If you work with clients who have chronic Lyme, mold illness, autoimmune patterns, fatigue, PANS/PANDAS, or persistent symptoms that have not resolved with conventional approaches, this conversation will give you a new lens for creating a more strategic path forward.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO, is America’s Lyme Recovery Expert and a leading voice in the treatment of chronic Lyme disease, mold illness, and PANS/PANDAS.
He’s the founder of the Lyme Disease Practitioner Certification & Mentorship program and host of The Lyme Insider podcast. A Fellow of the Medical Academy of Pediatric & Special Needs as well as ILADS Fellow and former acting President, Board member and Committee chair, Dr. Tom trains clinicians worldwide to confidently treat complex, chronic illness by blending cutting-edge science with practical, results-driven care.
Dr Ritamarie
Protocols suck. That’s a conversation that my dear friend Dr. Tom Moorcroft and I have a lot. And he, like me, has been in practice treating and working with people with a lot of chronic issues for a long time, so we’re going to talk today.
We’re going to hit on Lyme disease, and we’re going to hit on peptides, and anything else that comes to mind and nervous system dysregulation.
Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Tom. He is America’s Lyme recovery expert and a leading voice in the treatment of chronic Lyme disease, mold illness, and PANS PANDAS. He does have a program where he teaches health practitioners how to work with people with Lyme, but like me, he doesn’t like protocols. He likes to teach you how to personalize for each person and how to figure out the sequence.
He’s the founder of the Lyme Disease Practitioner Certification and Mentorship Program, the host of the Lyme Insider podcast, a fellow of the Medical Academy of Pediatric and Special Needs, as well as an ILADS fellow and former acting president, board member, and committee chair. Dr. Tom trains clinicians worldwide to confidently treat, work with, plan, however you use that in your scope of practice, chronic illness by blending cutting-edge science with practical results-driven care.
Thanks so much for being here. I’m so excited that we get to chat, and we get to share our conversation with the world and with other health practitioners who are as dedicated as we are to helping people overcome this epidemic of chronic conditions. Welcome.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (02:12)
Well, thanks, Dr. Ritamarie. I’m so excited to be here. I mean, it’s so nice to be able to have a recorded conversation where we can share all the stuff we talk about behind the scenes with everybody, because I think it’s the nuts and bolts of healing. So I’m really excited.
Dr Ritamarie (02:24)
It really is. You and I, we started this pre-conversation. We were talking about nervous system dysregulation, and we were talking about sequencing, and we were talking about protocols and how we don’t like that word, and how we both cringe when practitioners and clients alike will ask us what’s the protocol for? Whether it’s hot flashes, menopause, TMJ, whatever.
There’s really not a protocol for a condition. It’s more you could call it a protocol, but a plan for a person. I’d love to hear you share your feelings about that, before we jump into some specifics.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (03:06)
I think it’s such an important point, because I grew up as an osteopath in medical school, and we, my wife and I, did a lot of manual medicine training and in cranial osteopathy where cranial sacral work comes from, a lot of people would teach you a technique. There are two groups of people. One would be the ones who just gathered techniques, and then the other ones who said, What was this technique that the mentor was trying to teach us?
What we gathered from that was that the technique or the guideline, like this plan, is a starting point, not the end point. We’re not recreating the wheel every time, but it’s a place to say, throughout my exploration, this is where I got to. I want to shortcut you to get there, but then I want you to go further. I want you to continue to explore what that unique individual in front of you needs at the moment. I try not to use the word. There’s a lot of medical guidelines and in medicine we tend to think you have to follow the guideline. I go, well, it’s not a guideline. It’s a mandate, and so I’m like guidelines are just that. They guide you, and I teach people approaches. If they want to call it a protocol, sure, but like you said, I love it. You create a plan.
I think of it as chess. Chronic illness chess, because if you look at chess, and I actually went to a conference a couple months ago, and I was all jet lagged and tired. Instead of going to the bar with everybody, I did what I was supposed to do. I tried to lead by example and go to bed early, but it was a little hard. I turned on Netflix, and I found a chess documentary. I’m like, this is going to put me to sleep, This is better than any sleep method.
It was the most interesting thing I had ever seen in terms of looking at this question of protocols and guidelines and strategy and sequencing, because what you found was it was about this woman who was like playing with the men and in the upper echelons of the entire world.
They were just saying that every time she started, she would do this one move and then the other guy would do the defense. Eventually when they got down to the end, she’d either lose, or they might tie, but it was always her way to go. It wasn’t until she changed her opening move and did something different that she had a different outcome.
The point of it in chess terms is they know all the moves. These people are the greatest chess players in history that they’re documenting. They know every possible move, but they have to pick up the piece, and they make one move, and then the other person makes a move, and you’re continually in this balance, this back and forth of strategizing where you think you want to go, but then you have a living system, this ecosystem that’s going to respond to you. Maybe you wanted to move like some pawn or some knight there, but then you have to move your queen over there. That doesn’t throw them off completely. It just makes them think and then they revise their strategy.
I tell people who want the protocol, it’s not necessarily a straight line, but we know most of the rules. The cool thing about medicine is sometimes we learn new things and then we have new rules, which is fun, but we have a strategy where we can make the most appropriate next move, then we observe the response of the patient. We observe how the labs change, and then we respond in another strategic manner. If it’s just cookie cutter, we wouldn’t need doctors or other practitioners.
If there is anything that’s cookie cutter, everybody would do it, because it would work ninety nine point nine percent of the time.
Dr Ritamarie (06:48)
Exactly. I love that perspective and I love equating it or comparing it to chess. I like the word framework. What’s the framework for somebody with chronic illness? The first thing we want to find out is this, and where are all the imbalances lying, and how long has this thing been going on, and what were the precipitating factors, and all the stuff that we learn how to do.
In medicine today, when people come in and talk to me, their doctors have this 5 minute, 10 minute, 15 minute window, and they don’t have time to explore all those pathways. They just jump right into, “You have hot flashes, so we’re going to test your estrogen and progesterone and then depending on what comes back, we’re going to give you a hormone prescription.”
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (07:42)
The part about that that’s crazy is they don’t have the time to manage it properly. It’s not always their fault. It is the system, and insurance reimbursement is based upon putting square pegs in round holes. They are going to hammer you with large doses of estrogen very commonly, including synthetic estrogens and even progestins and things that your body may not need, because they don’t have the time in their schedule to slowly and steadily lift you up like a floaty in the pool.
