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Lyme Disease: How Treating Her Son Changed Her Medical Career with Dr. Pamela Cipriano - E97
27 Plays3 days ago
Why do chronic illnesses like Lyme Disease go unresolved, even after years of doctor visits and countless tests?
What if the real issue isn’t a lack of treatment, but a failure to look deeper at root causes like environment, lifestyle, and nutrition?
In this episode, we explore the journey that transformed one doctor’s approach to care after her own son was misdiagnosed for years. You’ll learn why conditions like Lyme disease, mold toxicity, and chronic inflammation are frequently overlooked, how nutrition and environment play a critical role in recovery, the dangers of settling for the wrong diagnosis, and why true health requires connecting the dots between symptoms, triggers, and the body’s ability to heal.
Dr. Pamela M. Cipriano, DNP, APRN, is a nationally recognized nurse practitioner and founder of The Practice of Health and Wellness in Connecticut, specializing in complex chronic illness and advanced root-cause diagnostics. She is known for identifying seizure disorders misdiagnosed as epilepsy and uncovering neuroimmune, infectious, and toxic triggers behind conditions such as autoimmune encephalitis, tick-borne disease, mold exposure, and chronic inflammation.
“If you don't make sure you're eating the healthiest way possible, you're just not going to get better.” - Dr. Pamela Cipriano
In this episode you will learn:
- Why root causes like Lyme, mold, and heavy metals are often missed in chronic illness.
- Signs and symptoms to look for when standard tests and doctors fail to explain persistent symptoms.
- How autoimmune diagnoses like lupus or RA can sometimes reverse by fixing the true trigger.
- Key shifts in diet, from cutting sugar to choosing flour from outside the US, that can reduce body inflammation.
- Simple tools like specialty labs, anti-inflammatory diets, and IV vitamins that can support better health.
- Why persistence in searching for answers can change outcomes, even after years of misdiagnosis.
Resources
- Connect with Dr. Cipriano on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Dr.Pamela.Cipriano/
- Follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/practicehealthwellness
- Learn more about her practice: https://www.thepracticeofhealthandwellness.com/
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
https://www.zapods.com
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
https://alively.com
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Transcript
A Mother's Journey: First Patient, First Challenge
00:00:00
Speaker
And him being my first patient and being my son was probably the most difficult thing a mother can go through. Because as a mother, you want your child to succeed. You want them to be able to get fixed.
00:00:11
Speaker
When it's a patient, you have more clarity. You're not living with them. You're not with them all the time. You're not hounding them. You know what I mean? Begging them. it was a very different experience.
Meet Dr. Cipriano: From Nurse to Doctor
00:00:25
Speaker
This is the Home of Health Spam podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
00:00:38
Speaker
Dr. Cipriano, welcome to the Home of Health Spam podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I am looking forward to our conversation. And before we jump in, I'm curious, how would you describe yourself?
00:00:51
Speaker
So I'm a lively doctor of nursing practice. I graduated from a diploma nursing school back long time ago, over 30 years. From there, I um became an ICU nurse right away. Went back from my APRN, graduated in 2011, back from my doctorate degree, graduated in 2016, put myself in my own residency and opened up my own practice in 2016.
00:01:17
Speaker
So I have a lot of experience in um hospital medicine, emergency medicine, and in overall health. So a lot of try and get patients off of their medications, try and get them on a better diet.
00:01:29
Speaker
um And I ended up concentrating a lot of my medical practice on tick-borne diseases, which unfortunately fell in my lap when my son was misdiagnosed for so long. And I was able to find out what it was that was contributing to all of his very vague symptoms.
00:01:45
Speaker
And I definitely want to get into that.
Trailblazing in Connecticut: A Nurse Practitioner's Solo Practice
00:01:47
Speaker
When you mentioned in 2016, you set up your own practice, because I understand you were the first to do so when the law changed it, enabled that. That's correct. So in 2014, the law was changed that if you had um the experience needed and the number of hours necessary under a collaborative agreement with a physician, you can open up your own practice. And so I had done my due diligence of research and to see how many other nurse practitioners had done so. went on the Department of Public Health site in Connecticut and 119 nurse practitioners were practicing independently.
00:02:18
Speaker
So I thought, okay, I can do this. Well, they weren't practicing independently. It was on paper only. So when I started my practice, I had no idea I was gonna be the first. which turned out to be, it's never fun to be the first of anything because you're the one who is paving the way for not only yourself or everybody else that's following your writing on your shirt tails. And so the insurance companies weren't up and running. They didn't update their bylaws. I had to get in touch with an attorney. I had to sue the insurance companies to get me credential without a collaborating position. um The way the law stood was I could legally practice independently. But there were still a lot of things that still weren't where they needed to be, especially with like Medicare and Medicaid.
