Lyme Disease with Dr. Darin Ingels

Trevor:             Hi there, I’m Doctor Trevor Cates. Welcome to The Spa Dr. podcast. On today’s podcast, we’re discussing Lyme disease. There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation about Lyme disease out there. So, I asked today’s guests to come on the show and talk about it, so we can clear up some of this. My guest is Doctor Darren Ingels. He is a respected leader in natural medicine with numerous publications, international lectures and 30 years’ experience in the healthcare field.

Trevor:             He received his Bachelor of Science degree in medical technology from Purdue University and worked as a clinical microbiologist and an immunologist, prior to attending medical school. He went on to receive his Doctorate of Naturopathic Medicine from Bastyr University in Seattle, Washington. He is a licensed naturopathic doctor in both Connecticut and California. Doctor Ingels is author of the new book, The Lyme Solution, a five-part plan to fight the inflammatory autoimmune response and beat Lyme disease. In this interview, Doctor Ingels explains what exactly Lyme disease is, all the possible ways that you can get it even beyond tick bites, as well as testing for it and treatment. Please enjoy this interview.

Trevor:             Darin, it’s so great to have you on my podcast. Welcome.

Darin:               Oh, thanks, Trevor.

Trevor:             Yeah. So, we’re talking about Lyme disease today. I think most people are familiar with what Lyme disease that it’s generally people that you made a tick-borne illness and more common in certain parts of the country. But I think there are a lot of misunderstandings some misconceptions around Lyme disease. So, why don’t you tell us from your perspective what Lyme disease is and how do you get Lyme disease?

Darin:               Sure. Well, Lyme disease as a bacterial infection and you usually get it through a tick bite. We tend to see it more in regions of the country that tend to have a lot of ticks. There’s actually a very specific kind of tick that’s known to transmit Lyme disease. So, it’s called it the deer tick. As you can imagine by the name, it’s transmitted through a deer. So, areas like New England and the central Midwest tend to be areas that are more common for Lyme.

Darin:               But realistically, we’re finding Lyme disease pretty much in every state throughout the country, although it’s more endemic in those regions. Like in [inaudible 00:02:18] and California, we’re now seeing a higher incidence of Lyme than we have before. What we’re finding is that deer are the big carriers, but it’s actually the smaller rodents that tend to carry these ticks. So, it’s rats and raccoons and squirrels and obviously those go everywhere. So, we’re starting to see Lyme kind of spread throughout the country.

Darin:               What happens is, these ticks they sit on an animal, they ride on the animal, then they get on a plant. You happen to brush up against that plant and then the tick gets on you. So, if the ticks on your skin, it can bite you much like a mosquito bite or a flea bite. When it bites you it actually injects a little bit of its saliva through your skin and into your bloodstream, but it carries a bacteria. It’s a bacteria that’s called a spirochaete. It’s kind of a corkscrew-shaped organism. When that organism gets in your bloodstream, it starts to potentially cause what we now call Lyme disease.

Trevor:             Okay. Okay, great. What about getting tested for Lyme disease? How do people find out if they have it?

Darin:               The testing, unfortunately, has been a big problem in this country. The test that we do is a blood test. So, the CDC has recommended what they call a two-tier test. You do a Lyme screen test, which an antibody tests. If that test is positive, then it goes over to another test called a Western blot. Unfortunately, we’ve found in the research is that this testing is only about 43% sensitive. Which means is, what are the likelihood that it’ll pick up the illness if you actually have? What that translates to is that it doesn’t even pick up half the people who actually have this disease.

Darin:               We have a lot of problems with Lyme testing. Unfortunately, this has been the gold standard for 40 years. Now there are some newer labs out there that offer better-specialized testing, and their sensitivity seems to be a lot better. So, I recommend if you feel like you might have Lyme disease, to work with your doctor and use one of these labs that has better sensitivity.

Trevor:             Right. And there are doctors that specialize in Lyme disease, right? Especially, some functional medicine and naturopathic physicians that specialize on Lyme disease. It seems like they know a lot more about these types of tests than people that don’t specialize on Lyme, because it definitely is a specialty.

