Mimi:
Welcome to the Heal podcast for all things related to Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. I'm Mimi MacLean, mom of five, founder of Lyme 360 and a Lyme Warrior. Tune in each week to hear from doctors, health, practitioners, and experts to hear about their treatments, struggles and triumph, to help view on your healing journey. I'm here to heal with you. This week's podcast is brought to you by Air Oasis. As a Lyme Warrior, I know how important it is to have clean air in the home. I've been using a room air purifier, but recently had to purchase an all home unit to combat mold issues throughout our house. I did some research and found a great company called Air Oasis. Their air purifiers help fight bacteria, viruses, and mold. So if you have not put in an air purifier into your home, go to Lyme360.com/airoasis. They carry room units as well as entire home units.

Mimi:
Welcome back to the Heal Podcast. This is your host, Mimi MacLean. And today we have Dr. Kristine Gedroic. She is a doctor I have been seeing for the past year and have really enjoyed getting to know her and her practice. And her treatment has been instrumental in my healing. Dr. Gedroic is located in New Jersey and she spent over a decade recovering thousands of patients with chronic illness, including all types of autoimmune disease, Lyme disease, neurological conditions, and more. She is also an author of a book called A Nation of Unwell, which has been modded by Deepak Chopra, Mehmet Oz, Dr. Weil and many other health experts. Dr. Gedroic graduated from Harvard University and medical school from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. And I am so excited to have her on today to talk about her practice and also her Lyme journey that she had. To get my detox for Lyme checklist, go to Lyme360.com/detoxchecklist.

Mimi:
Dr. Gedroic, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. There is so much I want to talk to you about, and I know we could talk for hours about everything. But I would love for you to just touch on your story. I know you were highly affected by Lyme and mold, and that's what made you for focus on your practice with this and what you've learned. You are definitely one of the smartest doctors I've ever met and it's hard for me to follow you sometimes. So anything you can do to help make it palpable for those of us who aren't scientists, that would be great.

Dr. Gedroic:
So my history is very unusual. I have had absolutely Lyme disease, I had mold illness. I had almost everything I treat at some level. The things that I've had to walk through kind of shock me at times when I look back at it. But the odd thing about it was none of that was really my story. So none of it stuck. I did get better, I did get through it. When I look back, I found my way luckily the things at the time that I didn't even understand why or how they were healing me. Now, I understand it as I've studied healing and I've studied recovery. But what really happened for myself was that I was the product of big pharma. I was a very allergic child, grew up with a lot of animals, had allergies to dust and lived on shots and inhalers and medication all the time and prednisone.

Dr. Gedroic:
And I truly believe that those medications allowed me, and they did, allowed me to live a very healthy or seemingly healthy normal life. So I went like that to medical school and then settled on a plastic surgical combined residency, which is challenging to get into. And I was very proud of my surgical days. I was at Cornell when I started and two years into the program, I started having probably what anybody would start to encounter if they were truly taking care of themself in the worst way possible. I don't even think I drank water. I think I only drank coffee and diet Coke. I didn't even know the value of nutrition or taking care of myself. I thought of myself as young, healthy invincible working a hundred hours running a marathon, I would go run 12 miles on my day off type of thing and nothing was going to take me down.

Dr. Gedroic:
And then I started breaking basically is what happened? I started getting headaches. They went from intermittent migraines to chronic daily headaches that were unresponsive to medications. My stomach started to break down. I got ulcers, they had medicines for that. It was one thing after another. And one of the cocktails and medications just blew me out, and ultimately I ended up in the ICU and I was just leveled from no one fault of any one person or any one thing. It was just the way the universe treated me at the time. And so in my recovery, I really was left without, if you will say it this way, the standard of care had not worked for me. So I was forced to look elsewhere and I was kicking and screaming at the idea that that was even a possibility. I ended up seeing a holistic physician who had 20 years ago now, the term was holistic.

