The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Chronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Epidemic and How to Get Healthy Again by Steven Phillips, Dana Parish

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

Chronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Epidemic and How to Get Healthy Again by Steven Phillips, Dana Parish “A powerfully informative guide for patient and practitioner from a misinformed past toward a future of recovery and health.” —David Perlmutter, MD, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Grain Brain and Brain Wash In this important and timely book, Steven Phillips, MD, and his former patient, Sony singer-songwriter Dana Parish, reveal striking evidence that a range of common infections, from COVID-19 to Lyme, cause a variety of autoimmune, psychiatric, and chronic conditions. Chronic explores the science behind what makes them difficult to diagnose and treat, debunks widely held beliefs, and provides solutions that empower sufferers to reclaim their lives. After nearly dying from his own mystery illness, Dr. Phillips experienced firsthand the medical community’s ignorance about the pathogens that underlie a deep spectrum of serious conditions—from fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus, to depression, anxiety, OCD and neurodegenerative disorders. Parish, too, watched her health spiral after twelve top doctors missed the underlying infections that caused heart failure and other sudden debilitating symptoms. Now, they’ve come together with a mission: to change the current model of simply treating symptoms and shift the focus to finding and curing root causes of chronic diseases that affect millions around the world.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast welcome guys one and all the Chris Voss Show, the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. I mean, how great is that?

That's the best thing ever. I don't know why everybody goes, how is that? Everyone loves that. We all have family members. I don't know what you're talking about at all. Right. I can't relate, actually. Oh, okay.

Clearly, you just have to link to your family members. So anyway, guys, thank you for joining in. To see the YouTube version of this, they have this new service. It's free for an unlimited time. You want to go there and get that offer. It's on youtube.com. Hit the bell notification button so you can get all the notifications, everything we're doing over there.

If you're seeing us live, be sure to throw us some questions you might have for the brilliant authors that we have today. Also, go to our books on goodreads.com. As you can see, everything we're reading and reviewing, my books over there. See all the groups on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all those crazy places those kids are doing their flipping fingers at. They're constantly using their phones. We're there as well. Also, go see our big LinkedIn newsletter. That thing is just killing it over on LinkedIn. And our LinkedIn massive group, 132,000 people,

give or take one or two thousand or something. I don't know. So go see us over there. Just search for the Chris Foster channel. You'll find them everywhere. Anyway, guys, we have amazing authors on the show. I don't know why. We put them in the Google machine. They pop up and they go, amazing authors. And we're like, hey, we should invite those people on the show. And what do you know? We've got some

today. Who saw that coming? So today we have two wonderful people on the show. The book just came out February 2, 2021. The book is called Chronic, the Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Healthy Again by Dr. Stephen Phillips and Dana Parrish. And I should mention the paperback actually just came out February 1, 2022. So you got to love the rollout there. And they're going to be talking to say about some of their experiences, lessons they've learned and everything else. Let me get the bios down here. Dr. Stephen Phillips is a well-published Yale-trained physician, and he is a researcher and best-selling author. His career has focused on diagnosing and treating infectious causes of many chronic diseases and illnesses. He has lectured across the U.S. and Europe, and he's also helped shape public

health policy by serving as an invited expert in his field for the states of Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont, a global face of the Lyme and Bartonella pandemic. He has featured on countless media outlets, including Dr. Oz, The Doctors, New York Times, and Emmy-winning documentary Lime and Reason. With Dina Parrish on the show, she developed Lyme-induced heart failure as a result of being improperly diagnosed by some of the best doctors in the country and had her life saved by Dr. Phillips. That's awesome. And she is a chart-topping singer-songwriter for Sony Music Publishing, has written songs for superstars like Celine Dion and Idina Menzel. I'm sorry, my apologies to Idina.

She has become a powerful voice for change in the field of Lyme disease. She lives in New York City. Welcome to the show, both Dana and Dr. Phillips. How are you? Great. Thank you for having us. Yeah. Thank you so much. It's great to see you.

Awesome, Sauce. It's wonderful to have you both. Can you give us your guys' plugs so people can find you on the interwebs, those inner tubes in the sky? Link.com. Sure. So our Facebook is at The Chronic Book. Our Twitter is The Chronic Book. I think our – is our Instagram The Chronic Book? I really don't know. I think it is. And then it's at Steve Phillips, MD at Twitter. And I'm at Dana Parrish at Twitter.