00:03:02
Speaker
So Medicare, you still have to have a physician sign off, for example, for diabetic ah shoes or um to sign home care orders.
00:03:12
Speaker
I can sign DNR orders, but I wasn't allowed to sign home care orders, which doesn't make a lot of sense. no And because the physicians at the hospital I worked at knew me so well, If there was like a surgeon on board or if there was a urologist or a rheumatologist, I would call them and ask them if they would sign the home care orders for me so that that you know the patient didn't have to be referred out to a different physician. And I never had an issue with this until one time it was a urologist who just didn't feel comfortable because he specialized in urology and didn't specialize in infectious disease. And the patient was an elderly man who had ah been ah admitted for sepsis.
00:03:51
Speaker
because I was admitting so many other patients when I was a hospitalist, one of the physicians had said to me, if ever i needed a favor, he would be more than happy to because he loved all my my admission notes and how thorough I was. So...
00:04:04
Speaker
On a wing and a prayer, I called him and he was more than happy to sign any orders that I needed. He didn't have me sign a collaborative a collaborative agreement with him. He didn't charge me the $1,000 or $2,000 a month that a lot of physicians were charging nurse practitioners if they wanted to open up their own practice and didn't have the number of hours behind them. It's really because of him, his name was Bradley Rosenberg, that I was able to successfully not only be the first nurse practitioner in the state of Connecticut to open a solo practice, but do so without a collaborative agreement. So he he was really, he appreciated me, but I really appreciated him as well.
00:04:38
Speaker
Looking at your background, kind of the work you do, and you were talking about your journey with your son being misdiagnosed for so long, and then really getting to this root cause on some chronic conditions.
A House-like Approach: Investigative Medicine
00:04:49
Speaker
as a house fan, what you do seems a lot like for people who know Hugh Laurie, the Dr. Gregory house, the show, this real investigative, it's detective work meets medicine.
00:05:03
Speaker
Do you think that's fair? I mean, that's, that's how it kind of looks. You know, funny enough, I've I have been told that by not only my kids, but so many patients who've been to so many doctors and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with them. And then they come to me and, you know, I'm reviewing everything that's already been done I'm What's not done in mainstream medicine, they don't look at the diet the way I do.
00:05:29
Speaker
They don't look at mold toxicity, heavy metal poisoning, tick-borne diseases the way I do. um And a lot of that was because of what I went through with my son and You know, and went, you know, it took me 10 years, by the way, to figure out what's going on my son.
A Personal Motivation: Discovering Tick-borne Diseases
00:05:46
Speaker
He was bit at six years old, had a bullseye rash.
00:05:49
Speaker
Pediatrician put him on. I had to guess 10 to 14 days of antibiotics because he was so little. He had no symptoms. Aside from the bullseye rash, he had absolutely no symptoms whatsoever. Uh, 13 years later, we went scuba diving. so now he's 19 and we were about a hundred feet down. He had ah lot of pain and pressure in his lower abdomen. So I did a quick physical on him and at the hotel.
00:06:09
Speaker
He had the tiniest hernia I could find. His pediatrician, when we got back to the States said the same thing, but because he was in so much pain, referred him to the department of surgery. And in the middle of surgery, the surgeon left him on the operating room table to come out to talk to me, to ask me if he had connective tissue disorder that I was unaware of, or that he was unaware of.
00:06:28
Speaker
He was a healthy 19-year-old kid. He was a musician, um six feet tall, maybe 150 pounds, like no reason for what they found.
00:06:39
Speaker
What they did find was that his entire abdominal wall, they described it as Swiss cheese. So for some reason, he had this all these hernias throughout his entire abdominal wall, which they couldn't identify what was called. He had never seen this before.
00:06:53
Speaker
He had gotten in touch with Connecticut Children's Medical Center to see if they had seen anything like this. and They didn't either. There's always a trigger when somebody has a chronic illness, whether it's related to tick-borne diseases, heavy metal poisoning, mold toxicity. Your body becomes almost accustomed to it until there's something that that triggers it. So it could be anything that drops the immune system.
00:07:17
Speaker
Car accident, death in the family, surgery, anything like that. So for my son, it was a surgery. After the surgery, everything happened. It was the, I don't feel well, nothing nothing felt good. You know, body aches from head to toe, brain fog, lot of difficulty with starting a urine, um,
00:07:37
Speaker
felt like he had to have, ah he had to urinate, he just couldn't, the urine wouldn't come out. um Lots of inflammation throughout his colon. It was like so many different things, but nothing was pointing to one thing.
00:07:48
Speaker
Gosh, he went to so many different doctors. By the time he was 24, he had to learn how to self-catheterize himself because he couldn't urinate at all. I contacted the urologist on Easter Sunday morning and he was kind enough to meet us at his office and my son didn't have to go emergency department.
