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Show Notes
Dr. Joel Rosen: Alright, Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of the less stress life where we teach exhausted and burnt out adults the truth about adrenal fatigue so that they can get their health back quickly. And I’m really excited to join up forces with my next guest, MacKay Rippey.
He’s graduated from the Maryland University for Integrative Health and was one of the first acupuncturists in the country to hold a master’s degree in acupuncture. He’s been helping clients feel better, with the five-element acupuncture for more than 25 years. And he’s just a wealth of information he got into the world of nutrigenomics. And, and how to become a detective in recovering from chronic illness. So, McKay, thank you so much for being here today.
Mackay Rippey:
I’m so happy to be here, Joel.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, well, it’s me too. And we were talking a little bit earlier about how excited I was to not just present this information to my audience but to be able to pick up some really great clinical pearls along the way for myself. So we always start McKay with understanding your story in terms of why did you become an acupuncturist?
How did you get focused on the world of Lyme and potentially LOTE, knowing that there’s not one protocol that fits all? And it really requires understanding all of that. But there’s got to be a story from you in terms of a health challenge and why you got into this in the first place.
Mackay Rippey: All right, you’re sure you want to go through this right?
Dr. Joel Rosen: Well, yeah, we have, we only have we have three hours.
Mackay Rippey: So let’s go because I was thinking about that addition is like, Holy smokes, I’m that dude. Now, because I started studying acupuncture in 1989. Now, that means I’m no longer young, right, I started, I was the youngest person in my class, I was used to being really young. And I stumbled, I’m going to say, stumbled across acupuncture. It was a Cosmas, either a cosmic joke, or it was divine intervention. And I’ll let you decide which one it was. My father was a patient of acupuncture and had some information around the house about acupuncture. And I would come home from studying English literature at St. Mary’s College, Southern Maryland. And Alex kind of lost, initially thought I was going to study physics.
And then I discovered physics was just calculus in the skies. And I wasn’t that interested in math. So I need some sort of skill. I thought I learned how to write and become an English major so that that’s where it was at the time. So I’m reading this information on acupuncture, and just become absolutely fascinated by the theory of it. Not so much helping people just the theory of it. And one of the things that caught my attention, my mom’s struggle with bipolar all her life, like hospitalized bipolar, serious, serious mental illness, and the doctors always say, Oh, it’s just simply a chemical imbalance in her brain. And once we rebalance these chemicals, she’ll be fine. Of course, she was never fine. The chemicals were never imbalanced.
Though in the back of my mind, I always had a healthy disrespect, let’s say, for the medical profession, and along comes acupuncture. And they’re basically saying that that ancient Chinese ancient Taoist idea that if you obey the laws of nature, you will be healthy. Okay, okay, that’s interesting, what are the laws of nature, so then they start expounding on them, right? And it’s all the stuff you talk about, over and over again, in your podcasts and your materials on your website and with your, with your patients.
It does you go to sleep on time, eat the right foods, eat the right foods in the right seasons, keep your emotions in check. Don’t let stress build up with you all these things, right? Just the basics. And this intrigued me to no end. Because I was a city boy, I grew up in Washington DC, right? We had cement for a front yard right on the sidewalk. We had a bus stop in front of our house. That’s our city we were and I happened to go to school and this lovely
state in it was a Montessori school. So there are these magnificent gardens with azaleas and rhododendrons and all kinds of wildlife. So I had this contrast between nature this idealized nature and my cement city sidewalk. So that’s what got me interested, the lack of effectiveness the medical community had with my mom, and that there’s another way. So I went to study acupuncture. And at first, they turned me away. They said You’re too young. I was still in college at the time when implied you’re going to be talking with very much senior people who are going to have types of illnesses that you’ve never even heard about and have no sympathy for. So Go away, come back in a year or two when you’ve lived. So I came back the next year.
And they said, you again, I said, Yes, I’m still interested in acupuncture. They said, okay, you’re still really young, and what behind the ear. So if you stay for an extra year, and so we can observe you in our clinic and make sure you’re not an idiot, we’ll go ahead and let you matriculate. But I didn’t quite get my financial part lined up that year. So now I come back to the third year, right. This is a quintessential Chinese apprentice story. So I come back the third year knocking on the door, and they go, Oh, it’s you again. And by that time, I had gotten married, we got married very young. So now I’m married. Now I’m three years older, and they say, okay, you’re clearly serious about acupuncture, we think we can work with you.