There you go. So let's lay the foundation. What motivates you guys to want to write this book? Well, I've been in practice for 25 years, just toiling away, realizing that I think in a single word, if you had to put it, it would be just injustice. You know, these patients have been the most marginalized patients in medicine, the chronic illness population. They go from doctor to doctor. They can't find answers. And then Dana strolled into my office. She's like, we got to write a book. And it wasn't exactly like that, but it, you know, we, you know, I instantly clicked

and she was the enzyme that kind of made the whole thing, the machine roared into the action. And we were shocked because it ended up being a bidding war for this book. And it's ended up being a really nice bestseller and widely embraced by the mainstream medical community. And it's been a really great blessing because patients are contacted in my office from around the the world and said the books really impacted their lives and helped them out. Dana, do you want to tell us about the strolling? Yeah. Well, I was so sick when I met Steve. I really genuinely thought that I was dying. And what I didn't know was that I was already in heart failure. And so, yeah, I had a tick bite about five months before I met him, got it at a wedding in New Jersey. And little did I know what Lyme

could do. And I also had Bartonella. So I had everything from a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, lots of tingling in my hands and visual disturbances, extreme anxiety and insomnia. And then like a couple of months later, I couldn't breathe. And I'd seen like 12 top New York City doctors. Nobody would agree that my initial bite from the tick and rash needed further treatment, which it needed a lot more treatment. And nobody would agree that that was even what was wrong. And thank God, a friend of mine sent me to Steve and he saved my life. Yeah. Wow. Wow. And then it wasn't, I didn't stroll right in with the book. It was a little bit, it was after he got me better.

It is a crazy fun story, but a friend of ours, a mutual friend is in the book business. She's a writer, also bestselling author. Her name is Christina Grish. And friend, is in the book business. She's a writer, also best-selling author. Her name is Christina Grish. Hi, Christina. I love you. She woke up in the middle of the night, and she goes, You and Steve are going to write a book, and I'm going to get you guys an agent. I'm like, We're not writing a book. I don't know what you're talking about.

Anyway, here we are. She did everything she said. We got a great agent, and now we have a book. This is awesome because, like we talked about before the show in the green room, I've had some friends that have gone through the gambit. I know Daryl Hall went through it from Hall and Oates of getting Lyme disease and going and seeing a billion doctors and sometimes taking a long time, almost seemingly like a year or two,

to finally come down to the conclusion where somebody goes, maybe we should test you for Lyme disease. And I mean, they get diagnosed with MS and everything else, space aliens, you know, they go through the whole gambit. And then finally somebody tests them for Lyme disease. And I really, you know, I've seen them suffer, you know, sharing Facebook posts and stuff. So give us an overall arcing of the book and what's inside. So in the book, we each tell our personal stories. It's like the hair club for men commercial because I'm not just the author, I'm also a patient. And I had had Lyme starting in

med school actually. And it wasn't a disabling case, but it wasn't a three-week case either. And it did keep coming back. And I learned very quickly that there's something really missing from this field and doctors don't have a clue how to properly treat and diagnose these patients. And I then went on to have good health. And then when I was sleeping, just one day in my bed, I got a bunch of spider bites. I woke up, my arm was covered with spider bites. Now within two months, I had this rapidly progressive arthritis going down my spine and out to my extremities. And by six months after those bites, I couldn't take a single step on my own. And I gave up my practice. I didn't walk for two years. I went to 25 doctors, including infectious disease doctors, neurologists, three of the best rheumatologists in the tri-state area. And my diagnosis is rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis.

And I was bed bound. And here I am being a doctor in this field for since 1996. And this is my area going to other doctors like myself and then going to out doctors outside the field. And so if this happened to me to the point where I required 24 hour home care, almost died, couldn't sit up or turn over and bed on my own, then what chances the average person have. And that's really why I wrote the book, because these people don't have a chance. There's no chance for a person without a skill set to get through these.

And even with considerable skills, it was challenging. And I got back to full health, back in practice since 2013. And the book sets, aside from my personal stories, it goes over like a deep dive in the medical literature, hundreds of references to medical journal articles. It's not a textbook, but it's also like a highly vetted, really, really well-documented overview of these many infections. Lyme is the one that everyone's heard of, and there are many, many more. And Bartonella is probably the second one that's the most important because it's very, very common and can be very severe.