My job is not to create a hovercraft out of a body that’s supposed to float. It’s just when you’re tired, I lift you up, so you can float, then your body can recover. In the work that I do, which so much of it is infection and toxin exposure, so many people look at it as infections versus the nervous system, or this versus that. I think in complex chronic illness, there’s the infection, there’s the toxins, but there’s an immune response to that.
Different people have different immune responses. There’s an autonomic response, as you alluded to. There are other environmental factors. One of the funniest things to me is we all talk about diet like it’s what we eat. I’m like, well, that’s one of our diets, but we also have a mental, emotional, social media diet and a friend diet. What do we watch on TV? What do we read and consume? That’s part of our environment.
Then we put all of that together with the patient’s healing capacity, and all of those things create this sort of self-reinforcing loop. The way I look at it, it’s like an ecosystem, almost like Charlotte, like a web. Our job is to identify the dominant bottleneck and then make the next right move for that person. That’s really where that strategy comes in, because it’s like, what I just described literally just took longer than the average doctor visit.
Dr Ritamarie (09:37)
Yes, exactly, and that’s the problem with the system. You can’t do a systematic approach and really look at all the layers to see what came first, and what do we need to address first? If you address a downstream manifestation of the true problem, you’re just going to get symptom relief, temporarily. Then you find, this created this, created this, created this. Then you have that good domino effect of shifting one thing, which shifts another thing, which shifts another thing in the direction we want people to go, not the opposite.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (10:20)
Right. What might be someone’s downstream is someone else’s upstream. I was recently asked to present a case at an autism conference where they were trying to learn about pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome. We call it PANS, so we don’t have to say that all the time, but the bottom line is, what is it? It’s an infection triggered autoimmune brain inflammation that leads to acute behavioral changes in adults and children, but that more specifically is describing children.
What’s really interesting is I had a person come to me, they had originally had a strep as a trigger, and then they had the autoimmunity, but then they got exposed to Lyme disease after they had previously been treated, and it re-triggered similar symptoms rather than being strep, because they had this autoimmune predisposition. They hadn’t fully broken that cycle when they had Lyme, it re-triggered it, but it looked more like strep induced.
Then they went further and they were like, I found Bartonella. Everybody treated them for strep, Lyme, and Bartonella for four years. They had made very little progress. I was like, okay, why don’t we take a step back and find out what’s really going on? I understand in my practice I have a bit of a bias, because people come to me for a particular reason, and my specialty, but I relabbed them for many things, including infections. They found out that they had babesiosis that no one had identified, and then I started treating their Babesia.
Within four months, the kid is 95% better than they’ve been in five years. Well, why didn’t we look there? Well, it’s less common than the other ones. Okay, well, that might be true. Lyme comes from the same tick that gives you Babesia. I know that from personal experience, but the point is, it’s like when we put our blinders on, and we decide we know what the answer is. We sometimes don’t.
Sometimes it changes. The upstream and the downstream shift a lot. You and I talk a lot about the sympathetic nervous system, and one of the things that really jumps out to me is where that’s an example. Sometimes sympathetic activation is the cause, and sometimes it’s the consequence.
Dr Ritamarie (12:40)
Yes, exactly. Let’s talk about that. Let’s just reinforce. I have my new terminology for that. People are suffering from a sympathetic overload system, SOS. It’s the system crying out for help. We’re not necessarily giving them that help. Give me an idea. I like to talk about nervous system regulation.
In the nervous system, when the sympathetic is over driving, and we have very little parasympathetic, and the vagus nerve is being suppressed. That puts people in a situation where healing doesn’t happen, because their body is not safe enough to allow the healing to happen. I’d love to hear your perspective.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (13:20)
This is probably the most important thing. I look at things like there’s a biologic threat. If you even step back and call it trauma, because trauma is real, or perceived threat to unsafety, you have this threat which alarms your nervous system, your automatic nervous system, the one that’s a reflex protective mechanism.
When that gets on overdrive and on high alert, it’s not trying to repair your body. It’s actually trying to run away from problems. That reduces your resilience, because you’re not focusing on repairing things. You’re actually focusing on survival. Because of this, as it moves downstream, we have a greater sensitivity to that original threat and all others.
That’s a loop in my brain that came out after years of thinking about this. I think the first thing for me is kind of like what you highlighted. We’ve got what most people think of as our autonomic nervous system with the sympathetic fight or flight. If a saber-toothed tiger comes to my campsite, I’m either going to run away, because I think I can get away, or I’m going to turn and stand there and fight, but I’m pretty sure I can win.
The other one would be what we were doing right before the saber-toothed tiger came, which we were sharing a beer, or we were chatting around the fire, whatever the heck we were doing, having some of the whatever meal we were sharing. That’s that rest and digest and repair thing. What we found out though, by studying the nervous system more, is it’s not just fight or flight, or rest, digest, repair, have a good time. It’s like, what happens if say, you try to get away, but the saber-toothed tiger grabs you?
Then what do we do? I don’t really know, because I haven’t met a saber-toothed tiger, but I’ve seen this happen out in the yard. If you have seen outdoor cats grab a chipmunk or a mouse, the first thing it does is it freezes. Its survival strategy now changes. In its mind and its nervous system, it can’t get away, and it can’t win, so it goes limp.
What you see is, and you’ll see this in people, and COVID was a great example of this, many people were like freaked out, but then all of a sudden everybody you talked to was talking like this, and their eyes were down, and it’s almost like everybody was shrinking, and you kind of withdraw, and you get numbed to the situation, and then your nervous system is just in shutdown mode. That’s what happened.
If you talk about polyvagal theory, they talk about the freeze state. Now, what’s really interesting is they talk about safety as being crucial. I point out to people really often, safety is an interesting thing, because in our higher brain that’s doing all this thought and digesting all this information that you and I are talking about and thinking about. It makes common sense that if you’re sick, it would be better to heal. If I have Lyme disease or I have a mold exposure, of course it’s safe to heal.
The more reptilian nervous system, that reflex protective mechanism is saying, wait, change is often dangerous. Rather than safety, maybe we could talk about our comfort zone and what our body is used to is what it wants. All it wants us to do is be alive. It doesn’t care how we feel. It just wants you to procreate and pass your genes on.
A lot of people say in order to grow, you need to get out of your comfort zone. Well, in order to heal, you have to get out of your comfort zone. Then I was like, okay, well, that’s a little better terminology for understanding why it’s not just run and heal, because it makes sense. I wanted to look up if anyone had checked what the optimal dose of change would be before the nervous system got overloaded, because the problem is we’re saying we want you to get a little uncomfortable, so that you can get used to that and that becomes your new comfort zone.
