Dr Alison Grimston is a UK-based functional medicine physician with a background in general practice and extensive experience supporting individuals with complex, chronic fatigue-related conditions. With advanced training in nutrigenomics and root-cause medicine, she focuses on the hidden contributors to illness — including mold toxicity, Lyme disease, Long COVID, and chronic infections. She is passionate about empowering patients with personalised strategies to optimise energy, resilience, and long-term health.
Dr Ritamarie
Dealing with patients with chronic fatigue and chronic ill health is always a challenge for us as practitioners. And there's so many things that we need to investigate. And today's topic is going to explore some of those reasons that people are just chronically not feeling well, chronically fatigued, and those mystery cases that often have been to multiple practitioners over and over and not getting results.
So I'm excited to be here with an amazing expert in this field.
I'm here today with Dr. Alison Grimston. She's from the UK. She has many years and decades of experience as an NHS National Health System doctor. And her years there have left her a little on the frustrated side because of the short visits that they get and the kind of really narrow focus. And so now her focus is more in functional medicine.
She's a graduate of our nutritional endocrinology practitioner training. She's also certified through the Institute of Functional Medicine, and she helps people who have given up hope because their doctors have told them there's nothing else to do. Just take this drug, whatever, you're to feel like this the rest of your life.
So I'm excited to explore with her some of the options and some of the things she's doing in practice now to help these people who otherwise, have given up hope.
So welcome, Dr. Allie. I'm so excited to have you here.
Dr Alison Grimston (01:47)
Yes, it's so exciting to be here in Austin and able to see you in real life. It's really nice. It's such a privilege.
Dr Ritamarie (02:05)
Such a privilege. Yes. So let's just jump in, and let's talk about some of these people who come to your clinic with these chronic health issues that they've been dealing with forever, and they've been told just take a just take a pill or there's nothing left that we can do for you.
Dr Alison Grimston (02:19)
Well, where do you start? I initially focused on women's health and hormone balance, because that was an area that I am passionate about. But I have gradually joined a long COVID clinic, and we see people with chronic fatigue conditions, and they may have had these conditions for five years if it's long COVID. But we're now attracting people who had ME, CFS, chronic fatigue syndromes for much longer, sometimes 10, sometimes 20 years. And the medical establishment approach has left them with no hope. And they've just been given to understand that there is nothing that can be done to help their symptoms.
And I've been so shocked, really shocked, at the degree of ill health and fatigue that these people have. And sometimes they are women in their 70s, sometimes they are professional CEO men in their 40s, often people who were previously very, very fit and well going to the gym regularly. I've got people who used to cycle 100 miles at the weekend. And sometimes it is teenagers and kids. It sits all across the board.
Dr Ritamarie (03:40)
So you're not just seeing these perimenopausal, post-menopausal women anymore. You're seeing a wide variety. So what do we do? Like what has, as a practitioner, you're speaking to your colleagues here, what do we do when those people come in, and they say they've been suffering ever since they got COVID five years ago, four years ago, whatever it might've been, or that they've been struggling with this for the last 10, 15 years? Where do we start?
Dr Alison Grimston (04:03)
Because very often they've had glandular fever earlier on, or even been known to have Lyme disease, or a tick bite in the past, and the first thing we need to do, of course, as practitioners is establish rapport, really get them to feel heard. So really hear their story, because they've often gone for decades without feeling as if healthcare practitioners have actually listened to them.
So we need to be listening to them and reassuring them and being compassionate and understanding that medical gaslighting is a real thing.
Dr Ritamarie (04:37)
Tell us what you mean by that medical gaslighting.
Dr Alison Grimston (04:40)
Well, we have people who have been told time and time again by several different practitioners that they're making it up, that it's a functional neurological disorder, even if they're having seizures or dystonias, and they're being told that it's in their head. They're being told that they've got to pull themselves together so to speak. And of course the traditional training or education, or the traditional management of chronic fatigue syndrome, is a graded exercise program, and that has now been shown to be detrimental to them. It's not a case of gradually increasing the amount of exercise you're taking day by day, it's actually a case of pacing, listening to your body, and listening to intuition. And now we're beginning to re-establish that.