00:08:03
Speaker
And it helps that I was working as a hospitalist. So I had everybody's phone number in my phone at the time. So after that, about four more years go by. And I finally read and a research article in the Journal of Urology that had my son's exact symptoms.
00:08:18
Speaker
And I contacted the researcher. And that's how I found out about the an International Lyme and Associated Disease Society and all about Lyme disease. So I became a member. Found Dr. Horowitz and went away for training with him.
00:08:30
Speaker
I did a two week preceptorship with him. Dr. Horowitz, Richard Horowitz is a Lyme expert. He just recently retired, but he's doing other things now besides seeing patients. And um that's how I got my son better.
00:08:41
Speaker
And what did what did that journey of getting better look like? So for 13 years, it didn't really manifest. Like his body was dealing with it. He didn't notice anything because maybe it happened slowly. Whatever he was dealing with, he didn't notice. But then the surgery was this traumatic trigger that all of a sudden they started trying.
Deep Dive into Lyme: Triggers and Symptoms
00:09:00
Speaker
it But sensibly, there's something inside. If he was having all these hernias against the abdominal wall, everything Swiss cheese, stuff was happening. It's just maybe it happened so slowly it felt normal to him.
00:09:12
Speaker
And that's a problem with things like this. If you think about somebody who has fibromyalgia, you know, they it it's always triggered by some kind of something that triggers the immune system.
00:09:23
Speaker
So again, my sister, for example, our mother died when we were young. She was 24 and was 27.
00:09:30
Speaker
After the death, my sister had all these crazy symptoms started, headaches and joint pain and brain fog and inflammation. And um she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.
00:09:43
Speaker
And so, you know, after years of of doing the work that I'm doing now, I said to her, I really think you have chronic form of Lyme disease. And so I had her tested and sure enough, she did. But the local testing just is poor.
00:09:55
Speaker
So it's substandard. It's um antiquated. It's almost 40 years old. It's never been updated. So you have to use specialty labs to get the proper diagnosis. But what I did learn is you can treat all you want, but if you don't change diets, if you don't make sure you're eating the healthiest way possible, you're just not going to get better.
00:10:15
Speaker
With your son in the treatment, you described... nutrition and changing some lifestyle factors around, what did that look like in the case of your son? once Once you figured it out, what were the things you put in place? And then what was the timeline for things getting better for him?
00:10:34
Speaker
What happens when you get bit by a tick is biofilm is created by the bacteria. the bacteria uses your proteins to create a biofilm. And the biofilm is a protective structure that prevents anything from being able to kill off this bacteria.
00:10:50
Speaker
He could be you could be an antibiotics as much as you want. You're going to kill some of the bacteria off, but the the immature bacteria is going to stay there and it's going to be more of a chronic form of of um Lyme disease.
00:11:01
Speaker
So for him, because he had had it for such a long period of time, and because the bacteria was using his connective tissue as energy, that's what the hernias were coming from.
00:11:12
Speaker
um When we started him on antibiotics, every three weeks, he would get so sick that he just couldn't continue with the treatment. He also started eating sugar, like an incredible amount of sugar. And both my kids were brought up without sugar. Like we weren't the typical family. I brought them up very holistically to try and keep you know their immune system nice and healthy, and especially the rest of their body.
00:11:38
Speaker
So when he started like really craving sugar, I wasn't following the ah the understanding of why this was happening until I did so much research and found that the bacteria actually send signals to your brain to actually crave sugar.
00:11:56
Speaker
Because without sugar, they can't survive. Right. So he's eating Skittles like they're coming out of, i mean, like my my younger son said, like it was his job. He ate so many, so much Skittles that we just wasn't something that was that was normal for him.
00:12:10
Speaker
So as he's getting better and he's getting better, the amount Skittles he was eating was getting smaller and it was getting smaller. It was just so funny to see how this was working. And him being my first patient and being my son was probably the most difficult thing a mother can go through.
00:12:23
Speaker
Because as a mother, you want your child to succeed. You want them to be able to get fixed. When it's a patient, you have more clarity. You're not living with them. You're not with them all the time. You're not hounding them. You know what I mean? Begging them. It was a different very different experience um that i had that I went through with him.
00:12:42
Speaker
um But he was on antibiotics for about three and a half years. And after three and a half years, we found that babesiosis, which is a parasite that lives in a red blood cell,
00:12:53
Speaker
isn't always easy to find. um But after three and if you half three and a half years of antibiotics, we actually found the babesiosis in his blood. And that was causing a lot of anxiety and things like that in him, which is so common because that triggers a lot of psychiatric problems.