How do I move to that next level without overdoing it? I started looking at a concept called hormesis, which I’m sure you know, is essentially, it’s like if you have a classic car, and you turn it on once a year or whatever, and somebody buffs it, it’s going to be fine. It’s not going to wear out. If you drive it, it’s going to wear out.
A human body actually doesn’t work that way. If we don’t use it, we to some degree, lose it. We have to use it. When we go to the gym, many people understand that some days you push harder and sometimes you relax. There’s months where you’re trying to get endurance, and other months in a row on a block, you might be trying to get muscle mass or whatever. We call that periodization.
Hormesis is looking at a dose, or a duration of stress, that’s just enough to stimulate positive growth without falling into toxicity. I actually looked this up. There are over 1,500 scientific articles exploring what the optimal dose of a hermetic stress will be. I was like, that’s a lot of papers. I could not believe it, and the average across all these papers is between 20 and 30% above your baseline, and so it’s really interesting.
If you’re walking a mile, and you want to walk two miles, you don’t go from one mile to two miles. You do like 1.2 miles. If you think about it, if you can already walk a mile, 1.2 miles is not that much, and then you might do 1.1 miles the next day and 1.25 the next, but you just play around in that 20 to maybe 30% range, and then you give yourself a little rest and then you go a little further, and the more you do that over time, each time that 20% gap gets bigger.
In the beginning, this is where our folks who have been chronically sick might be really sensitive. We need to kind of be really aware of that for them. They have a greater sensitivity because of the state of their nervous system and so people get overwhelmed easily.
I’ve actually had people not start a treatment, because they got anxious thinking about it. I think when I look back on that, I probably gave them too much information that day.
Dr Ritamarie (20:02)
Yes, and that’s a really good point, because a lot of us who like to geek out about it, and we think that the person needs this detailed biochemical explanation for every item on our to-do list, we overwhelm them and then they freeze.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (20:21)
Exactly. You know me, I’m a big believer in informed consent. I really think we do a poor job of that in modern medicine. In a surgical procedure, they’ll usually go over it. For most things, they’re just like, do it, because I’m the doctor. I’m like, that’s not patient autonomy. That’s not respecting the patient, and it’s certainly not going over the major potential risks and the potential benefits, which is what we call informed consent.
I have tried to dial it back. I remember one of my mentors one day, I was talking to a patient with him, and this person, we had done like an hour consultation. He laid out this little, great, step-by-step for the next two months. Not a really bad period of time, but it was just this for one week, two weeks later, do this, and three weeks later, do that. It was very straightforward, very well laid out in my mind.
Then the person started asking, what if this and what if that? What about next? What about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? He said one of the things that really stuck with me. He goes, those are all great questions. We have enough to deal with today. We have a great plan for today. We’ll address those in the future, and I was like, so it is okay as the provider to say, that’s a great question. Let me make a note, and we’ll address that in the future, if it’s still on the table.
Dr Ritamarie (21:50)
If it’s still an issue. That’s a big important piece to make sure they know, because when you do find the upstream driver, and you make some changes, and they make just subtle changes sometimes, those downstream symptoms go away, and you don’t have to address them.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (22:07)
For example, this kid who had babesiosis. Mom was like, what about this? What about this? What about this? Everybody told her, and they were comparing themselves to others. I understand it, because they are challenged. This is a kid where they don’t have answers. Even when they come to somebody like myself, who’s well known for having answers to their questions, they’re still scared. It’s their kiddo. I understand. But in the end, it was like we did the one thing that needed to be done on day one.
At our follow-up, they were doing better. Then at our second follow-up, the mom was like, there’s almost nothing wrong. I’m like, so every question they had on day one, once they trusted the process, and I think this is an important piece, too. One of the most important things we can do is validate their concerns. That doesn’t mean we agree with them. It doesn’t mean we enable them or reinforce them, but we hear them, and we acknowledge that we’ve heard their concerns.
One of the things that’s helped me a lot is that, because a lot of people say to me, you’ve probably never seen anybody as sick as me. I am laughing. I’m like, my God, everybody says that to me. You can’t even imagine how many more sick people I’ve seen. It doesn’t matter, because they are as sick as they are, and they deserve to heal. They deserve to work with people who are trying to help them achieve their optimal wellness, and I don’t know what everyone’s optimal is, but I certainly am going to give it the old college try and do my best to help them be completely cured.
If we can’t get there, we’re going to get them and raise that bar as high as we can. I think it’s important to validate their experience and then also let them know that, I see people like you all the time. While everyone’s a unique individual, for me, it’s been over 15 years of this specialty alone, and I’ve been in medicine for 30 years. I didn’t think I’m old enough to do that. I started in 1995. Sometimes it’s just fun to share something like that, so they have a little smile on their face and go, wait, Dr. Tom, Dr. Ritamarie, they heard me. They’ve seen other people like me, and they’ve been doing this a long time. I think it’s important because even that, it was funny.
The way you smiled, it was like the nervousness went away. I get this. Everybody just likes to take that breath. So sometimes, it’s these really almost intangible things about the relationship. When you look at doctors who are burnt out, it’s the short appointment times, it’s the fact that they themselves can often barely pay their bills, believe it or not, and in order to optimize the reimbursement, they have to follow the protocols that are set out by other people to minimize the expense of care. They all, most of them, got into medicine, because they wanted to help people.
Dr Ritamarie (25:13)
Of course. We all did.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (25:17)
Imagine a patient who’s all stressed out, and a doctor who’s stressed out. That’s not the best. That’s why I think that’s the thing I love about you and the work you do. I love teaching other docs. I lead by example. I literally do meditations, hypnosis sessions, and breath work sessions for my training program. It’s not part of the official training, but it’s the most important part.
Dr Ritamarie (25:43)
When you’re working with a client that comes in like that, or patient, whatever you want to call them, whatever your scope is, when they come in, and they’re looking for that next supplement, that next herb, that next medication, that next whatever, and you’re telling them, okay, here’s what I want you to do right now. Let’s just take a deep breath together, and they’re like looking at you like you’re odd, but the healing that happens in that moment of getting them to just slow down and access their parasympathetic is phenomenal.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (26:16)
It is. It’s interesting when one of the things that happened for me is I got bitten by a tick. It clearly is the only time in my life that I got bit by a tick and didn’t know it. I got sick, because I got Lyme disease. I had brain fog, joint pain, fatigue. My boss found me staring at a computer screen that was blank, and I was drooling all over myself. I went to the doc, and they found this huge rash. He diagnosed me with Lyme disease. They treated me for 10 days.
