fermented foods, these can all be major triggers perpetuating or increasing this inflammation response and so sometimes we have to cut these things out for a period of time and then once we looked at the diet, what are some of the mast cell stabilizers? What are some of the histamine reducers?

Scott Forsgren:            There’s a lot of good ones, quercetin, luteolin, holy basil is really one that I’ve come to put high on the list because it’s good in this realm, but also good in many other realms that can be helpful in chronic illness.

Scott Forsgren:            Dr. Theoharides has a product called NeuroProtek which is phenomenal. Dr. Ben Lynch created a probiotic to really help with degrading histamine in the gut ProBiota HistaminX, Dr. Chris Shade has Quicksilver Hista-Aid.

Scott Forsgren:            So these are all fantastic tools. There are other tools as well ketotifen, Cromolyn, Diamine oxidase or DAO and various other mast cell stabilizers and histamine reducers and so my observation has been that when people start changing their diet, incorporating some of these that they really do see significant shifts in how they feel and then once you’ve done this, you still want to simultaneously work to reduce or remove the triggers.

Scott Forsgren:            So it is to some extent making people feel better by addressing the mast cell and histamine piece, but once we reduce inflammation in the body, the microbial piece goes easier. Everything is easier once the body is less inflamed.

Scott Forsgren:            So immune modulation I think can play a role here as well. So low dose naltrexone, Ty Vincent’s low dose immunotherapy, many types of homeopathy. Beyond Balance has a product I really love called IMN-Calm.

Scott Forsgren:            There’s a number of new peptides coming on the scene like Thymosin alpha-1, Thymosin beta 4, I think these can play a big role in immune modulation and it’s exciting that we have some new tools. So getting well, again, is not about boosting the immune system that can make things worse.

Scott Forsgren:            It’s about modulating, calming, it’s about integrating with our microbiome and I have done a few podcasts in this realm, wrote an article on mast cell activation in the talents and letter earlier this year. So if people are interested in that, those are available as a deeper resource as well.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, I love bioenergetics also as a way to modulate the immune system, our NEST health program is amazing. There’s a whole screen that looks at your bioenergetic immune system or your energetic immune system and can send correct operating instructions too and that’s a great way and a very elegant way to modulate immune system as well.

Wendy Myers:            But there’s different things work for different people. So you have to try a lot of different things. But removing the offending foods is great. I also, there’s an app I like to … It’s just type in low histamine diet.

Wendy Myers:            There’s an app that has all the high histamine foods and the other types of categories, fodmaps and other things depending on your elimination at that time.

Scott Forsgren:            Is that all I can eat?

Wendy Myers:            I don’t know what it’s called.

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, there’s a great one called all I can eat as well that gives you the opportunity to put in those low histamine and all those things and gives you a lot of great information.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, and those are really handy because then it would be hard to remember all those things and have them in your phone. So that’s cool. So let’s talk about step seven. So nutrition, microbiome, gut health, a lot of people are having issues with leaky gut, nutrient absorption because all the stressors in our environment and glyphosate, so what tools do you find are helpful here?

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, so I do think it’s critical that we look at the gut. I think most of our immune systems coming from the gut. So if we’re looking at having a microbial burden, we need to have our immune system supporting us and that then comes from working on the gut.

Scott Forsgren:            If we do have leaky gut as you referenced, we trigger more of this immune dysregulation. We trigger more mast cell reactions that we just talked about. So we need to first look at removing triggering foods.

Scott Forsgren:            I personally think gluten is bad for everyone that has a chronic illness. I think dairy is bad for some people. I think sugar is bad for most people high histamine foods probably bad for many people.

Scott Forsgren:            It really has to be individualized, but you can’t keep taking things in that are triggering inflammation and then expect to get well. In terms of the kind of diet, I mean, there’s so many of the paleo, the AIP, ketogenic gaps, simple carbohydrate fodmap as you referred to.

Scott Forsgren:            I think low histamine is a good starting place with the additional removal of some of the known triggering foods. I’ve definitely seen people do very well with a low histamine diet. It’s not easy to do and then of the things we’re eating, what highly nutrient dense things can we incorporate?

