Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome back to Integrative Lime Solutions with Dr. Carl Feld.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: I am so excited about the show that we have ahead of us. We have some phenomenal information that could save lives. I am Dr. Michael carlfelt, and with.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Me, I have my co host, Tanya Hobo.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: You're gonna need to tune in to what's going on today. The information is unpacked, so, yeah, don't step away.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: So excited. Let's go ahead and get this started.
Welcome to Integrative Lyme Solutions with Dr. Carl felt today. Our guest is Christina, and we're so excited to have her. She, I know, is a huge advocate in the Lyme community. She's part of the Texas Lyme alliance, and she also has a health coaching company. And so we're just excited to hear your story. I know your kids battled as well, so we appreciate you joining us.
[00:01:05] Speaker D: Sure. Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys having me on. It's nice to meet you. Dr. Carl Feld.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Well, we're so excited. I mean, it's so great with mean. They've had their battle with Lyme, and then they're turning around and giving back to the community because it is such a difficult disease, obviously, as we know. So that's so wonderful.
[00:01:29] Speaker D: Thank you. Yeah. I started my nonprofit after I started healing, my family started healing. And when I was in my darkest times, I was laying in bed thinking, how did this happen in America in the 21st century, with the medicine that we have and who was speaking for us? So I vowed at that moment that when I got better, I was going to speak for us.
[00:01:58] Speaker C: We hear this so much more often nowadays, and I just truly love it. People have been, I don't know, an attorney or something, and next thing you know, they're not doing that. They're doing whatever it is to help the line community, and we need these voices, and we need people like you in the community. So, again, we appreciate you.
[00:02:18] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. So, where would you like to start?
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Yes, that's up to you.
Where did it all start?
[00:02:29] Speaker D: Okay, well, I got bit in the head several times, playing in the woods behind my house in Fairview Heights, Illinois, around 1980. My mom would pull off several ticks at a time, sometimes when I'd be out in the creek playing. And we have a lot of deer in Illinois, in the midwest, as you can imagine, so on and off. I had the hallmark symptoms, and all the doctors missed it. I went to 16 different doctors across about 30 years and was only diagnosed with some autoimmune diseases and was told to continue to up my dosing when I was giving all the symptoms of Lyme disease that you could imagine.
None of that worked until I went to the right doctor and he heard the right things and knew of the specialty labs that are more specific for tick borne illness. By that time, I had already had four kiddos and was an owner operator of a large yoga spa in an outdoor mall here near Dallas, Texas.
So I realized once I got that test back that I knew nothing about my.
So they. My doctor referred me to a Lyme specialist here in Texas, and thank God for him. He encouraged me to, after taking a thorough health history, encouraged me to test our children, and they all had it. So none of our kids have had a tick bite, so we say it's congenital. But of course, I was undiagnosed to know better than to order the cord blood test for my genics or whomever else may have that kind of a tick born or vector borne illness test for a newborn baby. But that sure would have confirmed to get them treated as early as possible.
So I did four years of antibiotics.
I had a pick line, husband was traveling for work full time, I had to hire a part time nanny. My health was up and down from probably a week after I got bit, up and down, very athletic, and then I would go to being very sick.
Then once I started treating with antibiotics, four very long years went by. I started with 33 prescription pills a day and ended up in the ER multiple times, thinking I was dying from the reactions to the high doses I was on and the herxing.
So after I realized that I was really exhausted with the therapies that were not helping me as much as I wanted, I went to an integrative doctor, and I told him I wanted the big guns. I remember saying that, and he said, well, your Lyme doctor is a friend of mine, so we'll just add to what he's doing, and I'll keep conferring with him. And I went, okay, so it wasn't much further after that that I started seeing him full time and started doing more integrative therapies, homeopathics, herbals, a lot of oxidative therapy, ozone, high dose vitamin C, lots of mineral supplementation, lots of ivs, and started actually getting better. Low dose immunotherapy was something else that really helped me. And then, of course, had all the kids going on all this stuff. And although the testing wasn't perfect, they all started getting better, too. So we were onto something, and so we continued to use the two month rule is what I did, if I wasn't getting better on a therapy or the kids weren't getting better on a therapy for two months, then that was my cue to either change the dosing titrate combo or change altogether.
And then we started getting better. And about five years ago, I went to Germany to a Lyme clinic and got my own stem cells.