But fundamentally with these patients, we need to be looking at those baseline situations, baseline symptoms, look at their lifestyle, look at what they're doing to manage stress. And then the crucial thing is proper testing for chronic Lyme disease and other co-infections. And that's difficult, because the traditional testing for Lyme disease is just measuring IgG and IgM, the immunoglobulins. But the truth is, these vector borne infections, which I'm now a specialist in. So chronic Lyme disease, Borrelia, but, there's several different forms of Borrelia, not just Borrelia burgdorferi, but the medical establishment, at least in the UK, only tests for Borrelia burgdorferi, not for the other subtypes. And the subtypes vary depending on which country you're in. So if you got your tick bite, or most people actually, only about 18% of people recall having a tick bite.
And sometimes it's the nymphs which are the size of a grain of sand or a poppy seed, so they're really tiny. You don't know that you've been bitten, so wherever you've been traveling you need to be looking for the subtypes that are found there.
In America we have different subtypes, too. In Europe, we want to be looking for Borrelia strains, but we also need to be looking for other vector-borne infections. Babesia and Bartonella, both of which can be found within the red blood cells. These vector borne infections are very, very astute. They manage to hide from our immune system in several different ways. We also need to be looking for co-infections. There are things like Chlamydia pneumoniae and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, both of which hide. They come into the body when your immune system has been depleted by the chronic Lyme disease and co infections. And so what we need to be doing is looking in more depth for these things.
Dr Ritamarie (07:31)
So I come in to you and I'm like, I've been dealing with this for how many years? So let's start with, I've been dealing with this for five years since I had COVID. Let's talk about how you would look at that. And then let's look at how I say, I've been dealing with this for 15 years and everybody keeps telling me there's nothing wrong with me. Where do you go with that?
Dr Alison Grimston (07:52)
That's a challenge. Now we do have in the UK a specialist test that we are working with the University of Exeter with and that's called the Attomarker test, which actually lets us look at your anti-COVID antibodies. And some people are really depleted and this measures both the quantity and the quality of your anti-COVID antibodies for the different strains that have come in waves since 2020. So there's different strains over time. You remember the Wuhan variant and the omega and gamma. It also looks at the quality as well as the quantity. And some people are actually hyper responders. They've over responded. So where the normal level may be at 8, some of these people have responded with about 20.
Dr Ritamarie (08:42)
It's normal. And so what kind of symptoms would they be different if they were a hyper responder or a hypo responder?
Dr Alison Grimston (08:47)
You can't tell from the symptoms. You can only tell from testing. And it does influence whether you're going to recommend people have the monoclonal antibody if and when it becomes available, or the vaccine if one becomes available. And they are different people.
Some people found that their symptoms were greatly improved when they had the COVID vaccine. For those people, I would recommend they have the COVID vaccine, because they've already seen an improvement in their chronic symptoms before they came. So these are the people who have had chronic fatigue before. Some long COVID patients find a big improvement in their symptoms when they have the COVID vaccine. And some people find they're made worse. So the ones who are made worse, I recommend they don't get the vaccine.
Dr Ritamarie (09:35)
You mean continue to get vaccines?
Dr Alison Grimston (09:38)
Yes, because of the boosters. We are hoping and waiting for a vaccine that's not messenger RNA and that doesn’t have spike protein.
There's so many symptoms. It's a multi-system situation with long Covid. And so they may have microclots. They've often got cardiovascular symptoms. They may have palpitations, they may have POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or a tendency toward that sort of dysautonomia, where you can see that their autonomic nervous system has been impacted.
There are different things that you may use to help with that. So things like salt tablets, increasing salt in the diet, making sure they're having electrolytes with their fluids. But also some people need a lot of pharmaceuticals. So with some people, we're using Midodrine, we're using Ivabradine, as a doctor.
Dr Ritamarie (10:33)
Tell us some of the things to help with these symptoms. Because a lot of our listeners, most of our listeners are not prescribing practitioners. What can we do? I mean, I know you've shown me some of the herbal formulations that you use. So tell us a little bit more about the herbal formulations or the non-pharmaceutical and also the lifestyle. Like what are you looking at to help these people get over this?
Dr Alison Grimston (10:54)
Well, one of the important things is to be able to start working on the autonomic nervous system.