What are the stats on this, you know, maybe in America or worldwide, whatever you might know off the top of your head, what are the stats on, like, how many millions of people maybe suffer this or maybe are misdiagnosed? Per year? So the CDC had a jump. They used to say it was like 30,000. All of a sudden, one year later, it got to over 300,000 when they admitted that their Lyme testing was failing to capture 90% of the cases. So all of a sudden, it went up by a factor of 10. And now it's considered to be approximately close to 500,000 new cases per year. And conservatively, 20% of these cases

develop chronic symptoms. So we're collecting 100,000 patients every year that's chronically ill from just this one illness without counting the other infections. It's this whole mass of people walking around with chronic diseases and then get diagnosed with everything from autoimmune conditions to cryofatigue syndrome. There might be a whole mess more that don't, you know, miss that or don't get diagnosed or totally miss it. So, and I think you guys touch on lupus, I think, if I recall. Yeah, most definitely. I mean, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, MS is a huge area of interest of mine.

Really? I mean, the data with spirochetol, spirochetol is the type of bacteria that Lyme is. The data with spirochetol infection and MS goes back over 100 years. They were finding spirochetes in the brains and spinal fluid of MS patients. They did these studies where they injected them into baby animals, and the baby animals got MS. Some studies, they found spirochetes after they took the MS tissue and put them into the baby animals. So that wisdom has somehow been forgotten when they invented steroids, this whole kind of new field of medicine, this new rheumatology field of suppressing autoimmune conditions popped up

because they could figure that they could suppress symptoms very quickly. But it fails to get at the cause, and then they stop looking for the cause. You know, they just focus on treating symptoms. And now the pharmaceutical industry is so lucrative to give someone an annuity of something to suppress symptoms for 40 years that they're really not motivated to find the cause of anything. Yeah. And there's

some people that say that about cancer. There's too much money in it, especially for donations. I don't know. I don't want to be one of those people who's like, it's a black helicopter conspiracy kind of thing. But yeah, sometimes you wonder what's going on. I've gone to doctors and somehow I know more than them.

And these are usually just local practitioners. And I kind of know my, hey, I just eat real penicillin. Like, we don't want to give you penicillin. It's like, you know how it'll work. But those are the stories. But this is kind of interesting. So what, and I don't know more than doctors, people, I don't want to be that one of those guys either, but it, it was rare. So the, so what, I think there's some treatments that you

recommend in the book or that you found that work really well for this. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, I've been, I've been helping people for a lot of years and you know, I had a big jump in my learning curve after I got sick with this really intransigent infection. But by the time I got better, I'd already failed a year and a half of antibiotics, nine months of which was IV. And everybody asked the same question, like what made you continue on your search to do an antimicrobial route? Because they all kind of flared me up. They made me worse. Something called a Herxheimer type reaction where it's like a die off. So it's an oversimplification, but it's getting worse before better. But yeah,

the treatments that we use, there's antibiotics and there are non-antibiotic, what I call antimicrobials, you know, drugs that you would never think of that would kill bacteria that are published to kill things like Lyme and Bartonella and others. And these are drugs that don't impact on GI flora. For example, fluconazole is an antifungal. You wouldn't think it would kill a bacteria like Lyme, but it's been published to do so. And it gets in the brain really well. And we use it in a combination with tetracycline and lots of MS patients who have evidence for Lyme. And our response rates for relapsing MS has been very, very good for years.

My sister came down with MS when she was very young. She was diagnosed with a disability kind that would really mess her up fast. And I think if I recall the stats on MS, it largely happens to young women in colder areas of the Americas. Like here in Utah, the case of it is pretty outrageous. And, of course, we've had some really weird and interesting chemical drops here in Utah, the case of it's pretty outrageous. And of course, we've had some really weird and interesting chemical drops here in Utah. So I've always wondered about that. I don't know. The epidemiology in the temperate zones is part of it. They've noticed an epidemiology that's compatible with an infectious disease, actually. I don't know

if you've heard of the Faroe Island outbreak. They never had MS in the Faroe Islands because they try to talk about how much is genetic and how much is environmental. And after the British occupied the Faroe Islands during one of those wars, it was something some years afterwards, they had this point source epidemic of MS. And what did the British introduce? It wasn't enough time for them to genetically change the population. It was just a few years later. And then when they've done immigration studies of people from, let's say in Africa, there's not much MS, but people from Africa, when they immigrate

to Western Europe or the United States, it's like a 10 year delay. And then they start getting MS. Clearly the genes aren't changing. What in the environment is it like exposure, the chemical and infection or something else or both. Wow. That's amazing because, you know, you kick around everything with MS, and, you know, our uncle also got MS and lives in the same county here. Interesting. I think I'd read somewhere that Utah had, like, seven times higher MS than other states at one time. Interesting.

I'm not sure if that's accurate. Somebody would have to double-check that on me. And I think we have leukemia higher than most people. We always attribute it to, like, you know, we had the nuclear fallout here. Anthrax dropped here. We had the largest storage of mustard gas here. They'd burn off into the air. It's a pretty sick state with all the...

