Dr. Tania Dempsey: Mast Cells, Chronic Fatigue, & Hidden Inflammation

Right now, in my practice, 100% of patients with PCOS have mass elective syndrome. Up to 17 to 20% of the population may have mass cell syndrome and not know it. It mimics dozens of other conditions, allergies, IBS, anxiety, chronic fatigue, skin issues. Mass elective vision syndrome is a chronic inflammatory, multi-system condition. Everyone has mass cells. Mass cells are your front line of your immune system. They're helping us, but they can also damage us. They're chemical messengers and when their system is faulty, they can chronically secrete these without an invasion as if one was occurring. Let's look at the root and understand, you know, that the mass cells are affecting the motility, the causing inflammation in the gut. They're making more difficult to tolerate certain foods. This is such a fascinating underserved area of medicine where we start really looking at root causes and how symptoms don't necessarily link back to the pathology that people are diagnosed with. It may be something even deeper. But also, I want to give hope because I think there's so much that we can do and that's why I do the work that I do because I help people every day. For someone that's watching this, what would be some of the category of potential symptoms or ailments right that they would be suffering from? Or you would say, this might be a third of that. I always think about it as three themes that we see very commonly in people who have this. One is in. [Music] Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, Human Biologist Gary Breka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. Today's podcast is going to be one of those in-between. I'm so excited about this guest. I was actually first turned on to her because of my VIP community. My most loyal followers that are part of my subscription program. It's an amazing community. And I let them know who comes on the podcast before I bring them on the podcast. And I also ask them for suggestions on guests that they'd like to see on the podcast. They find some of the most innovative people in all of modern medicine. A lot of the guests that have been on here, MDs, PhDs, researchers. The people that are really moving the needle for humanity, but don't yet have a voice. I've landed here because of my VIP community. So I just want to give a shout out to you guys. Thank you so much for finding Dr. Tanya Dempsey. I am so excited for this podcast. I'm excited to be here. Because I believe that your expertise and your your board certified in internal medicine from Johns Hopkins, but you're also an integrated medicine, specialist, which I find that it's like being an artist and an engineer. Like I usually don't exist in the same person. It's very, I think it's the ultimate use of the left brain and the right brain, because medicine for so many decades has been so algorithmic. If this then that, if this then that, get to a diagnosis, just slide it into one of the 38,000 categories that exist for us, the defined pathology and disease. And very often, you have to zoom out and look at the whole person. And you know, as I did the preparation for this podcast, I pulled Malia aside, my podcast manager and I was like, this is going to be one of the best guests we've ever had on. Oh my gosh. I'm really super, super excited about this. I'm honored to be here. Yeah. And I'm honored to have you. You know, you have a core competency and in something called Mass Cell Syndrome. And I'd love for you to give my audience a, you know, a little definition of what that is, but what's fascinating about it is it's underlying so many of these other conditions that people are suffering from, which is can't put a finger on. So what is Mass Cell Syndrome? Yeah. Massal activation. Massal activation. Massal activation. Yeah. It's a, it's a chronic inflammatory, multi-system condition. It's a syndrome, right? Not a disease. We have to, we have to be clear, but there's a huge spectrum. The way I think about it is I like to start at the biology level. Let's talk about the Mass Cells. Because everyone has Mass Cells. So anybody faced with an infection, strap, flu, whatever, their Mass Cells will fight, will help fight. They get into gear and they, they, they call in the rest of the, of the soldiers to help them fight off the infection. So everyone has them. They help us deal with the environment. They help us deal with our internal, external environment, our internal environment. And they're pretty much everywhere. They're in every organ of our body. They're in our skin, in our brain, in our stomach, our lungs, our respiratory tract, like just basically everywhere. Kind of waiting to protect us. Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're, their front line. They're part of that primitive immune system that just fights. And the way they fight is they manufacture these various chemicals. We call them mediators. And they will explode and release these, these chemicals in attempt to fight what they see as foreign, as bad, as danger. And, and when they release these chemicals, they, they not only affect what they're trying to kill, but they actually affect the tissues that they're releasing these chemicals in. Okay. So there's, there's the good side of the mast cell and then the bad side of the mast cell. So they're helping us, but they can also damage us. So in mast cell activation syndrome, what happens is the, so we have everyone has these, but in the syndrome, these mast cells are already dysfunctional. They're not just waiting for the next attack. They're actually constantly sensing that something is wrong. So at baseline, they're leaking these chemicals out, causing a baseline of inflammation. And that inflammation could be anywhere in the body and multiple places in the body, but most people will know that they always have, let's say, gut issues, or they always have joint issues or muscle issues, or, you know, they usually know that there's a specific area where their inflammation is. But sometimes it's very subtle. And then what happens with mast cell activation syndrome is those mast cells that are already, they're already primed. They then, when they see a, a foreign attack on them, they explode even more. And then they basically go into this state of continuous activation, constantly releasing these chemicals, causing more and more inflammation. So, you know, everyone was talking about the cytokine storm during COVID. That's partially due to the mast cell. So these are cytokines, histamines, other inflammatory factors. Over 1200 different chemicals actually have been identified that mast cells can make. Everyone talks about histamine, because histamines and easy one to talk about. Yeah, but histamine is sort of a category, right? There's a number of histamine. Cytokines are kind of a category, too. It's not just acytokine. So these have their chemical messengers. And when their system is faulty, they can hypersacrete or chronically secrete these without an invasion as if one was occurring. But then, but then there are invasions. There are triggers in the environment. It could be mold on the outside. It could be other chemicals, toxins on the inside. It could be hormones. It could be, basically, the way I think about mast cells is that they're monitoring change, change in the environment on the outside, change in the environment and the inside. Again, and again, they're, they're supposed to help us. But in mast cell activation syndrome, they become dysfunctional, they overreact. And then they start to react to things that they really shouldn't even react to. Normal people who don't well, people who don't have mast cell activation syndrome would not even notice a particular scent, a particular chemical that or toxin that yes, all toxins are potentially dangerous. But this is at a level beyond what others would feel. And unfortunately, then it leads to this sort of multi-system inflammatory state where they are, again, constantly in this inflamed position. Some of them have allergic type symptoms or allergies. You don't have to have. asthma, you can invent some of high. IBS, those kinds of things. Correct. But you don't have to have allergic type phenomena to have mast cell activation syndrome. One is inflammation for sure. And then we say plus minus allergic phenomena. So some people