Toxic with Dr. Neil Nathan

Neil Nathan, MD, has been practicing medicine for forty-seven years. He has been Board Certified in Family Practice and Pain Management and is a Founding Diplomate of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine and a board member of the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness (ISEAI). For many years, he has worked primarily with patients who had not received a diagnosis from conventional medical sources, and especially with patients whose illness has made them unusually sensitive and toxic (hence difficult to treat). 

Neil has lectured to medical audiences both nationally and internationally. He has written several books, including Healing Is Possible: New Hope for Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, Persistent Pain, and Other Chronic Illnesses; On Hope and Healing: For Those Who Have Fallen Through the Medical Cracks; and Mold and Mycotoxins: Current Evaluation and Treatment. 

He has hosted an internationally syndicated radio program/podcast on VoiceAmerica called The Cutting Edge of Health and Wellness Today. He also is a researcher and has published several papers, the most important being “Metabolic Features of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” with Dr. Robert Naviaux. Dr. Nathan’s medical practice is the Redwood Valley Clinic in Northern California.

In this deep look on chronic illnesses, Freddie and Neil discuss why symptoms are the key to start your healing journey, the impact of mold while we shelter-in-place, how and why binders could work for you, the connection between EMF and mold, and so much more. If you need concrete steps you can take today to feel better, this interview is for you.

Episode Highlights

2:01 - Why it’s so hard to improve consistently with chronic illness

4:38 - How Dr. Nathan found his sandbox

8:50 - Symptoms are the key to unlocking your healing

15:25 - What symptoms do you start addressing first?

23:57 - How can we calm systems on high-alert?

29:31 - The impact of mold while sheltering-in-place

35:14 - Are we overreacting to COVID-19?

42:30 - Why do binders not work for me?

52:20 - You do not have to push through the pain to heal

54:17 - How do EMF and mold interact and relate?

1:00:09 - What does it mean to be beautifully broken?

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Neil Nathan (00:00.524)
It's about honoring your own perceptions. Your body is not your enemy. It's trying to tell you what you can take and what you can't take. Ignore those messages at your own peril.

Freddie Kimmel (00:15.362)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken Podcast brought to you by AmpCoil. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on this show, we discuss the common thread survivors share after walking through the fire, the practitioners making a difference, and the treatment modalities that deliver healing back into the hands of the people who need it most. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes. Because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel (00:47.758)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the beautifully broken podcast. am here with Dr. Neil Nathan, who comes to us with an incredible knowledge base. And he is the author of the book toxic, which I recently picked up on Amazon. Dr. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Neil Nathan (01:07.916)
Thank you very much for having me.

Freddie Kimmel (01:09.806)
Well, it's such an honor. have to say my audience, we have a lot of people that are dealing with long-term chronic illness, mold, Lyme, and for whatever reason, you know, our listener base is those who have tried anything and everything. And along this journey, you get to the point where you're just so frustrated because you start to feel like your body is broken. And that really ties into the title of the podcast, the beautifully broken podcast.

You know, stands to stands to question what is wrong with me and diving into some of your literature and listening to some of your podcasts. I was so moved with how you had taken something that can be so fractionated in so many different ways. And you've really developed a system to help the beautifully broken, the walking wounded, if you will.

Dr. Neil Nathan (02:00.75)
That's what I do.

Freddie Kimmel (02:02.04)
Doc, can we talk a little bit about why people with mold sensitivities and long-term chronic Lyme have such a challenge moving forward? Or if it's a step forward, it seems like it's four steps back, and why the body seems to just kind of be stuck.

Dr. Neil Nathan (02:18.798)
Well, there are quite a few reasons for that, actually. The first is the medical profession, which is most of my colleagues don't know much about Lyme disease. Even fewer know about mold toxicity. And even fewer know about what conditions they trigger that create the unusually sensitive and toxic patient. So that unless you get lucky and hook up with someone who knows what they're doing,

you're likely to get into the hands of someone who knows a little bit, and forgive me saying it, enough to be dangerous, but not enough to really help you. And with the best of intentions, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars doing well-intentioned things, but they're not what your body needs to get well. So what you have to figure out with someone who knows what they're doing is,

what is the main cause of what I have, not what's a downstream cause. So if you hear someone say, your main problem is that you're not methylated, or you've got viral issues, or you've got mitochondrial dysfunction, you do. That's given. That comes with the territory. That's not really a clear diagnosis. And if you try to work on those things, you will not fix them because you're not fixing what's causing them.

And you can spend a whole lot of time doing it and getting really frustrated unless you get down the cause. So I wrote this book, Toxic, which subtitled, Heal Your Body from Mole Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Other Chronic Environmental Illnesses, which is I'm trying to take a look at the big picture. And the big picture for most people is that the causes

are mostly mold toxicity and Lyme disease with its co-infections. For some, there are some other environmental toxins, certainly some that contribute, like having mental toxicity. But those are the biggies. And if you're not working on that and you've been sick for a long time, you're gonna be spinning your wheels and continuing to stay frustrated.

Freddie Kimmel (04:39.2)
I guess I would ask, how did you get into, obviously you've developed this as an expert to your skill set, is dealing with these very difficult people. How did you find your way into this sandbox?

Dr. Neil Nathan (04:51.598)
Well, that's a very long story. I don't know how much time you have. Okay, I don't know if I have an abridged. When I went to medical school, I wanted to be a healer. And I was quite disappointed to discover that that's not what they were going to teach me to be when I went to medical school. And I went to a very prestigious school, the University of Chicago. So it wasn't that I didn't go to a good medical school. And what they were teaching me is what I call medical technology.

Freddie Kimmel (04:54.538)
Well, we can do the abridged version.

version.