So there are several different devices that can help you with that. Obviously Heart Math, which you introduced me to many years ago, which is a combination of gratitude and breathing and appreciation.
Dr Ritamarie (11:15)
With the idea of shifting into parasympathetic.
Dr Alison Grimston (11:17)
Exactly. All the time we're trying to find ways to shift from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic to support the autonomic nervous system.
We can also help them with several devices. One is called the Nurosym, another one is called Sensate.
Dr Ritamarie (11:24)
Is the Nurosym the one that goes around the nerve itself?
Dr Alison Grimston (11:38)
No, I don't think so. Okay. And then I was talking to one person. I've just come back from the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society conference, and there's a guy there who does stellate ganglion blocks. And that actually helps as well. It comes from behind.
So that's an interesting, more invasive way. And really we need to get people using mindfulness and meditation and energy healing and these sorts of things to help. Because we're looking at mind, body and spirit every time. It's not just, let's focus on the science, let's focus on the physical. We need to try and help people to be more open minded about their approach to their health. Because the autonomic nervous system is always involved in this and so is stress and sleep quality is such a huge thing as well. So we need to help people with sleep quality. They may need for example, two forms of melatonin to help with sleep. They might want immediate release combined with modified release so that they may help them not wake up in the middle of the night with that.
We need to be helping them to detox, and when we're going through detox processes, we need to make sure that they are keeping those detox channels open. So they need to be opening their bowels regularly. I recommend at least twice a day. They need to be sweating, so saunas can be helpful if they can't exercise, which most of these people can't. They can't exercise to the point of sweating.
But it's also important to, as I say, look for these underlying causes that may be contributing.
Like the Lyme, because when we actually test our long COVID patients, at least 70% of them actually do have reactivated Lyme. And they didn't realize it. They can't recall it. It made it worse. Because the spike protein from the COVID infection or vaccine can be either reactivating latent viruses and bacteria. So they get reactivated Epstein-Barr virus, Coxsackie virus, CMV, or they get reactivated Lyme, Borrelia, Babesia, Bartonella, and these different organisms cause different symptoms.
For example, air hunger and plantar fasciitis are two things that can be brought on by Bartonella, which is classically cat scratch fever. But we now know that it can be transmitted by flea bites, by the cat scratch, which might have some flea feces on. Or from tick bites. So there are many different ways that we get these diseases.
Dr Ritamarie (14:17)
Okay. So what do we do to help these people?
Dr Alison Grimston (14:20)
We want to look at, first of all, look at those pillars of functional health. So we want to be helping them with mindset, with sleep quality, with community and oxytocin and some of them can't. Some people are so profoundly unwell. They've been in a darkened room, because they can't tolerate light. I've got a couple who can't tolerate even the sound of a pen on paper in their room. They can't tolerate it being vacuum cleaned. The sensitivity to sound or to light can be very, very profound.
Dr Ritamarie (14:57)
So how do we help these people? Because these people are the ones that are told you know, just live with it.
Dr Alison Grimston (15:03)
It's incredibly difficult. So once we have a diagnosis, again, it's not just a case of that, we need to look at their toxicities as well. So I use mycotoxin and virotoxin as examples from Mosaic, but there are different ways of measuring mycotoxins. And you want to measure not only what mycotoxins they're peeing out in the urine, but you also want to be measuring how it's impacting their body.
So you need to be using some form of organic acid test. Then if you find mycotoxin, and again, everyone that I've tested for mycotoxin with few exceptions has them. I've had two who've had a normal Metabolomix test, and I've had two that have had a normal GI Effects test. Which is surprising. But they've all got mold toxicity to some extent.
Dr Ritamarie (15:54)
So you need to be doing a mycotoxin test. You need to examine their environment
Dr Alison Grimston (15:59)
They've got to measure. So many people are resistant to having the mold toxicity test, because they know if it's positive, they're going to have to really do something to their homes, which we know, or move house. And we know this is a very expensive process. But so many of them are impacted by that.