Scott Forsgren:            So I’m a huge fan of my daily power shake, some high quality protein, collagen powder, good fiber blend, phospholipids, phosphatidylcholine and others, healthy fats, chia seeds, organic nut milk. Of course, some of these things need to be adjusted.

Scott Forsgren:            Chia seeds may not be great for someone with oxalates for example, but having a really nutrient dense shake in the morning has been really helpful for me personally, and then supporting the microbiome.

Scott Forsgren:            So my personal favorite tool in this realm is MegaSporeBiotic. I think it’s been tolerated well by people with mast cell issues, even people with SIBO, it not only provides the keystone strains to optimize our microbial diversity, but it really can help with inflammation with the immune modulation side of things.

Scott Forsgren:            It’s really great for leaky gut. So things like MegaSporeBiotic, there’s also some excitement around oral BPC 157 which is a peptide that can be helpful for optimizing gut health and dealing with leaky gut. I do like the product from Dr. Zach bush called it was previously called RESTORE.

Scott Forsgren:            It’s now called ION*Gut Health. Colostrum in some cases can be great for the gut as well, you have to be a little careful because it can trigger some inflammation for people. So you probably want to start slow, but I think definitely looking at the diet, removing the stressors, bringing in the higher nutrient content type foods, and then bringing in some of these supplements and nutraceuticals that can help optimize our gut health are really critical.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, I mean, that’s just, I’ve seen clients over the years where they are taking all these supplements, eating amazing food and they’re not absorbing it. You’re not what you supplement with or what you eat, you are what you absorb.

Wendy Myers:            So I think most people that are … I mean, everyone that’s chronically ill has some gut issues typically dealing on, but it’s just, it’s a big problem. Also, glyphosate, glyphosate just destroys your gut, you’ve got to eat organic and so let’s talk about step eight. Step eight is about adding foundational support such as KPU, adrenals in mitochondria. Can you talk about that?

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, so Dr. Klinghardt has been talking about kryptopyrroluria for well over a decade. He and I wrote two articles on it. If someone has KPU, it generally means that they’re peeing out their zinc and B vitamins that are supporting the immune system.

Scott Forsgren:            So then we end up with white blood cells that are like an army without bullets. So supporting deficiencies of these nutrients and someone with kryptopyrroluria can really help support our defenses.

Scott Forsgren:            You do have to go slowly. If you bring a lot of zinc into a zinc-depleted body, you’re going to create more inflammation, you’re going to trigger MMP-9, potentially, you’re going to trigger a release of heavy metals.

Scott Forsgren:            So with any of these things, I think we have to really remember that it’s a marathon and not a sprint and we don’t need to do things really aggressively and quickly. I think supporting the adrenals can be important in many cases.

Scott Forsgren:            At the same time, if we’re detoxifying, if we’re dealing with some of the microbial burden, we’re taking away the things that stress the adrenals, this may be less critical for some people, but there’s definitely people that need that additional adrenal support if they’ve really been depleted.

Scott Forsgren:            This is separate from the KPU conversation, but if we’ve exhausted our adrenals, the benefits from supporting them can be really great in terms of bringing in some adaptogens. There’s a product from BIORAY called Loving Energy that I really love, holy basil that I mentioned earlier in the conversation about mast cells can be really supportive here as well.

Scott Forsgren:            So I think probably in the foundational realm, one of the newer areas of interest for me is the mitochondrial piece. So we need more cellular energy, more ATP in order to efficiently detoxify, to function better at a cellular level, to repair, to regenerate.

Scott Forsgren:            So I do like things like red light therapy or photo biomodulation, some of the basic tools like CoQ10 can be helpful. There’s more and more talk about NAD and its application in terms of supporting the mitochondria. So I do think there’s a place where we need to bring some mitochondrial support and the caution would be that if you look at Bob Naviaux’s cell danger response, ATP is the danger signal in that model.