00:13:10
Speaker
And so then we were able to get rid of the babesiosis and things started to really change for him. So it's been, i actually diagnosed him a month before he turned 30. And by the time that happened here, he had already gotten the it's all in your head diagnosis by more than one doctor.
00:13:27
Speaker
And so when I had called him to tell him, like, I know what this is, because I had read that research article, um he was very apprehensive to have any hope, to be honest with you. And I feel like if I didn't diagnose him when I did, i don't, I don't even know if he'd be here today. I'll be honest with you.
00:13:44
Speaker
He was, you you could only be sick for so long and you have somebody tell you it's all in your head before you just give
Connecting the Dots: Lyme vs. Long COVID
00:13:51
Speaker
up on life. You know what I mean? Yeah. It makes me wonder with the,
00:13:57
Speaker
a lot of long COVID, right? Coming out of 2020, 2021. Was that a triggering event for it's it's not the COVID, it was, it triggered something that was dormant or underlying like this for a lot of people.
00:14:10
Speaker
You know, it's interesting that you said that because I'm actually on the World Health Organization Committee for Long COVID. And what we what I've been finding and the in the reason why I had accepted the nomination is because it's so similar to a chronic form of of um Lyme disease.
00:14:25
Speaker
I think that anything that is chronic in your body causing inflammation, you're going to have the same outcomes. You're going to have the same symptoms and you're going to have the same results. And so believe it or not, having what happened with COVID actually opened up some doors for Lyme disease because Lyme disease is very political diagnosis where COVID isn't. COVID affected the entire world.
00:14:49
Speaker
We had to do something as the entire world. When did you ever see the entire world actually agree on anything? um With Lyme disease, though, there's a huge underscore of reasons why it's so political.
00:15:03
Speaker
But because of the symptoms people do experience with long COVID, it made a lot of sense of why people are experiencing those same types of symptoms with chronic forms of tick-borne diseases.
00:15:14
Speaker
And so what are those symptoms? Someone that may be listening to this and may themselves or had family members dealing with something for a long time and a physician saying, look, we can't find anything wrong. You're, you're, you're fine.
00:15:30
Speaker
You just need to deal with it. What are the kinds of things they should be looking for? And then what should they do about it? Because maybe it's lime, maybe it's not lime, right? you You mentioned others, mold toxicity, heavy metals, like what should they be looking at?
00:15:43
Speaker
But let's start first. Sorry, too many questions. Let's start with what are they feeling? What are they experiencing today that should be signals to dig deeper? So, and and this goes for any number, everything that you just mentioned, lime,
00:15:57
Speaker
mold, heavy metals, you're going to have the brain fog, or long COVID. You're going to have the brain fog. A lot of times you're going to have migrating joint pain. um Many times you have this inflammation in your body. You don't know where it's really coming from. The inflammation is going to trigger other things like neuropathies, paresthesias, where it's like the pins and needles in your extremities.
00:16:17
Speaker
All of those things can be because of everything that we just talked about. But again, the mainstream provider isn't thinking of things like this. They're looking for diabetes. They're looking for spinal stenosis. They're looking for things that are taught in medical school. These things are not really taught in medical school. These things are taught in functional medicine. These things are taught in naturopathy and chiropractic schools, but not in medical school. It may make sense in this the 80-20 world, right? if the The old adage, if you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras, right? It's more likely that it's the horse. So 80% of the time, we're right? But if whatever the 80% treatment's not doing it for you and you keep coming back for months and years, then then you need to start looking at zebras, it seems like.
00:17:02
Speaker
By the time I get a patient, they've already seen... between four and 10 different doctors, all different specialties. um I'm fortunate and they're fortunate if they get to see me sooner than later.
00:17:15
Speaker
The sooner they see me, the quicker I can help them. And I, you know, whatever they've come to me with is wonderful. Bring all your records so I can see what's already been done. Whatever hasn't been done, we're going to check for.
00:17:26
Speaker
But we can generally rule out cancer, rheumatological reasons, diabetes. Like there's so many things we can rule out. And now let's figure out what is really going on. Autoimmune diseases are always going to be triggered by something. People don't just develop an autoimmune disease.
00:17:42
Speaker
autoe Autoimmune diseases are also reversible, which most people don't realize that. So if you get rid of the trigger that's causing the autoimmune disease, the autoimmune disease will go away. It's trying to figure out what's causing that autoimmune disease.
00:17:55
Speaker
I'll an example. I had a patient who came to me with rheumatoid arthritis. ah She had her titers were so high. They were greater than it was 1560. That's pretty high.
00:18:09
Speaker
When I tested her for Lyme disease through local labs, if she was negative. Then I i so tested her again through specialty labs like Igenix and she came back positive. So I said to her that I really didn't think she had rheumatoid arthritis. And I spoke with her rheumatologist who disagreed with me, of course, because that's that's his job, he's rheumatology.