have those obvious signs of allergy. And some people have. They feel like they have allergies to pollen or food or whatever. And they get allergy tested very often. It's all negative. And the allergy just doesn't even know what to tell them. What's the reason that they're reacting? The reason is because these mast cells are dysfunctional. And they are involved in allergy in some patients. But in this case, it's an allergic phenomena very often. And then the third thing that we see quite often, which is a theme, is what we call "distrophisms" or "enormal growth and development of cell." So we see things like tumors. We see things like cysts. We see things that affect the connective tissue. Things that are affecting any growth or repair. So even things like sarcomas and potentially. Potentially. What is the condition with the fatty deposits under the skin? Well, there's lipidema. Lipidema. Yeah. Which is actually pretty clear that it is a mass-old driven phenomenon. Right. Yeah. So, you know, my daughter was diagnosed with Pot. Now, this positional orthostatic tachycardia syndrome when she was when she was younger. She's 27 now. When she was in her early 20s, she would have issues. And you know, it's positional orthostatic. But She didn't have to change positions to feel this like hypotensive episodes, right? I mean, she would just feel faint sitting in a chair like we are right now. Sometimes, it would happen when she changed positions. And eventually, we went down the rabbit hole. She was later diagnosed with LRs. Danlos. So she was hypermobile. So this connective tissue issue led to all kinds of consequences because when you have hyperalaxid in your joints, you also have another connective tissue. So, you know, mouths are hyperalax. So this causes gut disruption. And you know, I didn't really ever subscribe to the fact that she had this pots because even though she had some of the symptoms, I refused to believe that it was just idiopathic positional orthostatic, or cardiocindrum. So we just embarked on a massive journey to clean the tank. Right? When a fish gets sick, we clean the tank. When humans get sick, we don't do anything to the tank. We mess with the human. We worry we worry about the tissue right. And so there were heavy metals. She had a mold. Micotoxin infection. She's been very public about this. We've talked about it on some of my detox challenges. And she had the MTHF-RM gene mutation. So we can supplementation, methylated multibitamins for that, red light therapy. But after we cleared the mold and the micotoxin infections, fungal infections, and reduced her heavy metal toxicity, it all went away. Now, she still has hypermobile joints. Got issues if cleared up, recurrence or throw it's if cleared up, skin inflammation, you know, has cleared up. And I wonder if what we inadvertently did was fix a mast cell activation syndrome. It made a very well-bend what was going on with her. Yeah, what you did was you taught the mast cells that there isn't anything to fight anymore. The micotoxins are gone, the heavy metals are gone. All those things are making the mast cells more reactive. So now they're quieter. Massal activation syndrome probably doesn't go away. Right. I think that's like the unfortunate thing that people don't want to hear sometimes. It may still be there. She may still be susceptible. But they're quiet. Right. And any time she gets exhausted or run down, thumb. I mean, you know, red eyes coming back from. L.A. Or, you know, when she doesn't get sleep or she's in a high stress state for a period of time, like when she's going through nursing school, we would see these conditions come more frequently. They pop up because you know they're there, but there's so much you can do. And this is what I love about the work that I do is to give people hope, right? Yes, there are these unfortunate things that can happen to the body, but there's so much you can do when you recognize what you need to do to keep your body healthy and how to keep your muscles safe. It takes time for a lot of people. It's not as quick a journey because they don't know the stuff that you know, thankfully, you know, you're in the business. You sort of understand, but a lot of people don't know, right? And they're suffering and they're reacting and they can't leave their house, but no one has been through it with them to understand, you know, maybe the house that they're in, that they're sick and that they can't get out of is actually full of mold. Maybe that is, you know, maybe if they left or they were able to remediate, then their muscles would settle down and they would, you know, recover and some of the things that you know. What would be some symptoms that somebody could be suffering from right now that's watching this podcast? There's a lot of people watch this podcast for answers to questions they haven't been able to get. And by the grace of God, you know, some of the guests I've had on here have really changed a lot of lives. And so for someone that's watching this, what would be some of the category of potential symptoms or ailments, right, that they would be suffering from, or you would say, this might be at the root of that. Yeah. So really starting from like the top of the head and all the way down, headaches, migraines, underappreciated basically due to mass cell activation syndrome most of the time, at least in my practice. You can see a number of different symptoms related to the respiratory tract, you know, people who have chronic post nasal drips, people who have chronic respiratory issues, sleep apnea even, I would maybe even put in that same category. God issues for sure, you know, this term irritable bowel syndrome is a ridiculous term. It really is. Just a category. It just, it just takes all of the symptoms and gives them one name instead of giving, it's not even a thing. It's not even a thing. It's just gas bloating diarrhea, constipation, irritability and cramping. Yeah. Here's an antidepressant to help you. This is sort of like what's provided, right? But let's look at the root and understand, you know, that the mass cells are affecting the motility, they're affecting, they're causing inflammation in the gut. So like, you know, that's a condition IBS that I think that we need to just stop calling it IBS and think about it as a mass-so driven phenomena. And again, I can go all the way down. All the issues for women, you know, we often see women have more symptoms around puberty. That's a sign of that maybe some of the M-CAS-related issues, PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome is a mass-cell related to huge, huge, huge. Yeah. You know, when I started my practice, so when I started practicing medicine 30 years ago, I was really interested in women's health. And so I saw a lot of women with PCOS. So it was really passionate about it. When I figured out M-CAS, I realized that they're actually the same thing. And I would say, and as a doctor, you always have to be careful about saying anything is 100 percent. But right now, in my practice, 100 percent of patients with PCOS have mass-cell activation syndrome. Wow. So it is actually the same thing. Wow. That is phenomenal. So is there a definitive test for M-CAS for mass-cell activation syndrome? There it is. Okay. We all spend one-third of our lives sleeping. One-third. That's 25 years of your life on a mattress breathing it in, absorbing it through your skin. The U.S. mattress industry is the most chemical heavy in the entire world. 96 percent of mattresses contain petroleum foams. 92 percent use chemical flame retardants. You wouldn't eat that, so why would you sleep on it? The ultimate snooze is different. No petroleum, no fiberglass, no boric acid, just G-O-T-S certified organic cotton and wool. 100 percent natural tala-lay latex and made in America. It's the only mattress that I back. Gary Breka, because it meets my standards for human optimization. Sleep chemical-free. Visit theultimatesnews.com and use code ultimate for 10 percent off. Now let's get to sleep. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. It is challenging to test. Okay. I'm lucky because I've set up a lab in our office where we can do the testing. That's necessary. What we're looking for to diagnose it is we're looking for those chemicals that they're releasing. Now they released 1200 chemicals. We don't have tests for all 1200. We have a couple handfuls of mediators that we can measure. We can measure it in the urine. We can measure some in the blood. But the samples have to be so carefully taken care of. They have to be refrigerated at all times. The lab has to process them properly. So what we find is that in the community, a lot of people are trying to get a diagnosis and they're told, we can't find anything. There's nothing there. Right. We have a little bit better luck because of the equipment that we've invested in in our office to be able to do the testing. But in a sense, it's a clinical diagnosis and I always tell patients this. If you have these set of symptoms and we know that you have an inflammatory multi-system condition and we don't have any other explanation, most likely it's this, it would be great to test. We actually published a paper called the consensus to criteria for- I saw that. You've actually published a number of papers. Not just that. I went and you've been a busy woman. Very busy woman. I really think is the work that I do while I'm in the integrated functional medicine world. I also come from that conventional world and I understand what publishing really does. It really gives me credibility in the work that I do. I'm not just pushing supplements for no reason. I'm not just doing the things I'm doing it because I'm studying it. Yeah. I love that. Now, you're talking about the publication, 2026, "Dagnosis and Management of Patients with Massl Centrums." It was 2020. Oh, yeah. I've got another one here in 2020. It's a very, very accomplished young woman. By the way, yeah, 2025, the utility of GLP1, receptor agnus and massolotivation syndrome, which is an area- We should definitely talk about that. I'm also very, very interested because these GLP1s now, especially red and true tide, are being implicated in their ability to reduce a lot of these inflammatory disorders and neuroinflammatory disorders and hormone balance and cognitive function. I'm reading a lot of. They're not well, I think the conclusions are well-authored, meaning there is certainly an impact. They always say you just need further research. But they seem to be consistently pointing towards supporting a better, a lower inflammatory state. Yeah. Exactly. And the expertise to know what the causal link is between those. Maybe you do. Well, I can tell you what they think. Yeah. I think it's helping massolotivation syndrome. Okay. What we did for the study is we looked at 47 patients. We did, it was a case series, essentially. And which GLP did you use? Um, actually, we included both semaglutide and tersepotide for that study. Okay. So red and true tide, we don't have the research yet. We don't have enough patients on that. And of course, it's not fully FDA-approved yet. But I can tell you, my anecdotal experience with it. But that study, we just pulled in patients who were both on semaglutide or tersepotide. And we looked at, you know, before and after, basically whether symptoms were before, whether symptoms were after. We included only patients who met this case. consensus to criteria for mass electivation syndrome. So they had to have a formal diagnosis. They had mediators that we found. So we knew that they had mass electivation syndrome. And what we found was this incredible improvement across so many different parts of the body. And what we understand is that the mass cells, this is what's so fascinating about the mass cells. The reason they are basically monitoring the environment is because they have receptors on their surface. So not only they make these mediators inside, but on the surface, they have these receptors that are like, I think of them as satellites. They're basically scanning the environment. And things can bind to these receptors and send the signal. Well, mass cells have GLP1 receptors on their surface. They have GIP receptors on their surface. So these drugs are literally binding to the mass cell and sending a signal, you know, basically all as well. Nothing to do, calm down. So it's basically stabilizing the mass cell. Now the mass cell is not releasing all these cytokines and chemicals and inflammatory mediators. And now the body can start to heal. And that's what we're seeing. So it's a direct effect on the mass cell, which is really fascinating. That is super fascinating. And I think so many of these chronic low grade underlying infections, Lyme, mold, microtoxin, fungus. You know, there's a whole class of allopathic physicians that think that mold is completely nonsense. And, you know, I've been missmarch for that too, that everybody has mold, mold, exist, and a body with been around for centuries, mold, mold, mold is not that issue. I would take the polar opposite side of that coin. Miami happens to be the mold capital of the world. So, congratulations Miami. Yeah, a lot of patients from Miami who come up to see me and they don't know where they're from. Your clinic's in New York, right? Yeah, we're in New York. Yeah. And we're in Westchester County, Westchester County, yeah. Okay. So, and you have this lab in there, and you do blood urine saliva? Just blood urine. And look for these in the air. We do all this, you know, we do these other kits that are saliva kits. We do a lot of different things, but the mass cell stuff is blood in urine. But a really good reliable test is something you should probably do in office. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So that you get the proper treatment of these things. I like to make a diagnosis because it opens up treatment options, right? But sometimes you just can't. And, you know, I think like you have to treat the patient not the lab work, right? And that's the problem with medicine in general, right? Everyone looks at labs and they say, oh, yeah, your thyroid looks normal to the normal range and this is in the normal range, right? And we have to be careful the same thing with mass electivation syndrome. If I'm measuring 10 mediators and they're negative in this patient, but there are 1200 mediators that their mass cells could make, but I can't measure all of them, but they have all those signs and symptoms of it. Right. I have to treat the patients. Yeah. So what's your frontline defense? Like, where do you start on a course of treatment? So do you then, once you decide that they have mass electivation syndrome, do you then start looking for the villain? Like, are you now are you going on a dive for metals, for mold, for microtoxin, maybe an underlying line virus, which is probably the most mismanaged virus in all of modern medicine? Probably the most pissed under-- I misunderstood you. The bacteria, the parasitic co-infections. And how tricky the virus is itself, dorsal reganglion, hiding in the dorsal reganglion, it's capacity to undulate, go asymptomatic for periods of time and then be symptomatic. I think it doesn't behave like a normal viral infection. Well, I'm as a bacteria, but you mean viruses in general? The virus is in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So now that you have somebody with mass electivation syndrome, what's the next course of action? Exactly what you said. We have to identify triggers. I would say step one is you need to know why they're reacting this way. Now, there are definitely going to be people who had triggers years ago, and their mass cells just never stopped. And so I can't find any current triggers. That's a small number. Generally speaking, we find-- they might say, oh, I had Lyme 20 years ago, I was treated. I don't think that's the problem now. And then I test them. And they have chronic Lyme, chronic Bartonella, chronic Babicia, chronic Epstein Bar, et cetera, et cetera. Epstein Bar is another one that-- I don't know for what reason. Maybe it's long COVID. Maybe it's related to everybody emerging from the pandemic and having weakened immune states. But even the level of titers in dormant-- what we were considered dormant, EBV-- are off the chart. Yeah, I've never seen so many positive PCR tests for Epstein Bar. Neither of I. Pre-COVID, we would make some assumptions if they had something called an early antigen antibody. We would say, maybe it's reactivated. It looks like-- But now we have PCR that's showing that the virus is actually replicating in the blood. And one after another after another, have never seen so many. Yeah. Proof. And recurrent dormant