Dr. Gedroic:
Now the needle's moved quite a bit. We moved to there's functional medicine, there's integrative. We were really practicing precision medicine in our practice. But he steered me towards wellness and it didn't take him more than one visit to get the real understanding of where he had to start. And so I slowly recovered. And then through that journey, I recalibrated my course to go back because I was dazzled. Think about the simplicity of the state. I was literally dazzled by the fact that my body had truly healed and recovered. And I had not been taught that. I was taught all these wonderful, fancy things. I ran the ICU, or was an intern in the ICUs in New York hospitals for over a year. Had plenty of critical care. But at the end of the day, to truly be part of spontaneous healing and see my body actually recover and how much better I truly else was something quite novel. And that was what sparked my interest in learning what had actually happened and starting to teach or move forward in my career in a different way.

Mimi:
That's great. Now, did you, at that point, been diagnosed with Lyme and the mold and all that or was that later on?

Dr. Gedroic:
It was later on. The Lyme was that actually between two of my pregnancies, believe it or not.

Mimi:
Okay.

Dr. Gedroic:
And I was challenged with what to do, and I was extremely healthy when I was pregnant in terms of how I felt. And it was a very big step away from... Because at the time I was practicing with a much more elaborate antibiotic schedule where we would pulse and do rotation and maybe two or three at the same time, which is standard in the Lyme community. Once recognized, it's often treated with these more aggressive schedules. And I just felt that that wasn't in line with what I wanted for my pregnancy. So I did it more holistically, if you will. And gratefully, I don't know if I got lucky, I don't know what happened, but I have three beautiful, healthy children today and I stayed healthy through the pregnancy. But that was a pretty big departure philosophically at that time in my life.

Mimi:
I've been to quite a few doctors for Lyme and everyone, for the most part, says the same thing, like you have to build up your gut, you have to make sure your detox pathways are open, you have to go after mold, you have to after parasites before you can even start at the Lyme. What makes your practice different? What are you doing differently than other doctors that are treating Lyme?

Dr. Gedroic:
So I don't know, I can glean what others are doing, because many of my are dear are friends and colleagues and we all share ideas and we talk. I suppose I know what they're doing from that experience. I can tell you that in my history, my practice of Lyme and other complex chronic illnesses was very much spokes on a wheel, which is how you just touch on, meaning you go after this, then you go after that, then you go after this and everybody might have a slightly different order. One might think it's this first and that second, et cetera, et cetera. But there was a little bit of an epiphany several years ago now, I remember when it was, it was in February. I forget the year exactly, but it hit me and it came because I was studying the microbiome.

Dr. Gedroic:
I was studying pathogenic biofilms, and I was studying the communication between the organisms and the way in which they are either synergizing or symbiotic in growth or antagonistic. Everything sort of gelled in a more three dimensional manner, of actually how our bodies are put together and what is needed in what order to help them recover. And so from that point, it's not been as much spokes on a wheel, I would say it isn't spokes on a wheel. It's actually, it's a more comprehensive approach. So the salient parts to that approach are to ensure that the cells are healthy. So the detoxification, restoration of the mitochondria, all of these things that you'll hear in the Lyme circle is critical. What's now known, which wasn't very well known at that time, if mitochondria aren't recovered, your immune system cannot respond properly. So they're the governors of our immunity and our inflammation.

Dr. Gedroic:
And by getting the mitochondria on board early, you're going to get a much more predictable outcome in terms of whatever infections you're trying to resolve. And the other piece of it is the way the microbiome is set up. Mold piece, we'll talk about, I'm sure we've got more to say about that. But that is huge. Comes into play with Lyme disease all the time, whether it's toxic molds or the candida organism's response to the presence of Lyme, which is very antagonistic. And then the role parasites play in creating some level of immune suppression. And so there's a program, if you will, because that's what I could see. And then by following this kind of order to correcting the immunology of the host, you allow the body to heal, recover, and be strong enough immunologically to get over Lyme for good. That's the real key thing.