Dr. Neil Nathan (05:21.248)
It's not the entire understanding of the mind, body, spirit, energy and physical component. It's pretty much purely the physical component. So I was quite disappointed. When I left medical school, I worked in a variety of capacities that opened my eyes to other things that you could do to facilitate healing. For example, in medical school, I learned hypnosis. When I left medical school, one of my partners was a chiropractor.

He taught me how to do some body manipulations and encouraged me to learn osteopathic cranial type work. He also got me involved with emotional release work in the form of like in therapy. And then I moved into therapeutic touch and then I moved into acupuncture and homeopathy. All of it was to try to increase the tools in my toolbox to help my patients.

Conventional medicine is great as far as it goes, but it doesn't have all the answers. And I was, perhaps naively, but I'm still naive, I wanted all the answers. I wanted to know how do you help really sick people? So again, maybe I was a little different from some of my colleagues, but I was really interested in helping the people that other people didn't. So I find that these tools were really helping me and a lot of my colleagues.

thought the same way. A lot of my colleagues were referring their difficult patients to me. I didn't find them difficult. I found them interesting. For me, they were a puzzle, if you will, to be solved. So over the years, I kind of became a medical detective. And I used my skills and knowledge, which I constantly studied. Probably very few people study as hard as I do. Still love it.

I love learning, learning for its own sake, can't help it. So over the years, I began to get referred those patients that they didn't know what to do with. I started seeing things that we now call fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. that later we began to see a lot more Lyme disease and then mold toxicity. So that over the years, my practice really consisted of helping really sick people that other people didn't know what to do with.

Dr. Neil Nathan (07:46.958)
And that's kind of how I got this overview. So the bottom line, Freddie, is that I'm old.

I've been doing this for about almost five decades, but over that period of time, I have come up with ways of understanding what makes sick people sick and how to help them. And I think that's what my book's about. That's what my work's about. My podcasts are about. I do a tremendous amount of teaching of my medical colleagues. We have a long way to go both to learn how to do this better.

But also we have a long way to go to educate our medical colleagues of this is real. And I'm sure in your journey you discovered that if you tell someone you think they have Lyme disease, they may look at you like you have two heads. And if you tell them you have mole toxicity, they're going to look at you like you have three heads. So it just hasn't reached mainstream medicine for a variety of reasons. That's how I got here.

Freddie Kimmel (08:51.042)
Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's when I, when I hear you speak about it, it's, I, it unfolds these layers of trauma because when I went, I mentioned this when we talked briefly, first, I went through metastatic cancer and there was so much empathy and there was so much understanding within immediate family members and people, they knew exactly how to address me. You know, there was a path I was moving forward, very clear.

However, after that, when I started to experience deeper symptoms of Lyme and mold toxicity through a massive exposure, you know, I looked fine and it was like there was no, I knew no one with mold toxicity. So I thought I knew no one with, with chronic Babesia or Bartonella. I didn't know those people, not outwardly. So there was no, I literally went in a circle. So it would be like, we'd get a test for something where I'd have some positive bands back from an IGEN X test.

We'd work on that for a while with herbs and then it would move to something else. We would move to the Epstein bar and the cytomegalovirus and then we would move to dental infection and it just went around in a circle, always treating these problems, which is incredibly disempowering. And it almost took my body. It was a reboot, which I read those, you know, the words in your book. It's about rebooting the system. I found that through dumb luck.

Dr. Neil Nathan (10:09.548)
Yeah, dumb luck is better than no luck at all.

Freddie Kimmel (10:12.106)
It is, it is. when you receive someone that's referred to you in your practice, what's your baseline to start with people?

Dr. Neil Nathan (10:22.412)
I talk to them for a very long time to get a very full picture of what they've got. My first visit with a patient is two hours, and we're going to cover a lot of ground. So I need to know everything so that I can put their symptoms in perspective. From where I'm coming from, the symptoms are the key to figuring out what you've got. If you understand them and you go into them in enough detail. And this is standard medical practice. You're taught in medical school.

that 90 % of your diagnoses will be made by taking a good history. Back when I went to medical school, we had time to do that. Nowadays, in managed care situations, patients have seven minutes to explain what they have and get treatment for it. I mean, that's crazy. There's no way you can do that, not with someone who's sick or complicated. I I need to not just ask basic questions.

But I have questions of those questions and I have questions of those questions. once I really have an understanding of some of the things that people are describing, I'll give you an example. There are certain symptoms that very clearly tell me what you have that nothing else is. One of those would be a perception that you have a vibration or buzzing going on in your body somewhere. Often in the spine, but it could be anywhere.

It's not visible, you're not actually having a tremor, but you can feel that you're vibrating or buzzing. That's absolutely classic for mold or Bartonella. I don't know anything else that does that. If you tell me that you have electrical pains moving throughout your body, that's mold. So if you tell me that you have numbness and tingling in different parts of your body that don't match neurological basis, for example,

tip of your nose, your belly, your back area where you don't typically get those things. Again, that's mold or Bartonella. Not much else will do that. So there's a bunch of what I call central things that I'm listening for that once someone tells me that, I can begin to look at the pattern that they're talking about and I can begin to figure out what is the likeliest diagnosis.

Dr. Neil Nathan (12:46.488)
Because whatever diagnosis I'm gonna give you, it has to explain, if possible, all your symptoms, not a few of them. So if you tell me you've got Epstein-Barr, that'll explain a few of them, but it will almost never explain that full gamut of symptoms that my Lyman-Mold patients have. It's way more complicated than that. Most of my patients have tons going on in every system conceivable. Fatigue, cognitive impairment, anxiety, depression.

shortness of breath, neurological symptoms like the numbness and tingling that we talked about, GI imbalances, diarrhea, irritable bowel, joint pain, muscle pain, weakness, dizziness, vertigo, and there's more. So when you tell a doctor you've got all of that, their first thought is, that's impossible. Nothing causes all of that. Because most don't know.

that mold, toxicity, and Lyme disease and co-infections can do that. And so the first thing you're told by many doctors is, this has got to be in your head. Go see a shrink, because I can't help you. This is not, quote, real, unquote. Well, it is real. It's totally real. And I apologize for my profession for not really understanding this at this stage in time, because we tend to resist new information.