So that’s how I started my acupuncture career. And like you said, In the introduction, I was one of the first people in the country to get a master’s degree, back then people, you’d still run into people and they’d never heard of acupuncture. They say, what’s that? Now at least everybody knows it has something to do with needles, even though they may not know exactly what’s going on. Everybody’s heard of it. So fast forward. So I’m doing my acupuncture thing over the year learning about how people’s life and lifestyle and their pasts, lifestyle all intersected the moment, and how to use needles to get them unstuck get them to rebalance, help their bodies heal again. And we moved to Central New York, which happens to be a hotspot for Lyme disease.
And, like so many other communities, the medical, the established medical community is just behind, I don’t hold them accountable for it, because they’re just doing what their associations and their educational pipeline teach them to do. But there, they’re still behind the times at least now they’re starting to order tests. And even though the tests aren’t any good, anyway, so as I said, I better get in front of this. I had a friend of mine from school who’s an expert in Lyme disease, I started studying Lyme disease. The more I read, the more I was confused by it. So similar to you, I started a podcast and the podcast is called Live ninja radio. And I haven’t done a new episode in about a year, I stopped after about five years.
And that was because it became very clear dill, that there’s not one single answer for chronic Lyme disease, there’s no one protocol that’s going to do it. I started a local support group here for Lyme disease. And there are a couple of people in the support group who just really still struggle, and they have seen literally everybody who’s got a name and a book and been on television about Lyme disease, right? they’ve been to everybody and they’re still suffering. So like what, what’s the deal with this? Well, the deal is that Lyme disease, chronic fatigue, adrenal fatigue, mold exposure, environmental toxins, we could go down a list, it’s now it’s, we’re starting to hear the COVID, long haulers, right.
Things happen. Build up in a person system, right? We’re going back to the Chinese ideal, we stopped following the laws of nature, right? We get overwhelmed with what our lives put upon us what the world puts on us what nature puts on us, and we just collapse and we’re unable to rebuild where Humpty Dumpty was unable to rebuild without some serious attention. So instead of using my podcast, to try and find the person who’s got the right answer, it became clear that what we needed to do is needed to train medical detectives, we needed people who could look at the genetics, who could look at organic acids test who could look at hormone markers, who could look at blood markers, and begin to weave together an understanding of what’s happening for this bio-individual person in front of them, and then begin to make appropriate interventions.
And then to see what works and what doesn’t, and to have Plan B if things don’t work to have a plan B. And if Plan B doesn’t work, have a plan C, because if you just have one protocol, here’s my line protocol. And this is what you’re doing. These are the herbs and these are you do it. If things don’t work. You’re out of luck. You’re just you’re sunk. So we this idea, I love the way you said the medical detective. So now I started a platform called Beyond protocols and we are training functional medicine people like you. Matter of fact, I should invite you, we should bring you on. I’m going to give you a pass you can come and join us for it and check us out and see if you like it.
Dr. Joel Rosen: We need to continue the interview anymore. It’s served its purpose. I got that invite.
Mackay Rippey: We’re all we’re all done right? So But anyway, that’s not the purpose of being here just dawned on me it’s like Hey, cool, we haven’t even buddy you’d be on there. But anyway, so that’s the progression, right? So this idea that nature has a plan, nature has an organization to it, health has an organization to it.
And if we understand that we can Biohack ourselves, right, the Daoists were the original biohackers. And here we are 2000 years later. And they’re new insults, but they’re basically the same, they cause the same problem. And so much of it ends with fatigue. So I’ll stop my little soapbox. History there. Let you ask some questions.
Dr. Joel Rosen:
Lots of interesting feedback on that, McCain, thanks for sharing, I have a similar experience with my mom and bipolar as well. So perhaps that explains our gravitational pull towards each other takes one to know one in the sense. But as far as I would agree, what’s really great about what you said is sort of the mental software that you made sense to you, right from the very beginning head, I didn’t really want to do the acupuncture, but I was fascinated by the concept of it.
And in today’s day and age, with environmental triggers that are, are beyond what we even realize, and like our mentor, Bob Miller says, I think someday we’ll look back at this and say, whoops, you know, and understand that this has really been problematic, because when you have that perfect storm of these environmental triggers, overlapping with genetic potentials, that can create the break weak, weak links in the chains, and that would result in at this at the cellular level fatigue, where you can’t meet the demands daily. And your body decides, okay, well, here’s what we got to keep the lights on.