Wow. I'm visiting right now for the coronavirus, but normally Las Vegas. But, yeah, this state freaks me out because, you know, you just, I don't know. It's always weird, but this is interesting discussion. So give us some other details that you guys cover. One of the things that we really like to talk about is the neuropsychiatric features of infections, of brain infections, because patients are so often, and we're seeing this now with long COVID. And we, you know, we wrote a chapter about COVID in the book because there's a tremendous amount of overlap politically and medically in what is happening in the vector borne disease world.

So one of the things that most people don't realize is that anxiety, depression, OCD, psychosis, even bipolar disorder, a lot of times those conditions are driven by an underlying infection. And so, you know, you go to the doctor and you have this constellation of strange symptoms, say, you know, your skin has rashes, you feel all this body pain, but at the same time, you're super anxious anxious but you can't and you have insomnia right that's brain inflammation so but your doctor's saying you need to relax it's anxiety just you know let me call a psychiatrist for you i mean this is a story that we hear over and over and over and over carrying along covid community constantly and i think that there is such an

underappreciation for how much the environment impacts your brain. And I mean, it could be a chemical exposure, as you said, it can be toxic mold. But we don't want to underestimate the power of what these infections can do head to toe, they can cause Alzheimer's, they can cause dementia, they can cause all kinds of neurologic diseases. So I mean, early on before all the dogma really became so entrenched about and all those sort of like denials about the truth about these infections, it was very well known. And like I have old articles from the New York Times and the LA Times that are great that where they're like big doctors quoted saying like, when I see

a patient with a neurological illness, the new onset, the first thing i do is i check for lyme and you know this just isn't really done anymore and it's really disappointing because we hear from patients that have been ignored for years and decades um including chris christopherson who got dementia who got alzheimer's from lyme from 30 years being undiagnosed, started with fibromyalgia and started with, you know, body pain, progressed, you know, knee pain, had something wrong with his heart. And then 30 years later, a doctor finally diagnosed him and he got treatment and got his life back. That explains his music library. I'm just kidding. That's so horrible. So that, so some doctors you talk about are gaslighting patients and putting them in that psychiatric box i know i have some

friends that are covid long-termers that would be interested as well so yeah it's really hard it's really hard dana brought up a few things that we actually go down a couple of rabbit holes because you mentioned how the infections cause alz psychiatric. There's only so many net kind of inflammatory pathways the body can take in response to an infection. So multiple infections can do the same net result. Like Harvard has been researching the infectious causes of Alzheimer's for a long time. And in 2016, they made this big announcement that they put salmonella bacteria, which is a really boring bacteria in the brains of mice. And the mice made amyloid in response to the salmonella bacteria, which is a really boring bacteria in the brains of mice, and the mice made amyloid in response to the salmonella.

So amyloid is the bad protein with Alzheimer's, and it's really like an antimicrobial peptide. It stops the bacteria from progressing and taking over the brain of the mouse. So mice that aren't able to make amyloid, if you give them a brain infection, they'll die of salmonella. So it's really protective in youth, and it doesn't really matter if things are protective in youth if they're detrimental in old age, because Mother Nature doesn't really care about animals once they have babies. And that's kind of the way it is for the other ones too. Same with this other protein called alpha-synuclein, which is the one involved with Parkinson's, and the finding that that protects mice from viruses. And in terms of

psychiatric stuff, they've done studies of people inpatient psychiatric facilities where they looked at all the major psychiatric conditions across the board. They looked at anxiety, depression, OCD, bipolar, and schizophrenia. And across the board, they had almost a doubling of the Lyme positivity rate. And there are similar studies, particularly with psychosis, looking at certain parasitic infections like toxoplasmosis, which is so incredibly common. No one ever has an idea. They're so shocked when I tell them like around, you know, one out of ten people can have toxoplasmosis or toxicara. And both of them are associated with significant, you know, mental health issues.

And these are things that people get just from growing up with a dog or cat or eating a hamburger that's on the rarer side. And it's not like you have to go to Africa to get them. The President of the United States, these don't make people sick in a really like hardcore way, but they make people sick in subtle ways usually that people don't ever get diagnosed. Note to self, quit making hamburgers out of dogs and cats. I'm kidding, folks.

I'm kidding. That's a joke. Don't do that. I'm kidding, folks. I'm kidding. That's a joke. Don't do that. I love dogs. So this is pretty interesting. Now, one of the, because like I said, I have a lot of, we've had a lot of guests on the show that are doctors who have written books. And I've learned a lot about how, you know, the gut and, you know, the intestines and how it interacts with the brain. I've had some people on that have helped relieve some MS users, at least lighten the load a bit.