Mimi:
Yep. And the mitochondria, how you look at it, is a little bit different, I think than other doctors. I know one of our first appointments after you tested for me and you looked at my mitochondria, no one had ever told me this, like the whole plastics. That kind of blew my mind that you had said, "Oh, you have some plastic in your body." You assumed I had breast implant and I didn't. And so that's why we were thinking and racking our brain, what could be causing this high load or what was making my mitochondria not working. You knew it was something to do with plastic. And that's when we figured out I had a plastic tooth from when I extracted my root canal. So how did you figure that out? How did you know her mitochondria is not working and this is probably why?

Dr. Gedroic:
So what isn't very well understood is that a lot of mitochondrial inflammation is being generated by toxins. So they can interrupt the oxidative phosphorylation chain. And it's really cool science. It goes back you the cell danger response, and this is Dr. Naviaux's work out of UCSD, who's a mitochondrial specialist and looking at the impact of toxins. So toxins have a charge. This is pretty fascinating evolutionary science. So when we engulfed mitochondria hundreds of millions of years ago, we did that in order to protect us from oxidative stress. So oxygen is a very oxidizing molecule and it's very dangerous for humans. So mitochondria, it's very helpful, but it's also very dangerous. So it's a very, very, very tight risk-benefit ratio. We needed to breathe and we use free radicals based on oxygen in order to kill organisms. But it can backfire if those free radicals are not reduced.

Dr. Gedroic:
So this is a very fine tipping point of how much free radical is good and how much is bad. And the mitochondria are very sensitive to the presence of anything that changes the oxidation state or the gradient of oxygen within the cell. So hundreds of millions of years ago, there weren't toxins around. So that was all coming from infection. And most of the infections would change that gradient and then the mitochondria would send up flare signals and stop our advanced cellular mechanics, and the host would go into a dormancy phase. What we're finding now in the work of Dr. Naviaux and others that are looking at this is that that dormancy phase, we're never coming out of it because the toxins are just hitting us hard and the mitochondria are being impacted by that. So you need to provide nutrition to help mitochondria heal, detoxification is necessary, and that really has to go alongside any other. It's not hard for people to do this, even on their own. It's not an impossible science, just a matter of the knowledge to know that it's there in the background all the time.

Mimi:
For anybody who's at home and who don't have the ability to either see a doctor, what's the best way for them to detox and try to get their mitochondria working if they don't have the means or aren't able to travel to a doctor? Is there something they can start doing from home to do that?

Dr. Gedroic:
So any form of detoxification is going to be successful at helping. It's a matter of how much is needed. But anything that increases sweating, saunas, activity, if they're strong enough to exercise. If they're not strong enough to exercise, then sauna would be a great way. The challenge is not overdoing it. And this ties now back to the mineral base. So when we sweat, we detoxify. That's nature's way of helping us. But many chronically ill depleted patients don't have enough minerals to allow their bodies to sweat properly.

Mimi:
Right. So you have to make sure you supplement.

Dr. Gedroic:
Yes. So you both supplement. And honestly, the single change that every person should be able to do is to drink the proper form of water. Sounds like the simplest thing in the world, but water is supposed to not only be clean, so filtered. A lot of people are aware that the importance of filtering water, they don't realize what's missing then from filtered water is the minerals that have to get added back. So what I tell patients to do is to try to find the highest quality mineral water that they can afford. So Icelandic, Fiji, we drink Mountain Valley. True mineral waters, if you look on the label, have a reported calcium and usually magnesium content. So you know there's actually minerals in that wall.

Dr. Gedroic:
And then just getting that back into the body will start allowing the body to detoxify more successfully. A lot of the natural cooking herbs, cilantro, is touched on a lot, powerful detoxifier. It will pull heavy metals. And a lot of people that don't inherently like cilantro, they actually have a lot of heavy metals and the body is protecting itself to say, "Hey, don't eat too much of that because you're going to feel really sick from it." And then when we work on them and get their numbers looking better, then they'll develop a taste for cilantro because it returns.

Mimi:
Anthony from Medical Medium loves cilantro, right?

Dr. Gedroic:
Yes, amazing.