and recurrent dormant. And these cycles go on for years. And they just wreak havoc on their daily life. I mean, they're exhausted. They've got brain fog. They interrupts their sleep patterns. It disrupts their hormones. It gives them non-viral symptoms that seem to be mood and mental disorder-related symptoms. Exhaustion vertigo. I mean, the number of symptoms that I've seen come out of these patients that have these reactivations of Epstein Bar is-- probably just brought us-- Massell. But it's the virus. The symptoms are really, I think, through the mast cell. Because all those symptoms-- The virus triggering the mast cell. The mast cell triggering the vertigo, the fatigue, and all these others. Because all those symptoms are actually caused by the mast cell. So I think it's the infections that are constantly spurring the mast cells on. Just like, please, just keep going, keep going, keep fighting. And so these keep these people in this inflammatory-- - Loop. - --suit constantly, yeah. And do you see this on their CBC? Do you see that on their white blood cell count? Where do you find this chronic, low-glute gradient inflammation? It's a good question. Right. So again, these mast cell tests that we do, we can identify-- we'll look for histamine. We'll look from a tabloids of histamine in the urine called methyl histamine. So those are inflammatory mediators. But sometimes you have to look elsewhere. You have to look at other inflammatory markers. Interestingly, a lot of mast cell patients don't have elevated, let's say, high sensitivity. You see reactive protein, for instance. Sometimes it will be elevated. But I'm surprised at the level of inflammation some people have, and they have normal CRPs. Sometimes you'll see a little bit of the sed rate. ESR, maybe that will bump up a little bit. But still, the level of inflammation that they feel and have is not always so detectable in the blood. There are other markers. Sometimes I'll look at a Vegef. That's an interesting marker that can sometimes tell us a little bit about mast cells actually release Vegef. Some people believe Bart Nella also makes the body release Vegef. So we can use some markers as a gateway to understand what other things we have to look at. That's kind of how I-- So what would be the typical villains that you would start to test for as soon as you confirmed the Mcast diagnosis? So what I usually do-- when I see a patient, I'm not only thinking about Mcast, I'm also always thinking about the triggers and the other things that could be in that soup in them. So I take a history. And if there's any history that suggests exposure to animals, exposure to cats, exposure to fleas, or ticks, or lice, or-- there are all these questions that I ask. I make an assumption that they could have a vector-borne infection. And so I'm sort of testing almost simultaneously. I'm saying, you know what? I think you have mass-activation syndrome. Let's prove that. But you have risk factors for vector-borne infections. So let's test Lyme, Babicia, Bart Nella, maybe some other infections. You have fatigue. You have some of these other things. Maybe they have a history of a feeling worse after COVID. Then I'll do all the viruses. Epstein Bar and CMV and HHV6. Many of them are reactivated. And so I'm kind of like passing a pretty wide net. Because I know that these patients are not going to-- it's not going to be a simple process of like identifying M. Cassandre treating it. I know that there's all this other work that I have to do. I'm also going to concentrate and help put them on things to calm those muscles down. But I know that I won't achieve that until I get rid of this other stuff, right? The toxins low. The microtoxins are always-- I get that history of-- were you ever exposed to mold? Do you have water damage? Do you have any evidence to believe that you might be exposed? A lot of people will say, no. And you have to dig. Dig anyway. Sometimes you have to show them the test to prove that they have something for them to go the next step. But it's because people don't want to believe. And also mold doesn't always show up. It's not like-- It's not always that pungent smell of mold. No, sometimes it's not. It's not just bad, bad. But right, by that it's bad. But it could be in the HVAC system blowing in. You don't even know it. That's the most common place, right? So you'd have a beautiful house. Brand new, no water damage. But it's in the HVAC system because it hasn't been cleaned properly. And it's literally blowing throughout the house. And now making you sick. And again, people don't recognize that because they don't know what to look for. So what do you do when you-- I'm always curious about how you address EBV. These are current EBV infections. Because I'd love to talk about EBV in long term. - Yeah, specifically. So in Nebstein-Barr, it's not really a virus that you caught, it's sort of one you've had for a long time and it could be mono showing up as Nebstein-Barr later in life. So what makes it reactivate and is that a weakened immune state is it doesn't necessarily need to be a full-blown autoimmune deficiency, but just a weakened immune state that doesn't allow the virus to stay dormant. I mean, there's a lot of replicatory cycles, and I think a few people realize this is actually wound into your DNA. - Intermediate, yeah. - And the virus is in there, and every time it's zipping and unzipping, it has a chance to raise its ugly head. And so it-- - I potentially caused cancer and other things too, which people don't appreciate. - I think so too. I mean, there's a whole thread of evidence now of, you know, barrelings to cancer, because all cancer, regardless of its form or its origin, was at one time a healthy cell. So something caused the metabolic shift, right? It could cause the metabolism that shift to break down, metabolism that's held to break down, and now you have cancer cell. So the question is, what broke the metabolic machinery of the cell? But when you see these recurrent EVV infections, you know, I've used a lot of these homeopathic remedies, eight-week EV remedies with some level of success. How are you addressing those chronic viral reactivations? - Yeah. So, you know, just to give you a little background, right? So most people, by the time they're an adult, have had mono, probably a nucleosis, right? Some people remember-- - Yeah, everybody's had EVV. - Right, but some people don't remember it, right? And so they say, how the heck can this be? I don't remember having mono. - Right. - It could be a very mild respiratory infection, you think, as a cold, right? Some people have it more severe, some people have it more mild, so you have it. And then these types of viruses, Epstein bars, part of a family called the Herpes Virus Family, these Herpes Viruses reactivate. You know, people who have, let's say, Herpes Virus, you know, Herpes Simplex one or two, you know, they get cold sores or whatever, right? They reactivate, they go quiet and they come out, Epstein bars the same way. So they're supposed to just sort of sit around and sit in the cell and not do anything, right? But as the body gets stressed, as the immune system gets dysfunctional, if the immune system is trying to fight something else, they're trying to fight line or it's exposed to mold, or you have a really, you know, really traumatic event or stress in your life, or you're not sleeping, right? There are all these different factors that then allow them, the Epstein bars to start replicating and leave the cell. And once it leaves the cell, it activates the mass cells and activates other parts of the immune system. So actually the immune system becomes more dysfunctional, right? This is the problem. It becomes a vicious cycle of immune dysfunction, becoming worse and worse, with more and more of these infections kind of taking hold. And so I always think about Epstein bar and Lyme and all these other infections as the really, the way to get to it. We could talk a lot about protocols and things that I use, but the reality is what I say to patients is that you're never gonna kill all the Epstein bar. You're never gonna kill all the Lyme, you're never gonna kill all your Bart Nella and all the stuff in your body. It's there where we carry it all through our lives, even strap, by the way, which is interesting. You never really get rid of it, you