And we got to do this, but we’re not going to be able to do that. And I think that makes sense to people and I think that it’s the time has come where common sense, which is typically not so common, will be more accepted, right? Because Yeah, it makes sense that I’m a creature of the earth. And over the millennia, my DNA has evolved and become sophisticated. And that could work for me or against me. And ultimately, I have to understand how to harness that and not just reductionistic we say okay, I take this or take that and expect that to be a one-size-fits-all and hence the beyond protocol.
So yes, I agree with everything you said there, MacKay. So as far as to let’s dive into the line, because when I initially asked you to do this podcast, he’s like, well, what would you like to talk about? I like to talk about everything, you know, I want to talk about Lyme disease and how that overlaps with fatigue and how you become a medic. What a medical detective, gathers clues and Usual Suspects and, and, and then also like some things that aren’t on our radar yet in the traditional approaches, and even the alternative worlds like inflammatory cytokines and how we signal so why don’t we kind of just start from a one on one on that. In terms of Lyme disease, and how we go about becoming a metal, medical detective, and all the considerations we need to think about.
Mackay Rippey: Okay, before, I’m gonna do that, I’m going to tell the story first. Okay. As I think this is an important story, and the story illustrates how things have changed in a generation or two. And before COVID, where we are we have this wonderful outdoor theater, they do mostly opera, but some musicals called Glimmerglass, it’s, it’s, it’s really world-famous. And every year we go catch a matinee at Glimmerglass and we’re there we have a picnic lunch before there. So we’re sitting down at the picnic tables, and most of the people going to the opera are older than I am, right. It’s an older set. Let’s say that there’s a picnic table of people who grew up in the 50s.
And they’ve got their potato salad and potato chips and sandwiches, kind of almost you expecting like the jello mold to come out. It’s like that, that generation of people, they’re all fit. They all look healthy, right? And I’m looking over at their table and I’ve got basically my keto lunch. If I ate as they did, I would weigh 250 pounds and I’m, I like to say five, eight, but five eights being generous. I’m, I’m a short Italian man, right? That’s kind of the genes that came through my side. If I ate like that, I would weigh 250 pounds, I would be amazingly obese. So something has shifted in the culture and whether it’s my gut, whether that’s other exposures to things like glyphosate over time, who knows exactly what it is, but I can’t eat like that. My father can eat like that he lives nearby, we eat with him a lot. He can eat like that. And he’s fine. For the most part, right? If I like that my metabolism goes all to heck. So Lyme disease to tie this back to Lyme disease. So Lyme disease is one of these things that I think has been with us for a long time.
spire keyed infections have been a long time they, they dug up Otzi The Iceman in Austria, and he’s 5000 years old, or some are 3000 years old. And sure enough, he had Lyme disease buried inside him that they were able to find he had dead spire keys, so he had Lyme disease. So Lyme disease has been around forever. But why is it such a big deal now? And there’s there are a lot of things, why is mold such a big deal now, right? So what we’re dealing with are these chronic low-grade infections. And maybe it’s just that we’re living longer, right? Maybe that, you know, people used to die of the flu, and we don’t die of the flu anymore, we hang around longer. So it’s now these more low-grade slow-burning infections.
But as you said, these stealth infections and Lyme disease is just the poster child of this, this whole series of immune insults that the body has to deal with, you know, whether it’s a virus, again, whether it’s a mycotoxin, leftover from previous mold exposure, whether it’s a current mold exposure, you have mold colonized in your gut, or your lungs or your sinuses, right or wasn’t, some people get into like crayons, but those tend to kill you pretty quickly. So there are all kinds of things that affect our immune system, and, and trigger it chronically. And they set up a very similar set of symptoms. Matter of fact, if you kind of go through the mold, and mycotoxins and Lyme and viral, you’ll see a very similar set of symptoms that show up and one of the big ones is fatigue.
And why is that? Well, that’s because fundamentally, when we get sick, initially, the body shuts down and by the country. That’s interesting. The body doesn’t want to use energy with the mitochondria and wants to spend the energy on the immune system. And number two, the mitochondria produce a fair amount of antioxidants. And one of the ways that the body uses to clear invaders, pathogens is with oxidants, it creates oxidants, like superoxide, it produces nitric oxide, which is an oxidant and produces peroxynitrite. It produces things very similar to bleach, internally, hydrogen peroxide, so all these things do some damage. So if you pile this on top of what the body’s naturally already creating, it’s going to create unnecessary damage.