None of our treatment protocols for chronic Lyme disease and co-infections will tend to work if they've still got mold toxicity going on. So sometimes we will start them on oral or IV antibiotic protocols which are always supported with herbs because of the extras that we need, and I'll come to that in a minute, or we have a nutraceutical protocol. But you can go for six months and still not get any improvement, and very often that's because we haven't looked at the mycotoxin or other toxins, or we haven't checked adequately for dysbiosis, all of which can block this improvement.
Dr Ritamarie (16:58)
So you're saying that a lot of the folks that come in with long COVID, unbeknownst to them, have chronic Lyme disease, other viral infections, they have potentially mold, and that's probably one of the underlying reasons that they were so nastily affected by the COVID virus compared to other people who might just go through a couple of weeks of discomfort and then it's gone.
Dr Alison Grimston (17:25)
Absolutely. But we also know that genetics comes into it too. So doing the Nutrigenomics is really crucial in this process, because again, if you've got somebody whose antibiotic protocol's not working, then we need to be looking at the MTHFR and supporting that, because 40% of people have MTHFR SNPs that are preventing them from activating antibiotics and really having the effect.
But the other thing, which I haven't covered yet, is the way in which these co-infections deplete our immune system. It's been an incredible learning curve over the last year, adding this to my knowledge. And the chronic Lyme disease and other co-infections, firstly, they hide under a biofilm. So they've got a biofilm that's stopping your immune system from seeing them. So they produce that when they get together, and they can produce this biofilm.
So we need to be using herbs that break down the biofilm as part of our protocols.
Dr Ritamarie (18:18)
What are your favorites there?
Dr Alison Grimston (18:20)
Oh, we use, I can't remember which is for what, but I think Cryptolepis and Serrapeptase.
Dr Ritamarie (18:25)
Does nanokinase work for that? I know it works for the clots, but so it can be multi-purpose.
Dr Alison Grimston (18:32)
And then they also hide in areas of the body like connective tissue that have a very poor blood supply. So again, your immune system doesn't see them, and then they also deplete your body of the particular subtype of lymphocytes that your body produces against, that produces the antibodies against Lyme disease. So the CD57 cells, which are the ones that produce IgG and IgM to Lyme disease and co-infections are depleted, and where they should be usually at least 130 per microliter, we see people with 20, with 10, with even 5.
And this is an important part of the testing that is left out of mainstream medicine testing.
Dr Ritamarie (19:16)
Okay. We're seeing people, they're coming in. They started feeling lousy as of the COVID. When you dig deep into the history, most likely you find that they've been tired other times in their past, but they may or may not.
Dr Alison Grimston (19:34)
The other thing to think about is vertical transmission.
So we get mother, daughter, son, all with long COVID. And when we start delving in, not only do they have Borrelia, chronic Lyme disease, but they've got the same strain. And it was actually transmitted in utero, in the placenta. So it's a Pandora's box, really. Once you start delving.
Dr Ritamarie (20:05)
I'm starting to think about some people in our practice. Whether or not they come in with 15 years of chronic fatigue, or it's just been since long COVID, chances are good, and you cannot leave it unturned that there's some Lyme or co-infections or mold intoxication. So we have to dig deep. So whether it's the longer term or the shorter term, we can't just say, it's long COVID.
So let's talk about some ways that we as functional practitioners can help these people. Obviously you talked about sleep and stress and mindfulness and all that and getting them on a good diet. Because for a lot of them diet is so… .
Dr Alison Grimston (20:45)
Well to be honest, by the time people come to our practice they've done a lot of research. They are highly intelligent people. Either they, or in the case of the kids, their parents are very, very involved in their care. Thank goodness for that. We've got well-informed parents and well-informed patients. They've done a lot of the work.
Some of them have already worked with a nutritional therapist. If they haven't, I will often ask them to use it and to work with a nutritional therapist within a multidisciplinary clinic, because getting the right diet for that person is crucial. We've already seen in our Nutritional Endocrinology training, we've learned about things like oxalates and other sensitivities, and MCAS, of course. So Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, along with POTS, are just so rife amongst these patients. They've often got a history of hypermobility or EDS. But then once you start delving deep, these co-infections can cause hypermobility and EDS. And they can cause endometriosis, can cause polycystic ovary syndrome, they can cause MS symptoms, they can cause epilepsy symptoms, and it's really fascinating that we get taught at medical school that the era of infectious diseases was up to the 19th century in its past. The discovery of penicillin put an end to infectious diseases as a significant contributing factor to ill health in this day and age.