Mimi:
So can people also just put the drops in, the mineral drops?

Dr. Gedroic:
Definitely. Absolutely. You can do drops. There's plenty of over the counter. I love food based supplements, so MegaFood is a great brand of food based supplements. They make a mineral product. There's a lot of things people can find their way to that provide a lot of natural healing that can go alongside of whatever program they're doing. It doesn't have to be a natural program, it could be an antibiotic based program. But cellular health is very different from infections, and they're two separate things and they really should come together.

Mimi:
Okay. So the second thing I have learned from you is how important or integral probably mold is if you're not getting better. I would assume the people that come to you that are chronic, you're not the first doctor they've gone to and they're pretty sick. So do you see it's usually the mold component that's preventing them from getting better from a traditional treatment for Lyme?

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah, this is huge. There's a few different things to talk about here. So one is the idea that if we're living with toxic molds, those could be even things like black mold, which are clearly toxic for the human organism, or an abundance of friendly molds that are just too much for our organism. So those are two different scenarios, but they both can feed back on the same inflammatory pathway. So a lot of this knowledge has been put forth in the scientific community as recent as 2010, when the NextGen sequencing platforms were able to identify mold or fungal genetic elements from the biome. This is very critical because the bacterial elements were only discovered in the Human Microbiome Project between 2006 and let's say 2012. And in that discovery process, we realized that not only bacteria were living in our gut, 37 trillion. That's like a shocking number considering before that in 2005, we didn't understand we had any infection.

Dr. Gedroic:
And then the discovery that there are up to 66 strains of friendly molds that can inhabit us, many of us know the candida species, aspergillus, penicilliums. There's other molds that live on the skin. And so these can all be good. But then we can be otherwise inhabited by toxic molds that we get exposed to in our home or a place that we're living for some time. And the very, very interesting relationship between Lyme and molds is in a couple ways. One is that there is a specific fatty acid that's made by molds in order to help produce their, what's called filamentous form, which is their growth form, a little bit like a mushroom versus a spore.

Dr. Gedroic:
So the idea that their growth phase is very inflammatory and now has been shown in the literature to be present within the gut of people that have a lot of inflammatory diseases. This feeds Lyme. So if you have a mold issue, even if it's as simple as having taken too many antibiotics and you have a candida problem, you're really never going to be able to fully get rid of Lyme because you're going to have an internal source that's continuing to feed to the Borrelia, If that makes sense. It's like this symbiotic situation. And I always say, we're never going to get control of the Lyme entirely until we get the mold piece really settled and then you can start to see it change.

Mimi:
Yeah. It's amazing how, like now with my Lyme, I never noticed this, but I am so sensitive. I can go into a hotel room and smell it immediately. I'm like, "Don't you smell that?" And my husband's like, "What are you talking about?" But I can smell everything and anything. I'm so sensitive. And so the Lyme caused that?

Dr. Gedroic:
There's a couple things. It's probably the mold, quite frankly. There's so many different answers to the question. It's actually kind of fun to think about why that might be. So it could be as simple as you simply have a more sensitive olfactory.

Mimi:
But I never used to, it only got that way once I had the Lyme. So it's like, which caused first? Was it the mold that caused the Lyme or the Lyme that caused the mold? I don't know which comes first, right? The chicken or the egg.

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah. Well, the other interesting piece is that the brain grabs on and associates trauma with certain events, with anything, even biological principles. So if the smell of mold equated to some form of traumatic illness, if you will, you're going to be hypervigilant about sensing it again because your body, at some level, is going to remember that experience and not be happy about it.

Mimi:
Interesting.

Dr. Gedroic:
I have the same thing. I'm like the canary in the coal mine. I have to go into the hotel room first because he'll just wait at the front desk and be like, "Let her figure it out, and if we have to move rooms, I don't want to have to unpack."

Mimi:
Yeah. I'm the same way. I can smell as soon as I walk into a lobby. I'm like, "Uh oh, this isn't going to go well."