Darin:               Right. You’ll see the term that’s called the Lyme literate MD or Lyme literate ND, medical doctor and naturopathic doctor. These are doctors that have specialized training in Lyme disease, and they tend to be very knowledgeable on the different types of testing that’s available. One of the problems we’ve run into with the testing too is that when we first discovered Lyme disease … For people who don’t know, Lyme disease was named after Lyme Connecticut. That’s where they first discovered the disease in a group of children that were diagnosed with what was called juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which is actually a very rare condition. It just so happens there were a lot of kids in this area that had that problem. And of course, many years later discovered it actually wasn’t that, it was actually Lyme disease. But that was named after Lyme Connecticut.

Darin:               But when they first discovered this bacteria, they found it was a string called Borrelia burgdorferi. What we’ve now learned is that there’s about 100 strains of Borrelia in this country, maybe of those 100, 12 to 16 actually can cause Lyme disease. But our testing is still only looking for that one strain. Part of the challenges that we’re running into is that we’ve been looking for the one strain and not really looking at all the strains. Now there is a lab that just started last year that is now offering a blood test that has a sequence. It’s a DNA sequence. It’s actually common to all the Borrelia species. I think as technology continues to develop, we have a better chance of picking up the different strains of these Borrelia organisms that can cause Lyme.

Trevor:             Which labs are the ones that you generally are working with? Do you mind sharing that?

Darin:               Yeah. So, the labs that I generally work with. There’s a lab out of Palo Alto called IGeneX. IGeneX has really been one of the leaders in Lyme testing for many years. There’s another lab out of New Jersey called Medical Diagnostic Lab. They do very similar testing to IGeneX. And then this new lab that just came on the scene is called Global Lyme Diagnostics. They’re the ones that are looking at that sequence that’s common to all Borrelia.

Darin:               No test is 100% perfect. Often, we’re doing multiple tests, and sometimes testing people multiple times to try and pick it up. But at the end of the day, Lyme disease is really a clinical diagnosis. It’s based on your symptoms more than just what we find on the piece of paper.

Trevor:             Right. I wanna talk about the symptoms. But first, before we go into that, besides getting it from a tick, what are some of the other ways people can get Lyme disease?

Darin:               Well, some of the research coming out of Europe suggest that you can actually get it from mosquito bites too. [inaudible 00:07:05] done any research here in the United States showing that, but there has been at least a handful of studies out of Europe showing that both mosquitoes and, or fleas maybe transmitting it. It makes a lot of sense, ’cause I see people who live in areas that aren’t necessarily endemic for deer ticks, they get Lyme disease. So, it’s possible that there’s some other insect that’s transmitting and as well.

Trevor:             Yeah, I know. Even in Utah, there are quite a few cases of Lyme disease here and people who are not traveling, and there just aren’t any bugs here. So, it’s interesting. Can you get it human to human contact?

Darin:               That’s a great question. The truth is, we don’t really know. What I will say is, when you look at the research, particularly in like mom to baby, you would think since it’s a blood borne organism that the baby would be very susceptible. What the research shows is that moms that have Lyme disease, their children have a higher incidents of birth defects, but not necessarily that the child gets Lyme disease.

Darin:               Now in saying that, I have seen a lot of patients that mom had Lyme disease and when the child is born, they suffer from developmental delays and other potential neurological issues. My personal opinion is that I think Lyme does get transmitted from mother to baby. The other question that comes up a lot is through sexual contact. Again, the research hasn’t really demonstrated that it is sexually transmitted. Because it is a blood borne organism and because it is transmitted through a bite of a tick, I don’t think casual contact is probably likely to spread it. Perhaps if there is a blood to blood transmission, it’s possible. But the research hasn’t really shown that.

Trevor:             Yeah. Interesting. It’ll be interesting to see what more comes to this with more research and what we can learn more about how people are actually getting Lyme disease, because we’re seeing more and more of it and it does look like other conditions.