For the first four days I couldn’t get off the floor. I was 23. My parents, my mom and my dad, literally had to carry me to go to the bathroom. I mean, how embarrassing. All the symptoms I had looked like babesiosis, but no one told anybody to look. I got better after those 10 days, but over the next months and years. I have joint pain and brain fog and muscle pain and fatigue. It got to the point where Jill would touch my arm right after we got married, and it would feel like Darth Vader shoved a lightsaber up my arm. I was like, please don’t touch me, which is really not the best way to start off a marriage. Although we did just celebrate 25 years a month and a half ago. Iit worked out, but you know, it was interesting.
Over the years, they’re like, you’re depressed. I’m like, no, my body hurts, and I’m tired, and you guys aren’t offering me any help.
Then I started to get angry. They’re like, bipolar depression, because you’ve got all this energy. I go mad, because you have your head up your butt. I tried all the medicines, and one of the keys, I think, is every medicine I was tried on, they’re like, I’ve never seen anyone respond like this. You’re not responding like everybody else, so here, take more.
Ultimately I was like, none of the meds worked. I had to wean off of all these weird, psychiatric medicines that weren’t working, but they were causing all these problems. Then I go to my primary and I tell him I have joint pain, brain fog, fatigue, and muscle pain. He goes, I know exactly what you have, and he says, fibromyalgia syndrome. I’m like, Great, so I told you that I have joint pain, brain fog, fatigue, and muscle aches, and you told me that I have joint pain, brain fog, muscle pain. I didn’t need a doctor for that, and the problem was he put me in a box and then he stopped looking.
If I had looked at the potential causative agents of fibromyalgia syndrome symptoms, that would have been a different story, but at that point, I gave up on modern medicine. I was kind of in the early parts of medical school. We were doing lots of osteopathic manual medicine work, and that kind of helped calm my nervous system, but not that much.
Someone handed me a yoga DVD, and it was Ashtanga Yoga, which is where power yoga is from. Most people learn from a really acrobatic and muscular yogi. The people that I learned with were people who spent tons of time in India with the guru of Ashtanga Yoga, and they said it’s movement on breath, and if you can’t fully breathe, you shouldn’t be doing the posture. If you can’t take a full breath in and out, relaxed and calm, that’s your litmus test that you’re pushing too hard. It’s a 90-minute practice, six days a week. You take the new and the full moon off so that you can respect the gravitational pull, the water in your body, and you take once a week off so that you don’t become essentially addicted to your practice and think that that’s the only thing.
I started and 90 seconds was the most I could do and then I was dying, and I’d have to lie down and breathe for 88 and a half minutes. My nervous system was so jacked, but I said my back was against the wall. Jill decided to do it with me. She could do three quarters of the practice right away, and I’m sitting here like, I can’t move. I’m in pain. I respected it, and I didn’t know hormeses at the time, but I respected that I couldn’t push too hard. I used that litmus test. Eventually my body opened up and opened up and then we went to these yoga retreats with the guy who I’d learned from his book and his DVD, and I wanted to get real life training.
Everybody there was professional yoga instructors. They’re like, Jill and you have the most beautiful Ashtanga practice we’ve ever seen. Who’s your teacher? I go, him. How do you teach with him? I go, I got his book and his DVD, and I just did what he said, which was movement on breath, not the other way around. It’s not calisthenics.
Now I tell people, look, one of the litmus tests is, if you find yourself pulling the breath up, or you’re like, just take a moment. You don’t have to do these deep, crazy ujjayi sound breath, yoga stuff, but just tune in with your breath and just be like, I’m breathing in, I’m breathing out, and just be present with it. If you can’t breathe when you’re doing something that’s pushing a little bit, then slow down and respect it, because it’s then it’ll open up.
So the point I was actually trying to get to that I almost forgot was for me, about 70% of my symptomatology went away over two years of following this. Then coincidentally, kind of like the yoga DVD being handed to me, I had a last minute ability to change a rotation. I went to an osteopath’s office. She’s doing manual medicine. Her husband’s a naturopath, and they were both treating people, and he was doing the medicine and the herbs for all these people with chronic Lyme disease.
When I talked to all the patients, and I listened and observed, it was the first time in over eight years I heard another person who sounded like they had what I had, so I said to the guy, I was like, Dr. Mulligan, I’ve never heard any other human being have the symptoms I have. Everybody in your practice does.
Whatever you’re testing them for, here’s my arm, here’s my credit card, and do it. A couple of weeks later, we had the diagnosis. Now, it took another four and a half years to get better from Lyme and Babesia and heavy metal toxicity, but the big point was I learned a lot about how to access healing. I believed firmly and when I was doing the yoga, I started to change my diet naturally. I just started to not like processed foods, not wanting sugar.
No one taught it to me until after I actually stopped doing it, but it was really an amazing experience, because I believe what happened was I prepared my body to accept the medical treatments it needed, but I did the work first. When they gave me treatments, my body was ready to change. I see so many people, like you were saying, what’s the supplement that I need? What is the tincture? What is the medicine, or the gadget that’s going to heal me?
Unless it’s brand new, or we get really lucky, that’s probably not the first question you should ask.
Dr Ritamarie (33:24)
Yes, so what is the first question we should ask?
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (33:28)
I want to know what state your nervous system is in and your immune system. More importantly, I think I want to know what state you’re in, because we talk a lot about body, mind, and spirit. Osteopaths have been talking about it since the mid 1800s, and it became really popular in the last 20, 30 years. The body does not function separately.
The question really is, where in this loop of things, what is the number one thing for you? Because what’s right for you, Ritamarie and me, is not what’s right for my neighbors down the road, or the patient I’m going to see first thing tomorrow. I think that’s really the thing. It is like where is that bottleneck for you? The way we figure that out is understanding all of the moves, going back to chess. What are all the moves that we are at least reasonably aware of?
We risk stratifying them. We call it differential diagnosis, but what’s the most likely and also what is the most dangerous, if I miss it? Then we figure it out. I think the most important thing I found is that it is amazing when you actually sit there and connect with someone and then ask them what really is going on and really get to know what that is, especially the traumas.
Dr Ritamarie (34:46)
I love that. That’s connection, and that’s what’s missing, that’s the missing link, I think, in modern medicine and in a lot of functional practices as well, because a lot of people that go into functional medicine come from allopathic, and they’re looking for what’s the box and what herbs and nutrients and red light therapy and peptides and whatever else we’re going to throw in versus this, the drugs. It’s really the same thought process, and that’s not what people need.