can live in your gut. But the key is to build your immune system up so that it can handle the infections. So how do we do that? So we think about, I think about, because my lens is the mass cell, so I'm a little bit obsessed about the cell. - Yeah, no, I love this. It's, I mean, it just explains so much. - Oh, I'm glad. - Yeah, I mean, it really does. One of my favorite biohacks outside of breath work by far is mineral salts, by how gold sea salt. It's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient or fatty acid deficient. We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this and water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today. I actually made a grass-fed steak with grass-fed butter and I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary and I sprinkled bio gold sea salt all over the top. Try it. It'll be your new favorite for cooking too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks. I don't know, a $15 or $20 bag of this will probably last you five years. This is literally the world's best biohacking secret. - Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. - So, you know, I think about it is if I can stabilize the mass cell, then I'm going to also help the immune system handle the infections better, but I also have to lower the load of the infection so that the mass cells and the rest of the immune system can recover. So, I think of it as a dance. We have to do a little bit here and lower the load. We're not going to kill all of it, but we've got to get them back into hiding. But we also have to work on that immune system so that it recognizes that it just can keep it at bay. So that the body can recover and heal. So that's really like my approach to all infectious diseases at this point. Sometimes we have to lower the load and we have to go added with, let's say, antivirals. We can use medication antivirals if we're talking about Epstein Bar. We have herbal antivirals. We can do homeopathic things. We can do a variety of different types of IV therapies that we use that have antimicrobial properties, ozone. IV ozone, we use a couple of different ways that we do it. That is, it's a disinfectant, essentially, some kills. We can use other things to help, again, the immune system recover by lowering the load. And that's what we do. Now, one of the treatments that I'm really excited about that I think really has a more holistic way of approaching this, but also a really molecular scientific way is to use a technique called supportive oligonucleotide technique or sought therapy. It's also called CureStrain. And it's basically a lab that's able to create an RNA to match the DNA of the virus or the bacteria or the parasite or whatever you're trying to focus on. And you actually can directly bind to that infection and cause it to stop multiplying. And actually, they die. That's my favorite treatment, actually. So it's like a trained mRNA. Yeah, essentially. Wow. And they make this synthetic mRNA specifically the infection that you have. Where do they do that? Why do it? You do it. Come to New York. Yeah. You're like the Elon Musk viruses over here. Well, I have a lab that I work with. You know, I'm not the only one. But this is like to me really exciting because-- No, it's super exciting. It allows me to avoid a lot of anti-microbials, a lot of medication, especially in my patient population that they're very sensitive. Yeah. Even to herbs. And a lot of-- there's very little in the way of targeted immunotherapy out there in the world right now. I mean, there are a lot of blanket immunotherapies. But nothing that is targeted like this. And do you ever use things like peptides like thymacin alpha to build the immune system? Love. That's my favorite one. Let me show you a big one too. I'm a huge peptide fan. By the way, I'm working to get the FDA to allow that back on the bulk list. Yeah, awesome. Marty, if you're listening. But-- No, it needs to be accessible because peptides are a game changer for so many patients. So you put some people on thymacin alpha. You know, there are different ways to do sit sometimes, twice a week. But it just-- it really does allow their T cells to come online for the body to start working. And sometimes I even see people feel their fatigue get better just with thymacin alpha, which is not specifically supposed to help fatigue directly. No. But the immune system is recovering. It's indirectly good. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I got asked a really introspective question on a stage talk a few months ago. Somebody asked me, they said, if you were to put the top 50 experts in the world-- top MDs, PhDs, researchers-- in longevity and aging in a room, and asked them to agree on one theory of aging. What do you think that theory would be? It's like, wow, that's a really good question. I think we would all agree on the theory of immunofatigue. I'm not saying it's the only theory in aging, but a slow progressive overwhelming of the immune system. You know, back to the fish in a tank analogy. Little algae grows in the tank. The fish is a little tired. Fish is doing just fine. You know, you had two drops of chlorine. He's fine. Then you had four drops of chlorine. And then you had a little bit of bromide. And then you clog the filter. And eventually, this microtoxicity overwhelms the immune system. And the tank, the environment, is too dirty for the immune system to properly function. And now-- I love that analogy. You start-- I've heard you may use that freely, if you'd like. Yeah. No, I've heard you use the fish tank before. I love that. I think-- Just to get people to start thinking about their environment and toxicity and big fan of a lot of these new blood filtration technologies in use for eSys, their big positive change. Yeah, their putip plasma change. We're doing it in my office. Are you? You used to do everything. I know that's my-- My kids are all-- My kids are always like, oh no, but she's going to come back with it. I go to another one. There's always been-- her kids are off camera. But she always been the mad scientist. I can see you guys growing up and moms in there with the chemistry set. Pretty much. And they were-- Back to the future movie. Yeah, they were my subjects, right? Yeah. They've tried a lot of things. It looked pretty good. They look pretty healthy. Yeah, they're healthy. I mean, he's got a little bit of a foot coming out of the side of the head there, but I'm just-- I'm sure we're good. [LAUGHTER] No, but I think that finally the frontier of medicine is opening up. And we're actually starting to believe more in what God gave us than, and less than what man makes us. meeting. like the best defense we have to live a long healthy happy life is our God given immune system. And when it gets run down on disabled, it not only can't protect us, it can't police us, right? I mean, because it does a lot of functions internally to regulate cellular autophagy and cellular senescence. And so this really is like, you know, as a single source, healthy immune system is really our best defense against all cause, mortality and infection disease. So you, you, you, you have a patient that's positive for massacens syndrome. You begin to start looking for the villain. You find Epstein bar maybe underlying line. A lot of people had line years ago. They did the doxycycline for whatever 21 days. They felt better. And they're like, okay, I don't have line at it. Right? Just like when I get influenza and I'm down for a week and then I'm back up, I'm like, okay, I don't have the cold anymore. Not realizing that you may still have it and be asymptomatic. And it may just be waiting for its opportunistic moment for the immune system to get run down again. So we can again, rear it's ugly head. So these therapies of walking somebody out of these syndromes, I want to read some of the links to this massaclet syndrome because it up to 17 to 20% of the population may have massaclet syndrome and not know it. It mimics dozens of other conditions allergies, IBS, anxiety, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, pots, skin issues. And, and this is why patients kind of ping pong around to different specialists because medicine is hyper categorized, you know, you're gonna neurologist for this. You go to internal medicine for this, you got infectious disease for this. Nobody's actually looking