And yet, chronic diseases are the thing of the current time. Like cancer, ischemic heart disease, stroke, we know those are important.
Dr Ritamarie (22:27)
And they're all related to the immune system, by the way. We're finding more and more.
Dr Alison Grimston (22:32)
And they can be caused by these cancers. These organisms can cause cancers.
Dr Ritamarie (22:37)
And here's the thing I want to say, and I'm just going to throw my own two cents in, my opinion in this. When we're working with people with whatever these co-infections, viruses, they're things that their immune system should be able to deal with. Underlying all of this is an immune system that's not working properly. And in our day and age here, we have either the underactive or the overactive, right? And that's a very general term, but autoimmune or lack of resistance and lack of being able to deal with this. So I always like to go back to, it's not really the bugs' fault, it's the body needs to be shored up to be able to handle, and be able to differentiate, between these organisms and self, and organisms and healthy things coming in.
I'm just going to go back to diet, because it's my thing, but when we go back to how kids are raised, how teenagers eat, how adults do, and during the pandemic, what did people turn to? Healthy, I’ve got to eat healthier? No, they turned to sitting, watching the TV and the news, getting stressed out and drinking wine and eating fast food and comfort food. And so as practitioners, that's a really important thing.
And what you're identifying here is how critical it is for us to help people to really, first of all, do a thorough history. What's their history like? What are their habits? What do they eat, drink? How do they stress out? How do they relax? Do they relax watching cop and robber movies and the news? Or do they relax by going out in nature and being with other people and getting an oxytocin boost?
So all of these things are so critical to know how to handle it. Once we've done that, and we found somebody with a depleted immune system, and they've got co-infections, and maybe mold toxicity. They had COVID. We want to be able to help them. And a lot of times they're not in a position where they're going to go spend hours in the kitchen making great food, and they're not going to even have the strength to go out and exercise.
So are there things that we can add to their regime, nutrients that you found to be effective herbs, specific foods that can help them get over the hump, so they can actually be in a position to do all the other things they need to do.
Dr Alison Grimston (25:04)
Well that's an interesting question. One of the things I have observed is that with those people who come back with positive mold test results or heavy metals, I've had a couple who've improved 80% just with doing the first two months of the mold detox. And you see, originally, I was thinking two months was enough, but we had a lot of mold detox education at the ILADS conference, and you can need treatment for up to a year.
And we need to be helping them to be patient. People get taught by the medical establishment, I'm writing this prescription, take this, and you'll feel better. And you'll feel better, and they expect that. They’re expecting this quick fix thing. And it's just not about that. People need to be going to their functional medicine practitioner for something to do, not something to take.
Even though we know that herbs are helpful in the whole protocols, right? It's not enough. They've got to be doing the mindfulness. They've got to be improving their sleep. They've got to be eating the right things and getting rid of some of those allergens that are compounding their dysbiosis and intestinal permeability and blood brain barrier permeability, as well.
Dr Ritamarie (26:18)
So what I'm hearing here is that all of the things we do as foundational, these, are critical in these cases, as well.
And there's also need for, sometimes, you said pharmaceuticals combined with the nutraceuticals, but it's always combined with lifestyle, mindfulness practices, improving the diet, et cetera. Unlike in the conventional medicine model, which you grew up in and were in for so long, it's just “Take this pill” without telling them all the other things they need to be doing.
Dr Alison Grimston (26:54)
And if you get an acute tick bite, even if it was only attached for a moment, that's enough time for transmission of infection, because just as they inject their saliva in, that's enough. And so the classical idea that you only need to give doxycycline if they've got an Erythema migrans, that rash can take any form. It can look like a shingles rash. It can look like eczema. It can look like a burn. It's not just that classic circular target lesion and only about 17% of recognized cases, I say recognized cases using classical testing, actually get the rash, but that means that it's only about a tenth of that, of the real cases, because of what we're picking up. And if you do get an acute tick, but you need at least 21 days of doxycycline, not just a week. So you do need that. And then for actual treating chronic Lyme disease, or if there's ongoing symptoms like Arthralgia, you need to have a load of antibiotics or antibiotic herbs.