New technology? I'll embrace that in a heartbeat, because there's a ton of money going into that. New drug? Absolutely. New idea? Not so much. It's no... My favorite is when I hear doctors say, if what you're saying is true, someone else should have taught me that a long time ago. And I get it a lot. Now, if that makes sense to you, great.

Freddie Kimmel (14:38.124)
Yeah.

Dr. Neil Nathan (14:42.304)
It makes no sense to me whatsoever. So it's kind of like, now let me get this straight. There's nothing new to be learned in the world that you already know everything you need to know? Really? Problematic. So patients start out not only sick, but also not being believed and not being taken seriously. And that's a double whammy. And then you get into the, we're literally causing PTSD for our patients.

because they're having interactions with us and not getting anywhere. And they're going, well, where else can I get answers from? The answer is you're to have to do a little bit of homework, and you're going to have to get a little bit lucky to find someone who knows what they're doing here.

Freddie Kimmel (15:26.486)
Yeah, so if we if we're lucky enough to find, you know, through self discovery, through enough reading and enough podcasts, we're lucky enough to find a barrage of tests that lets us see there's a level of toxicity in the body. We've got a level of let's say let's say we do get a little bit of mold. We get a little bit of Bartonella. We find that there's some some co infections. Once we've got that, there's some things going on in the Petri dish.

Where does one start out? Is it to look at the active infection or is it to optimize the body systems? Or is it a little bit of both?

Dr. Neil Nathan (16:01.614)
A little bit of both. So first of all, from a treatment standpoint, if you have mold and Lyme or co-infections, almost always you start with mold. Most of my patients are so compromised by the time they get to me. They've already been sick for years. They've already seen five to 20 doctors and they've not been helped. They're really sick. Most of them can't take the antibiotics they need, even if they wanted to. So as a general rule, we start with mold.

which is easier and more benign to treat and essential, and also creates a massive amount of inflammation that makes treating Bartonella and Lyme and Babesia very difficult. So easy question, we start with mold. Here comes the complicated part. But mold toxicity triggers or causes in most patients mast cell activation and an inflammation

and dysfunction of their limbic system and vagus nerve system, all of which make them unusually sensitive so that they can't take typical doses of things that other people can take, and they can't move forward until you treat that first. So for most of my patients, we have to explore, do you have a limbic involvement? What does that mean? The limbic system is the part of the brain that controls emotion.

mood swings, sensitivities, sensitivities to light, sound, touch, chemicals, food, and EMF, and it controls to a certain extent energy, cognition, and pain. So most of our patients have a lot of that. And if you don't quiet the limbic system, it won't let them move forward until they have reassured it that you're safer than you think you are.

Now, another part of the brain, in addition to the limbic system that gets involved here, is the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is central to the autonomic nervous system and to gastrointestinal physiology and heart physiology, but it also is responsible for our perception of safety. And most of our patients don't feel safe in their own body. They don't trust it. They don't know when are they going to react to something.

Dr. Neil Nathan (18:26.104)
They don't know when they're going to eat something that's going to send them down a rabbit hole or take a supplement or a drug or a homeopathic that's going to send them down the rabbit hole. So the vagus nerve and the limbic system are separate systems, but they talk to each other very, very intimately. So job one for many of our sensitive patients, before you do anything else, is you've a quiet the limbic system.

and you've got to quiet down the vagus nerve so that that being feels safer. Now that safety is not a mental state, it's not psychological. The nervous system itself is hardwired to scrutinize their environment for what's safe and what's not. And over time, in an attempt to protect them, it's become hypervigilant. So it's looking at that nervous system in such a way that, huh,

I wonder if there's anything out there that I gotta be worried about. I don't know about that. I don't know about that. And it won't let them do anything until you can convince it that it's safer to go ahead. So one of the things that is very underdiagnosed is the conditions of limbic dysfunction and vagus nerve dysfunction that has to be addressed sooner before you even get off, before you get launched.

A third condition is that of mast cell activation. cells are immune cells that are present in every tissue of our body, but especially in our tissues that interact with the outside world, our sinuses, our gut, primarily. And what that means is that if these mast cells are what we call activated, hypervigilant applies to them as well, hyperreactive. And mold toxicity and Bartonella are the primary things that do that, by the way.

But if they are, anything that you eat can cause a reaction. This is not food allergy. And many of my patients have spent years scrutinizing what they eat, baffled, because some days I eat this and within five minutes I'm reacting. I'm flushing or sweating and my heart palpitation or anxiety or my brain is shutting down or my gut is in pain. Five minutes.

Dr. Neil Nathan (20:53.346)
But tomorrow I could eat the same thing and it won't happen. Doesn't make any sense to me. That's because it's not allergy. It's mast cell activation. And it has to do with how activated the mast cells are at that moment in time. And it fluctuates as toxin levels fluctuate in the body. That fluctuates too. So it isn't crazy. I've even seen people react to drinking water. It doesn't matter what you put in your gut.

If those max cells are fired up, they're going to release histamine and 200 other inflammatory chemicals and make everything worse. So again, it's only been recently recognized that this is a major player here. So for those people who have not been helped with many years of struggling, those are starting points. Once those are quieted down, then you can take the binders that you need to take.

to pull the mold toxin and other toxins out of the body. Then you can eventually take the antifungals for your sinus and gut areas to get out of your body the mold and the candida that's colonized in your sinus and gut areas. And then if you're not completely well, you will be so much better that it'll be very doable to treat Lyme and co-infections. Once those are fixed, almost everything else falls into place.