They're not legal here in the United States. Once it's out of the body longer than 24 hours, as you may know, it becomes FDA regulated, and that's not approved here. So there it is. I got the most out of the clinic has ever seen. I was so grateful for that autologous methynchymal stem cells and came home and had a complete neuro shutdown. Slurring, dragging my feet. Sounded like I was drunk. I couldn't finish sentences that lasted only about 24, 48 hours. And then I started seeing improvements with repairing because I had already felt like I was.
Everybody always says a percentage. I hate doing that, because who knows, right, what your percentage is?
So if I were to put a number on it, I was thinking probably 80, 85% better before I went and got stem cells because they're only meant to repair. And so after that, I continued to do well, and the kids continued to do well.
And then I started advocating about seven years now for congenital Lyme families because no one was talking about it. And I thought, my God, if they know this happens, they admitted in the 80s it can be transferred from mother to fetus. It's right on the CDC's website. Now.
Why isn't anybody talking about this? Every obgen in the world needs to know that this is a risky situation to not test for during the family planning stages of a young woman's life or a young family's life.
So I started drawing attention to that. And after we started getting better more and more, I realized my one son was not getting any better. He had gone so far, and then he'd reach a plateau, and then he'd go backwards, just like the normal Lyme story you probably are very commonly hearing out there from everybody.
And so I made the hard choice with a traveling husband still to close my business. The day that a mom called in because her child had the flu, I was like, are you kidding me?
She has every right. I didn't hesitate to go in and cover for her. When you own a business, it has to come first.
And I was leaving a very sick child without parent care here at the time, he was well old enough to babysit himself, but just broke my heart. He couldn't lift his head off his pillow without screeching and pain. Just so sick, super tired, needed help to and fro.
And that was the day I decided to close my business. I wasn't making enough money for that. There's no amount of money for a mom to give that job up with that situation. So if something's not making a million dollars, you can't sell it. And so I made that hard choice, and I was so glad I did because it took about a year, and he is better.
I started my nonprofit that next year, and it just turned three years old, and it's going well, and my family is healing, and we reached remission. As a matter of fact, we were all five in remission for a little over a year, and then slowly it just picked us off one by one. So we have four retreating something, but we're all athletic and going to school and doing our thing and feeling good. So when you come from a state of remission and you retest, you know, you have to change something, obviously, but it's not as hard.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: So a lot easier just kind of going back a little bit.
You mentioned the beginning that you had all the classical signs of Lyme, and obviously, Lyme is a mimicker of all diseases.
[00:11:50] Speaker D: 300 symptoms.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
What were they? That. What were you struggling with? And then I was curious to see kind of what each one of your child, what their symptoms were as well, so that people can have a little bit of a picture of what that looked like.
[00:12:09] Speaker D: Yeah, sure. So my symptoms were repetitive sinus infections throughout the year. Conjunctivitis, mono, strep throat, little infections like that that were very difficult to get over. But on a daily, I counted eight different sources of pain.
Headache, migraine headaches, back pain, migrating joint pain, fibromyalgia, stomach dysbiosis, and pain, repeated ulcers. I had a crohn's disease diagnosis at one point.
Had to have emergency stomach surgery for that. As a matter of fact, when I was 19, almost killed me. That was not fun, but continue to heal. And that's the good news about it all, is this can happen. And the kids and, of course, severe fatigue. Couldn't lift my head off my pillow. Wasn't able to shower for three years because of the water hitting you. It's an immediate lymphatic increase in circulation in the lymphatics, and it was too much. It would just wipe me out. I couldn't stand up that long, so fatigue was crushing.
And just the sore throats the different pain from head to toe, different things. My legs were so achy, I would just cry.
And my kids were all different.
Although they got everything from one mom, it seems like they would be similar, but they weren't.
One child was high functioning autism, Epstein Barr, strep.
So there was temperamental issues.
We didn't know this one was autistic at the time and very high functioning, very smart.
And then would miss, like, 32 days of school throughout one school year, and then now doing wonderfully.
And then another one was my only kiddo who had, like, one band. I had two positive and one positive, two that had multiple bands, so igenics positive. And then my sickest kiddo had.
He looked negative. He was eigenics negative, CDC negative, and by the way, I am CDC positive and digenics positive.
So he was having absence seizures throughout the course of the day when he was a toddler. I didn't know what it was.