00:18:29
Speaker
When we got rid of the Lyme disease, her RA factor disappeared. So she never had rheumatoid arthritis. I had another patient with lupus, the exact same story.
00:18:40
Speaker
her Her lupus anticoagulants were the highest they could possibly be. She was in so much pain that she couldn't walk down a flight of stairs. She used stuff to go down on her butt, step by step by step. She was young. She was in her thirty She had two little kids.
00:18:55
Speaker
She told her doctor this, and he said, with people with lupus, because they're in so much pain, that's normal. There's nothing normal about being in so much pain that you have to go down the stairs on your butt. So I tested her again, same thing.
00:19:08
Speaker
Local testing was negative. Igenics testing was positive. I started her on antibiotics, gave her the anti-inflammatory diet that I designed, put her on all the supplements that go along with the antibiotics.
00:19:18
Speaker
She never had lupus. So this autoimmune diseases that occur, a lot of times there's an underlying reason why you have them. Once you find that underlying reason and you correct it, the autoimmune disease goes away.
Treatment Tactics: Antibiotics and Beyond
00:19:32
Speaker
Can you take us through, i mean, that treatment? So it sounded like antibiotics, anti-inflammatory diet and supplements. So what what does that stack look like like? What are the antibiotics you're taking? What is in your anti-inflammatory diet? And then what are the supplements you you stack into it?
00:19:47
Speaker
So Lyme disease is only one tick-borne disease. There's 14 different diseases and where I live that one tick can carry. But we'll stick with Lyme for now. It would doxycycline, which covers the intracellular portions of the bacteria.
00:20:01
Speaker
Sephiroxine, which covers the cell wall portion of the bacteria. I combine monolaurin, which improves your immune system. It's a coconut derivative. seropeptase, which is a du derivative of silkworm.
00:20:14
Speaker
For a silkworm to get out of the cocoon, they have to excrete seropeptase to turn into ah a moth or a butterfly. When you're taking it internally, it eats away any non-living structure in your body, including biofilm.
00:20:25
Speaker
Liquid stevia is used to help kill off those persister cells. There is um a researcher, her name is Eva Sapia, the University of New Haven. She actually discovered that ah information with liquid stevia and seropeptase. So I try and combine things that are going to help to not only improve the immune system, but also break open the biofilm so that not only the medications through antibiotics, but also the antimicrobials through nature can help to get rid of everything.
00:20:54
Speaker
okay Probiotics are exceptionally important to keep the microbiome um in your gut really healthy, making sure that we're not causing issues down the road. And how long are they on these antibiotics and supplements?
00:21:05
Speaker
It really depends on how how long they've had a tick-borne disease. If they have a tick-borne disease and they have mold toxicity, that's exceptionally common. Sometimes we have to get rid of the mold, open up the detox pathways before we can actually start working on the tick-borne diseases.
00:21:20
Speaker
Because if we're trying to get rid of Lyme disease, but a person is still living in a mold-infested environment, we're never going to get them better. So it's really getting back to literally nursing 101 where you're you know either going to their house to see where do they live? How are they living?
00:21:36
Speaker
you know Do I smell mold in their house? do i Are they living in an area where there's still you know dead leaves surrounding the perimeter of their house? So you know there's going to be water in the basement or there's going to be dampness.
00:21:47
Speaker
And people don't realize how important little things like this are. um Mold can, doesn't have to black mold. Any type of mold is going to cause issues. And some people are going to be more sensitive than others.
00:21:59
Speaker
Okay. And then the anti-inflammatory diet, what, what is in it and what is explicitly not in it?
Diet and Environment: Keys to Healing
00:22:05
Speaker
What are you avoiding? So it started off when i was getting my doctorate degree. I was working in a practice. It was a dual physician practice. One physician had retired.
00:22:13
Speaker
I took over that part of the practice and um found that the vast majority of these people were pre-diabetic or diabetic or already. And the hemoglobin A1C wasn't that well known at the time. In fact, when i did my doctoral dissertation, the PhDs never heard of the hemoglobin A1C. They were out in the Midwest.
00:22:31
Speaker
um So that was really interesting to find that something like this really wasn't well known. The A1C will tell you if you're diabetic, diabetes starts at 6.5, but it also tells you you're pre-diabetic, pre-diabetes starts at 5.7.
00:22:45
Speaker
And so I initially started off with getting people on a low glycemic index diet just to get them to decrease the amount of sugar they were eating. And it turned out to be statistically statistically significant. My research was preventing the progression from pre-diabetes to diabetes mellitus type two, which worked.