The mitochondria can heal themselves. Methylation comes back to normal. Heavy metal toxicity comes back to normal. The immune system can handle all of those pesky little viruses that you've been thinking are causative. They're not. They're just a side effect of this weakened immune system triggered by mold and Lyme. So there's your Cliff Note version of what to look at.

Freddie Kimmel (22:47.306)
That's amazing. It's actually, it's very, very helpful. Again, you know, I have these waves of how many books do I have on my shelves of different diets that we're going to drop the inflammation, cure me through a series of eliminations. And I, and I look back now and I, and I can see that almost set me up. Some of those elimination diets, specific carbohydrate diet, it almost set me up for a huge regression.

because I was limiting nutrients that I really needed in my body. And I was just listening to the response. I was looking at the inflammatory response from lettuce, from bread, from celery, really, really weird things. I mean, it's like, how are you reacting to celery? It happens. You know, and it was like, from my uneducated standpoint, was just like, just keep taking things away. And you get to a point where you're down to six foods, 13 foods.

And then you're, you know, you're obviously, as you know, you see this, you're highly malnourished and you're really in, then you really get in trouble because the brain is not operating because it has nothing to run on. Yeah. It's a, it's a tricky slope. So can we talk about the limbic system and the vagus nerve and maybe some of your, your initial go-to is for bringing some relief. You know, if these things are on high alert, how do we calm those systems?

Dr. Neil Nathan (23:50.232)
Yeah.

Dr. Neil Nathan (24:07.234)
Well, good news, we can. So there's a couple of systems I like for limbic retraining, which is the first thing I usually do. Annie Hopper has developed a fabulous program for quieting the limbic system, which goes by the initials DNRS, which stands for dynamic neural retraining systems. she has it available either streaming or with DVDs.

where you can get the DVDs and at home go through her program step by step and follow it. Annie is a very remarkable woman. She's really a joy to be around, very, very nice and bright lady. And she herself had these problems, particularly chemical sensitivity, for which this is superb. And she studied the most recent research.

in what we call neuroplasticity, how to get the brain to rewire itself or reboot itself. then, using those information pieces, she formulated this really nice program. I've used it in well over 300 patients to quiet the limbic system. And for some people, it's just a godsend. It's just, wow, that for most patients, within four to six weeks, you can already tell the difference.

You can already go, wow, I had no idea my limbic system was such a big deal. Now, she also has for patients, you can get through her website, a coach who can help you do it even better. And if you're lucky enough, you can get into her seminars, which typically have 40 patients a piece in them, and they're wonderful. once coronavirus has done with us, she can go back to doing her seminars right now.

They're not possible, but her DVDs and streaming is. Another program which many of my patients like also is from a fellow named Ashok Gupta and it's called Amygdala Retraining. Amygdala is just another name for limbic. So it's a somewhat more meditative program than Annie's. Both are excellent and both are very doable.

Dr. Neil Nathan (26:32.206)
Shifting gears, let's talk about quieting down vagus nerve inflammation and dysfunction. There's a bunch of things you can do. The easiest is to get hold of a book by a fellow named Stanley Rosenberg called Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve. You can read the book, which is helpful, but even before you read the book, you can turn to the back of the book and what he calls part two, where he goes over seven,

very simple exercises, take you seven minutes a day, to quiet the vagus nerve and the cranial nerves that are connected to it. Now, Rosenberg was a craniosacral therapist, and so he designed the book to go with cranial therapy. So again, with coronavirus present, you're gonna have trouble finding someone to do this, because it's hands-on. But once the dust settles,

If you've got someone who is osteopathically trained and is trained in craniosacral work, great tool to help quiet the vagus nerve. A couple of other tools, one of which you could do during this difficult time, it's called BrainTap. T-Tap is T-A-P. BrainTap is a medical device. It looks kind of like a virtual reality headset with earplugs.

And it delivers different frequencies of light and sound through the eyes and ears simultaneously to reboot the inflamed parts of the brain. Really nice device. I've used this in approximately 100 patients now, and almost all of them love it. The beauty is you can go online and order one. Tell the company what your symptoms are so they can streamline the programs that they have for you. Some of their programs,

and there are many, would have no relevance to you whatsoever. So you want to be sure you talk to someone so they give you the programs that would be most specific for you. They're short, 20 minutes in length, and you can have the device at home. You don't have to go anywhere for it. So you can wear this device an hour a day or more, and it's really helpful in quieting down the vagus nerve. Also, once the dust settles,

Dr. Neil Nathan (28:56.984)
There is a technique called frequency-specific microcurrent. It's a medical device where you need to see someone who practiced it, but they can, using some very, very, very gentle amounts of electricity, quiet down the inflamed parts of your brain, especially the vagus nerve, and really help you move forward. The more of these things that patients can do, especially combining some limbic strategy with some vagus nerve strategies, the more you can do,

the faster and more thoroughly you'll quiet down the system and you'll be able to move forward.

Freddie Kimmel (29:32.418)
Beautiful. That's so helpful. You know, I we've mentioned COVID-19 a couple times and while we're all sheltered in our homes, I can't help but think knowing what I know about air quality and the prevalence of mold with the building materials we're using today, that it is a real issue. whether you're I often I'll have my friends, they'll say, you know, I'm not sick. I'm not. I don't.

I don't have the issues that you have. doesn't all resonate with me. And then I'll go over to their house and in with about five minutes, I'm like, my teeth are numb. Cause my teeth, have this barometer on my body. My teeth get numb the second I smell mold. And I'm always amazed that they're able to exist in this environment. And it shocks me the number of homes that it's an issue. So I wonder what your thoughts are about, you know, this place where we found ourselves all sheltered in place.