Nobody needs to go in a box. That’s what a diagnosis is. It’s a box, and it’s a convenient way of classifying people, but it really doesn’t help. When you listen and when you ask questions like, tell me a little bit about when was the last time you actually felt really well, and then you explore that, like what happened before, what was happening emotionally, what was happening physically, what were you exposed to? They feel like you can visibly see them go, nobody ever asked me this before. I had no idea.
It was when my parents died and then they shuttled me off to this grandma and then grandma died, and I felt alone and abandoned in the world. That’s when all my symptoms started. Whoa. That’s different than, here’s your antipsychotic medication.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (36:06)
Sometimes people haven’t connected it either. When you connect, when you give them an opportunity to be in a safe space to really let that happen, it is unbelievable. I will also say, I currently have a patient who has known tick-borne disease exposure, been treated by a lot of people, and hasn’t really gotten all that well, but across the board forever, she’s had these elevated liver functions.
People have worked it up, but never really addressed it. When I met this person, their mother kept calling and saying stuff about alcohol use, but when I talked to them, they’re like, no, no, no, but in the back of my mind, I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, Hey, let’s be partners here. There’s a lot of different options for why your liver functions might be up. Let’s review all of them to make sure no one’s missed anything.
Then I added on a test that can tell, it’s kind of like a hemoglobin A1C, but for alcohol use. It was crazy. I talked to her three or four times, before I tagged that one on, too, because I wanted to develop the relationship. It was becoming more and more clear that this was more of an alcohol addiction problem than not, and it was. I got the test, and it was 10 times the upper limit of normal for horrific, and it was unbelievable.
What was so cool was I had spent all this time preparing ahead of time to make sure that I could talk about this in a compassionate way rather than see where you were lying to me, because they’re not lying. They’re just embarrassed. They might not know what to do. They’re addicted. That’s different than just whatever.
All different things could come up for me. I got all prepared, and I came into the visit. She had looked at it and must have, after having a couple of visits and really connecting, she goes, I’ve been drinking this much, and I’m pretty sure that it was at least half of what’s realistic, but she just spilled the beans and then we came up with a plan that would come away from all the things that people had been focused on, because they didn’t want to go into this place where you have potentially have a hard conversation. Then she just was all about it. Then I had the opposite problem.
Last week I got a phone call, I was like, my God, she’s going through withdrawal. She started slowing down and then just cold turkeying. Sometimes you know what you want to do, but you have to develop the connection, the trust, and the safety for them to go there.
I come out of the critical care medicine, and the ER, and the CCU, where in 20 minutes I might do 80 different things.
I do one thing and then I wait 30 seconds and see if it works, and then I do the next thing, and then the next thing. We have a protocol, a guideline, but then we freestyle. What I find is if you have a strong foundation, I know that all the stuff you teach, the foundation is so strong. Once you learn all that, then you can put the tool belt on the floor and just have a conversation, because you have all the tools.
Once I get there, then I can be Picasso, and that’s what I loved about it.
If I take a 30-minute cardiac arrest in the ER, I’ve done a bazillion things, but now I take chronic illness. Just spread that 30 minutes out over 18 months, so now you don’t have to rush. You just need the checkpoints to make those changes over time. I know everything I might do in the 30 minutes or the 18 months, but I don’t have to do them all today. Even if I know I need to get to point X, I might have to start at QP, whatever, or PQR, whatever, and get there over time.
I think it’s important to understand that sometimes you have to set it up. Everybody who plays sports, sometimes, you want to score a goal in hockey, but a lot of times, you have to set it up first. If you just go for the net, it’s not going to always work unless it’s completely wide open on a breakaway, then do it.
It’s the strategy of not only figuring out what the sequence is of upstream and downstream for that person, but I think it’s creating a strategy for how to get to the place that you think is the keystone in a way that allows the patient to essentially arrive there at the same time as you.
In this case, it was essentially her idea. I just brought her to it, and I don’t care whose idea it is. I just want them to accept it and understand it, so they can get better.
Dr Ritamarie (41:17)
No, no, and to feel safe talking to you about it. She clearly did, and you developed a rapport and then she was like, this thing’s happening, and this is what we have to do.
Share with us that test you did. I’m guessing, but what test did you run?
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (41:32)
I’m going to double check, because I don’t even know. I remember off the top of my head. I don’t see a lot of chronic alcoholism.
Dr Ritamarie (41:38)
I mean I think about GGT when I think about alcohol, but this was something beyond that.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (41:44)
What was interesting is, I was actually working on an AI adjunct for my online practitioner training program, so that they have extra resources, an extra sort of download of my brain. It taught me about this, and I had not even heard about it. This is a while ago now, but it’s a Phosphatidylethanol test. PEth is the shorthand for it.
Dr Ritamarie (42:18.285)
PEth, Phosphatidylethanol. Okay.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (42:23)
When they have Phosphatidylethanol levels in excess of twenty nanograms per milliliter, it’s considered evidence of moderate to heavy alcohol consumption. In this person’s case, theirs was four hundred and fifty-seven. It was like we walked into it.
Dr Ritamarie (42:38)
She was a little beyond moderate. Whoa. She probably looked it up, because they’re so easy to look up a test,
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (42:47)
I will say, as we’ve been talking about this, I do remember a time where it’s like, I really should be pushing harder on this alcoholism thing. I really should. I was feeling like I wasn’t doing my job as a human or as a physician. I was like, Am I skirting this, because I don’t want to have the conversation?
I did have the conversation, but you have to crack the shell just a little bit. Once you get a little light, don’t ram through it. Just open it. Just be gentle. I mean, if you’re in an emergency situation, it’s a different story, but we’re not talking about that.
Dr Ritamarie (43:307)
Of course. We’re talking to people who have been dealing with these situations for a long time. They’re looking for somebody who can actually crack it open and figure it out.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (43:38)
When you looked at her AST and ALT and her GGT, they were sky high. Her Alkphos was going up a little bit, but nothing else came up. I looked at all the autoimmune things, all the other markers, and the one thing, too, is you can not only risk stratify your patient, just like with the obvious stuff, but just look back. I look back and at least for four or five years, she had the same level of LFTs, and they had gone up a little bit more, but never went super high. They started to come down a little, which I was a little nervous about, because you actually can burn out and wait and then you get a lot of people who are yellow and end up with normal liver functions, because their liver is just toast. That’s so uncommon. Most people can’t even live long enough to get to that point with that.