You'd talk to him and eyes would be open, breathing, everything's fine, but he just wasn't in there. Then he'd come to. It was like he'd just come to, and he'd miss out on the last few seconds of what we had done, asking questions like, turn around, like, what do you mean? We just took sister to school. Why are you asking that? Stuff like that? So very od complex things.
He had lot of pain, fibromyalgia. They all had migrating joint pain, fibromyalgia.
Bartonella was more so in my number two kiddo.
And night terrors. Sleepwalking. Night terror episodes would have different conscious verbal situations where he would be speaking what he was dreaming or thinking in his head, like he was upside down. At one point, things looked very three d to him, and he was scared. Things like this, it's not normal, and they don't make sense, and they're very terrifying for a kiddo, but also for parents to go through. So these are important things to talk about. So parents know this is what it looks like. And although it's very scary going through it, there's things that you can do to get rid of it.
And then my other kiddo, and then the second one was in four schools by second grade is also very important. He had a lot of learning differences, dyslexic, audible processing difference, visual processing difference, dysgraphia.
So all doing very well and made it out of high school and started college.
My third kiddo took the longest, and the two middle boys were the sickest out of everyone. Seemed to be number three. Kiddo had same thing, missed a lot of school, almost didn't make it out of the fifth grade. All of them, by the way, struggled at puberty. That's very common for kiddos, for parents to know, so please try to diagnose and treat them if you have any questions about whether they have it or not before puberty hits, because it's a trigger.
My doctor stopped my period for a whole year. He was an obgen, so I don't know if that's the right thing to do or not, but it didn't hurt me, and I got better, so I'm not recommending that. But seemed harsh at the time. But, boy, it made treatment easier, so I was grateful for that. So, number three, a lot of mono issues. A lot. It was very difficult for him and my oldest to get over steam. Bar had to do a lot of work on that.
He did a lot of immune system treatment and missed a lot of school, but his symptoms were very similar.
Full on body pain, leg aches, migrating joint pain.
He had a lot of Lyme meningitis symptoms and encephalitis symptoms, brain on fire and different things like that.
Full feeling.
And number four, tended to have leg pains, migrating joint pain.
His was more limey, where flulike symptoms come and go more common.
But he's done the best, because I started treating him when he was only five years old. God love him. So, I think it's also important to note that none of my children have done antibiotics to recover from Lyme and co infections.
We've used pharmaceutical drugs as bandaids, and I think that's the way they were intended, in my experience. But I think band Aids are very necessary for people that find them helpful.
So, my eldest revisited Bartonella this year, and we revisited the traditional route with an LLMD, a Lyme literate physician. And he started five different antibiotics, or pharmaceutical drugs, and that lasted about two weeks. And I went and inventoried his protocol, and the one thing he was being pretty solid with was homeopathy, because they were used to that. So I went, okay, I'll take it.
Him and I have started testing for inflammation and started the protocol under the care of Dr. Bruce Patterson, which is really important for your guests and the public to know. Everybody should be checking for inflammation, because it can be risky with microclots and stroke and heart attacks and aneurysms to not know what your levels are and that there's treatment for that. Every time I got my blood drawn, they'd say, oh, my gosh, your blood is super dark and thick, and I'm like, oh, is that bad? That doesn't sound good. And they're like, well, you need to talk to your doctor about that. Okay, well, tell me. But you won't tell me what it means. Okay, I get that it's not good.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: So what marker do you want the audience to test is like, d dimer, c reactive protein, pttinr, what do you.
[00:21:51] Speaker D: So Dr. Patterson has gotten approved from the FDA for an encelkine 14 panel and an s one panel, and people should go to his website, and he has a whole practitioner's page to learn about this from as well, for you and your colleagues to learn about. But it's covidlonghaulers.com, and people always go, I never had Covid. It's nothing to do with that. There's like three different algorithms, and there's crossover of symptoms with things like Covid. Lyme disease patients, mecfs, fibromyalgia, and post vaccine COVID patients that they have identified all have similar inflammatory markers, and some are higher than others. And they've been able to use this through AI and machine learning, using their algorithms, to now be able to diagnose Lyme disease in a lot of patients that didn't formally know they had Lyme. And at that point, they send them to a Lyme doctor for treatment. And if they still have symptoms after they see Dr. Patterson and do his rocktail, is what we call it, therapy, then they go back and revisit Lyme treatment. So it's a confirmation of chronic illness? It's a confirmation of chronic Lyme disease and confirmation that this treatment works. All of my markers have come down. I have a little bit to go on. One.