Is this going to have an effect on the general population, the large numbers of the country sheltering in when we know, from my numbers, I've always heard it's about 70 % of homes have problematic air quality. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Dr. Neil Nathan (30:45.612)
Well, I don't think we know because I don't think we know how to measure air quality very well. Even experts don't do a good job. And if you ever want to get into a shouting match, ask two environmental engineers to discuss in detail their view of what constitutes mold toxicity and how to environmentally treat it. They disagree with each other even more than doctors do. So we haven't agreed yet on how to do that.

Now you're bringing up a whole bunch of points, so I'm going to try to address them separately. So first of all, I don't know what percentage of homes have mold in them. I don't know that it's as high as 70%, but it's probably 30 % or more. And I don't know to what extent. Some people are genetically capable of being around mold more than others. We know that. Some people are genetically more predisposed

to getting sick when they're exposed to mold. But some of it has to do with exposure, meaning if you're around enough of it, long enough, it's not just about genetics, eventually it's gonna overwhelm your immune system and you're gonna get sick. So with us being in moldy houses a lot longer, we're gonna have even more people with mold toxicity showing up. I don't think there's any question about that. The denial,

has no effect on mold whatsoever. It doesn't care whether you believe in it or not. It's not a psychological tooth fairy. It's toxicity. So we're gonna see some profound changes. We already have. We're already seeing more abuse, more divorce. When you put people who are not used to spending time together, together,

It's kind of like an old recipe I used to give couples who came to me and asked How do you go about knowing if if she's the one how do you know about? If we're compatible and my answer back in those days was go on a weekend camping trip If you want to really know who someone is and you get down to the basics How do you divide up those tasks who cooks who washes the dishes who gets water who digs the latrine? I mean who?

Dr. Neil Nathan (33:09.656)
How do you do that? And if you guys sail through the weekend, there's really good hope for you. If you can't get through this weekend, we got problems. And we live in this high tech society in which you can be in the same room as someone and spend very little time with them. And now we're being forced to. For many of us, for example, I'm a sports nut. I love sports. I don't care what sports.

There isn't any. So for, I'm not alone in this world. So you take away from me one of my passions and pastimes and you stick me in a home. Fortunately, I have enough to keep me busy. That's not a problem for me, but I know that that's not the case for many, Americans. For many Americans, this is uncharted territory. We've never been here before. We have no idea how to do this. And we're not necessarily doing it with grace.

although we tell ourselves we are. So COVID is gonna have profound effects upon us. Already has. I mean, regardless of the effect of the virus, the effect on our economy will be much worse. People who are homeless, out of work, can't afford to make payments on their, I mean, the economic impact of what we have already done is profound.

So I know we can't not talk about it because we're living in the middle of this quarantine. But there's many other things we can talk about COVID, but these are just things that worry me because the virus will eventually wear itself out. It's gonna happen. It's just another flu virus. Maybe more contagious and maybe more deadly than some, but it is just flu in the long run. It's gonna go away.

But we're going to be stuck with all of these decisions and choices we've made, which may not have been for the greater good.

Freddie Kimmel (35:15.726)
Yeah, it's very interesting to watch it unfold. I'm always, I try to look at it with a sense of wonderment and just wondering, I'm hoping there's somebody behind the scenes smarter than I am making these plans or decisions. And because I struggle to grasp how we would move through this when virtually every single business in the world has been paused unless everybody pauses payments, debts owed.

It would almost need to be a global forgiveness on the time where we're sheltered in, which would seem wonderful and utopian, but that might not be a realistic for now. I can't come up with another scenario that moves us through, because we are so interdependent and so interconnected at this phase of, of the game. just, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm just trying to step back from it and not be overly reactive, but still try to be,

supportive of the people I can support.

Dr. Neil Nathan (36:15.65)
Well, read a friend of mine this morning sent me a paper written by an Israeli physician scientist who has analyzed statistically the COVID cases and deaths all over the world. Now, the one country that is not quarantining and not isolating is Sweden. So we have a chance and interestingly enough, they are not having

a greater problem than any other country. They are not having a worse. And in the Israeli physicians research, what he found very fascinating is that no matter where you are, no matter how you quarantine, to whatever extent you quarantine, the virus has basically a life cycle. It tends to go exponential for a while, level off and drop over about an eight week period. It's happening in Sweden.

that's happening all over the world. And what many people bring up is, what about Italy, where there have been so many deaths out of proportion? And he points out that Italy is unique in that their healthcare system, while Western, has been totally inadequate for a long time. And that several years ago, they had a simple flu like all the rest of us, and had a disproportion of deaths in that country from that as well. So he then points out that

There's a particular statistician whose name I do not recall offhand who was the one whose projections freaked out the whole world. And when we look at his track record, he has been generally a harbinger of doom throughout his career. And he has overestimated the toxicity of deaths in every projection he's ever made. But for whatever reason, we chose to follow his projections.

that we were gonna lose two million Americans if we did not do this. In point of fact, that we may not have even come close to that. So this particular paper, which I found fascinating, is making me question, are we making the right choices? Is this really necessary? We've never done this before in the history of humankind. We have never quarantined a world. I this has never happened.

Dr. Neil Nathan (38:42.552)
So it's almost like a PR spin thing where when one country does it, the other country goes, my God, what would it look like if I don't quarantine my citizens and people really get sick? I've got to do it too. Until essentially all of us did it. Did we need to do it? I hope so, because otherwise, you have a of explaining to do, Lucy.