at the whole picture. And so, so for these people that find themselves in this in this myriad, where do they start? What are their conventional therapies? Are you using using things like sauna, gut binders? Do you look at diet? Got like a biome? Is this all a part? Okay, okay, great. This is all a part of. It's all a part of it. Yeah, but I think it also has what I love about, you know, my center is called aim center for personalized medicine. So it's all personalized, right? So not everyone is going to be able to tolerate a sauna, you know, and massels can be very heat sensitive. So I have a subset of patients, interestingly, that do really well in sauna, but I have a lot of patients who don't do well in sauna, right? So maybe some of them just need to work up, you know, to it. So we have to start slower. Sometimes we'll never going to be able to get them into a sauna. So we have to find other ways to detox. And so we're always looking at ways to, again, approach the toxicity load that we that we have to deal with, right? Because the reality is we're all constantly dealing with this. No question. Yeah, I mean, this is the life we live in. So a lot of people will say, well, why do you need all these technologies? Like, why do you need to do all this stuff? And it's because even if we're as healthy as we think we can be, even if we eat, you know, perfectly, even if we sleep perfectly, even if we do all those things, right? We still have to fight against what we're constantly breathing in and being exposed to, right? So I think like people should know that even healthy people still have to have to keep up with, you know, our bodies. But for people who are sick or obviously it's a little bit more, more advanced, a little bit more complicated. So yeah, so I do all those things. What I love is we do a red light therapy. We have a red light bed. I saw that you have a red light bed as well, right? So for a lot of nasal patients, that has actually been really, really helpful in reducing inflammation. Yeah, if you're consciously that was not to cut you off for that, that was one of the biggest things that we implemented for my daughter when she had pots. And which in the more year, more I'm talking to you the more I think it was nasal activation syndrome by far and we just inadvertently calm them down by getting toxicity out of her body. And, and then, you know, I pointed to the mold and the metals. And, but really those were just the triggers, not the actual, not the root. Not the root. So I didn't go deep enough into the soil. But but red light therapy was amazing for her. Yeah, and it is for a lot of patients. So that's why I bring in all these different modalities because I have to figure out what's going to be the easiest way, right? To get to to the root to all the roots. I love therapeutic plasma exchange as it detox. I know it's a little bit aggressive. It is aggressive, but I am have you tried it? I've done it twice. And I've also done inus freezes where they return the plasma. So they filtered the plasma was fascinating to me. So my wife and I did it for our anniversary. I mean, talk about nerd. Yeah, that's definitely something I would do. Hey, I got you something great for your animal. You're going to love this. We're going over to this clinic and we're going to get, you know, these dual cannulus put in and we're going to, but we have side by side beds and the play nice music. But we did it in Dubai. And you know, unfortunately, you can't get the inus freezes here. Yeah, yeah. It's coming. Yeah, I hope so. No, no, they're working on it. Oh, really, I really hope so because this whole idea of subtractive medicine to me is very fascinating, right? Not adding anything to the body. Removing. Removing. Removing what it's dealing with. Yeah. That's why, you know, sweat, stool, urine, detoxification, binders, you know, therapeutic plasma exchange inus freezes, EBO2O zone with filtration. And I'm always fascinated by how much stuff comes out of that collection tank. And you know, what we did was we sent it to the lab as urine. Okay. So you know, we collected it in there. And because they actually wouldn't run it. They won't run it. Yeah, they won't run it. So hopefully the labs aren't watching this. But so I sent it as urine. It shows that urine kidney failure. So you have to ignore that part because it's not urine. But but the list of toxicity that comes out of those EBO treatments that ends up in that collection tank tank tank and causes all that foam. And everything. Sometimes the top comes right off and it's foaming out of there. That has got to be good for you to take it out. And the same with the with the plasma. We're still trying to find, I have a lab that I think is going to help us test the plasma that we're getting out of people. But you could see sometimes that's really good too. Because right now they don't do it. Like Switzerland does it. Yeah, we don't do it. But I have somebody who may be interested in doing a study with me. But you could see the color of the plasma. And the more you do the the treatment of TPE, you'll see the plasma starts to get clearer and not as cloudy. But we're doing blood and urine analysis on patients pre and post. And actually so we may not be able to directly test the plasma yet. But we will. But we can test the body and we can see the level of toxins go down. You know BPA comes down PFAS forever chemicals. We're doing a study right now on forever chemicals. And it looks like you know, it looks like it's removing it. So that's so good. That's what's amazing. Yeah, it's exciting now too because you can actually test the levels of of microplastics too. Yes. And I've been reading a lot about the presence of microplastics in these phybrinogen bonds that are that in these atherosclerotic plaques that are that are causing hardening, narrowing, soft-flacking in the arteries. And biofilm for people who have long COVID and some of these other infections that I can't get rid of it, everything is sort of like clumping together in the blood. And what do you do for those kinds of things? Nata kinase, um, Bilocchi, Lumber kinase. So all the kinases, you know, great. And um, and you know, but therapeutic plasma exchange actually does pull out some of the biofilm, which is really, I think, exciting too. Because some of them are just really resistant. So I love the supplements. I love being able to break them down, but they don't sometimes doesn't work. Sometimes we have to use anti-quagulants, actually like a hapron, like hapron or eloquence. There are a bunch of different ones that that you can use. Sometimes you have to just really kind of thin the blood out as much as possible to get get the bugs out of these biofilms. Yeah. You know, the biofilms is like a spider web. It's just you know, holding on to everything and until we can get them out, we all the treatment of the world, all the ozone and all the, you know, antimicrobials, even the SST therapy, like nothing is going to work if everything is in this, you know, kind of fibrillogen, you know, uh, platelet, uh, it's just a like a soup of, yeah, yeah, and a lot of these, a lot of these pathogens are attracted to hapron. You know, they, they, you know, um, I mean, hapron binding sites, you know, there, there are filtration technologies, one called Xtera, um, which I've also done, um, they use hapron binding sites to draw out certain pathogens, um, fungi, uh, mold and microtoxins, um, certain viral pathogens, uh, even CTC circulating tumor cells that, that are, that are that are like to bind to these hapron, hapron binding sites. It doesn't put the hapron back into the body, um, but they do clump around these hapron binding sites. I think that's not interesting because mass cells make hapron. Okay. It's the one cell in the body that actually releases and manufactures hapron. Really? Yeah, that's one of the mediators that we can actually test for. So it makes me wonder, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it does make me wonder too, is that like, um, so you see elevated levels of hapron in the blood, yeah, because these mass cells are, yeah, yeah, that's how we identify. Which makes a lot of sense because you don't want, you don't want clumping and clotting if you have, um, pathogen, right? You don't want to wall it off or seal it in. You want to actually presumably, yeah, I mean, you