00:23:00
Speaker
But then when I opened up my own practice and everything i have happened with my son, and really revamped that diet to really include all foods that decrease inflammation, um what foods to buy in this country, what foods to buy in other countries. So for example, yesterday, every Sunday I make homemade bread, I buy Manny's Choice flour, which is flour that's made it in Italy. It's not made the United States.
00:23:26
Speaker
If you buy anything from the United States, even from an organic farm, it's going to be um tainted with glyphosate, which is Roundup. That causes so many issues with the immune system, causes inflammation in the body.
00:23:42
Speaker
It's a hormone disruptor, decreases testosterone. I mean, I have more 30-year-olds low testosterone when I compare it my 80-year-olds who have better testosterone in these kids are in their thirties and it's because they haven't eaten the same foods that these kids are eating all these years. So there's so many things about our food in this country that, you know, we, it's done for financial purposes. So flour is, you know, glyphosate to use to try and it's cheap.
00:24:09
Speaker
you know, it's pesticide. Then the flour is grown in poor soil. So now we don't have the nutrition we need from it. Then it's bleached to try and get it to stay the shelves for a longer period of time. So by the time you're done with it, you're eating a sugar pop.
00:24:23
Speaker
You know, there's absolutely no no nutritional value whatsoever. The nutrients are bleached out and then they're, they're you know, re-instilled with synthetic aye nutrients, which sort of our body doesn't know what to do with so synthetic things.
00:24:38
Speaker
So there's a lot of reasons why i don't eat, you know, like certain things we don't eat that come from this country. Yeah. Okay. And so, and then are there any, i would imagine the same thing probably applies to plants, but it's hard to get fresh plants from other countries.
00:24:55
Speaker
What, as you're doing the diet, mean, what do you recommend to patients? How do you navigate that world? So i everything's broken down into food groups. And there's a list of every single thing that you can have that's exceptionally healthy for you.
00:25:09
Speaker
If you're not one to make your own bread, and a lot of people aren't, there's something like Ezekiel bread or um Alvarado street bread. It's made with wheat sprouts. I can't promise there won't be glyphosate in it because it's still it's still made in this country, but it's not a flour. So you don't have to worry about the bleached part of it. It's a wheat sprout that it's made with. So it actually digests as a perfect protein. So it's not going to increase your your blood sugar.
00:25:33
Speaker
It's not going to increase inflammation because that sugar part of it is as out of the equation. So it's really about eating as healthy as possible, trying not to eat anything that is processed or preserved.
00:25:49
Speaker
If you're eating something from a box or a package, you're going to have more issues than somebody who's making all of their food from scratch. So including meat, you know, you want to make sure that meat is from an organic farm. Make sure that meat is, you know, animals are allowed to roam. They're allowed to chew cod. they You know, they're allowed to do the things they're supposed to do because an animal who is tethered to barn or a chicken that is infiltrated with a whole bunch of other chickens and they not even room for them to spread their wings or anything are going to very unhappy animals.
00:26:21
Speaker
And think about a person who is treated like that. Their stress levels climb. they become They become sickly. you know Autoimmune diseases because of all the the anxiety and stress they're under. Animals are the same way. And then you're eating that meat. And now you get all of those issues. yeah Distilled down even, right?
00:26:39
Speaker
You're concentrating it and then consuming it. Okay. So the principles are whole foods and as organic as you can get and ideally and less from the U.S. than Yes, exactly. Unfortunately, yes.
00:26:54
Speaker
I mean, it it is something that comes up. and My mom had stage three colon cancer and has all sorts gastrointestinal issues, but she finds when she's traveling in Europe or literally anywhere other than the U.S.,
00:27:06
Speaker
Her stomach's way better than whenever she eats here, no matter what she does. So I've i've seen it firsthand. And then, so we so we said brain fog, but with the 14 different tick-borne illnesses and mold toxicity and heavy metals,
00:27:23
Speaker
what would someone listening want to look for for themselves or for a friend or family member of other than brain
Challenging Diagnoses: Look Beyond the Surface
00:27:34
Speaker
fog?
00:27:34
Speaker
Is it the pain? Is it Because I mean, you couldn't feel a sense of relief almost if you've been going through this and like, oh, it's lupus. And so you just stop there. You're in pain. You're saying, well, this is just what it is. At least I know what it is, even if I can't do ah anything about it.
00:27:53
Speaker
Or it's just rheumatoid arthritis. Okay, that's horrible. And I'm in pain each morning. And and it's but at least I know what it is. And so I'm not gonna, there's nothing I can do about it.
00:28:04
Speaker
How do you navigate that space? Because I imagine somebody has been looking for a while. it is a relief to just have ah a label to put on it, even if that label is not right. And then when you start saying, is this label right or not? How how how would someone who's not 30 years practicing be able to identify that and know to keep digging?