Trevor:             Let’s talk about some of the signs and symptoms, because it seems like a lot of people get diagnosed with something else and then later down the road, maybe find out that they actually have Lyme disease.

Darin:               Right. Well, in my practice, it’s kind of like if you had a condition that’s been long standing, and you can’t find out what it is, you have to kind of look at Lyme. They called Lyme the great mimic. It looks like a lot of other different illnesses, particularly a lot of other autoimmune diseases. Things like MS and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. If you ask your doctor, or well even if you’re diagnosed with that condition, “Why do I have that?” They’re gonna shrug their shoulders. They don’t know.

Darin:               I think it’s possible that Lyme can be a catalyst for these conditions to develop. But when you look at the symptoms, they’re vague and there’s over 100 symptoms that have been associated with Lyme disease. I sort of break it down into what happens when you get acute Lyme disease versus what we now call kind of chronic Lyme disease.

Darin:               When you get acute Lyme disease, generally you’re very ill. You feel sick. You can get a headache, fever, chills, joint pain. One of the features that’s sort of characteristic of Lyme is what we call, wandering joint pain. One day, it’s my right knee. The next day, it’s my left shoulder. The next day, it’s my left ankle. You’ll see the sort of migratory pain, which I have never seen any other condition that causes that other than Lyme.

Darin:               You can also get a condition called Bell’s Palsy where half of your face starts to droop. You can get swollen lymph nodes, you can feel very, very tired, and you can get other miscellaneous sort of neurological symptoms. The classic symptom, though, is what we call a bull’s-eye rash. The spot at where the tick bites you, leaves this sort of looks like a target on your skin that will start fairly small and will spread over the course of weeks to months. When you see that, that’s a hands down slam dunk. You know you have Lyme disease.

Trevor:             Yeah. Do you know what percentage of people actually get the bull’s-eye lesion? Because I remember in medical school when I went there, that was 20 years ago, that was part of the disease pictures. You would have that bull’s eye lesion. It’s nice to know, as a doctor, signs like that. Especially as a skin … Specializing in skin, if you see something on the outside, that’s a great indication. But there seem to be so many cases now that people don’t even notice it or don’t have it.

Darin:               Yeah. The CDC says that 70 to 80% of the people who get Lyme disease will get the rash. But if you look at the research, it’s actually probably less than 40% and maybe even under 30%. So, certainly in my practice, it’s less than half. So, we can’t use that as a reliable mark or as whether you’ve been exposed or not. But if you do see it, you’re pretty confident that you’ve been exposed to Lyme.

Trevor:             Yeah. What are the sort of chronic symptoms, the ongoing symptoms?

Darin:               Right. What happens is after you’ve had it for a while, the symptoms tend to change. Although you can still have a lot of the symptoms that we see in acute Lyme disease, we start to see more neurological symptoms. It can be things like balance and coordination problems, memory loss, sometime a cognitive impairment. People just become very forgetful. People will describe themselves as being clumsy. You can also get what’s called neuropathy. It’s numbness and tingling in your hands, in your feet and sometimes other places on the skin.

Darin:               Being a skin specialist, one of the things that I hear a lot is what we call a sensory distortion. People will feel a buzzing in their skin, a burning in their skin, and you’ll look at their skin and it’ll look completely normal. But there’s something that’s happened to the nerve that goes to the skin that’s being altered and that’s why they feel the sensation. So, when we start to see these other neurological symptoms, again, particularly if you’ve ruled out everything else, that puts Lyme really kind of at the top of our list.

Trevor:             And so, things like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, arthritis, those can be some of the things that people have been diagnosed with, right?

Darin:               Absolutely.

Trevor:             And then finding out that there actually is a Lyme component.

Darin:               Yeah. Again, I think a lot of these conditions are sort of vague diagnoses, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia. What does that really mean? It’s just a collection of symptoms. So, again, it doesn’t really explain what the root of the cause is. I think for a lot of people, and certainly, my experience has been a lot of folks who get that diagnosis, Lyme is part of their underlying problem. In fact, the one that I probably see the most is MS. In my practice, multiple sclerosis is Lyme disease until proven otherwise.