wonder like why the mass cells make all these things, right? So maybe that's part of it. Um, but what I think, what I, where I think in man, man, a fest very often, not to get too off topic, but I, but I think about women who have, um, really like heavy, menstrual, uh, periods where they're high estrogen, you said, can it activate as well? Yeah, and connective exactly. So I think with the mass cells, what's happening at the level of the uterus, they're releasing Heparin. And so these women are like hemorrhaging, they're having these really, really heavy, heavy periods because the mass cells, which are being, yes, are being triggered by changes in estrogen levels or other hormone levels that are releasing Heparin. Now that, now that blood is thinner and it's, it's coming out of the history. Wow. So they have these menoraj, menoraj in. It's such a hard word to say. Yeah, yeah. A menoraj, a menoraj, whatever it is, but lots of bleeding. Yeah, remember. For, you know, during their menstrual cycle, again, so fascinating. I mean, especially given the percentages of the population that may have muscle. Yeah, like 20%, 20% is tremendous, right? Think about that. It's like one in five. And that's probably more, I think there's more, more than 20. But you know, that's the study was like 17%. 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And yeah, parasites are, you know, actually quite pervasive. They're pervasive and they're very real. In fact, you know, I was reading a study on multiple sclerosis on this parasitic theory. They call it the clean hands theory where, you know, the over sanitation and reducing the healthy parasitic colonies, maybe causing the immune system to hyperactivate to some of these testosterone hematodes and these helmeth parasites in, in, in MS patients. And at least this one study that I looked at, which was postmortem autopsies, they, they found similar or identical deficiencies. And I want to misquote the study. I'll actually put a link to it in the, in the show notes in case I misquote it. They found similar or are identical colonies that were vastly missing from these patients and with, with MS and they, and they hypothesized that this over sanitaryization, and you know, where, where you actually don't have the healthy parasitic colonies, we're actually causing the immune system to have this autoimmune reaction to myelin. Yeah. And they found corkscrew parasites in some of the locations where the immune system was attacking. Because if you think about it, you know, why the immune system can dissolve myelin or attack myelin, why is it sort of uniformly attacking it everywhere? Why does it seem to be taking rifle shots? Oh, that's interesting. That's an interesting thing. It's really randomly around the body or maybe concentrated in areas of the brain. I mean, there's myelin covering all of our nerves. So why is it not affecting or evenly dissolving this? And I thought it was very, you know, very interesting that there could be a bug theory behind it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm one of those people. I think there's a bug theory behind almost all the chronic diseases. I would disagree with you at all. I just, I just, every single patient, every single patient I test for who I has Parkinson's or Parkinson's like infections or I mean, conditions, Alzheimer's, you know, I can look at different manifestations of mental illness, OCD, anxiety, depression. You know, always have got issues. Yeah. Almost all tests positive for vector-borne infections. Yeah. I find parasites in them and I find Bart Nella, almost across the board. Yeah. Our clinic director had a Dr. Carey Sarda. She had a patient she was treating that came down to see her for Parkinson's. Been six years diagnosed with Parkinson's. I'm completely unresponsive to traditional therapies and we're all just couldn't figure out what was going on. The mood collapsed. The dystonia, the dysthetico-cannesia, the whole sequence of events. And when she did the viral testing, it was one of the highest, not lying tighters, West Nile tighters that the lab had ever seen. Oh, wow. And ironically, he had an office in South Beach and was commonly visiting South Beach when the largest Zika mosquito outbreak in South Beach has come back 12, 13 years, 11, 12 years. There was a period where even, even, customs was not allowing pregnant women, you know, they were coming through to go to Miami Beach because their, this, the Zika mosquito was so prevalent. I think I didn't have to control. But that's what Carey's the. And it also cares what West Nile. West Nile. And it was one of the highest tighters that they'd ever seen. It was active. Never tested for it. And so she went after the, you know, the virus. And I won't say all of the symptoms went into remission, but I would say 75, 80% improvement in its symptoms because he didn't have Parkinson's. He had Parkinson's isms from the viral infection. And a lot of these viruses seem to have very similar ideologies or least presentations to things like Parkinson's, which are very often diagnosed by an observation. Yeah. Well, it's an inflammatory response. It's just, I think that there's a vulnerability. I always think of it like people will say, well, why did I get this condition, Parkinson's like condition and somebody else got, you know, a different, you know, got Crohn's or Colitis or got. So, you know, so I think there's a vulnerability that people carry and maybe it's genetic, maybe it's hard to find. But then there are these, you know, infections or triggers or toxins, whatever, that then triggers that genetic vulnerability to come out. Right. And it's presenting in this way. And so you have to, you know, alleviate or remove the triggers. You might still have some symptoms left because some of that is maybe even genetic to some extent. It got already turned on. You mean like methylation pathway issues or poor waste elimination or things like that? Yeah. Yeah. So, you're going to be able, let's say the damage is done. I like to think that I can reverse all, you know, all damage in everybody, but it's impossible, right? So some damage is already done. But if you remove, let's say that infection, maybe you can heal a lot of the damage. Right. That's the, that's the goal. Yeah. Climb them down, boost the immune system because immunodyseragulation, you know, the consequences of that encompass all of the things that we've talked about so far. And it mimics so many other pathologies. These poor people are just literally running around the country or running around the world sometimes trying to figure out what could be causing this. And I would disagree with you at all that I think, you know, the bugs are related to a lot of a lot of these issues. Let's go, go into the gut for a minute. Yeah. If you don't mind. How important is gut dysbiosis, the gut microbiome, you know, that single cell layer of protection that we have on the luminal wall of our gut, sort of separating our inside environment from our outside environment. What can we do to care for it? And how often do you think that there is a gut related anomaly in, in massacitor? I mean, again, I know you're probably going to say 100%. Like, I would say, right, I would say like 99, 98 or whatever. You know, there's a, and it's interesting because I do have patients who swear they have no gut problems at all. And the gut is not their problem. They have all these other neurologic and other systems involved, right? And I go, really, you have to like, no, nothing, like I was never see it, right? So then I'll have them do a test, you know, do some stool testing, right? And I'm like, well, you, you actually have a, have it. I don't know why you don't feel it, but there's definitely something going on there. And that's, that's where the bulk of your immune system is, right? Is that a good thing? Yeah. So it's hard to imagine. There's so many mass cells that line the entire GI tract. Oh, yeah. So, you know, you have to think like if they have a mass cell condition, the, the mass cells in the gut are involved on some level. And maybe some people are more sensitive to feeling in some, aren't, right? But I think it lessened. And the toxic world we live in, it's very, very difficult to maintain, you know, a proper digestive system. I would agree with that, right? The food that you eat, you know, the pesticides