Scott Forsgren:            So we have to know when the triggers for the cell danger response have been addressed and then really bringing these things in low and slow if you aggressively support the mitochondria, you can trigger detox reactions.

Scott Forsgren:            Triggering a detox reaction can trigger a mast cell reaction. So you don’t want to do it heavy handedly, but I do think that mitochondrial support just allows the body to do everything more efficiently and then in this kind of foundational realm, another one that I think people maybe don’t look at a lot that is also worth exploring is the coagulation side of things.

Scott Forsgren:            So if we have thickened blood which can be common in chronic infections in toxicity like heavy metals, it’s really more difficult to make progress. So things like Baluk nattokinase, those are probably some of the more popular tools, but it’s an area that’s it is complex, we need to do lab testing, we need to really look at it and see if there is a need to help deal with some of the blood viscosity.

Scott Forsgren:            But I would say that’s also kind of one of the foundational areas so the kryptopyrroluria, potentially the adrenal support, the mitochondrial support and then looking at is there a potential for hyper-coagulation that needs to be explored as well.

Wendy Myers:            Yes, yes. So important and then and hydration is really important too for getting rid of the clumps in the cells and I use this product, it’s called Watt-Ahh. This really helps a lot with the coagulation and we’ve seen that under live blood cell analysis that this helps a lot with that.

Scott Forsgren:            I saw you mention that and I actually was going to order some but the shipping was more expensive than the water so it’s still on my wish list.

Wendy Myers:            It’s worth every nickel.

Scott Forsgren:            Okay.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, it’s expensive to ship water. They try to keep the price really low because they want to help people, but as low as the prices is as low as they can make it.

Scott Forsgren:            Okay. I’m going to order some after the show since you brought that up again.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah. Yeah. It’s just expensive to ship water. I think the shipping is cheaper on Amazon, but if you go on aquanew.com, if you put in coupon code, Myers Detox, you get like 10% off, but this is and I’m not making some sort of fortune with this company or anything by any means, but it’s like this Watt-Ahh here is really a game changer for hydration and feeding your body tons and tons of electrons and oxygen which can help all of the above and people tend to be euphoric for a few days when they first start drinking it. So you know it’s working.

Scott Forsgren:            Okay, maybe we’ll be introducing a new step into this brain dump of mine.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Scott Forsgren:            I do definitely agree with you that hydration is critical and that many or most people with chronic Lyme and mold illness and whatnot are drinking tons of water, peeing out tons of water and are still dehydrated at a cellular level. So I think it is critical.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, and then you release more histamine when you’re dehydrated too and so that’s something that maybe people don’t know about. So let’s talk about like step number nine. So what everyone’s been waiting for, these pesky critters that everyone’s trying to kill their body. So let’s talk about infections, microbial overgrowth, pathogens and parasites. What do we do about that?

Scott Forsgren:            So I think it is important. I mean, you and I both know that killing bugs is not the priority in a balanced health restoration protocol. So I do intentionally kind of put this towards the end of the way that I think about this kind of model.

Scott Forsgren:            It may seem like the place to jump in and start my experiences, that’s really not the case and so once we start supporting the body with different pathogens, the order potentially could shift a bit as well, but I think a general guideline is to kind of start with the viral and retroviral support, the parasites and gut dysbiosis or SIBO-type issues moving then into fungus and mold and yeast, and then the Lyme and co-infection.

Scott Forsgren:            So even within step nine, the Lyme and co-infections, I kind of still think of a little bit later and then finally the biofilm and broad spectrum type support. So many of us do have a reactivation of viruses like Epstein–Barr virus, HHV-6.

Scott Forsgren:            Herpes zoster I think is a big one that’s not as well recognized. I don’t think we have to have shingles in order for herpes zoster to be creating symptoms, particularly things like hyperacusis, tinnitus, sometimes eye issues and so I think that’s an important virus to be considered as well.

Scott Forsgren:            And then we have these endogenous retroviruses. So Dr. Klinghardt talks a lot about retroviruses which by the way are made worse due to EMFs in our environment and so once these reactivate, we usually need long-term viral and retroviral support throughout the duration of a protocol, and so some of the tools that I like BioPure has a fantastic product called EN-V, that’s EN-V, Cistus Tea or Cistus tincture can be great.