Darin:               What’s really interesting is that if you do an MRI on somebody with MS and an MRI and somebody with Lyme, the lesions that you can get on the brain look identical. So, it’s pretty much impossible to differentiate the two just from imaging studies. So, when I see somebody with MS, the first thing we do is we look at Lyme.

Trevor:             Right. Because of the memory loss, maybe also a dementia, Alzheimer’s, early stages of Alzheimer’s it might be looking like that as well, yes?

Darin:               Yeah. In fact, there was a very well-known case of a famous actor, Kris Kristofferson, about a year and a half or two years ago was diagnosed with early stage dementia. Actually, one of my colleagues discover that he had Lyme disease. After he got treated for Lyme disease, his dementia completely cleared up.

Darin:               So, I think a lot of people were seeing, particularly again with early onset dementia, that would be something we would wanna investigate to make sure that’s not part of what’s causing that.

Trevor:             Okay, great. Let’s talk about treatment. I’m sure everybody is ready to hear about that now. Because what you just said was, it was able to be reversed. The symptoms were able to be reversed, which is really great news, especially when we’re talking about some of these types of symptoms that you’ve mentioned and some of the diseases that somebody may have been diagnosed with the prognosis of, “Yeah, sorry. This is just how your life’s gonna be.” This can give people some hope if they can get tested and then get treatment.

Trevor:             What is the treatment for Lyme that you’re finding most successful?

Darin:               Yeah. For somebody with acute Lyme disease, antibiotics really are the best course of action. The research shows and just clinically we know that when you get early treatment, antibiotics can be successful at eradicating Lyme and really preventing it from going on to cause any further problems. What happens for a lot of people is they don’t get early diagnosis, and it stays in their body for months to years. By the time they figure out what’s going on, antibiotics at that point, don’t tend to be as effective.

Darin:               What I’ve discovered is that, the longer you’ve had Lyme, it sort of morphs from an infection really into an autoimmune condition. You have to treat it more as an autoimmune disease than just a straight infection. I’ve actually been using herbs to help support the body. Really kind of help the terrain function better, so that your body’s better equipped to deal with both the infection part and the autoimmune part. There’s many different herbal protocols that are out there that people read about it. It’s probably at least eight or nine that I know of, and probably a bunch that I don’t know of.

Darin:               But I found two different herbal protocols I’ve used with patients. I had Lyme disease myself, so I’ve been through this as a patient as much as a doctor. When I had Lyme disease, I was on antibiotics for almost nine months and it practically killed me. Really, I lost 25 pounds, my gut was a mess, I felt terrible, and it really wasn’t getting to the root of the problem. So, I actually found a doctor in New York City, who’s a Chinese herbalist and has a series of Chinese herbs. His name is Dr. Zhang Z-H-A-N-G. His herbs really pulled me out of the weeds. Since then, I’ve really kind of used his protocol as my primary treatment for at least adults with Lyme disease.

Darin:               When you look at what the herbs are doing, again, they’re really helping go after the infection if there’s anything still there. It’s helping support the immune system, it’s helping improve your circulation, it’s got some anti-inflammatory analgesic effects. So, it’s really covering the basis of everything that Lyme can do to your body. But I like the fact that it’s really supporting your body versus breaking it down.

Darin:               Beyond that, there’s another protocol. There’s a doctor named [Lee Cowden 00:17:27] who was a cardiologist in Dallas. He started using a group of liquid tinctures that all grow from the Amazon and down in that area. In fact, his protocol has been researched by a woman at the University of New Haven named Doctor Eva Sapi. She found that the herbs actually work better than the antibiotics. So, we’ve got several different herbal protocols, and it’s really just a function of the person, whether they can take pills or liquids. But I just want people to know that there are a lot of different options available and that they really just need to work with their doctor in finding out which one is better suited for them.

Trevor:             Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that because with antibiotics, that’s certainly a standard of care and what’s typically used and certainly the training that we get when we’re in medical school. But part of the issue with Lyme disease his gut dysbiosis, right?