on the food, the, the toxins, the glyphosate, things like you could be so careful and still get exposed to things that are going to eventually, like break down that layer early antibiotic use, you know, as children, frequent to strep infections, very, very commonly will. cause a dysbiosis, right? So people may not notice anything until it's sort of like the straw that breaks the camel's back, right? So they're living with some dysbiosis, they're not, you know, they're not in, you know, they don't have a lot of symptoms yet, but there's usually then something that then brings it out fully. They get to know the course of antibiotics or they get, again, they have a stressor in their life, they get, you know, they get COVID, they get something and then all hell breaks loose. And then now they have major gut issues. And so, you know, it's about, you know, feeding the good microbiome there, right? So a lot of them, a lot of good stuff is gone. There's a lot of bad stuff, right? So it's actually finding that balance between killing some of the bad and getting more of the good, and so there are a lot of tools and supplements. - What does something like that look like? What does a, what would I do? - Typical protocol look like. I know it's not a one size fits all. I mean, in terms of gut testing, are you doing GI maps? Are you doing the, like a biome stool test? - I'll do like gut sumer from vibrant wellness. I like that one a lot. - Okay. - Sometimes the GI map, I don't want to say anything bad about it. I've just found some inconsistencies with their testing. You got to be really careful with the testing and they're actually, I know several people who are trying to do comparison studies between the different labs to see why some labs are picking up parasites and some labs are not picking up parasites. So the same samples, right? - Wow. - So we're just trying to, we're trying to, so the testing is actually in some ways a little bit rudimentary, but I've been pleased with some of the GI tests that we've tried. - Yeah, I've used vibrant in a lot. - Yeah, the same. - I mean, hopefully I should have with that. - They have a lot of good panels. - Detox challenges and things. - Yeah, and we use their, your tests for the total talks. Before we do the therapeutic plasma exchange, and after, right, so we make a lot of their stuff. So, customer could be a good place to start. I love doing paracite specific parasite testing. I don't rely on anyone lab to pick up the parasites 'cause parasites are really hard to find. - They are, yeah. - I think of it, I use this analogy with patients, right? I think of parasites like, they're like Spider-Man. They have like suction cups on their hands, they don't have problems. They're like the imagery. So, they're like sticking to the wall of the intestine. And so, when you have a bowel movement, they may fall into that stool, they may not. - Right. - And so, you may not find it into your test and test and test. So, I have a lab that I really like that has been really good at finding a lot of these parasites. - Wow. - And I am really shocked at what we're finding. And not to go too off topic, but you know what's really interesting to me, as a, when I was doing my residency at NYU in the city, we saw a lot of HIV patients, patients with that type of immunodeficiency, immunocompromised states. And they used to have this, we used to find this parasite in them all the time called cryptospiridium. And I was taught that cryptospiridium is a parasite that only infects people with really suppressed immune systems, cancer patients, HIV. I see it probably in 75% of my patients. - Wow. - But they're not HIV or cancer patients, right? So, that tells me that part of this mass electivation syndrome and all the other things that I'm seeing is suppressing the immune system so much that there were seeing parasites that should not be in relatively healthy people. - Wow. And are you doing regular frontline things, Ivermectin, Venben, Dizzol, Mementin, Dizzol? Okay. - Alinea. - Alinea. - Alinea and all the, yeah. I usually do a sequential type of protocol with them. I find, listen, I love herbs and I love natural stuff, but for parasites, you know. - I'm for the same thing. - Yeah, need the drugs. - You gotta bring the, you gotta bring the, bring the, bring the, so again, so when I'm approaching a patient, if they have parasites, I'm gonna do a parasite protocol. - Yeah. - They don't have parasites, you know, maybe I'm gonna start with some other stuff, right? I'm working on the diet. A lot of the patients have low short-chain fatty acids, you know, so I may use a butyrate. - Sour crowd even. - And fermented vegetables. - Sometimes, but some of my muscle patients can tolerate it because it's high in histamine. So, you know, so it's again, that's true, that's a good point. - We're a little challenged because we like, things that we think are good may backfire. So, but we have to, you know, kind of inch towards that. I have a patient right now who is able to, had really bad mass so stuff, but like started to be able to introduce sour crowd and stuff, so that's amazing, right? Like wow. - Yeah, but the fatty acids and things, yeah. - Yeah, but we can use butyrate. We can use some other things. We can, you know, again, it's about bouncing the gut. We can use immunoglobulins like, you know, like an IgG type of product that has, you know, it's basically bovine serum, immunoglobulins. You can use colostrum if people can tolerate dairy. And all these things, I mean, again, there's like, there's no perfect way to do it. It's just finding it the right way for the patient. - Yeah. - So it's about balance and it's about killing sometimes. And then it's about quieting those mass cells down in the gut directly. So that the immune system is not constantly in this kind of cycle. - I burn flame, I don't even say. Yeah. - Dr. Dempsey, this has been absolutely fascinating. I really hope you'll come back on the "Human Podcast" because I want to follow this. - All right, okay. - My VIPs are so excited for you in the VIP room. They've got a whole litany of questions for you. And I appreciate you too, also agreeing to stay today for this V2M and the live format. This is such a fascinating, I think, underserved area of medicine where we start looking at really looking at root causes and how symptoms don't necessarily link back to the pathology that people are diagnosed with. It may be something even deeper that has caused this immune system, mass cell activation, but cause the immune system to be so rundown that it's, you know, essentially can't protect itself anymore. - Not exactly. - And it's more pervasive than we can imagine, right? So the thing, I think the more people, the more toxic our world gets, the more COVID and all these other things that people get, or the more weird infections, like this winter was kind of crazy with a lot of receiving infections. - Oh my gosh, monkey pot, I mean, you name it. - Yeah, so the more that immune system just gets revved up and revved up, unfortunately, I think this is like really a pandemic in a way of mass cell activation syndrome. And so I think everyone really needs to know this, right? Cause the thing is like people listen and say, well, that says I'm gonna apply to me, you know, I do all these things and I'm healthy, but it may apply to somebody that's close to you. - Yes. - And it may apply to you eventually, hopefully not. - Right. - But also I wanna give hope, because they think there's so much that we can do, and that's why I do the work that I do, cause I help people every day. - Yeah, this is so fascinating. For my audience, it wants to know more about you or where they can find you, where can they find you? - Okay, so my center, AIM Center for Personalized Medicine, my website drtanyademc.com, Instagram, drtanyademc.md, Facebook, you know, like all that stuff I've YouTube, I have, yeah, I'm trying to think what I'm missing. And then my podcast, a mass cell matter. - I saw you at the unit podcast, mass cell matters. I love that. - I'm gonna have to have one that too. - I would love to be on there. We see eye to eye on a whole lot of things for sure. Yeah, so absolutely fascinating. Guys, please, I'll put all of that in the, in the show notes below. I'll put the study that I referred to earlier in the podcast and until next time, that's just science.