Sometimes they've seen, depending on where they're on the spectrum, some recovery. And it's really interesting how much of our gut and our flora, fauna, whatever all that stuff is, I'm not a doctor clearly, but it's really interesting how much that has an effect, like you say, on inflammation in the body and what we eat, what we intake, and everything else.

There's definitely a gut immune system kind of interaction and a gut-CNS, central nervous system interaction that's just really beginning to be studied. I first took an interest in this when there was a case report of a mom who noticed that her autistic child was given oral vancomycin for some reason and then autism got better. Vancomycin is not absorbed. So how did her autism get better?

And they did a little case series on that. That was reported. But that area, we need to know what's going on. I don't think any doctors really have a clue. There are a lot of doctors that have strong opinions, and the science hasn't caught up to how this exactly works. But something is going on there. So what is, in your book you talk about fluvozaxime?

Fluvoxamine? Yeah, yeah. I'm clearly not a doctor. Tell us a little bit about that and the medical community and use and stuff. Fluvoxamine is an old, cheap antidepressant that's been approved for, I don't know, how many gazillions of years already. And, you know, it's part of the greater conversation about COVID and the fact that old repurposed drugs that are effective for COVID

have been one by one kind of dismissed and ridiculed. And it's this question, like, does the government only get behind expensive, shiny, new patented drugs that may farm lots of money? Because this TOGETHER trial was a recent large randomized control trial, which backs up a trial that happened before that that showed fluvoxamine was beneficial. And in this study, they had these preset parameters where if you did better than a certain point, the fluvoxamine, if it performed better, the study would have to be stopped. And if it performed less well, then their lowest expectation would have to be stopped because it

would be unethical to give it to the people because it didn't work if it didn't do well. And it would be unethical to withhold it from the placebo group if it worked that great. And it worked that great. So they had to stop the study and give it to all the placebo group. And yet no one hears a peep about it. So it reduced mortality by more than 90%. And the NIH is not recommending it. It was funded by very mainstream folks like the Gates

Foundation. And it's just another example of what's been going on. Like I said, before we went live, I used to think that the field of Lyme infected, born infections and chronic illness was like the one big, like kind of corrupt area of medicine. And then when I see what's going on with COVID, this like blatant anti-science kind of a thing that, you know, kind of corrupt area medicine and then when i see what's going on with covid this like blatant anti-science kind of a thing that that you know kind of favors profit over patients i really think that it's all about the money in medicine now my understanding of this and i'll let you expand on it is one of the problems that the body has when it has whether it's covid or some sort of attack lyme disease and everything else is it overreactsacts and it inflames and, you know, puts up the big, you know, go fight that stuff with all the, I think, white blood cells and stuff.

And sometimes it can overreact and end up damaging parts of the body or injuring them. And then that's what the inflammation is from. Is that, do I have that correct? Yeah, I mean, the amnioc immune system is a double-edged sword. It helps eradicate the pathogens and it causes the illness in many cases. So like with COVID, it's definitely a two-phase thing, viral replication, and everyone knows the immune phase now. So the immunosuppressant steroids are really helpful in the second phase. And the first phase, you really need antivirals and you need them quick. And really first couple of days, like my patients who get monoclonal antibodies,

they do best in the first two days. And even though they're indicated up to like seven or ten days in some cases, I've never seen them work well after like five days ever. So I'm sure someone out there has had a good response to six days. But among my patients, they really work best right away. Yeah, I've had a couple of friends that have actually got it twice, and they've got really bad long haulers between, you know, just all sorts of body problems. Sometimes they had underlying health conditions before. Please get vaccinated, people.

Well, the vaccines don't stop long COVID. So that's something that's really important to say is that the vaccines may prevent you from being hospitalized and dying, which is very important, although most people don't die and get hospitalized anyway. But they don't, you know, there's data across the board. So there's some that says the vaccines don't help much at all. And some that say it helps around 40, 50% to prevent long haul. And to me, that's absolutely not acceptable. It's not an acceptable risk to take just to use the vaccines and then go out into the world and live a free life. I know people don't like the truth of that and they don't like to hear it. And I understand that.

I don't want to live like this either. But, you know, if you're going to be going into a public place with shared air and not wearing an N95, you are going to be exposing yourself to a very high risk of COVID and long COVID. And that's just the truth of the matter. And that can mean diabetes, blood clots, strokes, and a long period of latency between the initial mild infection and all hell breaking loose. And that's very similar to what happens with patients that have Lyme as well. So it's really worth talking about that. Great point. It's a real roulette wheel and you just don't know how you're genetically going to reply to it. My sister with MS in a care center had, she got it twice, sadly, from all of these care centers.