But what’s supposed to happen is the body then clear these radiate conquers the invader, it puts it back in its place, it removes it, or makes it go dormant again, and then we kind of go on our merry way. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be happening with a certain subset of people, right, the COVID long haulers, the chronic Lyme disease people, the people that you see in your practice that have the chronic fatigue, and often I really believe underneath it all, is some sort of insult to the immune system that got it triggered, and it can’t stand down. It can’t turn itself back off again.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, it’s a great, great, great answer. And the COVID, long haulers, the chronic Lyme, the chronic fatigue, they all have these threads of connections, which, which we’re going to get into here in a second. And ultimately, I do feel like if we can harness the danger response in the body and understand it, then we can come up with the medical detective solutions to be able to, again, I think this is an important preface in terms of, it’s not just going to be a slam dunk, Mrs. Jones, and you’re going to do this and that’s it. That’s all these are all the potentials that we figured out and isolated and customized for you.
But the real work begins when we establish the implementation of it and realize that there are so many moving parts and one of the main moving parts is the actual Goldilocks and not too much and not too little as well. Right. So we were contending with a lot of different things. Okay. And so as far as the actual what we know about what happens with stimulating of our immune response and the signaling of in our, in my world, the HPA axis and the releasing of cortisol to tame histamine. Why don’t we get into your world now in terms of okay We educate practitioners to become medical detectives? Let’s look at the line, epigenetic major factor, and kind of build out a roadmap from there. Does that make sense?
Mackay Rippey: I’ll do my best. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, and hope I can fulfill on the roadmap won’t get us lost along the way.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Here we go. Oh, actually, before we do that, just a real quick little question in terms of I asked a lot of my guests, especially in the world of nutrigenomics, and functional genetic interpretations, which basically means looking at our inherent genetic potentials to figure out how to customize a recovery program. What would be your 32nd explanation of saying of asking if, if it’s a valuable test?
Because a lot of doctors will say, like, you know, I don’t see why you need to understand that. And you all you need to do is, okay, take methyl Foley, because it’s an MTHFR thing like, how what do you say to people that have ignorance on the utility of a functional genomic test? And how indispensable or dispensable it is for your medical detective the answering the next question.
Mackay Rippey: So I have a little inside baseball, I know that you just interviewed my colleague, Emily Gibbler. And she’s the one who really, I got into this through Bob Miller, just like you did. And he was kind enough to take me under his wing a little bit and show me the ropes. And at one of his conferences, I heard Emily present. And Emily Gibbler, for those of you who don’t know, is just this amazing practitioner, who, because of the way her brain works, has synthesized and organized an understanding of functional genetics. And we’re going to distinguish that from a kind of normal genetics. So the way a doctor normally looks at a genetic test is they want to run a bunch of tests, they want to find out which specific variant equals a disease, and that’s what they’re happy with.
So, you know, a specific variant means that you’re more susceptible to celiac disease, a specific disease variant means that you’re more likely to have high cholesterol, a specific variant means that you’re more likely to have breast cancer, and that’s where they stop. It’s like, it’s they’re looking for this one-to-one correspondence. What we’re looking for in the functional world are patterns. And even, let’s say patterns upon patterns. And that’s what fascinated that’s, that’s how an acupuncturist, right, I’m an acupuncturist, you know, I hug trees, that’s what we do, right? We’re where we come from so far away from biochemistry, that it’s amazing.
But here I am in the biochem, I’ve got a foot in both worlds. And that because I recognize what Bob was doing, what Emily’s doing, what you’re doing joke, is that you’re looking for patterns in the genetics and the symptomatology and the test results. And looking for what these patterns indicate. So here’s another short story. As I’d mentioned, I went to St. Mary’s College in Southern Maryland, and we were lucky enough to be on the St. Mary’s River. So one of the gym classes was sailing. And anybody who didn’t take sailing for a gym credit was just brain-addled in my mind. So I’m taking sailing. And we’ve got this world-class sailor, who’s teaching us and he says, Can you see the wind?
And we all laugh, right? We said that no, it’s a wind invisible. He says, No, you can see it as a What do we what are you talking about? He says you can see its effects. said you need if you’re good sailor is looking around and seeing what the winds doing so we can take advantage of it. So you’re looking for the ripples on the water, you’re looking for the tail tails at the top of the mast, you’re looking for gusts of winds that are happening across on the other bank, and the trees on the other side of the river, things like that. So that’s what we’re looking for. With functional genomics with these functional tests.