Freddie Kimmel (39:09.166)
Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I see both sides of it. You know, I see it. There, there are definitely days where it seems so overreactive to me and I, I, hate to compare it to other things, you know, that, where people are doing the things I'll post a social meme and they'll look at the amount of people dying from drunk driving, alcohol, um, liver toxicity, cancer, um, smoking, um, you know,

heart disease, and then you see this little number down here, is COVID, or even child suicide. We don't pause all things. We don't stop for these numbers. It's just why now, why COVID-19, which is I just, and I don't know. I just look at that number and I say, why now, why this? And it does seem there's an element of,

something driven by the media. And then I also have, you know, I have friends that are in their forties that are in the ICU on ventilators. A couple of them are healthy people. So that's weird to me too. You know what I mean? These, this is a, one of my friends is a Broadway singer. You know, he's got as good as lungs as anybody in America, arguably be better. You know, he's a young dad and he's, he's three weeks in ICU and this just

He got knocked down by this. there is something unique about this virus, obviously.

Dr. Neil Nathan (40:37.11)
It's more lung toxic than other viruses. It hits the lungs more than others. But keep in mind, it isn't his lungs that are the issue. It's the inflammation that has been triggered that is affecting his lungs. As an opera singer, great lungs, but that doesn't mean they're immune to inflammation. We don't know the state of his immune system. And again,

In no way do I want to be cavalier about this. However, however, I'm raising questions about how we're handling it, keeping in mind that we have never scrutinized a flu before, like we're scrutinizing this one. So we're now reading about basketball players' parents who are dying of this. And that's news, and that's being pushed by the media.

Whereas those elderly people died of flus before, I mean, we never had a laundry list of all the famous people who were getting it or who had it. We never saw this before. So I am saying we are taking this out of proportion. My heart and prayers go to anyone or family who's got a member who's got this, absolutely. There's no question about that.

But I am questioning as a country where our priorities are. In fact, as a world where our priorities are. Did we really need to do this? Was this gonna happen anyway? Is it even possible to quarantine a virus? We don't know. Never, this is a massive social experiment that's never been before in the history of humankind. No one's ever done this.

Freddie Kimmel (42:31.742)
It's absolutely incredible, you know, to just stand and witness. You know, if you would have told me, I often say this, if you would have told me two months ago that the world was going to stop all commercial travel and we were all going to put down our lives across the globe, I would said that would never who's going to comply with that. But we've done it, which is, mean, when one respect, that's so amazing that we can all take action. We can.

judge the drivers behind that, it is amazing that we've shown ourselves that we can do it when we need to do. So I think I do think that's, that's an incredible aspect. want to dovetail off COVID. And I just want to jump back to, because I know this is an area of expertise for you. I would love to just jump back to, often get questions about binders.

And it's such a broad topic. And when I say binders, just for the people in the audience who don't know, people will often take binders with a biotoxin illness, mold, lime, to try to bind toxins, move them out of the system. The idea that you will relieve the body from toxicity and feel better. Myself, I've never really been able to tolerate a binder long-term. It just depends. I've had a little success with some. Generally, I'll give you a per-sec-

perfect real world example this week, I got really inspired after listening to a Quicksilver scientific podcast. I grabbed their ultra binder, which is fine clays and charcoal. And then there's a supplement that actually it's called the push catch. So you drink some herbs, some bitters that are going to move something, move a little extra juice to the liver through the bile. And then you time to take that supplement after to almost catch those toxins coming out of those organs. And I feel terrible.

Like in three days, I feel like I got hit by a car. Like my every, and I'm generally pretty, pretty pain-free. mean, feel and brain function's fine, energy's great, but this, it's so acute and it's such an acute reaction to these binders. And I find in this community, that's what I hear. People have such a different response to these things in their body and there's no consistency whatsoever. Again, I would, guess we're gonna,

Freddie Kimmel (44:45.388)
route this back to the limbic system and the vagus nerve being sensitive to the no.

Dr. Neil Nathan (44:51.33)
No, not this is a different thing. This is different. Now, if the limbic system and vagus nerve are dysfunctional, that reaction will be stronger and worse. But this is a direct reaction to the binder. So let's talk binders. If you don't mind a personal question, have you yourself had, have you had a urine mycotoxin test? Okay, and what does it show?

Freddie Kimmel (45:12.899)
Yeah.

It was a year ago. It was very high with ochratoxin A very high with gliotoxin. a little, what's the one that starts with the T that's associated with Stachypotrys trichotocin a little bit in there. And then my last one, which is two months ago, everything was normal except the highest one was aflatoxin. So everything was down to normal except aflatoxin, which was cut in half. Okay.

Dr. Neil Nathan (45:29.006)
Trichathocene.

Freddie Kimmel (45:45.09)
So I've still got some work to do on the aflatoxin.

Dr. Neil Nathan (45:48.622)
So that gives me a greater context to answer your questions, and I'll make it about you, but other people can generalize if you like, all right? Well, you get a free consult. How bad can

Freddie Kimmel (45:56.824)
Please make it about me. That's awesome.

Dr. Neil Nathan (46:04.416)
How can that be? Okay. Now, let's understand how binders work, which I don't think we understand. And I also have a very strong bias that anyone with any sensitivity can't take combination products like Quicksilver offers. Then you have to start with very, very tiny doses of binders that you can take. And I'll even give you some guidelines to work with. The problem with the word binder

is that the connotation is that things are bound tightly. Like imagine my hands clasped tight together so that the picture that people have when they use the word binder is, yeah, that binder grabbed onto that toxin and it's pulling it out of the body. It does bind, not that way. For example, let's take charcoal. The way charcoal works, it doesn't actually bind

The word that we use medically for charcoal is it adsorbs, it allows kind of like static cling. It just allows the molecules of toxin to rest very lightly on the charcoal surface.

Freddie Kimmel (47:20.479)
Is that because of the charge of the charcoal?