So sorry. Well, we're a red state, so there you go. She was fine. What was weird was she was asymptomatic most times. Now, most people that might be hearing this would be like, see, it's blah, blah, blah. But here's the thing. She's still got blood clots, which wasn't good for her because she's in a wheelchair. And, and so she's still got some damage from it, even though she didn't even know she had it. They kind of, she's has dementia.

So they just kind of lied to her and put her in a room and said, oh, we're keeping you away from that. Oh boy. I'm so sorry. Cause she, you know, she didn't, they didn't want to freak her out with dementia. You know how hard it is. Yeah. You know, somebody's made a comment on the show, Follow the Money. I know I don't want to demonize doctors.

I don't want to feed that narrative. But, yeah, we saw that with opioids where sometimes doctors sometimes are getting a little too much money or bonuses or whatever the sort of gift from some of these prescription things. But, you know, not all doctors are bad. I think there's a small percentage. No, I'm fine to demonize the ones doctors are bad i think there's a small no i'm fine the demonites the ones that are bad though honestly i've been doing this so long that you know you realize you get jaded after a while when you see things that are blatantly anti-science and then they put themselves out there as this like final arbiter of science and you know i just it's it's it gets

overwhelming at some point but yes of course i know of course, I know some of the best people I know are physicians, and some of the people that really should never have gotten any position of authority have also gotten through med school and become physicians. I'm not sure that the motivation also is in the general medical community. I think it's a lack of education for a lot of them. Yes, there are definitely bad apples. I looked up one of the rheumatologists that I saw from hospital for special surgery to see what his conflicts of interest were when he was pushing immune suppressants on me. And he made something like

$750,000 or $800,000 that year for doing these kinds of talks for pharmaceutical companies. I'm highly, highly against that. But it's really coming from a really high level. So it's like the IDSA, which is the Infectious Diseases Society of America, they have they own patents to different Lyme vaccines. And, you know, there is so much money to be made at the highest echelon. I don't, I don't blame the doctors as much as many people in the Lyme community do. I understand their anger. I was also dismissed by a lot of doctors, but I think truly it was pure ignorance, lack of curiosity.

I think doctors follow orders and follow directions and do not independently think a lot of the time, which is something that really surprised me in this journey. Like I would go back to them and say, guess what? I met this brilliant doctor and he's getting me better. And here are all the symptoms that have gone away.

Isn't this exciting? Don't you want to learn about this? Blank stares. You know, just no curiosity, just no ability to assimilate this new concept that infections cause chronic illness. Literally, except for one or two of my doctors. Nobody nobody took it as a learning opportunity. It was really disappointing. But one of my doctors did and actually went and diagnosed one of her cousins

who lived in Canada, brought her here to the US for treatment. Cousin got well and now she sees it in a lot of her patients and she's now sending them to people like Steve. Yeah. So and I actually went back to my three rheumatologists, you know, because they wanted to give me a misrepresentation as well. And I just couldn't, just couldn't do it. I just kept saying, you know, I'm born with this immune system for a reason. I want to make it stronger and make whatever pathogens in me weaker, you know, and, um, and like, well, we can't help you. So a year and a half went by, I got well, I went back to them.

I said, look, you know, this is my case. Here's my blood test. My inflammation levels were off the charts high. My knees were the size of soccer balls, literally, and beforehand. And I get back to normal. And I said, is this going to change how you treat any of your patients or approach patients similar to me? And they're like, look, nobody can deny what you've had to come back from this, but we couldn't possibly. This is how we're trained. We're doing this 30 years. We expect this based on this out-of-the-box thing to change our whole lives upside down, and they couldn't do it. They're seeing 20 patients a day, whatever.

They're on this, like, tread, whatever, the hamster wheel. They can't get off. That's part of it, too. Doctors are so busy in today's medicine. Unless you have, like, a boutique practice where you don't take insurance, you spend an hour with the patients. But if you're doing seven minutes per patient you think you have time to unravel the the big mysteries of medicine there's no way you know yeah the and i imagine doctors are also they've got a gut in their head with you know all the lawsuits i mean over over my

over my over my lifetime i've watched you know these these lawsuits these lawsuits of malpractice. I mean, if they do the wrong thing, lawsuits come, and a lot of them have to close their practices because of the malpractice suit insurance. So maybe some of that is that sort of, well, we can't really play outside the lines, maybe. I don't know. Maybe that's it. Doctors are getting sued, though, for underdiagnosing and undertreating these illnesses, too, and they've been sued successfully for that.