We’re looking for the effects of the patterns that have been established inside the person. And while they’re very similar, there can be slight variants there and that helps us untie, you know what, what is causing the initial perturbation? Is it mold, toxins? Or is it something like an infection like Lyme disease, and it’s important to know because it gets better you need to remove the issue, right? If a person has a chronic infection, and you just Detox Detox, detox, you may get them a little better, but the infections rage on. Likewise, if somebody has toxicity, particular, and a genetic problem in a mold detox pathway and not all mycotoxins are detoxes the same way, so it’s important to know which one, let’s say glucuronidation pathway.
So if you have a problem with a glucuronidation pathway, and you have a mycotoxin, that needs to be cleared out through the glucuronidation pathway, and the person has Lyme disease, you can throw antibiotics at the Lyme disease forever. And you’ve heard the stories where people are on antibiotics seemingly forever, and they don’t get better, because it’s more of a toxicity issue. And that’s where reading these patterns that are seemingly invisible, right, until you understand that, no, we can look at the effects. So that’s what we’re doing with genomic nutrition. That’s what we’re doing with this genome functional genomic medicine. That’s what we’re doing with beyond protocols.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, awesome answer. And I’ll tell you, I had that epiphany just the other day because I am met with controversy from other doctors that say it’s not important. And I always say, It upsets me when you’re dogmatic in one sense, but also ignorant in the other and vehement about saying it’s not helpful, just say you don’t know, you know, I’ve always said that versus saying it’s not helpful. But you know, I’m like Forrest Gump shrimp like I, how many ways can I make shrimp, I listened to these over and over and over again, I got a harness my OCD in some kind of way.
So I listened to them over and over and over again, McKay and Bob Miller are training modules. And every time you hear it, you hear something new, right? Because, yes, you’ve commensurate to your knowledge, as the practitioner, you’ve seen one, one to one respect responses, and then you get this little nugget of Oh, my gosh, this brings everything together. And as far as one of the epiphanies I had is, it’s not so much the genetics itself, even if it is a functional assembly line that’s in 3d, and you have to understand substrates and inhibitors, and, and promoters, and genetic polymorphisms.
And all of the above. But ultimately, as you said, it’s the patterns, it’s the ability to understand how all of these cells are coordinated, and, and how to come up with a game plan. That’s feasible and precise, like, and most importantly, effective, right? Because these, these are really stealth, perfect storm, all of the variables, check on the list. And at the end of the day, you have debilitating chronic illness of people that can’t function and are just getting sicker and sicker and sicker. So, I agree with you.
And so I, the way I explained that genetic test is it just, it gives us information, how to help you the best, it’s not just to say, Hey, we got to reductionistic, we give you this supplement for this gene, we got to figure out lifestyle, mindset, you know, a dietary, and then if we can implement nutritional strategies, but I’m sure you’re in that same boat of, we have a slippery slope of giving nutritional strategies because we want to help them so much. And then the next thing you know, we look at what we’re taking. It’s like, this is ridiculous.
There are too many things going on here. So So McKay and with that, let’s kind of dive into Okay, now someone’s coming to see you. And you are this medical detective, you’ve been able to open up the blueprint of the predispositions and potentials. And you understand that they have suspected Lyme and they’re exhausted, they’re fatigued. They have typical Mo, they’ve tried antibiotics, and they need McKay to give them some hope, and some direction, what do you do from there?
Mackay Rippey: So it depends. So I have as an acupuncturist, I have a toolbox right there. There are various treatments that we have that I’m going to use kind of jump between ancient Chinese philosophy and kind of your understanding we have treatments that reset the cell danger response and also kind of reset some mental patterns that I think gets stuck. And so I hit those pretty hard, in the beginning, to see if we can’t just jump-start the person’s physiology. Like, let me give them tell the story.
I have this patient right now. And right now, our strategies were rebuilding her gut, but her gut is so sensitive that we have to go less than a crawl, right? We have to go. She can handle a little bit of a probiotic one or two days out of the week any more than that it just suffers tremendously with gut pain and bloating. So and she’s been on. She came to me initially with psychiatric symptoms, right? Major anxiety she even had a Couple of suicidal events, I mean, things were getting really, really bad. And with this all, she had major gut issues, she got to the point where she could only eat one certain salad out of core life, she would go to Coralife at lunchtime, get her salad, eat some for lunch, and then eat some for dinner.
And it was just like one single salad like they knew her by name. They had her stuff ready for her. And that’s all she ate for about a year and a half. So imagine that your entire life food-wise is down to one menu choice. And in a restaurant, it’s just it was just it’s mind-blowing. Right. So there’s clearly a gut piece to this. So after treating for a little bit, it becomes clear to me I suspect Lyme disease, I said we need to start treating you for Lyme disease. And she’s kind of onboard. Her family definitely wasn’t on board. But they took her to a local Lyme literate doctor. So the line letter doctor got the test and kind of took over treatment. So I lost control of where this was going. So she goes under the wing of the line litter physician, and they give her antibiotics, increasing variety, and increasing intensity up to she had a PICC line inserted, right all the way.