And interleukin eight, for instance, is one. There's a lot of different ones that he runs. But it would be wonderful for you to go learn about it and see what you think and encourage your colleagues to learn about it, because everybody's walking around with this inflammation, and it's in the millions of people that don't know that they're at high risk for thrombosis or heart attack or stroke. Everyone who's had chronic Lyme cancer, Covid vaccinejured, that's a thing. These people all need to be tested just to see if that's going to help them or not. And people always ask me, did your symptoms subside? And I'm like, well, I don't know if people have symptoms before a heart attack.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:24:27] Speaker D: It's not one of those things. They don't think of it the right way because we're used to medicine being one way, and we have to start thinking about inflammation is very hidden, and it can have sudden health threats that you don't see coming until you know how to look through a different lens, so to speak.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: So tell me about the rocktail therapy so people know what it is that you're talking about.
[00:24:54] Speaker D: Yeah. So, like I said, you go through Dr. Pederson's website to order the labs that he has put together.
And the rocktail therapy usually consists of maravirok, which is safe for babies. It's been around 30, 40 years.
Cell zentry makes it, and it is not an antiviral or an immune suppressor. It is an immune modulator. I hear researchers and doctors misquoting it all the time. It's an immune modulator, and it has to be taken with a statin of some sort. I am a much bigger fan of herbs and low dose immunotherapy and homeopathy and stuff like that, but to my knowledge, there's no other treatment like this.
And then he also added, for me, after some time on the protocol, a drug called cultazine, which is for gout. So I also take a baby aspirin. So I'm on actually four different ones because I think I was a sticky case.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:26:08] Speaker D: It worked for me. But, yeah, it's not medical advice for your audience, but Dr. Patterson's done an amazing job with his research, starting in the HIV epidemic. And I actually had him come and do a presentation at our chronic inflammation event in May when I hosted the quiet epidemic here in Dallas. So people can go to my YouTube channel and y'all can go learn about his science and what he's discovered through, which is pretty cool. Through AI learning.
AI and machine learning.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: What website is that? That people can go, oh, mine is.
[00:26:52] Speaker D: Christina Bauer on YouTube. And then Dr. Patterson's is covidlonghaulers.com. And they just click on what country they're from and whether they're a practitioner or a patient. And it takes you through ordering the lab work, and then you get an ordering physician, and he's the managing physician, and he's got like nine doctors, last I checked, that work under him. And you could even go, any licensed medical provider can go and get that training and become a provider of his lab work and therapy.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Beautiful.
[00:27:33] Speaker C: That's awesome. So, quick question for you. Back to your kids, and I appreciate you taking the time to kind of detail out what their symptoms were and what they were dealing with, because we know that there's so many common symptoms, but there's also a lot of uncommon ones, probably especially for kids that parents need to be aware of. But. So you had a child that was autistic and then dyslexic. Are those completely reversed? Was that actually Lyme disease that they were dealing with?
[00:28:05] Speaker D: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, it would be hard to say without one test connecting to one symptom and then that resolve with one treatment. There's so many variables that make it so complex, but the timeline fits.
The kiddo that is high functioning autistic is very high functioning. So it was missed for a long, long time. Doing very well. The kiddo that was dyslexic had a difficult time in college, but has done very well, pardon me, retreating, taking a gap year from college.
They put him in seven classes to start him out first year playing baseball full time. And that's tough. Anybody? I was not happy about that at all, but I wasn't involved. When they start to establish independence, you go, you're going to do this the way you need to do this. And kind of just. That was hard, but it's nobody's fault. It's just that it was way too much and it wasn't the right fit. And he's working full time and doing wonderful. And we've encouraged calling college or something close and go to a community, at least just get a class or two going and stay involved. So we're big fans of education.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:29:41] Speaker C: That's awesome. And then just one last thing. So, the Texas Lime alliance, can you tell the listeners exactly what that is and what it does for the community?
[00:29:52] Speaker D: Yeah, sure. I also wanted to tell people that I started lime coaching. I am a certified integrative nutrition health coaching health coach, and I offer that on my website where they can click to schedule, and it'll take them to a different website under my company, Synergy Consulting, where I will connect people with resources for free from my Texas Lyme alliance, which is lots of.
It'll walk people through on my website, from what is Lyme to how to get testing and treatment.
I work to fill the list of practitioners on Project Lyme's website, and so there is a referral link there as well. There's also free support group meetings, and then my coaching page is also on there.