Trevor:             When you’re taking antibiotics, especially as long as a lot of people end up having to do like you did, then you’re creating more gut dysbiosis issues, which seems would make the chronic symptoms worse.

Darin:               Yeah, absolutely. I think people kind of forget what antibiotics are really doing to the body. When you start disrupting your normal gut bugs, that has a big impact on your immune system. 80% of your immune function comes from your gut. When your guts not functioning well, your immune system is not going to function well. I think the longer people are on antibiotics, obviously the greater likelihood you have of changing that whole gut ecology.

Darin:               We wanna preserve that balance so that your immune system does what we want it to do. When you look at some animal studies, we know that a single dose of [inaudible 00:19:12] disrupt that gut flora for up to six months. So, you can imagine what’s happening now with people when they’re on antibiotics for months to even years. I’ve seen some Lyme patients that have been on antibiotics for 10 years, 12 years, I can only imagine what that’s done to the gut and how long would it take for the gut to actually recover. We don’t really know the answer to that. But my experience has been that if we use things, again, that are more supportive of the gut instead of breaking it down, we get better clinical success.

Trevor:             Right. Okay, great. And so then other treatments that you find to be particularly helpful. Do you recommend IVs and other types of treatments?

Darin:               Yeah. I think we start looking at what are the more specific symptoms that bother each Lyme patient. For some people the fatigue is more problematic. For other people, it’s the joint pain. There’s a lot of things we can do nutritionally to support the body. We’ll do IV nutrients, IV vitamin C can be very beneficial or what we call a Myers cocktail, which is just a combination of various vitamins and minerals. There’s a lot of things for people who don’t have access to IVs that you can do orally. There’s a lot of nutritional supplements and herbs that you can take just by mouth to help support your immune system, improve your circulation, improve your fatigue.

Darin:               So, I think it kind of really depends on what is more problematic for each person. I do talk about this in my book about each of the different symptoms and what you can do to try and help support that area of your body.

Trevor:             Yeah. It really varies from patient to patient, right? because it depends on what else is going on with their health. What genetic factors they have, what other illnesses they may have or have had, their general or medical history, and a lot of their environmental exposures and-

Darin:               Well, and you just hit the nail on the head, is environmental … One thing I probably find most common with Lyme patients is mold. It’s hard to find any place in this country where there isn’t mold. For whatever reason, people with Lyme tend to be very sensitive to mold and whether it’s mold allergy or what we call mycotoxicity.

Darin:               If you’ve been living in a water damaged home or you work in a water damaged building, some molds consecrate these toxins that when you breathe them in can damage your nervous system, damage your lungs. But the symptoms of mold exposure and Lyme disease are almost identical. So, living up in Connecticut where we have a lot of mold, it’s always important to, as part of your differential diagnosis, to try and figure out is it just Lyme or is it Lyme and mold? In some cases, we treat their Lyme and they get a little bit better, but it’s really not until we address their mold that they get a lot better. So, it’s always very important to be very cognizant of your entire environmental exposure.

Darin:               Mold is probably the biggest issue, but it’s everything else that you’re exposed to. It’s what you’re putting on your skin, it’s what you’re putting on your hair, right? It’s all these toxic chemicals that add to your total load. Your body burden. Anything you can do to reduce that stress on your body, again, is ultimately gonna help your immune system.

Trevor:             Right. When you say address mold, I’m guessing you’re talking about addressing mold in the home and getting rid of the mold, but also addressing the issues that that the person has physically going on, their symptoms associated with the mold exposure?

Darin:               Yeah. Obviously, if you’re living in a water damaged building, you want to fix it. If you continue to be in a problematic environment, that will continue to create symptoms in you. If you know that you’ve got a leak in your rule for a leak in your basement, you wanna get that fixed as soon as possible. But once you’ve had that exposure, you wanna seek some sort of active treatment to start pulling, particularly mycotoxins out of your body, because your body sort of has a limited capacity to get rid of it on its own.