Scott Forsgren:            Beyond Balance has an IMN-V-II and IMN-V-III product. Microbe Formulas has a bioactive carbon called Foundation which seems to be really helpful in this realm with all of these chronic viruses, sulforaphane, pantethine, selenium, lysine and then homeopathics here as well like some of the tools from Energetix or DesBio.

Scott Forsgren:            Energetix Viru-Chord is one that I really like and then moving on to parasites and SIBO and gut issues, I think parasites are more common than we recognize. I don’t think they’re difficult to acquire even if someone has not left the US.

Scott Forsgren:            Parasite testing is notoriously poor. So I think looking at different types of energetic testing, whether that’s a muscle testing system like ART, whether that’s EAV like ZYTO, or QEST 4 or [NIEHS 01:03:58] or acupuncture meridian system assessment which is Dr. Simon Yu’s primary tool.

Scott Forsgren:            I do like ParaWellness Research with Dr. Raphael d’Angelo, I think his stool and urine test is very, very helpful. They find a very high percentage of samples where they do find some type of parasite.

Scott Forsgren:            I’ve used it in my journey and found the information very insightful. Diagnostics has a gut health panel called the GI health panel. The GI map is a fantastic tool. None of these tests are perfect though.

Scott Forsgren:            So we really need to explore it from a number of different angles. When we’re talking about parasites, we could be talking about the nematodes or helminths or worms essentially. We could be talking about protozoa like Giardia, Cryptosporidium, toxoplasmosis.

Scott Forsgren:            I like a product from Dr. David Jernigan called Jernigan Paragen. That’s been a fantastic tool. Bringing in some frequency or homeopathy support with herbs I also find to be very helpful to kind of synergistically work together.

Scott Forsgren:            So again Energetix has a product called Para-Chord. Microbe Formulas has a whole line of great tools in the parasite realm Beyond Balance. I do think that sometimes, the pharmaceutical anti-parasitics can be really helpful.

Scott Forsgren:            So things like Oleana, Ivermectin, Biltricide and then making sure that we’re really supporting detoxification because when we’re killing these parasites, we’re releasing more metals into our system.

Scott Forsgren:            If we take the gut piece a little further, we’re looking at SIBO. It’s not so much that the pathogens are the problem, but probably more that they’re just microbes that are in the wrong place.

Scott Forsgren:            So when we look at SIBO, it’s not so much that the pathogens are the core issue, but it’s probably more likely, more of a nervous system, neurological issue related to the migrating motor complex, the vagus nerve.

Scott Forsgren:            So we can really work on the pathogen piece, but at the same time, that’s probably the result and not necessarily the core root cause or trigger and then we can also have other types of dysbiosis as well.

Scott Forsgren:            So Clostridia and Proteus and klebsiella and H. pylori and all those kinds of things. So I do like Biocidin. I think that’s a great tool. Again, MegaSporeBiotic has been very helpful. Beyond Balance has a product called IMN-GI that I like a lot and then we move into the fungi, the yeast, the molds, most people are familiar with Candida which is a yeast, but we can also have colonization of some of the molds from water damaged buildings like Aspergillus for example.

Scott Forsgren:            And one of the challenges that we have is reducing these fungi is they can also release metals. So when you’re killing Candida or Candida and you start releasing more metals, people can also feel worse. So we’ve got to make sure that detox is really well supported that we’re not being too aggressive in the approaches that we’re bringing into the system.

Scott Forsgren:            Candibactin from Metagenics can be great Michael [Region 01:07:01] from Beyond Balance, Byron White has one called A-FNG. There’s a lot of different pharmaceuticals here that people like to use, itraconazole for example, Fluconazole, Nystatin.

Scott Forsgren:            I spoke to a researcher Dr. Steve Fry at the recent ILADS Conference and he really strongly feels that the fungi are the biggest threat to our long-term health and that’s a very significant burden on the body.