And she’s doing antibiotics now for nine months. And she doesn’t get better. In fact, she gets maybe a little bit worse. And her main complaint is fatigue. She is sleeping near 20 hours a day, right. I’m sure you’ve heard the story before. So she’s finally got to the point where she and her family have decided that they’ve done everything they can do with the Lyme literate physician and no knock on this physician. She’s like, she’s got a certain toolbox. She’s got her protocol, she went through them. But it didn’t work for this person. Right? Because of a lie in this case. It’s my belief. Do I know for a fact? No, I don’t know for a fact. But lime was not the driving factor. Was it a complicating factor? Yes, but it wasn’t the driving factor. And I would not have treated her with antibiotics because her gut was such a mess Anyway, now her gut is a mess time 1000. Right. So the before we can even begin to dress anything else, we’ve got to get her digesting food and getting hurt system, her immune system calms down from the inside out.
At this point, if she does have Lyme, right, we can get into the argument of isn’t does Lyme ever go away? I don’t know. Nobody knows for 100% sure. But it’s not the primary factor anymore, right? That’s changed. It’s been at least suppressed by those months and months of antibiotics that she did the right antibiotics for Lyme. But she didn’t do anything to heal this woman’s gut. So now we’re stuck with this gut thing. And so that’s the type of detective work that we’re doing is like what, what, right now is the main issue, what’s going to move the needle the most? Is it the infection? Is it recovering your gut? Is it detoxification?
You know, is it a little bit of all of the above? And how and then like you said so brilliantly the Goldilocks, how hard can we push you? Because that’s often a trial and error, right? Do you have an idea we started what I thought was really really gently with her and she was okay? Like we’re starting with a product called he changed his name it was restored Zack Bush’s product, as they call it.
Dr. Joel Rosen: I Forget what it’s called now but you’re an ionic.
Mackay Rippey: or by ion or whatever it is. Anyway, so I said Look, I don’t even the normal dose of this is a teaspoon. I think it’s either teaspoon or tablespoon that I want you to dip the end of the spoon in and just lick the end of the spoon to start with like that’s how gentle we’re going with her. Right. And so she graduated to one drop. Haha. So it is so now she’s doing one drop a day which is still you know if you think of the full doses, a teaspoon or tablespoon whatever that is. That’s a bunch of drops on I’ma drop that is it’s not one. So she’s on less than an infant’s dose of this stuff, right?
She is on a convalescent dose of this stuff. she accidentally one day squirted juice using a pump, squirted, like three drops into her mouth, and said, and what the heck, what harm can it do? That knocked her out for about two weeks with gut distension gut pain, Misery. And then once your gut goes or psychiatric issues come back, she gets even more fatigue. It’s just a total wreck.
So on one hand, it’s like okay, we’re pretty clear. Now, what when your gut goes wonky, you go wonky, so we need to take care of your gut first. But on the other hand, she lost two weeks, just because he added two drops of this really benign stuff. It’s not even really a probiotic, right. It’s just some fulvic acid, right. It’s just some really basic minerals. There’s, there’s nothing in that stuff. yet. That’s how sensitive these patients can be. It’s, it’s incredible, and most doctors, right and even most clinicians don’t have the patience and the capacity to deal with failure over and over again, to help the He’s patient, but it takes a certain mindset, it takes a certain amount of, I’m gonna call it wisdom, but the experience just to be able to sit, stay calm, calm the patient down and move slowly, slowly.
So you can help them and stick to the basics and not get distracted. Because you know, you want to race to the finish line, but healing her gut is going to be a year-long process, it’s not going to happen. You know, some people, you give a probiotic, and they feel better in a couple of weeks. It’s like, Oh, thanks, Doc, I feel great. Those aren’t the people we’re talking about here. And those aren’t the people who are really stuck with adrenal fatigue, right? Those we’re talking about the people who’ve got sensitive systems.
Dr. Joel Rosen:
Yeah, to a couple of things that that I would like to just summarize that with I we don’t see the easy clients anymore. It’s kind of like Aquaman that puts out that beacon and brings in these different fish and these fish are more complicated than they’ve ever been, I would love to have just taken the probiotic and feel better. The second thing I think is really important that you mentioned is we are I use this analogy a lot and feel free to steal it, or use it and read take it but we are golf pros that are not teaching people that have never swung a club before, that’d be easier, they’re swinging so poorly that we have to get rid of that swing.