Dr Ritamarie (28:02)
And so here's the thing I'm thinking about here. If we're dealing with these people, like I said, we need to do a really good history, but we also need to know what to do to help them, right? Whether it be to refer to somebody you know as an expert in this area or as a starting point, what are some of the tests you can do, right? You said that not all the tests are created equal and not all of the ones that they do in, at least in Europe in the conventional medicine circles, are going to identify, because they're just looking at IgG or IgM. And in America, mainstream medicine just look at IgG and IgM. Give us a list of three to five or two to five, whatever number you have of other tests that should be looked at.
You just came from this conference, and you shared a couple of them, and you showed me these cool pictures.
Dr Alison Grimston (28:54)
Testing is complicated, because there's a new type of test called a Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH) test. It's very effective. With any test, you've got a compromise between sensitivity and specificity.
The test that we use in our clinic, is a subtype of T-spot test, which is looking at the interleukin 2 and gamma interferon that is released by immune cells in response that are specific to those subtypes. And so we can go really, really specific and measure. We do a mix of five. We do the Borrelia burgdorferi, which is classic Lyme, and we do a mix of five other local strains, but we also have the ability to do it for America as well, for our travellers. We can't, in our clinic, treat people in the US and Canada. There are many people who say this is actually increased false positives. And if you do IgG and IgM, which is what they say is what you should do, you're going to get increased false negatives. So the question is, is it a false positive?
Is it a false negative? How do we know when we're talking about microorganisms? Because the IgG and IgM show negative even when you can actually get a direct microscopy and see the organisms in the blood.
Dr Ritamarie (30:25)
So it sounds like it's hard to get a specific diagnosis.
And that a lot of the things that we do anyway with our clients to improve their diet, improve their sleep, improve their stress, get them doing mindfulness, getting them out in nature, which may or may not be possible for some of these folks, are important.
I know you mentioned in your clinic, we'll give them a choice between the pharmaceutical plus nutraceutical plus lifestyle or the nutraceutical, and you said, of course, it takes longer. What are some of those?
If you can throw out a few of those nutraceuticals. I know we were talking about Cryptoleptis being a good one and what are some of the other nutraceuticals?
Dr Alison Grimston (31:05)
Well, we use a specific brand of nutraceuticals that's been developed. Back to the testing, you can polymerize, PCR, or polymerized chain reaction. There is an enhanced version of that called cultured PCR. So you may use that.
Back to the treatment again. We tend to use one specific brand developed in Germany by somebody that we work closely with Dr. Carsten Nicolaus, who's co-founder of the German Berylliosis Society. And so we use his make well products, which contain blends. So there's a particular product for Bartonella. There's a particular blend for Babesia.
The ILADS conference, of course, it was based in San Antonio, Texas. And the stands were all US based brands, right? And there are plenty of really good, personally developed brands that use tinctures. So instead of having loads of supplements. And then again, with those, some of them are actually geared towards Babesia. If you've got it in Europe, this one is for Babesia if you got it in the US. Okay, got it. So it's specific. There's many different brands that you can look at.
But I don't know the success rate of that. Those are not the ones that we work with. The ones you work with. But the success rates of the recognized protocols introduced by ILADs are about 70%. People are actually recovering from that chronic fatigue, and we see that. It just takes a long time. It's just about being patient. Generally we say the nutraceuticals alone tend to take one to two years.
Antibiotics orally tend to take six months, and the IV antibiotics tend to take four months.
Dr Ritamarie (32:51)
It takes four months, where are you getting them from and to in that length of time?
Dr Alison Grimston (32:57)
And that's the thing, you see at that stage, we may be moving them onto oral antibiotics, or we might be moving them onto nutraceuticals. The thing about the T-spot test is it allows us to see if the CD57 count is improving, if the interleukin 2 and gamma interferon is improving over time with the treatment. So we've had people whose gamma interferon levels have have reduced from 100- 200 at the start to 9 over that period of time. And so we're testing periodically throughout.
Dr Ritamarie (33:32)
So you're testing, and you're going symptomatically and seeing how the improvement is.