But with Texas Lyme alliance, what we do is we connect people to resources, so we educate, advocate, and legislate for congenital Lyme patients, and opening access for a treatment for all by fundraising for researchers who are finding effective treatments for the most vulnerable, which is our pregnant mommies and kiddos. I feel like they get left behind all the time. There's just not much of information out there about effective diagnostics and treatment for that audience. And so that's the work that I do there. And so I have uploaded over 50 expert interviews with physicians and researchers and clinicians and practitioners and podcast channel on all podcast channels.
So I'm trying to get the word out there. I appeared a little small screenshot and then it's gone. But in the movie monster, the monster inside me Lime documentary, and we've done a lot of work in hosting the quiet epidemic and got another one coming up in Houston. I'm trying to do different support group meetings across Texas so that we can find our friends who are going to help us write a Lyme bill and let their legislators know that Lyme disease is in Texas.
Reporting isn't mandatory by the CDC, and so the reporting that's coming out is, I don't think it's as accurate as it could be. 85 cases in the whole state of Texas all year. I just don't find that when I have five in my own house, I just don't find that accurate. But we have to prove that wrong is my goal, or prove it right. One way or the other. I want to tighten up surveillance and the criteria for reporting.
[00:33:08] Speaker C: That is awesome. Yeah. And we definitely need that.
We need a lot. We've come a long ways. So those listeners out there that are very defeated, we've come a long ways in the know, decade or two, but we still have a long ways to. So. Well, we will be sure to add your link to your YouTube page, your coaching page, all of those links onto the title so people can find you and reach out. And we appreciate what you're doing in the community, especially for those. Right. We. They need help. They have no.
[00:33:42] Speaker D: So there's not one doctor in all the state of Texas that's a pediatric Lyme specialist. There's not one in the whole state of Texas. That blows my mind.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: Christina. Yeah. You're doing amazing work, and we need to create this awareness. So thank you so much for coming on, too. I so appreciate all the work you're doing. It's amazing.
[00:34:09] Speaker D: Yes, thank you.
[00:34:11] Speaker C: For you and your family used to have a little hurdles, but you guys are doing amazing. So we're super happy to hear that.
[00:34:17] Speaker D: Thank you so much. It's a lot of hard work, but I just want to keep parents to keep going and the kiddos out there, that my kids were able to finally start playing sports again and able to do well in school. And sometimes it's a roller coaster and it can get scary. But there's help out there, and people need to never give up and know, even after they heal and still have psychiatric issues, that it may not be Lyme, it may be chronic inflammation, because they do get through the blood brain barrier, and it does cause anxiety and depression. And this can be disabling. So people need to know that we need to be checking this inflammation. Dr. Patterson's research I'll just end on, because it's so dang exciting. He's found that our monocytes are actually reservoirs for dead remnants of these pathogens. So even if you no longer test positive for Lyme disease, it does not mean that you're done. You need to follow up with what I call and when I do coaching, a three pronged approach, we work the immune system. Second is kill, detox and deficiencies. And the third is that inflammatory stage. We have to be checking everybody thoroughly and making sure that we touch on each one of those things. And it's about a six month program that I run, so it's very affordable. I don't care if people can or can't afford it, it's all the same price.
But I do offer a lot of free help on my website. People can go there, txlimealliance.org and get what they need or ask any questions. I'm here to help.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Christina. This was great.
[00:35:58] Speaker C: Yes, thank you.
[00:35:59] Speaker D: You're welcome, guys. Thanks for having me. Have a great night.
[00:36:02] Speaker B: You as well.
[00:36:11] Speaker A: The information this podcast is for educational purposes only, and it's not designed to diagnose or treat any disease. I hope this podcast impacted you as it did me. Please subscribe so that you can be notified when new episodes are released. There are some excellent shows coming up that you do not want to miss. If you're enjoying these podcasts, please take a moment to write a review. And please don't keep this information to yourself. Share them with your family and friends. You never know what piece of information that will transform their lives. For past episodes and powerful information on how to conquer lime, go to integrativelimesolutions.com and an additional powerful resource, limestream.com. For lime support and group discussions, join Tanya on Facebook at Lime conquerors mentoring lime warriors. If you'd like to know more about the cutting edge integrated of Lyme therapies, my center offers, please visit thecarlfeldcenter.com. Thank you for spending this time with us, and I hope to see you at our next episode of Integrative Lyme Solutions with Dr. Carlfeld.