So they're not protected by failing to diagnose these and failing to treat patients and listen to their... I just say this to patients. It's like a general advice. If you feel like your doctor is not listening to you, you should find another doctor. Because there's so many times patients are dismissed, and then they go home like, well, there must be something wrong with me. The doctor's a good doctor, and he or she thinks I'm fine, maybe a little stressed out. But if you know in your heart that there's something intrinsically wrong, you have to keep looking.

And I personally don't take no for an answer. If I did, I wouldn't have seen 25 doctors and ultimately take it into my own hands to try and get better because I couldn't find help. I went everywhere. I don't know how many more doctors. I wasn't going to go to 50 doctors. At some point, I was able to thankfully help myself. But, you know, now the education about these infections, it's all risen. That was 10 years ago when I got sick. And the doctors like me have done a lot of lectures on this topic, and there's a lot of access to care now that wasn't available 10 years ago.

Wow. Wow. You know, so basically your recommendation is, is if people think they're suffering from this and they're not getting the answers they want from their doctor, they should number one, of course, read your book, may reach out to you or at least, you know, get some second or third opinions. Well, actually, yes. Although the second and third opinion has to be come from the right kind of a doctor. This is the mistake that we all made in the beginning. Learn from my mistakes where I went to all the mainstream traditional. I went to NYU and Mount Sinai and I went to the regular doctors

and nobody had any clue. Even though it was very, very obvious, what I kept saying like, do you think it could be from that tick bite? Do you think it could be from the Lyme? No. Just shut me down. Why? One from and one infectious disease doctor from NYU actually had the nerve to say to me I said how do you know why and he said because I went to medical school and he also told me that a lime was killed a hundred percent of the time with an antibiotic in the test tube and that's actually not even true. So, you know, again, like if you're not going to pursue the right care, so in my opinion, you know, you could go to an integrative doctor, you could go to a functional medicine doctor. And then there are

doctors that mostly treat Lyme and other vector borne diseases all, they are associated with an organization called ILADS, I-L-A-D-S.org. So you can always write to them, tell them where you live. I live in Utah. And they'll send you back the five or 10 doctors that are closest to you and Google and see who feels right. That's actually, and it ended up that a friend referred me to Steve, but I went through all of those steps. And it was very, very helpful to just kind of see what was out there or what my options were. And they felt like they got much bigger when I recognized that I didn't have to stick with these sort of dogmatic in the box thinkers. And I think with Lyme disease, some people don't know they're bitten or whatever. I know one indication or, well, correct me if I'm wrong here,

one indication is the bullseye. If you pull out a tick and you, within, what, two or three days, you see a bullseye, that's an indication. I mean, the thing is, it's not nearly as common as the stereotype, you know, suggests. The problem is it's part of the diagnostic criteria now, so you have this skewed sample of what cdc says happens so it's like saying what percentage of or you could say this conclusion like 90 of people in a prison have committed a crime when committed a crime is like entrance criteria obviously to the prison it's like that with the bullseye rash before they used that as part of

surveillance criteria the old studies in the 70s, it was 25% of patients from the original data when they first discovered Lyme was 25%. It's not 90% or 70%. In my experience, it's a minority. And, you know, but there's also, there's a skewed sampling on both sides because the people that I see that come in with complex later stage illness, most of them came into that because they didn't see the rash, you know, so it's skewed that way too. And, you know, for my sister, my sister's, what, in her forties now, she's seven years younger than me, which is really weird to have

someone seven years younger than you in a care center with, with people that are elderly. And, you know, it's harder, it's harder for her because she's, her age group isn't in there. Can, you know, if they've, if they've really been suffering for this 20, 30, 40 years, do some of the remedies and advice you give in the book still help them, or is this something that needs to be covered early on? So just in general terms about MS, I'm sorry I can't give specific advice, just a disclaimer, but primary progressive MS, which it sounds like she has is a different animal than relapsing MS,

and it's got different characteristics. It tends to be less lesions. Obviously, there's no ups and downs. It's just a slow, steady decline. Those patients were actually encouraged to even come see me because they don't have a very good outcome. In my experience, we've only had a 15% response rate, whereas the relapsing MS is like 90%, 95%.