Dr. Gedroic:
I know, I know. But you know what? The nice thing is that, and I'll say this for your listeners because I was just crushed by mold at one point, I live a normal life. I can go to conferences now and I know there's mold in the conference room and I'm okay. I know enough to know how to live a healthy life. I'll go out for a run or go out and get fresh air afterwards and have certain supplements I could take. And I don't feel maybe great after a few days of having to do that. I don't feel perfect, but I rebound and I feel good enough. It's not disabled my life permanently.

Mimi:
How would people go about testing if they have mold? Are they just doing a blood test to see for mycotoxins? What's something that they could ask their doctor for?

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah, yeah. That's one of the problems. There isn't a great laboratory assessment through the standard labs that's completely covered by insurance. But there are some things that could get done that might tell you. So any patient could ask for candida antibodies, right? And certain candida antibodies just really shouldn't be there. If they're there, it suggests candida has gotten into the blood. How did that happen? Well, it's supposed to be in the gut. So if it got into the blood, there's the suggestion that there's a more invasive form in the body. The way that a lot of this knowledge actually started with myself is we started checking Cladosporium antibodies. Now that's an environmental mold. We will all get exposed to Cladosporium. It comes in, in the fall and the spring when the mold counts are high.

Dr. Gedroic:
But when you think about it, Labcorp for instance, can run an IgG titre on it. How does it get into the bloodstream? It's not supposed to get into the bloodstream. And the reason it gets into the blood is if there's some kind of a leaky barrier surface, the mucosal surface. Those patients are at higher risk for having had something go on in their past or currently. And that was initially one of the things that we followed. It was not a great marker to follow through treatment, but it was actually a very good marker to initiate the thought around mold being a bigger issue for this patient. But it's something every patient can certainly go to their doctor and ask for.

Mimi:
Is there anything that someone could take at home, if it's garlic or oregano oil, like we talked about, that assuming they either have mold that it's going to help or it won't hurt anyway so you might as well just, like taking garlic's not going to hurt you?

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah.

Mimi:
But if you do have mold, it's going to help you. Is there anything you would suggest? I've also heard grape seed extract.

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah. Grape seed might, but grapefruit seed for sure can help.

Mimi:
That's what I meant to say, grapefuit seed.

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah. That one came around, around the cystic forms of Lyme initially. But what it found when you think about it, cyst spores, probably similar physiology. And so that's very good. That has a liquid form to it, so that can be helpful for people that don't want to be taking a lot of tablets. Oil of oregano, excellent antifungal, antibiotic. I love that. It's a great place to start. And people that are too unstable, too depleted to even handle a real serious course of care, we'll often start them on an oil of oregano extract just to get the biome, or the microbiome, a little bit healthier in the early weeks of treatment. And then we start treating with more stronger potent herbal formulas or medications whatever's necessary.

Dr. Gedroic:
So I love that. And then garlic is wonderful. It's very interesting, a lot of these botanicals, it's coming through in the literature that they are down regulating the candida growth phases. So I touched on that a minute ago, but the idea with fungi, or when I say this, there's some words that are being used interchangeably, they're not technically interchangeable, but they're generally the same, is that it's a biphasic organism. So there's a spore state that's quiet and very anti-inflammatory and then there's this aggressive filamentous state that's inflammatory and associated with autoimmune processes and often the trigger of autoimmune things.

Mimi:
So if people take one of those three herbs or oils and they feel worse, does that typically mean that they probably have the mold?

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. If they tell you, "I can't tolerate that, I feel horrible, nauseous" or blah, blah, blah, that's because their body is fighting off. So if we have no other way of going about it, then the simplest answer is well, work up slowly. Like okay, fine, you can't take the whole capsule. So open it and take a little bit today and don't take any tomorrow and take a little bit the next day and just be patient and get yourself up slowly because eventually the body will work it out.

Mimi:
The other thing that we touched on a little bit before when we were talking, which I would love to talk about now is what you felt was instrumental in your healing is talking about the emotional component to it.