00:28:23
Speaker
I think you have to have a love ah for science, first of all, and not just go by what you were taught in medical school. Um, when i went to my second ILADS conference, out of curiosity, I just started of asking doctors around me, how did you get involved?
00:28:40
Speaker
And the answer was always the same. It started with a family member where somebody in their family was sick and no matter what they did, they couldn't get them better. So if they were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease or they were diagnosed with, you know, Alzheimer's disease or whatever the diagnosis was, the medications just weren't helping.
00:28:58
Speaker
lot of times there was no diagnosis. They had no idea. Like with my son, you know, it was all on his head. They couldn't figure out what it was. But I think that the most important thing that people can do is not stop at that diagnosis. And I completely agree with you.
00:29:09
Speaker
You know, when you're sick for so long and you get a diagnosis, it's a, that's a beautiful thing because you have no idea what's going on. You feel like, okay, now I have something I can work with. But when you get something you can work with and all it is, is medication to suppress your symptoms.
00:29:24
Speaker
they We have to do better than that. Because if you have hypertension, if you lose the weight, get rid of the salt, and start exercising, the vast majority of people can come off of their antihypertensives.
00:29:37
Speaker
If you have... Parkinson's disease. Make sure it's not Bartonella, which is a tick-borne disease. My cousin was misdiagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
00:29:48
Speaker
um She was 50 years old. I was in school to be an nurse practitioner at the time. And I was just like out of frustration. Like I didn't know how the heck she could have gotten this at such a young age. And I've mentioned that to one of the other students in my class. And this woman had seven children and three of them had a chronic form of Lyme disease and they were seeing a doctor Mount Kisco, New York.
00:30:06
Speaker
And so she said, it's worth a shot. And so I called her up and I said, you know what? It's worth a shot. Maybe it's not Parkinson's. And sure enough, she had Bartonella. And so he started her on a PICC line because her symptoms were so neurological and she was getting better, better, better, better.
00:30:23
Speaker
But her husband being a pharmacist and seeing a doctor who didn't explain why he doesn't take insurance, didn't explain why he had to use a lab outside of the normal LabCorp, Quest, hospital labs, you know, felt that he didn't need to explain himself.
00:30:39
Speaker
As a pharmacist, he said, antibiotics will will decrease inflammation. Like, I don't know if that's what's happening. Like, we should get a second opinion. So they went to another neurologist who said, you definitely don't have Bartonella, which...
00:30:51
Speaker
like they even know what that word meant. because most people don't even know what Bartonella is or how severe it can be. Cause you think of like cat scratch fever, which isn't usually a game changer, but think of trench fever that was killing people in world war one. You know, so you have to think of how this could be presenting with other people. So she came off the antibiotics, she went back on the Parkinson's meds and she got worse, worse, worse to the point where she ended up in a wheelchair with contraction contractures and had to have a deep brain stimulator placed. And it was because it was Bartonella and it wasn't Parkinson's disease.
00:31:27
Speaker
So just because you got the diagnosis doesn't mean that's the correct diagnosis. So if ever you have a diagnosis like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis or Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, disease Go find, if it's not me, find somebody who does understand how to treat tick-borne diseases, mold toxicity, heavy metal poisoning, knows how to get to the root cause of the disease process. Because there's a good possibility that's not what you have.
00:31:52
Speaker
Right now, i have two patients with ALS. They don't have ALS. They have ALS now because they were misdiagnosed. So they got the the diagnosis, but then it was too late before they started to like look outside for other things.
00:32:07
Speaker
One was, she's only 44 years old. She had a foot drop, was her main symptom. The provider sent her to neurologist who died.
00:32:18
Speaker
did a bunch of genetic testing. nothing for There was nothing there to suggest she ALS. There are tests for ALS, blood tests. She did not have them. Okay.
00:32:28
Speaker
By the time she went to see a naturopath, because now she's thinking, I don't think I have ALS. She was already in a wheelchair and was diagnosed with Lyme disease and Bartonella. And now she was referred to me. Well, by the time I got her, was completely paralyzed from the neck down.
00:32:44
Speaker
Already in a wheelchair, unable to move any of her extremities. A week later, she was getting a trach place because her breathing was becoming so difficult. you know And so now I got a PICC line on her. you know id started the antibiotics immediately, but it was too late.
00:32:58
Speaker
So those are my biggest concerns is there is a window of opportunity that we can reverse this. It's a small window. So that's why if you get a diagnosis like that, like just go find another provider who really understands everything about functional medicine and tick-borne diseases, just to be sure you really do have Parkinson's or you really do have ALS.
00:33:21
Speaker
Okay. So if if I'm following kind of someone listening to this, looking for an action plan for themselves or a loved one, You start getting symptoms of something and you're chasing around for a diagnosis.