And there’s all in this analogy, it’s not even the swing, it’s the mental connection to the swing like I know, it’s my swing, and I’m married to my swing, and it identifies that my swing and unlearning that mentally. And that’s where you talked about resetting the brain in the limbic center, which is really key. And then the last thing that I would say, and then not only fixing the broken swing, but you know now teaching that person how to swing effectively and, and so there are two processes there. And then the last thing I would say, which is a real critical pearl for anyone listening, and you’ve I think about Beth O’Hara, when I hear about this in terms of just very sensitive mass cell stimulated clients where even a little bit of fairy dust is enough to blow them out of the water. And so what I say in that instance, is you have really sick cells, your your your voltage gates, and your action potentials and your depolarization of the cell is because it’s sick and leaking calcium in there, it’s less positive, it takes fewer stimuli to cause that action potential. And that causes you to be very hypersensitive or exceed your metabolic capacity very quickly.
And the analogy would be if I touch your skin, and you jump off, it’s because your body your cells are sick, and you don’t require a lot of stimuli to overstimulate and reach that problem. So the clinical plan that is, what you said is I get a lot of clients that will say, well, it helped me in the beginning, and then it no longer helped you hear that a lot. Or it blew me out of the water and I just threw the baby out with the bathwater, but there’s no starting slow enough.
And I think that’s a really important caveat and a cool tool because a lot of people I’m sure you found are so close yet so far with being in the right arena. But it would have been something as what they as benign as doing a half a cap and even that was too much. So yeah, if you’re hitting stagnant points and you’re listening to this, maybe think about really putting fairy dust on your food or whatever it is that you’re taking. So does that make sense? MacKay?
Mackay Rippey: Yeah, absolutely. The two points are that the first one is there’s a famous and I can’t remember the name of it, tennis Training Center in Siberia, right. And like Anna Kournikova came out there, some other famous Russian people came out of there. And it’s like this just abandoned warehouse, right? It’s ugly, it’s gross. There’s not much going on there. But they trained world-class tennis players. And every single lesson doesn’t matter if you just walked in the door. Or if you want to the pro tour, they start with what Phantom swings. So they practice swinging an imaginary racket they even put the racket down. So that’s the whole point is like we get attached to, you know, this is the protocol that got me to this point.
And, you know, what do we know is it serving sometimes you have to put everything down or most everything down, you can always add it back in. But what got you to a certain point may not get you the whole way through. Like if you’re climbing a mountain you can take so much equipment to the base camp, but you can’t carry that to the summit. You know, you’ve got to change your gear, you got to change your attitude to make it to the summit. So that’s point number one and then point number two was refeeding syndrome and Another friend of mine, a chronic Lyme person, did an amazing job healing yourself.
She has a master’s degree in nutrition and was just able to dig through constantly over years and years and years and years and years. And one of the main things that helped her climb back into health are being in a healthier state, what she discovered refeeding syndrome. So, and this was really known after the concentration camps in World War Two. So what happened is the army would come in, they’d see all these starving people and say, Here have a meal and it would kill them. Their bodies were too weak to eat. Right? So then they started to figure Okay, how can we begin to refeed these emaciated really weak people so we don’t overwhelm them. And we can have the same thing happen, we’re not emaciated to that state, right.
We don’t look like skeletons. But our metabolisms our mitochondria are that week, where too much of a certain nutrient can just wipe you out metabolically and hurt you, where normally would be a nutrient it becomes a poison. So what you say is, is so very important. And then we forget the basics. Like what, you know, what, what has become depleted after being sick for three years, five years, 10 years? You know, are you are some of these conditionally essential amino acids missing or low? Are we low in potassium? Right? Nobody, nobody gets enough potassium. We don’t even talk about potassium.
One, some people think we’re not actually so much sodium excess, as we’re potassium deficient, and we just got our potassium up, we would be fine. So little minerals like electrolytes like that. And again, you can’t just pile it on there, cuz you’ll kill people. So you have to reintroduce these things, remineralize slowly, slowly, like you said, a grain at a time.
Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if we look back to farming practices, and depletion of our soils and mineral content, I think that is as good a place as any to really start and not be, you know, too, too problematic, given the tenants of as low as you can go, right. So let’s say now someone’s come to see you. And they understand the idea of relearning how to swing properly or unlearning how to swing in properly.