Dr. Gedroic:
Yes. That isn't highlighted enough. And having now worked for so many years in this complex disease space and having to be part of so many people's journeys toward wellness, it is really profound how much grief and negative thoughts and holding onto judgment and anger and whatever you want to throw in that waste basket of all the negative vibrations attached to emotion, if you will, is going to hold anybody back from healing because healing requires positive frequency. Laughter, that's why they say, my boards, I had to take integrative boards. One of the true therapies listed in my textbook for people suffering from autoimmune conditions is laughter, believe it or not. Now the reason for that is these positive emotions bring a healing energy to the cells and the gut responds and lowers its inflammation as a result, which then goes out to the systemic circulation.

Dr. Gedroic:
So it's very interesting how this is truly at the heart of the mind-body connection. And it's very hard for people, when we're healing somebody, the realization of loss, of loss of time, of loss of relationships, of loss of career. My entire career was whipped away from me. I was a surgeon until I was not. I was told I wasn't able to be a surgeon anymore. To let go of that was a big thing. And to embrace a new path, another big thing. These are all huge milestones. But if we aren't able to make these emotional transitions, the illness is going to get locked with our emotional lock. It's the same concept.

Dr. Gedroic:
So I am working often with patients in a very, what I will call sacred space to help them see all of that in a very divine way because the universe doesn't make mistakes, whether it's universal or in a religious context, there's other energies out there that are influencing us. And once we can start to see that, it can help us see down the road a little bit and understand how these illnesses came to pass and how we can get past them, ultimately.

Mimi:
Is there anything that you, either for yourself or that you recommend to your patients, if it's a program or journaling or a specific kind of breath work or talking to shaman? I don't know. Is there a particular path that you would recommend people to get there?

Dr. Gedroic:
There are lots, there are lots. And a lot of it has to do with what truly speaks to a patient. So people that are very needing to document and want to take notes and use lists to keep them organized and check boxes, that's a patient that probably journaling is a great solution for because it can provide a relief and an outlet for what might be anxiety, otherwise, if they're not putting something down on paper. Everybody's grounded by nature, but nature speaks differently to different people.

Dr. Gedroic:
So for me, grounding and spending time in nature, having my shoes off and really just observing flora, fauna, animal, for me been more impactful than even meditation because it speaks to me and I can release a lot that way. There are programs. There's a program called DNRS that I've loved, by Annie Hopper. I'm sure you've heard of it, know of it. Some patients do havening. We have referred to shaman. There's so many different ways to access this core piece, but it comes to me in the visit what's going to resonate the most with the patient of the repertoire of suggestions that I might have.

Mimi:
And I know you and I have talked about this before in person, and I never really thought about this or believed in it or trusted it, I don't even know how you would say it, until getting sick, but really tapping into your intuition. And I know you talk about it a lot for yourself, but getting to really, I don't know, I feel like now that I've been sick, I really tap into my intuition and my gut and I really listen to it now. And I can see clearer and I see people's, like you said, energy and there's a higher level complex being. I don't know what you want to call it. And I know you and I have talked about it.

Mimi:
And I think that might have been from, I've worked a lot with a healer that talked a lot about past lives and how past lives are brought with you, like what you've learned from other past lives that you've lived and lessons learned that haven't been taught and you're still holding those lessons on. And it's been like clearing those. I don't know if you've ever done anything like that with any healer, but that has been interesting. But it's definitely brought on this whole other element that you're bringing past lives with you or there's whole other dimensions out there.

Dr. Gedroic:
Well, you're speaking exactly to how I look now at the challenges that I face, is that they are merely tests. Everything that happens is merely a test of how you're going to handle it and what emotion you're going to allow to attach to it and how you're going to move through it. Are you going to take the high road through it? Are you going to let go of it? The work I do is very, very challenging on many, many levels. There's a lot of things that have come at me over the years. And to try to stay in love and kindness and not judgment, it's a test, but it's a beautiful test. And when you start looking at every interaction that we have, there's no coincidences, right? Everything is to the meant to be.