I didn’t need to rush. I just needed to arrive at the destination. I teach practitioners you don’t always have to rush, but you need to know where you’re going. When you’re treating people, you don’t need to rush there. You can teach them that they don’t need to rush.
In our program, I’m just like, crawl before you walk, but walk before you run. If not, you’re going to realize that somebody tied your shoelaces together. You’re going to try to sprint, and you’re going to fall and break your nose, and now we have another problem.
You don’t need to be a jackass about it. Step back. It’s almost like that. It’s funny. When I got it, the first thing I did in medicine was wilderness medicine. There were two guys, Buck Tilton and Frank Hubble, and I worked for Frank. He was in North Conway, New Hampshire, and he started solo outdoor learning opportunities, and he was an EMT, then a paramedic, then a PA, and then a DO. I was like, that’s a lot of school. He was one of the coolest doctors I ever met, because he just talked to people. When he worked acute care, it was like you were friends immediately with him.
He was telling a story one time about scene safety. When you’re in emergency stuff, you have got to make sure you don’t get hurt when you’re going to help somebody else, because otherwise now you have multiple victims/patients, and you don’t have anybody to help him. He said in the beginning, he’s like, I don’t recommend this, but Buck Tilton, the other guy that I kind of created the whole field with, was like, he would go to an emergency situation, he would stop and have a smoke, and then he would do something. The point was he was a smoker, which he shouldn’t have been, but the point was take a deep breath, take it in, get a concept of everything that’s going on. I mean, there’s no need to rush.
These are emergency situations where you have to act quickly, and everybody’s saying take a deep breath before you act.
In chronic illness, sit down, have a glass of water, a cup of tea, talk to people. You don’t have to rush. Part of what I want people to really do, practitioners, is like we mentioned earlier, lead by example. Part of leading by example Is everything you do. You need to practice what you preach, including the nervous system regulation stuff. All the stuff I ask people to do, we do that or something similar in our own lives. People are like, Well, do you really expect me to eat that way? I’m like, I do. I know you do. Then they hear about the way I exercise. They’re like, That’s a lot. I go, It is. You don’t need to do that, but you need to do something.
Dr Ritamarie (47:20)
Exactly, and I love the little Hormesis example of twenty percent more. How far can you go without being exhausted for three days? Okay, you can go a half a mile, great. Do that for a week, and now I want you to go twenty percent more, whatever that is.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (47:36)
The other side of people who just as soon as they can do anything, they overdo it. I tell people, I give them the whole thing, but I feel them out. A lot of those people I say, do seventy percent of what you think you can do. If you think you can walk a mile, just walk seven tenths of a mile. And then work up.
Dr Ritamarie (48:00)
It’s interesting how we can be like it can hit you. For me, I went through a stressful period, and I kept trying to push my five miles a day and my heavy duty lifting, and I’m like, I just walked around the block, and it was a mile, and I feel tired. What the heck is going on? I knew what I needed to do, and I needed to reset my nervous system. I really was smart. I actually just walked the mile and then the next couple of days later, I walked a mile and a half, and eventually I did get up to three miles, but it took a couple of months.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (48:36)
What’s interesting, when you think about exercise physiology and all this, and periodization, people, they’ll peak, but then they purposefully take time off so that they don’t burn out and not completely fall off. This will come back in one second to how we can treat our patients and help them navigate flares and new exposures.
One of the things that I’m always interested in is, there are days when I get done with work and I’m like, there is no way I can exercise. I feel so beat up. There’s a feeling where I’m like, I’m just going to take a break. Then there’s another one where I’m like, I mean I’ve worked on this for a long time, so I know my body. If I exercise, and I push just a little harder today, I’m going to actually feel better. It’s about getting in touch with your intuition. All the things that you and I have been talking about help the practitioner, one be healthier, but hone their own skills in and their spidey sense in, navigating this with their patients.
Then you teach these things to your patients early, and you integrate it into, well, hey, like Lyme disease is a great example. A lot of people are worried about a Herxheimer reaction, or a symptom flare, with effective treatment.
What’s too much? What’s too little? I find that some people are so afraid of feeling uncomfortable, so we’re coming back to that, that they won’t let themselves feel uncomfortable at all.
Then there’s other people who are like, I have to feel horrible in order to heal. Both of those mindsets are probably not optimal. I think that when people learn that you will at some point most likely feel a little bit uncomfortable, 20%-ish, then, and we teach them that over time, they start to feel more comfortable with discomfort. If your comfort zone’s here, I can move you over a little bit only if you’re willing to be a little uncomfortable, but you’re not going to be kamikaze about it.
When my folks have a treatment flare, I often ask them, how bad is it? Is it like nuclear, or is it just uncomfortable? How frequent is it? I usually ask them to give me a couple of days. I always tell people, sometimes you’re going to have a symptom, and you’re not going to know you’re probably going to be a little afraid of it. Maybe not, but a lot of times people are like, Whoa, this is new, or this is different. I’m a little afraid. What I want you to do is send me a message, or call the office, and let us know. We’ll tell you what we think, but we may not know what it means when it happens once, but let’s say it happens once this week but then it happens once next week, and then it happens in whatever. We try to see the trend.
I just always coach people from the very beginning that we’re not always going to jump to conclusions right away, but we’re going to work it out together, so I always am building the construct of this is teamwork, and it’s also strategy. Part of strategy is actually taking the time to collect the data but then it’s also sitting back and contemplating the data and observing it in real time so that everything we’re doing is, and I try to even do this in a podcast and in blog posts, is not to always be definitive, but to tell people how we’re going to implement this strategy over time, so that all the material, like marketing materials, emails, the way my staff talks, the way I talk, all of it is about the same, so that everything is reinforcing this is how you’re going to heal. This is the way that you can get the best access to healing.
It’s great when it happens in my practice, but even if it doesn’t, that’s the mindset that they need in order to heal at all. Ultimately my goal is for people to get better, regardless of whether it’s my practice that helps them do it, yours, or somebody else’s. I just want them better.
Dr Ritamarie (52:48)
Right. Exactly. Healthy, happy people don’t fight. Healthy, happy people create a peaceful world. My goal is to create a world where we have a lot of healthy, happy people and work with them to create that. I love the partnership thing, letting them know I don’t have all the answers. I’m going to be digging some of those answers out of you.
