Episode 230: Symptoms and How They Correlate with Infection

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Deb 1:12Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find this episode both insightful and thought provoking. Listener discretion is advised. Now for the show, Welcome to Let’s Talk wellness now. I’m your host, Dr, Deb, and I’m thrilled to have you here together. We’ll explore the cutting edge of health and wellness, uncovering powerful strategies to help you look, feel and live your best at any age,

Deb 1:35from alternative medicine to integrative therapies, functional nutrition to mind, body healing. We’re here to challenge the status quo and empower you with knowledge. As a nurse practitioner, naturopathic doctor, shaman and someone who’s walked the path of healing firsthand, I’m passionate about helping you thrive. So let’s dive in and discover the tools you need to unlock a vibrant, healthy life. This is your journey, and I’m honored to be your guide. Let’s talk wellness. Now today, we’re diving into a fascinating and critical topic about how symptoms in our bodies often serve as red flags for infections. Understanding these connections is essential for both timely diagnosis and effective treatment.

Deb 2:25Symptoms that our bodies show us in our ways of signaling something’s wrong, but often they can be misunderstood or misdiagnosed, and by connecting these dots, we can uncover hidden infections that are driving chronic health issues.

Deb 2:44You know, I’ve treated chronic illness now for over 20

Deb 2:49plus, maybe 25 years, close to that somewhere, and

Deb 2:55it always presents in very similar patterns of things, and unfortunately, what ends up happening are the symptoms that people go to their primary care doctors with often, I believe, overwhelms them. And we’re taught that if somebody has multiple symptoms to think about depression and anxiety versus thinking about an infection or something chronic in nature and in our naturopathic world, we’re taught that the body is a whole and as a whole, every symptom gives us another answer or another glimpse into exactly what’s happening. So symptoms of infection are quite common, right? We know fever, fatigue, pain or swelling, that these are not necessarily the problems themselves, but these are the things we pay attention to. And if you remember having the flu. We’ve all had that, right? You feel achy, you feel tired, you feel flu like this, what we call it. But what if you felt like that more times than not? What if your symptoms kind of ebbed and flowed? They were here for a couple of days, and then they were gone. They were here for a week or two, and they’re gone. And you’re trying to find that pattern that

Deb 4:30trigger, so to speak, that makes these symptoms present or makes them worse. And that’s where you become the medical detective. That’s where I’ve become the medical detective, and it’s learning to identify those symptoms between acute and chronic symptoms in nature. So acute symptoms tend to be fever, sore throat, rash,

Deb 4:56they’re usually linked to short term colds and.

Deb 5:00Lose. But you can have these symptoms as chronic things as well. Or, like I said before, they can come and go in patterns. Typically, when we see chronic symptoms, it’s chronic fatigue, fatigue that can be so debilitating that you can’t get out of bed. Or maybe it’s just fatigue. When you wake up in the morning and you don’t really feel rested, you don’t feel like you’ve slept, you’re not ready to hit the floor running and get going through the day like you used to. And then there’s brain fog, that fog over your head where you’re just not quite remembering things properly, or something that we call word finding. You can’t find the right word. You’re looking at an object, and you know what the name of the object is, but you can’t quite grasp the word for it, or you’re mixing up words. You’re calling a chair, a table and a table, a bench. You can’t find a person’s name like you used to we tend to think that’s common with age, but it’s really not. Or what about the joint pain or the muscle pain that comes and goes one minute, it’s your wrist or your finger, and it’s a knee, then it’s an ankle, then it’s my neck, then it’s my shoulder, then it’s my elbow. That type of migratory is what we call it, joint or muscle pain is not common. It’s not normal aging process. It’s a red flag for us and tells us that something’s going on. What about symptoms like numbness and tingling that come and go, or the feeling is, though something’s creeping and crawling inside of your body. We call that the circulations. These are all symptoms that are not normal symptoms as we age, chronic headaches where you feel like somebody’s just driving a stake or a spike in your head, the blurred vision that comes and goes, the floaters, those squiggly lines that happen inside of your eyes, or the eye pain, jaw pain,

Deb 7:17these are just some of the symptoms that we see with chronic illness. What about the bladder? Symptoms that happen, that urgency, that frequency, or that pain in the bladder, that burning in the bladder, or food sensitivities. One minute you can eat something like gluten, and the next day you can’t you’re feeling sick from it. Or one day you can have tomatoes, and the next time you have tomatoes, your joints are on fire. These are all signals of a bigger problem, a bigger thing. Now, oftentimes it is infection. It’s something like Epstein Barr or chronic strep, which gets now diagnosed as pans pandas. It could be Lyme disease or some other tick borne disease. And these are all symptoms of Long Haul COVID as well. These things that come in waves about every two weeks, you see a pattern arising. These are chronic symptoms, and their chronic illness, things and they really, truly debilitate people’s lives and keep them from working, keep them from doing the things that they absolutely love in life. Now, viral infections like Epstein Barr Virus can create a lot of these same type of symptoms, this chronic fatigue, the swollen lymph nodes that come and go, the low grade fever.

Deb 8:51These are very debilitating. Some of these conditions, like Epstein Barr and HHV six, which is a herpes family virus can actually lead to bigger problems, like autoimmune diseases, thyroid disease, diseases like Ms. The literature is very clear that these things play a role in autoimmune diseases, the HHV six and CMB. So HHV six is a herpes family virus and CMB is cytomegalovirus. These are definitely linked to neurological symptoms, chronic pain and even cognitive decline. HHV, six for years, has been known to be a culprit in fibromyalgia, that sore muscle achiness that just doesn’t want to leave the body. And unfortunately, we’ve kind of gotten away from looking at these viruses as being culprits for the symptoms that we have, and instead we’re looking at, how do we treat the symptoms, instead of, how do we get to the root cause of these symptoms? Now there’s other bacterial infection.

Deb 10:00As well. Lyme disease is one of them. I mentioned that a little bit earlier, this typically in an acute setting, will start like flu, like symptoms, joint pain, possibly a bullseye rash. But according to people like Dr Horowitz, we know that the bulls rash only appears in about 20% of the population of people, so that’s not always a telltale sign. Or if you get bit in an area where you wouldn’t necessarily see the bullseye rash like maybe on your head, it could also be missed. Now, some of these symptoms can evolve into neurological issues, numbness and tingling and even seizures. We see chronic pain is a very common one, and Lyme disease actually can mimic diseases like MS and other autoimmune diseases like lupus, and these symptoms can go on for decades, undiagnosed and untreated. And we have some other tick borne diseases as well, like Bartonella, which is commonly associated with psychiatric symptoms, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, there’s a common term that we use called Bart rage that will cause people to be totally normal one minute, and they go from zero to 100 in seconds, like they’re fine, they’re angry, and then they’re fine again. This is very common with a Bartonella infection, and then we have bacterial infections like chlamydia pneumonia that can directly affect the cardiovascular system and cause a lot of cardiovascular symptoms like syncope or blood pressure issues or pots uh, postural tachycardia orthostatic or sorry, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. And this can be very debilitating for people, because their heart rate goes up very high, sometimes to as high as 180 or 190 and then comes back down right away. So these bacterial infections can be very devastating. When they’re not diagnosed and they don’t continue t...