Scott Forsgren:            So finally, we get to things like Lyme or borrelia, and co-infections like the babesia, bartonella, Ehrlichia, Anaplasma. We have the opportunists like mycoplasma and chlamydia. So with these, I think it’s ideal to start with more targeted herbal formulas, not jumping in with something that’s really broad spectrum that’s going to create a big die-off reaction potentially triggering the mast cells and inflammation.

Scott Forsgren:            Beyond Balance, Byron White all have great tools in this realm that are a little more targeted as kind of a starting place and then later, we can broaden out to maybe a stronger broad spectrum kind of tool that early on could lead to a lot of die-off, but maybe later is more appropriate.

Scott Forsgren:            So again, being more focused early on, it also gives practitioners more insight around what issues potentially are their patient or their client dealing with. So if you work on let’s say a bartonella specific herbal formulation, if they have a strong positive or negative response, that gives you a clue that you’re on the right track and so this is a provocation technique.

Scott Forsgren:            It’s been discussed historically by Dr. Neil Nathan, Dr. Wayne Anderson and others and then once you have this kind of layered approach, I think then it can make sense to move on to these broader spectrum tools, to thinking about biofilms.

Scott Forsgren:            I do think the biofilm piece comes after the majority of the microbes have been addressed. There are some practitioners that like to start with the biofilm piece, but I think if you really break into these biofilms and you release a lot of toxins and microbes into the system, you trigger the inflammation, you trigger the mast cells and it can really be more than people are ready for and so there’s a lot of tools here in the biofilm realm.

Scott Forsgren:            Cistus tea for example is one that Dr. Klinghardt talks about is a selective biofilm breaker. Lots of enzyme products interface plus BFM from Beyond Balance, lots of different enzymes.

Scott Forsgren:            I just think these kind of come later in our protocol for most people. So I’m not personally drawn to start with pharmaceuticals, but I do think that people need to have an open mind. There’s certainly people that have tried lots of natural herbal homeopathic options, and their real game changer was an antibiotic.

Scott Forsgren:            And so, I try to keep an open mind about that. I personally was on antibiotics for a long period of time back in 2005 when I first got diagnosed, but we didn’t have a lot of these tools. We didn’t have a lot of Nutramedics and Vital Plan and Beyond Balance and Byron White, those things that many years ago.

Scott Forsgren:            There is a lot of excitement right now in the Lyme community about a pharmaceutical called Disulfiram. I’m definitely watching that. I have a podcast that’s coming up on that topic. So hopefully there will be some game changers that are coming soon in this realm, but for the most part, I think kind of slow and low and gentle is the general way to kind of lead people to higher ground.

Scott Forsgren:            And again, some of the companies that I really like in this realm from microbial support are BioPure, Maypa Herbals, Vital Plan, Supreme Nutrition, Beyond Balance, DesBio, Researched Nutritionals, Nutrimetics.

Scott Forsgren:            I mean, there’s a lot of phenomenal companies and tools that we have access to now that we didn’t have when I was going through this process.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, and it’s … You do need to reduce your pathogen load, your mold load and all this, but I like what you said, you have to go really slow because these toxins will release their own parasite poop and mycotoxins. When they’re dying, they get really irritated, and it can make people sicker and you have to go very, very, very slow.

Scott Forsgren:            Absolutely.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah. And so let’s also talk about dental contributors to health issues. This is something that I’ve been dealing with. I’m kind of pretty far down my journey. Okay, let’s check the cavitations because I feel like there’s another level that I want to go to and I know that I had my upper wisdom teeth taken out when I was about 19 and so I thought maybe there’s a cavitation and sure enough, wouldn’t got my dental scan, the 3D dental scan that you need to do to discover those and I have an amazing dentist Dr. Panahpour in Beverly Hills, and he worked … Trained with Dr. Klinghardt for about 15 years.

Scott Forsgren:            I know him well. Yeah, absolutely.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, and he said I had a horrific infection in my love cavitation which was just so thrilled to hear and so talk to us about how that can be a big contributor to people’s health issues.