With fibromyalgia or maybe somebody who has lyme disease and there's been suffering for maybe 20 years 30 years and they and they again they don't they didn't get it misdiagnosed do these things help or is it really something you have to jump on right away no for fibromyalgia it's like one of the easiest categories of patients to make better so they've done studies again this is a very lyme-centric conversation there's so so many infections but i know lyme is one that everyone's heard of but categories of patients to make better. So they've done studies. Again, this is a very Lyme-centric conversation. There are so, so many infections, but I know Lyme is one that everyone's heard of. But they've done studies with Lyme where they had the very CDC-positive,

stringent criteria for Lyme, so you know the people had Lyme. And then they followed them. And then they met the very stringent American College of Rheumatology criteria for fibromyalgia. And then they did muscle biopsies on them to see, like, what percentage had Lyme DNA still in their muscles causing the aches. It was 75%. So, you know, there is really good evidence now that Lyme is associated as a causal thing for fibromyalgia. Some doctors like to call it post Lyme fibromyalgia, but it's just still Lyme, you know, because anybody that has

Lyme has the same symptoms of fibromyalgia. And, you know, what's the difference? You draw this imaginary line in the sand, you get your three X-ray doxy, it was lime, your symptoms one through 10. Now those symptoms one through 10 are now called fibromyalgia. It's kind of like almost silly. It's really interesting how our bodies work and how, I don't know, fragile we can be sometimes. Is there anything you want to touch on, excuse me, on the book before we go? You know, I just think that it's a great guide for patients and doctors.

I've been so touched by how many patients have given a copy to their doctors and how responsive some of them have been. We really, really appreciate hearing that because this was a huge labor of love. It took us almost three years to write. And, you know, I wish honestly that I had this book when I was going through my illness. And I wish that I had the resources and everything that we provided in the science.

You know, one of the things that was also really helpful for a lot of patients in showing the book is all the science that we provide. It is not voodoo. This is hardcore science that they can bring and support the conditions that they're going through and hopefully get help. Yeah. And that's not all the science there is. The publisher was like, enough. It's not a textbook. I mean, I think I included 300 references. I'm like, yeah, that's way too much. But the science is so strong. I just want to tell you, in 2009, I was one of a handful of

doctors that was invited to speak at this national hearing in Washington, D.C. at the IDSA hearing, effectively the side of America, because this big, big conflict about chronic Lyme. And they asked me to write up the data that documented chronic Lyme as of 2009. And now there's a lot more. It ended up being 81 pages long with over 200 references. And that was the data in 2009. And it's, like I said, progressed quite a bit since then. Since then, we've realized, and don't ask me why it's taken 35 years of fighting to find this, since then, major universities like Johns Hopkins and Tulane, Northeastern, and many others have shown that they can't even kill Lyme bacteria in the test tube with the antibiotics that are purported by IDSA to be curative in humans. And, you know, that's like a test tube where there's no place for it to hide, can't get inside a cell, can't get in a brain cell or a heart cell or in a ligament where

the blood doesn't get in, and you still can't kill it when it's out in the open. So anyway, let's stop. It's really important. People share your book, share what you guys have out there. I like the idea of passing to the doctor. You know, the one thing I always want to clarify with people is, is science is always evolving. It is never a final because I get these people, you see them online. They're like, yeah, well, science told me this yesterday. Now they're saying something different. It's the beauty of science is it's, it's always an

evolving thing. And we're always learning more and developing more. And you know, it's, it's never a finished product where you're just like well this is the end all be all so keep that in mind folks so give us your guys's plugs so that we can people can check you out find you out on the uh interwebs well the chronic book is our website i should have said that earlier i forgot and you can buy our book at amazon at barnes and noble target walmart books are sold yeah everywhere the are sold. That's what I was supposed to say. And at StevePhillipsMD is my Twitter, and Dana...

At Dana Parish is my Twitter, and then we have Facebook at The Chronic Book, and also Twitter at The Chronic Book. There you go. Instagram, yeah. Well, thank you very much for coming on, both of you. We certainly appreciate it. It's been very insightful, and hopefully we've helped some people here. Yeah, thank you very much for coming on, both of you. We certainly appreciate it. It's been very insightful, and hopefully we've helped some people here.

Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Thank you. Thank you so much, Chris. It was great to be here. Thank you. And, folks, pick up the book wherever fine books are sold, but only go to the fine book places. Stay out of those dark alleyway bookstores.

I don't know what that means. Chronic, the hidden cause of the autoimmune epidemic and how to get healthy again. It just came out on paperback February 1st, 2022. And you can order it in all formats there on all the different places you can take and consume books. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Foss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. You can probably find the book there as well. Also go to youtube.com, 4Chest, Chris Foss.

Hit that bell notification. We have so many brilliant authors on. You'll definitely want to see everything we have going on there. Also, go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those different places. Just search for Chris Voss, The Chris Voss Show, our major newsletter on LinkedIn and our big group on LinkedIn as well. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.