Dr. Gedroic:
And then you start looking at it. I look at them at least like, what am I supposed to learn from this? I really truly talk to my children about this. I say, "There's no mistakes. You're learning a lesson." And if you learn the lesson correctly, you will not have to learn it again. You will get another lesson the next time and then another lesson. But that's the way I think we move through this lifetime in this soul path, however you say that.

Mimi:
No, it's totally true. Okay. So this has been amazing. Is there anything that we haven't touched on yet, because I don't want to take too much of your time because I know you're super busy, that you would like to talk to that we haven't addressed or last minute advice or especially because you know how hopeless it is being home and by yourself and no one believes you and you have kids to take care of and it's just a lonely, lonely, lonely disease?

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah. I do. I thought about this actually when I knew we were speaking and I wanted to say something to every listener. It's really, really important to be able to see wellness in your future. Throughout my whole journey, I had many things, but I was never that person. I had asthma, I was not an asthmatic. I had this, I wasn't that person. That was not something I was told at the time, but it's something I've reflected on and tried to understand why I was able to recover very seamlessly, if you will. I mean very traumatic at times. But at the end of the day, through so many things that I truly never should have gotten over. But ever saw myself as a sick person, I just had things to deal with. And that's what everybody really needs to know.

Dr. Gedroic:
I say this every day in the practice, every single day, somebody loses labels. We just got somebody over scleroderma, somebody over Sjogren, somebody over this and that. And they look and say, "Well, wait a minute. Do you say I'm never going to have that." I said, "I don't know how to say that. Your paper says you don't have it anymore. I don't know what you've been told, but at the moment you're a healthy person. So be healthy." In other words, [crosstalk 00:33:32]. Everybody that's sick has to truly believe they can be well and they deserve to be well, and that's really the heart of what starts the movement towards the better path to get better.

Mimi:
It's so true. And there's just so many simple things, mindset and start with water like you're talking about.

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah. So simple. So simple. Get the chemicals out of your environment, your skin eats. Stop slathering yourself with a bunch of stuff. Keep your house clean with your chemicals. All this simple, simple stuff and let the body heal. Get out in nature. Put your feet in the ground. Don't worry about the ticks too much, right?

Mimi:
No, it's true.

Dr. Gedroic:
We need very simple things. Get sunlight. Don't always wear sunblock. We need sun, we need the earth, we need water. Just breathing. All that simple stuff. It's works.

Mimi:
Because it's funny in the days when I didn't feel well, I realized like, "Wait, I haven't had any water today." And as soon as you go have a bunch of glasses of clean water, you're all of a sudden, I felt so much better.

Dr. Gedroic:
Yeah. I taught myself that lesson. Three years ago now I had really almost life threatening pneumonia. I was under so much stress from the practice that I crashed in one day. It was the holiday and I just woke up, it was terrible. Again, I taught myself a lesson. I should never have had that. I'm very, very, very healthy, but I allowed myself to be under stress that nobody should allow for themselves. And I had done that to myself. And so the message that I got out of that was I had to A, take better care of myself, but B, I committed to drew drinking really good amounts of water every day. I've not had one sick day since. Just flushing my body properly was all I needed to do to stop waking up with swollen glands, like if I was tired or whatever, I never get any of it anymore.

Mimi:
Right. Well thank you so much. This has been amazing and I really appreciate your time. And I thank you for helping me get healthy and back on my feet and feeling better. So thank you, I really appreciate it.

Dr. Gedroic:
You're welcome. It was absolutely a pleasure. I enjoyed it tremendously.

Mimi:
Each week, I will bring you different voices from the wellness community so that they can share how they help their clients heal. You will come away with tips and strategies to help you get your life back. Thank you so much for coming on and I am so happy you are here. Subscribe now and tune in next week. If you want to learn how I detox and you want to check out my detox for Lyme checklist, go to Lyme360.com/detoxchecklist. You can also join our community at Lyme 360 Warriors on Facebook and let's heal together. Thank you.