As practitioners, that’s what we need to learn to do is to sit with the information and ask and extract it from them.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (53:16)
Yes. I know that there’s all kinds of Lyme things to talk about. There’s all kinds of peptides and treatments and blah, blah, blah, but what’s so interesting, I want people to become reliant upon themselves. I want them to understand that they have a self-healing mechanism. I have polled about a hundred-ish conventional doctors, and I’ve said, because it’s very interesting. I said, when someone has pneumonia, and they come into the hospital, do our antibiotics sterilize their lungs and completely cure the pneumonia? Believe it or not, not a single person said yes. In fact, everyone said no.
My follow-up question is, well, what happens, and how do they heal then? They go, well, the antibiotics bring down the load of the infection. We provide supportive care, until their immune system rebounds enough to do the rest of the work on its own.
Why don’t you treat everyone that way? I mean, literally what they just said is if you want to boil it down, as clinicians, practitioners, whatever our thing is, we’ve got two things to do. The patient has an ability to deal with crap and an amount of crap to deal with. If the amount of crap you have to deal with exceeds your ability to deal with crap, you feel like crap.
I have two jobs: decrease the amount of crap you have to deal with, and improve your ability to deal with crap, and then you feel awesome.
Dr Ritamarie (54:52)
Exactly. That’s what’s so important. I love you, Tom. That’s why we have these conversations, and it’s so missed. We just have to give them the vaccine or give them the antibiotic, but in the meantime, you’re not telling them about the things they can do to increase their capacity. We have to increase their capacity and decrease their load. That’s the bottom line of everything we do. Increase capacity, decrease load.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (55:20)
In my world, as a DO, I kind of have access to pretty much everything. Everything’s on the table if it’s reasonable. Llike as an example, if I put people on antidepressants, sometimes I’m like, they’re suicidal, and they’re partnering with me. If I send them to the other person, because I don’t want to do it, they’re not going to look for the underlying cause.
Because of the severity of your symptoms, we’re going to use XYZ medicine, whether it’s an anti-I mean, every medicine I put anybody on, or botanical for that matter, I say, this is what we’re treating. We’re going to use it as a stopgap measure to help decrease the load, whatever, but we are going to work on the root cause. My goal is everything that I put you on is a therapeutic trial, and I have a plan to take you off of it.
I mean, I’ve weaned people off of Ambien from other doctors with a compounded, sustained-release Ambien that took me 18 months to get them off of twelve and a half milligrams, because that’s what they needed. I always have an exit strategy. The only thing I don’t really have an exit strategy with is breathing.
Dr Ritamarie (56:41)
Breathing, we can’t stop that. Hydration.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (56:43)
The things that are just normal lifestyle things to do. Any intervention that’s not healthy eating and food, I’m like, even if I’m giving you glutathione or rhodiola or something, I want you to use it only as long as you need it. Then, I want you to come off. It’s about really improving their own resilience and their ability to take care of themselves. Ultimately we all have a self-regulating, self-healing mechanism in our bodies.
My training really made me think of it as everything that we give someone should be a catalyst to allow their body to heal and function more optimally. It’s a catalyst, not, “I’m not doing anything.” You are.
Dr Ritamarie (57:28)
Everybody has that ability. They feel empowered when you share that with them. I can heal. I do want to get off of those supplements. It’s costing me $500 a month for all these supplements I’ve been on for the last four years. I do want to get off of them, but we’re going to do it in a strategic way.
Thank you. This has been amazing.
When I’ve already talked to you about Lyme, it’s not a matter of taking this homeopathic, doing this herb, and doing this. It really starts with all the stuff we’ve been talking about today, Reducing the load, increasing the capacity. Where do those treatments come in, like the peptides? I know you’re very knowledgeable about peptides. At what point do we say that this is a tool?
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (58:25)
It’s interesting. As you’re saying that, I’m thinking about the way I train folks in our program, and I wonder if it’s similar for you. I actually look at a lot of what we do is sales and marketing. People say, I want to be better, and so I’m like, here’s how you get better. They go, I don’t want that. They want the “out” and so it’s kind of like we’re selling the destination, not the path there.
They’re so knowledgeable with the internet these days and groups that they’re trying to sell themselves a transformation, that partnership. People come and you kind of have to sell them what they think they want and then over time show them what they actually need. The practitioners who I train, they all want to know what does it look like? How common is it? How do I diagnose it with lab testing? Then how do I treat it?
One of the things that just dinged in my brain as you were asking me that question is one of the reasons I think they like that. It’s concrete. They can grab something. It’s a good starting point. When I teach them all the things they need to know as their foundation, and when they first start to implement it, they’re nervous about doing stuff that’s literally cookie cutter by the book, even though they have a mentorship program where if they have any questions, they they can ask, and they get them answered in real time. They always have a backstop, but it’s months or even sometimes years later, where they get really comfortable, where you start to see them developing this clinical acumen to do all the things we’re talking about.
What I usually sell people who come in, and I work with, whether they’re patients or especially the practitioners, is work on these foundational pieces. Let’s really get that dialed in. In the meantime, work on these other things that you and I have talked about tonight on yourself.
The beauty, in at least our field, a lot of people are talking about the limbic system, the amygdala, and the fight flight freeze, polyvagal. We introduce them to programs that allow them to do it. We’ll kind of do it concurrently. One of my friends who does a lot of mast cell activation work said, “Look, everybody wants to calm the mast cells down first, but the problem is why are they even active?”
Why? It’s a syndrome. It’s not a thing. Mast cells just don’t start degranulating everything, including histamine, for no reason. They’re on hyper alert. What she always says is like you, you at the very minimum, you have to do the central nervous system limbic work concurrently. Preferably you start here. Some patients, so I always look for what is the access point for the learner’s learning, or what is the access point for healing?
This lady we were talking about, I don’t see a lot of chronic alcoholism and stuff like that, but it was like I wasn’t able to get to the point I needed to get to without engaging where she was ready to engage, so forcing my medical model on someone who’s open to going on the journey, but not ready to meet me at the dock, yet. They need to go do some classroom work, or they might need to go to REI and pick up some new boots and a life preserver or whatever.
Sometimes they have to take a detour with them in order to lead them to this concept that you and I have been talking about.
With some people I use medicine on the first visit. I’ll use peptides right away, peptides later. It’s always different. It’s amazing. I just tell people, I’m very honest. My filter doesn’t really exist. These are the three things that I think are most important for you. Which one or two of them could you actually do for the next four weeks?
If I tell them that if you do this in ninety days, there’s a ninety nine percent chance you’re going to be better, but they’re like I’m not going to do it, then it doesn’t matter..