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah. It’s funny. It was years and years ago, and I think the book was called The Tick Factor. It was written by an Olympian Perry Fields and I remember reading her chapter recounting her experience with cavitations.

Scott Forsgren:            I think I was actually reading it while I was doing a coffee enema and I remember saying, “Gosh, I’m so glad I didn’t have to go through that personally.” Well, things changed and I did have to go through it personally.

Scott Forsgren:            So some of my mentors Dr. Klinghardt, Dr. Yu, they really explore the dental piece very early and in their models, they still do some preparation work. So Dr. Klinghardt likes to start with the retroviral issue first and supporting that.

Scott Forsgren:            Dr. Simon Yu often likes to deal with the parasites before jumping into the dental work. I’ve seen some people do dental work before their bodies really were ready and can make things worse. So it is often an invasive process, actually didn’t find it nearly as difficult as I anticipated, but it is an invasive process.

Scott Forsgren:            People can do too much early on, they’re not really ready, not well-enough supported. So I don’t necessarily think this step always comes as far in the way my mind thinks about this for everyone, but I do think it’s something that we want to be really conservative about, cognizant, working with a good biological dentist that understands the complexity of someone with a chronic complex health challenge like Lyme disease or mold illness or any of these things.

Scott Forsgren:            I do absolutely think that amalgams and root canals and cavitations can definitely be significant stressors on the system, but again, they may not be the place to start. My cavitations were done six years ago, I was already in a really good place.

Scott Forsgren:            I wasn’t even again expecting to have this issue, but Dr. Simon Yu in St. Louis, Missouri identified them with electrodermal screening and later confirmed that. I had them probably for years before Lyme and mold, they were taken out, my wisdom teeth were taken out when I was in high school and so the question then is, did that set the stage from an immune system perspective for me to then be taken down by Lyme and mold and maybe I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have these dental cavitations.

Scott Forsgren:            So amalgams, obviously they contribute to our heavy metal burden. They ideally would be removed by a biological dentist, I have seen people get worse by doing this inappropriately or doing it the wrong way. The timing of these dental procedures is really important.

Scott Forsgren:            So making sure that you’re having a team where your primary doctor is working closely with your dentist to determine if it’s the right time, if you’re surprised well in doing that. Root canals we know those can affect organ systems in the body, meridian systems, we’re essentially leaving a dead tooth in the mouth and potentially having far reaching implications that can be an ongoing source of infection in the body.

Scott Forsgren:            The cavitations, these are infections in the jaw bone, normally from areas where there was a prior tooth extracted, but they can occur elsewhere in Lyme disease co-infections for example can put us at higher risk of these cavitations.

Scott Forsgren:            So bartonella for example, some of the retroviruses, they can require surgical interventions to remove them from the body probably almost always in my opinion do. I don’t think we’re quite at the place where they can be fully addressed with ozone and other technology.

Scott Forsgren:            So I think hopefully we’re getting closer to that where we can address some of these with less invasive procedures and Dr. Klinghardt suggests that nearly all of his patients have some degree of cavitation.

Scott Forsgren:            Tonsils are another issue. A lot of times, not only in kids with pandas for example that are dealing with strep, but they can be an issue in adults. I personally went to Germany a couple of times and had tonsil cryotherapy to deal with tonsil issues that were a contributor to my health challenges and so while I think that significant dental issues really need that collaboration with a biological dentist or a good oral surgeon, there are a lot of things we can do to optimize our oral health.

Scott Forsgren:            I like, Supreme Nutrition has a great product called oral defense. Bio-Botanical Research has Dentalcidin both in a toothpaste and in a pump that you can swish around to really help minimize the pathogens in the mouth.

Scott Forsgren:            There’s a number of fantastic essential oil blends targeted for dealing with the oral microbiome. Oil pulling can be great. So I think my thought process in kind of putting this at the end is I don’t think we should take it lightly.

Scott Forsgren:            I don’t think we should jump into it without giving it enough thought. It’s important to have that relationship between your dentist and your doctor that really understands when the right time is, but I definitely think there are people where their healing process or progress is being impeded or held back or this becomes a real roadblock and in some cases, those people may need to do things a little bit earlier.