Darin:               We typically use things like binding agents like activated charcoal or bentonite clay, takes those mycotoxins and pull them out of your body. If you’ve got mold allergy, we can do different things with immunotherapy. Kind of like allergy shots. We can start desensitizing you against the effect of what the mold spores do to your immune system. Depending on what the problem is, and if you’ve had exposure to mold, you could be allergic to mold spores, you could have exposure to mycotoxins, they’re both treated differently. In some cases, we do have to deal with both. But part of my process is to go through and take stock of again everything in your environment that might be adding to your load, and you just kinda treat each one individually.

Trevor:             Yeah, absolutely. And then what about other things that can support someone recovering from Lyme disease like diet for example? What kind of dietary recommendations do you recommend?

Darin:               I’ve tried a lot of different diets with Lyme patients over the years and everything from, an anti-Candida diet or a paleo to keto. The diet that I found seems to help most people, that’s also, I’ll say maybe the easiest to stick to, is what I call an alkaline diet. An alkaline diet is really about eating foods that promote better alkaline pH in your body. It’s independent of the pH of the food. For people who don’t know what pH is, pH is really talking about whether something creates acid in the body or alkaline or alkalinity.

Darin:               There’s been some research many years ago that looked at how alkaline diet affects your body. What it’s really trying to do is affect it at the cellular level. It doesn’t change your blood pH. Your blood pH is actually very tightly regulated, but it actually starts to change the pH within your cells. But that’s where all the action’s happening. That’s where your enzymes and all of these activities really going on. So, if we can improve that, we improve the function of the cell. So, trying to get to the most deep level of the body, I think this is a way to do it.

Darin:               In a nutshell, what an alkaline diet really means is that you’re eating mostly a vegetarian diet. You’re really trying to limit your animal protein so that’s meats, fish, eggs to about 20 25% of your total dietary intake. And really, we remove all junk food, processed food, candy, cookies, that kind of stuff. Plus, coffee and plus dairy. All of these foods tend to be very acid-forming in the body. What acid does chemically to the body is it creates inflammation. So, our ultimate goal through this diet is really to help reduce inflammation.

Trevor:             Okay. All right. Great, great tips on diet. Now, what about other things like exercise, stress management, those sorts of things, sleep?

Darin:               Yeah. I think most of the people I see with Lyme, sleep is probably one of their biggest hurdles. For whatever reason, after they get exposed, even for people who always slept well their whole life, now they don’t sleep well. They’re not getting deep restorative sleep. We know certainly from a neurological standpoint; your neurons repair themselves when you get into that deep restorative sleep. If you’re missing that, we have to do pretty much everything we can to get your sleep pattern on track.

Darin:               Again, we have a lot of natural substances in our dispensary that we can use to induce better quality sleep. I use a lot of 5-Hydroxytryptophan, 5-HTP. Again, research has shown that that’s helpful in getting a deeper sleep. I use a lot of an amino acid called glycine. Glycine is a very safe amino acid that you can eat and that can help again induce deeper sleep. I think where a lot of people suffer in their sleep is even if they fall asleep okay, they don’t stay asleep. I think that’s probably the bigger problem. So, again, anything we can do to help facilitate that deeper sleep is gonna help.

Darin:               Sort of the heels of that goes with exercise, because moving your body as part of the way that you can help get better sleep. For a lot of people with Lyme disease, they physically don’t feel well, so exercise can be challenging. But at the most fundamental level, I find even for people who have some physical disability, even stretching can be a thing you can do easily at home you know when it’s convenient for you. But that still is movement, it’s still stretching the muscle, improving blood flow. Any kind of body movement, I encourage what your body will handle.

Trevor:             Yeah, absolutely. Anything else that you wanna add to the overall treatment that you like to use for supporting people with Lyme?

