Chronic Infections: What ARE they?
Are you chronically symptomatic? ….This week? Us, too…sorta. Last week we did have a lingering fever-boy at home, which meant I had a lingering office helper and this e-news is a bit tardy! Let’s build on our conversation about why toxins bother you and not your less-health-striving partner.
In my practice and healing journey I’ve been “fortunate” to learn by experience, and this year has been no exception. My focus, when leading our team and clients, is always on the hope to resolve chronic symptoms forever vs. really great symptom management through diet/supplement/lifestyle. For many, we have more success with forever, and get really great symptoms management in chronic clients, and I’ve not been content with it. I want more.
I want your healing to last, so that you can eat what you used to, live how you once did “before everything with my health changed.” There are a lot more chronic health strugglers out there than we think, too. I’ve had seasons of being in denial that I was one. Sure, we see clients with a little GI issue after some food poisoning or lengthy weeks of bad habits that ended in candida or even families in severe mold exposure that made even the dog sick - they heal for a season, we do this work for a reason and they return to their lives as before: enjoying all the normal foods and experiencing a typical life.
But there are far more of us for whom, this lifestyle has become a way of life, even a survival guide. We must stay gluten, dairy and sugar free to keep symptoms at bay or we ride the Ferris wheel of skipping all the rules for a while, have a mild health crash, then return to great food restriction and symptom management through increased lifestyle efforts - sauna, neurofeedback, vitamin IV’s, perfect supplement regimes etc… Like Goldilocks, to embrace vibrant health, everything has to be just right.
Ultimately, symptom management isn’t what I want for you - I want deep and permanent healing and reversal of your symptom load.
Enter Chronic Infections
They’ve been the mic drop of my healing work.
What is a chronic infection?
A chronic infection is any pathogen: virus, bacteria, parasite that the immune system cannot achieve complete dormancy with. Could be from the original infection or a reactivated infection or a constant, steady infection.
What does a chronic infection look like?
A simple example is a recurrent strep infection. Johnny has strep in October, does ABX, it’s back in November, does ABX, now he’s having tonsil issues, does ABX, then at Christmas, he begins to have ear infections which end in a tonsillectomy and ear tube placement. Johnny has chronic strep and continues to struggle with declining handwriting, baby talk regressions, increase in impulsivity and interrupting, develops anxiety, come-and-go eczema and other random, yet regular symptoms.
Chronic infections can also be reactivations. Think chicken pox. Jenny had this when she was younger, her Mom medicated the itchy dots, it went away in a couple weeks and her immune system kept chicken pox dormant for years. Until. In adulthood, she left a stressful marriage and the Varicella Zoster Virus responsible for chickenpox, comes out of dormancy and Jenny experiences it in adulthood as painful shingles. After a few weeks, her immune system beats the virus back into dormancy and Jenny *hopefully* has no recurrences. But sometimes, folks can have several bouts with shingles. These people are dealing with reactivated chronic infection.
A cold sore is another example, as in Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 (HSV-1). Those sores will pop up right before finals, when it’s time for your wedding and after you’re strung out from the holidays - a reactivated chronic infection.
Chronic infections can also be low lying, like Lyme or Bartonella, a vector-born confection. We’ll be unpacking this for weeks to come, but many folks have been exposed to the Lyme bacteria, Borrelia, whether through a tick bite or a mosquito, fly, lice, flea….etc. One person may be bitten and show no response. Another may be bitten and have any immediate emergent issue or the tell-tale bullseye rash or joint swelling. In this case, we can identify the pathogen and address the infection until symptoms recede: infection conquered.
Or is it? Others are bitten at some point, but the immune system can quickly reach initial dormancy or destruction of the pathogen. Great! That’s what our immune system is designed to do: recognize a pathogen, virus, bacteria or fungi when it comes into the body, kill it, create an antibody that remembers the pathogen, clear it and move on. If not put into full dormancy, this person may eventually notice feeling run down, may need weekly saunas help them get a health boost or find no sugar improves their overall symptom load enough to make life functional. They may eventually notice joint pains or swelling, migraines, twitches, developing an energy limit they cannot surpass, blurring vision, brain fog and more...
The chronic infection can make progress in the body overtime as it hijacks the immune system and we now have a person struggling in chronic illness from a chronic infection.
How do we identify these chronic infections?
Symptom load and patterns, detailed health history, your health timeline, the standard blood test: CBC with Differential, the GIMAP stool test, other advanced testing. If your symptoms have a theme, if everything changed at a linchpin point, if your labs “look beautiful, but I feel terrible" or if your diagnosis “doesn’t fit quite right” or has psychiatric components and physical components…we want to explore chronic infections.
There are many infections and they work stealthily to hijack your immune system. As this study shows, one virus, Covid, can reactivate another virus, Epstein-Barr, commonly known as mono - and masquerade as what American medicine calls “Long-covid”.
This study shows us how Epstein-Barr triggers the body to make thyrotropin receptor antibodies, which cause Grave’s Disease.
Diagnosis (Graves Disease) …meet your Root, Chronic Infection (Epstein-Barr Virus)
For the chronic symptom warriors among us, chronic infections are often the root to all the symptoms and diagnosis or mis-diagnosis we’ve received over time. Which makes immune disfunction both the problem and the solution. We’ll continue to dive into this for months to come and I look forward to sharing with you our client's healing stories and the science behind this on my podcast, coming Spring 2024.