00:33:33
Speaker
Finally, someone comes up with one. It's ALS, it's Parkinson's, it's lupus, whatever it is. like okay, great. And here's how we're going to treat the symptoms. they Okay, maybe I start treating the symptoms, but then I also listen of, hey, maybe there's something triggering this. I could go another level.
00:33:51
Speaker
i need to go find a physician who is more familiar with tick-borne illnesses, mold toxicity, heavy metal exposure, how would I find that person?
Holistic Healing: Beyond Conventional Medicine
00:34:03
Speaker
So... I can't say all, but many of the providers through ILADS, the International Alignment Associated Disease Society, also practice functional medicine.
00:34:15
Speaker
Because to treat somebody completely, you have to understand how the body functions properly. When you're giving a medication, you're you're literally giving them a band-aid to suppress the symptoms, but it's not doing anything to cure the issue itself. So when you, you can go on ILADS, you can do, ah you can do a search for a physician or practitioner, a PA, like I said, chiropractors, naturopaths, call the office and just see, do they practice functional medicine?
00:34:43
Speaker
Make sure that they do understand, do they, do they treat mold? Do they treat, you know, tick-borne diseases? Do they treat heavy metals? We get phone calls here from people who are very, very, they' they're really well-educated.
00:34:54
Speaker
They've done their homework and they'll ask my staff a number of questions to make sure, well, if they make an appointment with me, is it going to be a wasted appointment or am i do I really understand what's going on with them?
00:35:05
Speaker
And so, and my staff, they hear me talk constantly. So they could probably, you know, their verbiage is as good as mine is at this point, just because they could literally finish my sentences. I talk to i talk about this all the time. My husband keeps telling me to get off my soapbox.
00:35:21
Speaker
Well, please don't. I mean, I think... it It gives people a lot of hope, right? So there's one of thinking you're crazy because the system's gaslighting you. It's all in your head. That's so true. And and so then there's, hey, it gives them hope of let's let's go find what this is.
00:35:38
Speaker
There's another of, hey, maybe they're not gaslighting. They just diagnosed you wrong. So they told you, hey, you're not crazy. You have this specific condition and we're just going to treat the symptoms and there's no hope you're going to get better.
00:35:51
Speaker
you might as well say, well, let me just take another bite of this apple. Let me go to ILADS. Let me find somebody. Let me see if there could be something else going on and try to treat that and see if indeed I can't get better. Or maybe I'm like one of all these patients you referenced able to to move quickly enough that I can change my condition. So...
00:36:08
Speaker
if I can request anything is please don't get it off your soapbox. Please share this more because no one needs to suffer unnecessarily. there're There are ways to treat this. There are programs, there are diets, there's the medications, supplements, like there are ways to fix this.
00:36:25
Speaker
And I think more people need to know that. You are absolutely correct. And I mean, even if, even if something like long COVID, everything we just talked about, the anti-inflammatory diet, the supplements that i talked about, all those things are going to help your symptoms because it's going to get rid of the inflammation in your body. In our office, so I see people all over the country. I have a patient in Australia. So there's people all over the world that are are experiencing what I'm talking about. If you live close enough to where my office is, we have an infrared sauna that's going to help to
00:36:56
Speaker
clean out every cell in your body to to try and detox everything. We have halotherapy to um ah neutralize the positive ions in your body to be able to decrease your risk of viruses, bacterias, even cancers. and We do IV vitamins here, which are going to So if you take our you take a multivitamin, you're absorbing about 8% of it. If you take an individual vitamin, you're absorbing about 18% of it. If you get it intravenously or if you get it intramuscularly, you're getting 100% of it.
00:37:27
Speaker
So I see people who turn the corner just from just getting the proper amount of nutrients through IVs in their body. It's amazing what the body can do, how well it can heal itself when you give it the right ah ingredients.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah. That's amazing. Well, Dr. Cipriano, thank you for your work. Thank you for the lives you've already impacted and improved. And hopefully this message will help you do that for even more people. I really i really hope so. i just really want people to understand that, first of all they're not alone.
00:38:02
Speaker
And there are other answers out there from them from what you're getting right now. And if you can find somebody like me, At least pick me, you know, go, if you could find somebody else, that's absolutely perfect because you have one life, you know, live it to your absolute fullest and don't take, you know, the, it's all in your head diagnosis ever.
00:38:24
Speaker
That's a provider who doesn't know that there are other reasons why you're having these symptoms. Yeah. I think hopefully this will give a lot of people hope and not just hope, but an action plan to go change their lives. So thank you.
00:38:38
Speaker
I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast. And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other healthspan role models on Alively.com.
00:38:53
Speaker
Enjoy a lively day.