Scott Forsgren:            So personally, I don’t think we want to lose sight of the dental issues, but we also want to make sure that the body is in the place where it can handle some of these interventions when we do them.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, I’m so happy that I had my cavitation addressed and finally explore. God, it was a total pain in the butt because my dentist doesn’t have the 3D scanner and he didn’t know where to refer me to. So I had to go hunt one down and then I just didn’t go to it for a while and then finally, I had a tooth flare up and then I was forced to go and do that and do the 3D scan and then discovered that I did have to cavitations that need addressing.

Wendy Myers:            And I wished I hadn’t waited, I wish I had addressed it sooner. So and it’s crazy. I did a post about this and people are telling me that they did their cavitation surgery and there were parasite eggs in the cavitation.

Wendy Myers:            There was mold growing in the cavitation. I got my lab results back and I pretty much had like every infection that they tested in the cavitation. So this is going to be breeding in your body, placing a burden on your immune system which may already have significant burden.

Scott Forsgren:            Absolutely.

Wendy Myers:            So we’ve got to fix all this stuff. So the final step, step 11 that you want to talk about is regeneration and restoration. What are your thoughts on that?

Scott Forsgren:            I think by the time we’ve gone through Lyme disease or mold illness and chronic complex illness, it’s gone on for years, it really takes its toll on our bodies. So some of the tools and there’s probably way more than I am even aware of, but some of the tools we might want to think about in this realm include things like phospholipids, so phosphatidylcholine and other blends of phospholipids to help really repair our cell membranes.

Scott Forsgren:            I personally use a blend in my power shake every morning. There are IV therapies, what’s called the PK Protocol or Patricia Kane Protocol. Again, some of these things could be introduced earlier on, but I think once we get to addressing a lot of the stressors, then the body needs some regeneration or restoration kind of focus.

Scott Forsgren:            Peptides that I mentioned earlier in the immune modulation part of our conversation, things like BPC-157 for example, those are emerging as really helpful tools in repairing and restoring and regenerating the body.

Scott Forsgren:            I do really like photobiomodulation, so things like the REDjuvenator or the Joovv or a number of different tools in that realm for supporting the mitochondria, for helping to rebuild our collagen that’s really impacted a lot by Lyme disease or borrelia, giving our body more photons, giving our body more vital force, stem cells, exosomes, those kinds of things.

Scott Forsgren:            Maybe those will prove helpful. I personally have not seen them be significant for systemic type issues. Personally, I know there that whole arena is continuing to evolve and I’m certainly open to it and kind of watching it because there are some advances there, but I haven’t been too terribly excited yet about the stem cell realm.

Scott Forsgren:            I haven’t had a lot of information yet around exosomes, but I know that that’s kind of a new area of research and exploration and then one of the things that I personally do for restoration is something called the Vasper, V-A-S-P-E-R.

Scott Forsgren:            It’s a bike essentially that you do a 21-minute workout on, you have some intervals. So you’re maybe doing high intensity intervals, maybe four out of the 21 minutes, you have these big blood pressure type cuffs on your arms and your legs while they’re pumping water through it, that’s about 45 degrees.

Scott Forsgren:            And so it kind of tricks the body into thinking that there is a need for it to release testosterone and growth hormone. It actually also helps to reduce elevated levels of cortisol and so this is something that I’ve done two or more times a week for about a year now and found it tremendously helpful in terms of building muscle in terms of really helping the body to be able to regenerate and repair.

Scott Forsgren:            So lots of tools in this realm, but I think there is a time in the process where we need some supportive things just to kind of rebuild from the process of recovering from a long-term chronic illness.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, so key and for me, just reducing stress and going for walks and getting massages, releasing all the toxins from your muscles and helping with lymphatic drainage. There’s so many different things you can do in this realm as well. Those are just very simple things.

Scott Forsgren:            I always say so many toys, so little time.