And in this case, you’re stressing the importance of the microbial reclaiming the flag of Mackay and planting it in your microbe again, and getting it back. And that will take a lot of time. Are there things that we do simultaneously? Are there? Like, actually one of the things now says we open up the genetic profile? And we see that there’s this chronic, like, you mentioned, inflammatory response? How does your medical detective now take the baton and move to the next relay?
Mackay Rippey: So once we’ve got a little bit of a base to stand on a little bit of solid ground, a little bit of success, and feeling okay, there may be some hope here. That’s when you begin to Okay, what’s the next layer? What’s the next nutrient that’s we’re probably deficient in? And we can look at that in terms of pathways, right is are the genetic variants that are piling up and say, for example, somebody can’t manufacture glutathione well enough, or their cell membranes maybe not as strong as and coherent as they need to be. Because the way they deal with fatty acids or digesting fatty acids, or bringing them into the body aren’t good enough, or they’re some solid carriers, right, some nutrition carriers that aren’t working, as well, as they said. So maybe we need to add in a little bit extra, even beyond what we would normally do for this person. So we begin to look there. And that’s going to vary from person to person, right?
Genetics is the framework of the puzzle. you know, if my wife does puzzles all the time, she starts by putting the frame together, right? Find the four corners, find the edge pieces, put them together, and then that, that gives you an idea that allows you to build the puzzle within the frame. And that’s what genetics are doing. Genetics aren’t the entire story, but they allow you to make sense of everything else, it speeds up the process of building the puzzle, and that’s why you need that those genetics. So that’s, you know, that’s what we do. So, you know, for example, with my client that I told you about, who’s got the psychiatric problems in the gut, we’re looking at adding in some cysteine now, and just it’s very small amounts and because her cysteine pathway is not great.
Her ability to make cysteine in the body uses the state of the body is not good, and so her glutathione production is not good. So we’re doing that and The other thing, let’s and let’s veer into with this, let’s I want to veer into nitric oxide. Because it’s a, it’s very much an obsession of mine. And I’m gonna sound like a crazy person. Because I see nitric oxide as the hub of a lot of processes and involved in a lot of processes so much so that it sounds like nitric oxide does everything. And intellectually I know that doesn’t happen. But kind of emotionally. I mean, like, I’m all in with nitric oxide. So if I sound like a crazy person, just know that that’s just my particular passion.
And I see everything through the lens of nitric oxide, I believe. Let me back up one second here. So here’s the big picture explanation. So they’re complex problems to solve, right? So nutrition, somebodies health, and what we’re talking about is a complex problem. Multiple solutions could work, some of them better than others, and some of them terrible, right? Like the antibiotics for my patient was a terrible solution. Right? It didn’t help her at all. Right? Not a good solution.
So these, there’s in mathematics, you solve a problem like this, there are multiple solutions. So one of the classic problems is what’s the shortest path for a used car salesman to travel to every capital city in the nation, right, all 50 capitals? So there are multiple different paths you could take. But what’s the shortest, right? So it turns out that there are a bunch of
answers that are pretty close to each other. Right. So nitric oxide is one of these solutions, that’s a pretty good solution. For a lot of problems. It might not be it’s not the only one, but it’s a really good one. So that’s me, that’s my passion for nitric oxides. But take that with a grain of salt. Nitric oxide is a very small molecule, one nitrogen, one oxygen. And it’s it. It’s an oxidant. But it’s not, it’s not super reactive, there are other more dangerous oxidants in the body, but it has a particular affinity for various molecules throughout the body. So not only does it kind of break down kill viruses directly, but it also is a signaling molecule.
And that’s what makes it so important. So you can think of nitric oxide as another cytokine, even though it’s not directly, and it signals within the cell itself. So what’s an autocrine signaler, it signals to cells around the cell where it is produced, so it’s a Peregrin. And then it can even be carried with other molecules throughout the body. So it becomes an endocrine signaler as well. So this little tiny molecule is affecting your entire body. It uses the enzymes that make nitric oxide uses an amino acid called arginine. And arginine is conditionally essential. And what that simply means is that for the most part, we’ve got enough, but there are certain cases where we don’t have enough.
And I think one of the things that happen with our mass cell friends and with the chronic fatigue people is we can no longer produce enough nitric oxide at the physiological level. So one interesting thing that happens with the nitric oxide synthase, right, the enzyme that makes the nitric oxide, if it doesn’t have the right raw materials in the right conditions in the cell, it