Darin:               Well, I think there’s a big psychological component to this too. When you’ve been dealing with a chronic illness, I think it emotionally can wear on you. And so, I just encourage people if they’ve been dealing with this to reach out to other people, find support groups, find a way to manage your stress whether it’s through meditation, Tai Chi, it’s whatever works for you. But I know how it is when you feel bad about burning your friends and your family and they’re tired of hearing about it. I see so many people that feel very isolated, and I think that that becomes a big challenge. So, I just wanna encourage people to reach out to a greater community.

Darin:               There’s a lot of people out there dealing with the same issues. So, find that that person or people that can really help support you emotionally while you’re going through your treatment.

Trevor:             Do you provide a support community for the people that you see?

Darin:               We do. We actually have a Facebook page that we invite people with Lyme disease to come join, where I actually work with a woman who is a therapist social worker by training. She herself has had Lyme disease. So, we sort of co-manage this page together and we’re there to help give positive support, encouragement, and then useful tips to help people get through their day-to-day life.

Trevor:             Is that open to anyone, so people watching or listening to this or do they need to reach out to you to be invited? How does that work?

Darin:               Yeah. If you go to our website, it’s dariningelsnd.com, there’s a link to our Facebook page and they can just click on that and join the community.

Trevor:             Okay, great.

Darin:               Very easy.

Trevor:             I think that’s fantastic. It’s great that you have that for people because you’ve had Lyme disease yourself. And so, you know the challenges that people experience and it’s nice to be able to provide support to people and connect with others. I appreciate that you’re doing that, and thanks for sharing that. We’ll also put the link up to your website below the podcast, your podcast interview, so people can find that.

Trevor:             Also, with your book, your new book, tell everybody about that and why they might wanna consider getting it.

Darin:               Yep. So, I have a new book, it’ll be coming out March 27. It’s called The Lyme Solution. And again, it’s really drawn out of my experience as a Lyme patient as much as now having treated thousands of Lyme patients on what works. I wrote this book for you, the Lyme patient. It’s really a step by step guide that you can use to help navigate your own condition. It’s something you can share with your doctor and they can also help guide you through the different process. But it’s really a five-step plan where we talked about, again, how to improve gut health, how to follow a diet that’s manageable, how to treat the infection and I go through all the different herbal protocols with specific doses.

Darin:               And then I get in more into dealing with mold and these other toxins in the environment. And then the last part of that again is really about how to manage your stress, what kind of exercise you can do, how to get better sleep. I have another section that’s really something you would need to work with your doctor. These are medically managed therapies, but [inaudible 00:30:58] I’ve tried myself what I find works, what I find worked for other people. So, this is my hope for people with Lyme disease is that this will be a guide that’s gonna help you get over the hump.

Trevor:             Yes. I encourage people, if you’ve checked out this interview. If you listened and you’ve watched and you think, “Okay, this is something I needed to learn more about,” this is a great way to learn more is through this book. I know we can’t cover everything in the interview, so this is a great way to learn more. And also, seems like a good thing to be able to take with you to a doctor’s appointment. So, if you’re meeting with a Lyme specialist and you can already have a little bit of information and share that with your doctor and come up with a plan together.

Darin:               Absolutely. Yeah. I think it’s a very straightforward here you go kind of approach. I think if you’re working with a Lyme literate doctor, they’re already gonna be very open-minded to the kind of things I talk about. So, I just encourage you to read the book yourself, share it with your doctor, your practitioner, and I think you’ll find a lot of very useful information inside that will help you get over Lyme disease.

Trevor:             Okay, great. Well, Darin, thanks so much for coming on today and sharing your information. I really appreciate. Good luck with your book launch.

Darin:               Great. Thanks, Trevor.

Trevor:             I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Doctor Darin Ingels, and learned some things about Lyme disease that you may not have been aware about. If you wanna learn more, also maybe get Doctor Ingels’ new book on Lyme disease, go to thespadoctor.com, go to the podcast page with this interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there. While you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows.

Trevor: If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get your customized skin report at theskinquiz.com. It’s free, takes just a few moments and you can find out what information your skin is trying to tell you about your overall health, and what you could do about it. Just go to theskinquiz.com. Also, I invite you to join me on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube and join the conversation there. I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. podcast.