Wendy Myers:            A little time. There’s so many things I want to do in a day. So this has been just very, very information-dense, nutrient dense. So do you have any final words? Or any final words of advice or how people can work with you to go through all of these steps?

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, so first, I just want to thank you Wendy for inviting me. I’m definitely grateful for you and you’re sharing of information like this with your audience. For practitioners that are listening, I am involved in putting on an annual event with the forum for integrative medicine.

Scott Forsgren:            We’d love to have More practitioners joining that conversation. There’s a conference in March 2020 in Seattle, that’s really going to be exciting, some fantastic speakers and so if people are interested in that forum for integrativemedicine.org is the website and then I’m also involved in the LymeLight Foundation.

Scott Forsgren:            So we provide treatment grants to children and young adults 25 and under that need access to medical care for Lyme disease, but are not able to get that and so it’s been an honor for me to be involved in them and see lives that have really been changed.

Scott Forsgren:            We’ve now given out over five million dollars to grant recipients in 49 states and so if someone listening is either in need of that type of support, or in a position to support our mission and objectives, please reach out to us at lymeLightfoundation.org and then I think the last thing I would say is it’s just really critical not to lose hope.

Scott Forsgren:            I mean, if there ever has been a time in my now 23 years of really being deeply immersed in this chronic illness world, if there’s ever a time where I really do feel like there’s a lot of reason for hope, lots of research that’s happening, new treatment interventions that are coming up, I think now is a very exciting time.

Scott Forsgren:            So don’t lose hope, don’t give up. There’s so much that’s changing in our understanding of these chronic complex conditions over the past few years and again, new tools and new solutions that are really coming out.

Scott Forsgren:            So there is hope people do get better. Hang in there and I just think that message is so important because when we’re in the midst of these kinds of illnesses, it’s difficult to really see that hope, but it is always there.

Wendy Myers:            Yeah, yes it is. There are so many options today, but what is frightening is that all of these steps, none are available at a conventional medical doctor’s office. You do not have any of these things typically being tested, or addressed like if there’s not a medication for it, they’re not addressing it at all or discussing it, these options with their patients.

Wendy Myers:            So you have to be very, very careful. You have to really engage with a functional medical practitioner or even someone who’s not a medical practitioner that just has a lot of knowledge, someone even like yourself that has just been through this, been there, done that, and they know what it’s like to be on the other side and how to come through that.

Scott Forsgren:            Yeah, and I would just maybe then on that point, put a couple of resources out here for people so ILADS, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society at ilads.org. They do have a physician or practitioner locator and then there’s also another fantastic group that’s really emerged over the past couple of years called ISEAI, it’s I-S-E-A-I and it’s the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness, it’s ISEAI or iseai.org.

Scott Forsgren:            There’s also a practitioner locator there and those are people that are really familiar with biotoxin illnesses with chronic inflammatory type conditions, Lyme disease, mold illness. So there are a number of good resources people can find there and access to practitioners as well.

Wendy Myers:            Okay, fantastic. Well Scott, tell us where we can find you, where we can learn more about you, work with you. You have an amazing podcast. I love listening to … You have really, really engaging guests, amazing important information at BetterHealthGuy. So tell us where we can find you.

Scott Forsgren:            Thanks Wendy. It’s an honor for me to hear that you’re listening to my podcast. So yeah, so betterhealthguy.com is my website. The podcasts which is BetterHealthGuy Blogcasts is available at betterhealthguy.com. It’s on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, a whole host of different podcasting outlets, but if people want to find me and my website, betterhealthguy.com and they can reach me through the website as well.

Wendy Myers:            Great. Fantastic. Well Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope you have a wonderful new year. I’m sure this podcast is going to make the transcriptionist want to jump off the bridge, but it’s a very, very amazing podcast, fantastic information.

Wendy Myers:            So thanks for coming on and everyone listening, I’m so excited about 2020 and what it’s going to bring, I am just, I’m so optimistic and just love what I’m doing and bringing all this amazing information to you guys so that you can help yourself get better, improve your life. And so more is going to come. I have all these different things planned for you guys. So stay tuned and thanks for listening every week.