Dr Ritamarie (01:02:32)
It’s not going to get better. Right. Exactly. I love that empowerment. Give them the choices. That’s how I like to teach. I love the fact that you’re looking at it from the point of these are all tools, and they’re going to be right for the person at the right time for the person. There’s no protocol around that. There’s no, like on the third visit, we’re going to introduce peptides.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (01:02:56)
It’s funny that you say that. I was trying to put this into a framework for my practitioners. There’s four pillars and seven steps, and I’m like, step one and step seven are the same thing. It’s like step two and step seven are literally the same, but one is, do enough. I like to know what’s going on.
In the beginning of my career, I was kind of a wuss. I’m like, you don’t have to spend this money. I don’t think we should waste money on diagnostics, but man, I’ve been able to cut healing down by years by asking somebody to spend an extra $400 or $600. Then once I know what’s going on, there is a part where you can’t access healing unless you start doing the work. The central nervous system stuff, it doesn’t need to be complete for you to keep moving.
You just need to start, because it’s compound interest, just like savings. If I started putting a hundred dollars a month in my bank account, in an index fund when I was twenty one, I’d be a millionaire. Sometimes a lot of the quote steps, quote unquote, I find are you do some and then you keep moving with the other ones concurrently, then we revisit everything at the end. All the stuff we start with and then what we end with are the core principles of just healthy living and optimal wellness. The stuff in the middle is kind of like whatever else that person needs.
We need to be willing to find out what it is and what it’s not. I talked to somebody today who was referred by another client of mine, and literally their kids have similar things, but their histories are totally different. I order completely different tests on both of them, even though they’re talking about what I’m ordering. I know I’m going to get a call tomorrow. You didn’t order this.
I did tell them ahead of time why I was choosing this and not the other one, the other ones on the table for later, maybe. What do they need?
What does that unique individual in front of you need? That’s what modern conveyor belt medicine doesn’t or isn’t or ready for. We’re good in the 72 hours around trauma, and we’re good with some cancers and some surgeries. Some of the others, I mean, it’s got its place, but we should all just come together more as a team.
It would be so much cooler. I think a lot of docs are figuring it out. For anybody who’s dealing with docs who aren’t. There’s a lot of MDs, DOs, PAs, even nurse practitioners, and the PAs and the nurse practitioners are often more open, but people are seeing this. It’s really been changing in the last five, ten years. I think COVID opened people’s eyes to like, wait, we don’t have all the answers here.
In high school, I wanted to be funny in my yearbook quote, because some of my friends were hilarious, and the stuff they wrote was totally stupid. I couldn’t do it, and I finally found a quote from James Thurber that says, “It’s better to know some of the questions than all the answers.”
Dr Ritamarie (01:06:01)
Ooh, interesting. I love that. Questions are the most important thing, I think, in healthcare practice. We have to know how to proceed and not to have a list of questions I have to ask everyone. No, it’s how to ask a question and then go off to this question and come back to this question like we’ve done tonight, quite frankly. That’s how my favorite interviews are, and that’s how it is with people. You’ve got to really be able to go back and forth to get to where you need to be able to help them.
I love the way you’re practicing. Check out the show notes for Dr. Tom Moorecroft’s program, and you can tell us where might be the best place for everybody to go and find you.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (01:06:48)
I appreciate it. Our practice is originsofhealth.com. and any practitioners looking at Lyme stuff, we’re at LymeTraining.org. and on social media, Tom Moorecroft or YouTube and pretty much everywhere else is Dr Tom Moorecroft, like Instagram and stuff. There’s a lot of stuff coming up with alpha gal and lyme, and there’s a lot of change with the peptides, so we’re continuing to do that.
Anybody who likes music, I also do a lot of music production and a lot of DJ sets. We’re actually doing a lot of ecstatic dance. I’m actually doing a thing for a local community group soon. We’re doing shaking practice to calm the nervous system, 45 minutes of breath work and then an hour plus of just music inspired ecstatic movement.
My whole life revolves around this. I just want to inspire other people to live their passion and do the things that heal your body. When you’re moving around, it’s so cool because not only are you exercising, but you’re moving the lymphatics. You’re detoxifying, then you’re calming your nervous system, and you’re going to sleep deeper, which is going to improve brain detoxification, and on and on and on, and a lot of the stuff that heals us is this stuff that’s fun. It makes life more fun, and it’s just natural and easy and most of it’s free.
Dr Ritamarie (01:08:15)
Yes, that’s the cool part. That’s the really cool part.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (01:08:18)
We need all this other stuff. I needed another four and a half years of treatment after two years.
Dr Ritamarie (01:08:26)
When I say it’s not that there’s anything wrong with red light therapy, peptides, GLP, whatever, there’s a place for it in the right place, but it’s not the top. It’s not in lieu of healthy living. It’s not in lieu of healthy movement. It’s not in lieu of food and bringing safety to the nervous system. It’s a package deal. Some people need it, some people don’t need it. But don’t look for it as the magic bullet that’s going to cure.
Dr. Tom Moorcroft, DO (01:09:54)
The peptides are interesting, because they work so well when they’re put in the right place for the right person. Like your question, what’s the timing of it? And it depends. Some people need some thymus and alpha one to bump up and modulate their immune function really early in a chronic infection. Other people you do that, their nervous system will go ballistic, feel so not safe that you set them back months or years.
I always get asked to talk about all the nuts and bolts of things like pharmacology and the immune system. I got asked by A4M to do five hours on the immune system. I was like, my God. People are punting to me all these crazy scientific questions. I’m like, I’m the tree hugger, make all your food from scratch, go hang out in nature. I mean, my family and I just went camping in the desert with friends of ours and just like lived off the land for a weekend.
That’s the stuff that it really is, but it’s the combination and all the things you teach people outside of what we’ve been talking about are tools. All the things I teach people outside are our tools. These are the standard foundations that will work so that any tool you need for that person will work even better, and that’s the take-home message. That’s the real key.
Dr Ritamarie (01:10:12)
I agree, and thank you. We started with protocols suck, and we don’t need them, because that’s what protocols would say, Do this, then do this, then do this, then do this, and healing doesn’t happen sequentially. We have to be able to work through the maze of it.
I really appreciate you, Tom. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you everybody for listening, and check out the show notes. You’ll get all the information about Dr. Tom’s programs and his website and my Beyond Protocols download if you haven’t already downloaded that.
Take care everybody, and until next time, shine on.
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