Dr. Neil Nathan (47:22.922)
It is, but it's not tightly bound. And that means this very, very loosely bound toxin is moving its way through the GI tract, lightly bound to charcoal. And you know, it's so lightly bound that a lot of those molecules fall off. When they fall off, they get reabsorbed by the body and you actually get an increase in toxicity. So if all binders work in such a way,

that if you take too much of any binder, you're gonna actually mobilize toxin faster than your body can excrete it, and you're actually gonna get more toxin, which is what happened to you, and it happens to a lot of people. It's extremely common. So by understanding this is not binding binding, it's lightly binding, this means that you have to be really, really

internally clear that you can handle the dose you're taking with no side effects whatsoever. If anything you take makes you worse, it's too high a dose. You can't. And what most people do is they go, well, I'm a bit worse, but I can handle that. I'll just put up with it. If that's what I have to do to come out of the end of this tunnel, I'll do it. Erroneous thinking. And wrong won't work.

All that's going to happen is you're to get more toxic. So the most important thing about taking binders or about mold treatment in general with binders is you have to find doses that a person can take comfortably. So for you, the Quicksilver combo product didn't work. Too strong. It wasn't any other system. Just too strong. So given that you still have an excess amount of aflatoxin in your body,

Is that, that's the one, right? Okay. So the best binders for aflatoxin are charcoal, clay, and chlorella. So for you, I would start with a very light dose of clay. And what do I mean by that? I would get hold of a liquid clay preparation. The one I like a lot, you can get from Amazon, it's called Yerba Prema. And I would start with a 16th

Freddie Kimmel (49:22.286)
That's it.

Dr. Neil Nathan (49:50.166)
or an eighth of a teaspoon once a day. After a week, if you can handle that, bump it up to a full eighth. After another week, a quarter, stay there. Don't keep pushing it. If at any dosage increase you have symptoms, those symptoms are by definition that you're pulling by toxin into your body faster than you can process it. So it's not a side effect.

It's a toxin release. Very clear. Okay. Once you can handle a little bit of clay, then I would add a little bit of charcoal. Now what do I mean by a little bit? I get hold of a low milligram charcoal capsule, like 250 milligrams, and I would empty it out and take an eighth or a quarter of a capsule. And you can take that with the clay. You can do it once a day at the same time, away from food,

away from other supplements so you're not binding anything you need. And then we have chlorella. And you could start with some tiny chlorella tablets. You could start with an eighth of a tablet, slowly work up to one. Now, it says on the chlorella packages, take 10 or 15 of these twice a day. Please don't do that. If you want to go under the bus, great way to do it. So tiny doses of binder.

Freddie Kimmel (51:08.47)
I've done that.

Dr. Neil Nathan (51:16.746)
Insensitive people work really, really well. You don't have to go to high doses to effectively bind it out, but you've got to get a dose that works for you. So I hope that will be helpful to you in understanding that you had the reaction from Quicksilver means there's still toxin in you. No question about it.

Freddie Kimmel (51:37.646)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is helpful. I've, I've, think that lesson is you don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water that it's just finding the minimum effective dose, which is

Dr. Neil Nathan (51:50.338)
There's a plaque on my wall which one of my patients gave me and it says, if some is good, more is not necessarily better. And the thinking that I've got to do more, I've got to do more, I can never get well with small doses, wrong thinking. You will get well with small doses, but you won't get better with higher doses.

Freddie Kimmel (52:14.71)
You know, it's it's you must you must have to coach people out of this all the time all the time because because after somebody's been sick, the only thing they want to do, they're willing to push through any amount of pain if you can see light on the other side. And that's the mentality that you're actually as you're explaining it. And this is a lesson, believe me, I've learned it myself is that I've just you push, push, push until you're done and then you just set it down. But it's about moving through in a with a little bit of grace.

Dr. Neil Nathan (52:43.414)
It's about honoring your own perceptions. Your body is not your enemy. It's trying to tell you what you can take and what you can't take. Ignore those messages at your own peril. The majority of people who find me are type A people. Basically, I don't advertise. I make no effort whatsoever to attract a following, and unfortunately, that hasn't worked very well. But in order to find me,

Someone's got to be a type eight person who's out there listening to podcasts, reading books. So that's who I find. And type eight people's way of dealing with the world that was successful for them for their whole life was, don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Damn the torpedoes, fall speed ahead. And it's worked. It doesn't work here. And you're right. I have to give this talk over and over and over again.

to very bright people, and you just have to hurt yourself repeatedly, as you just did with your Quicksilver product. You have to hurt yourself repeatedly before it finally dawns on you, hmm, I don't think that strategy's gonna work. You've got the Einstein concept, which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, right?

So, but we keep doing it. You're not alone. It's almost routine.

Freddie Kimmel (54:15.988)
Yeah, we do until we don't. Doctor, I want to be respectful of your time and I just have a couple more questions I would love to do to throw at you before we we part here. The one the one other topic I'd love to just touch on for a moment is the the concept of EMF exposure coupled with mold toxicity or someone going through long term chronic Lyme.

How do you view that component? Is it problematic? Is it imaginary? Is it real?

Dr. Neil Nathan (54:48.014)
Well first of all, there's two answers to that question because we're talking two different phenomena. One is there is a very real medical condition called electromagnetic sensitivity. That's real, not in anybody's head. I know that people tend to think it is because, I'm in the same room with you and I'm not having any symptoms, why are you having symptoms? This has to do with how the limbic system gets

fried literally or dysfunctional. So when the limbic system is hypervigilant, it starts to react to things in minute amounts that it never reacted to before. And that includes EMFs. That's a part of it. Very real. When the state of California put in smart meters several years ago, I had a rash of patients who had been high functioning people

who suddenly couldn't think their way out of a paper bag. The smart meters were exposing these people to massive amounts of EMF that they'd not been exposed to before, and it shut them down. This is very real. It was not psychological. Many of them had to move into very remote rural areas, literally minimum of a quarter of a mile from the nearest home and have no electrical anything going on.

in order to recover. just took time. So that's real. There's no question about that. Now, to what extent does EMF affect mold specifically is another interesting question. Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, who's one of the better experts on both Lyme and mold and chronic illness. I mean, I've known Dietrich for many, many years. He's been saying for several years that asking the question,

Mold has been around since biblical times. Why now? Why do we have an epidemic of mold now? It's now estimated there are 10 million people in this country who are having some kind of reaction to mold at this moment. Why now? What changed? And I would submit that a lot of things have changed. We are weaker. Our environment is much more toxic. There are tens of thousands chemicals in our environment that didn't exist 50 years ago.