Well, the bottom line is this is complicated, right? And you're going to see a lot of these chronic COVID, long COVID, people in your case. You're going to see people have been sick for a very long time or trying to get help. Bottom line is to do a great history and then really try to understand where all this is coming from, how's the immune system doing, a dialogue seeing where they are, doing some things like Metabolomix, organic acid testing, where you can see the pathways and see which nutrients are in balance, out of balance. And we’ve got to correct that, get rid of the toxicities, improve the ability to handle toxicity, improve the immune system's ability to recognize and then eliminate or balance the organisms, and get the nutrients under control. And get the diet cleaned up, so you're not consistently putting more toxicity on the body.
And there are nutraceuticals, Makewell is one brand, and there's other brands. We can put some resources in the show notes for you. But it's complicated, and it really goes back to the fact that we really need to help people, and support people on all levels, not just look at biochemical level. Let's give them drugs or supplements, or the emotional level, and let's make them meditate.
It's a combination of getting the entire balance in order, which is true of anybody that we see, but especially true of people with these long-term chronic, exhausting kind of syndromes. Any last parting words?
Dr Alison Grimston (35:07)
There is one other thing that I'd like to highlight. What has come to the fore in recent years is B6 excess. I don't know if you've come across that, but it's very important. Vitamin B6 toxicity causes neuropathic symptoms, so tingling, which is the same as vitamin B deficiencies cause. What you find is a lot of supplement brands use B6 as a filler.
When you start to look at how much is in these different brands, you find that if people are taking five different supplements, which is very common in this situation, in fact, we have people on at least nine different nutraceuticals plus coenzyme Q10 and vitamin D, for example, plus they may be on some adrenal support, some thyroid support. But if you look at a lot of these, they've got B6 unnecessarily. So it’s really important to look out for that. The maximum intake is 200, I can't remember whether it's milligrams.
Dr Ritamarie (36:02)
Is that pyridoxine hydrochloride, or is that pyridoxine 5-phosphate, which 5-phosphate is more absorbable, so it might be much lower. So it might be looking for 200 of the standard version which is pyridoxyl hydrochloride, and then maybe 50 to 100 might be a better guesstimate. And you can look at pathways.
Dr Alison Grimston (36:25)
So Makewell has developed their MTHFR support, for example, specifically excluding B6. Because it's in so many of the other supplements.
Dr Ritamarie (36:32)
Right, and then you can always add B6 separately if needed.
I am a big fan of individual nutrients, individual herbs. I work with so many people who are sensitive.
I usually at least start with all the individuals, which doesn't make them happy, because there's a lot of different ones. But it's much easier to go, “You had a problem when we added this one. You're good. We added this one. You had a problem when we added this one.” So we know it's either too much of that one. So there are ways around that, and we avoid that kind of thing that accidental toxicity or overload of a specific nutrient.
So it's complicated guys. And those of you who really want to understand all this, you've been trained in conventional medicine, and you didn't learn a lot about nutrition, and herbs, and the whole way the body works, check out our resources at INEmethod.com, and we'd be happy to introduce you to and help you to get the right training that you need to get this in practice.
And if you're a health coach, coming through any one of the many, many, many health coaching schools these days, they just don't go into the kind of depth that you need to be able to truly help these folks.
So continue your education, always be learning is my motto.
Dr Alison Grimston (37:50)
Absolutely. And I'm just grateful every single day for the education I had at the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology that Dr. Ritamarie founded. The NEP training was amazing.
I wouldn't be able to do the work I do now without that. And these vector-borne infections actually cause Hashimoto's, as well.
Dr Ritamarie (38:10)
I'm not surprised, right? Because the immune system is confused. It's not working properly. Or it's working properly to get rid of the toxicity, but it accidentally attacks your own tissue. That's really what autoimmune is. It's not so much your immune system is confused. It's just trying to get rid of the toxicity in your body, and there's innocent bystander organs and glands.
So anyway, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Check out our show notes and check out the description for more information and just keep being passionate. That's the thing I see in Dr. Allie. And this is a thing that I express in myself is passionate about really helping these people. Sometimes you have to dig and dig and dig, and you need to pull somebody else in on your team, so that you can be offering them the best possible service possible.
So thank you for being here and until next time, shine on.
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