Dr. Neil Nathan (57:13.09)
The EMFs we're exposed to off the charts, never seen before in the history of humankind. So heavy metal toxicity, who knows how much radiation toxicity we have still from Fukushima. There's so many potential sources of toxicity that I'm quite certain that it's contributing to our inability to handle mold toxicity. But Dr. Klinkhart's position, which is really quite fascinating, is

He believes that the electromagnetic frequencies are actually irritating the mold itself, making it more toxic. Mold makes toxins in response to being stressed. So if we are stressing it with EMFs, now they've been around for a billion years. They've been on this planet way longer than we have. They have very sophisticated ways of dealing with planetary shifts and changes.

They manage us for a billion years, right? So we've got to honor what mold fungi are capable of doing. And yet, here they are, all of a sudden, getting annoyed and making toxins at a rate that we've never seen before in human history. Could it be the EMFs or other chemical toxins in our environment? Dr. Klinghardt believes that that's so. And to be very honest, I can't contradict him. Makes sense to me. Is it true? I don't know.

I'm not here to scare people, but I do think that he's raising questions that we really do need to answer. This is something that can be studied, and if we would put our efforts and research into studying this, and it's not being looked at at all, I think the lives of many, many people really will depend on it. So, hope that addresses your question.

Freddie Kimmel (59:05.672)
It does you know I use the real world example again there's a the times I do choose to have a glass of wine I have a company I I use dry farm wines who test their alcohol for mycotoxins very very low sugar it's the one glass of wine I can have a glass and feel really really good what they look at is a distillation process and the fact that when you do aggravate or

make the yeast and the mycotoxins that are on the grapes with a lack of oxygen in a tank, that mold does produce more mycotoxins. So it is reactive to the stimulus of the environment. So for me, like you, it also makes sense that could it be aggravated by a lack of oxygen? Yes. Could it be aggravated by a specific frequency? That also makes sense to me, although I haven't seen it, you know, graphed in a lab with a chart from a dish and

shown me more toxicity, but it does make sense. So I do think it's something to look out for. So our last question, here we are, the beautifully broken podcast. I have to ask you, what does it mean to you to be on this planet and to be beautifully broken?

Dr. Neil Nathan (01:00:22.848)
My focus is on maintaining positivity. So I don't want to think of anyone as being broken. Beautiful, yes. Broken, not so much. I've devoted my life to helping people and I want to be of service for as long as I'm on this planet. It's one of my spiritual goals. And so it's really important to me, and this may not

answer your question the way you want. But it's really important to me that people look at their journey from what they can learn from it and not think of themselves as broken or victims. That kind of thinking will actually get in their way of healing. It's critical no matter how long the journey is taken, no matter how difficult it's been, it's critical that they can believe that they simply are missing something in their journey and they can get well.

Because I personally believe in God, and to me, if you have the right mindset and you come with the right attitude, I believe you can be healed from anything at any time. That's my belief. So forgive me, I would like to think of people as being beautifully perfect on their way to being more perfect. There's an aphorism from

Suzuki Roshi many years ago, which I love, which is you are already perfect as you are and there is room for improvement. And so that would be how I would share that with you.

Freddie Kimmel (01:02:09.006)
It's a beautiful answer. Yeah, starting the podcast over a year ago, you know, I think you're like episode 63 or 64. you know, it was initially, you know, I looked at my timeline of being kind of a healthy, sick, you know, this healthy guy that's been through sickness and putting the broken pieces back together. And has this been this beautiful, beautiful process of learning and exploration and discovery.

And I agree with you too. I was like, should I rename the podcast? I can't. It's still the beautifully broken podcast, but you know, it's a, it was one of the most beautiful answers I've had to be totally honest with you. And I just want to say, your authenticity and your clarity and your commitment to what you're doing is, is it's been such an honor to listen to you speak. your humility is,

amazingly, I can feel it through the screen. It's visceral. So I just, I applaud the work you're doing. I've ordered, I've ordered your book and I'm recommending it to everybody on the podcast. And if there's any place you would like to tell the listeners to go to either find more information about what you're doing or resources you feel are very valuable to this person seeking this path. Please, please share those at this time.

Dr. Neil Nathan (01:03:29.102)
Well, I wrote my book for your audience. So if they haven't read it, get my book, Toxic. I think you will get answers there. I think it will give you a path to move along. If you want more of me, God, an hour should be enough. But if you want more, I've done a number of podcasts with the Better Health Guy, Scott Forsgren. And Scott's got a bunch of really nice

with some very, very wonderful healers that you can learn more and get into it more in detail with Scott. And I think that's a free, good source to use.

Freddie Kimmel (01:04:11.618)
That's perfect, believe me. It's great. It's great. Well, again, I just appreciate you taking the hour to be here with us and I am eternally grateful for you doing the show. It's been wonderful to hear all your insight and namaste.

Dr. Neil Nathan (01:04:28.302)
Thank you very much for having me, Freddie. Take care.

Freddie Kimmel (01:04:32.194)
Ladies and gentlemen, you made it to the end of the podcast. Now in a world where the average attention span is less than 10 seconds, we just spent almost an hour together. And I think this is the beginning of something really beautiful. Now one way to support the podcast is to head over to freddysetgo.com and check out my newly launched page, Freddy's Faves, where I've linked every five star product and healing modality you hear about on the show.

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