270. Dr. Tania Dempsey: Mast Cells, Chronic Fatigue, & Hidden Inflammation

20:19The reason they are basically monitoring the environment is because they have receptors on their surface. So not only they make these mediators inside, but on the surface, they have these receptors that are like, I think of them as like satellites. They're basically scanning the environment and things can bind to these receptors and send a signal. Well, mast cells have GLP-1 receptors on their surface. They have GIP receptors on their surface. So these drugs are literally binding to the mast cell and sending a signal. basically all is well, nothing to do, calm down. So it's basically stabilizing the mast cell.

20:59Now the mast cell is not releasing all these cytokines and chemicals and inflammatory mediators. And now the body can start to heal. And that's what we're seeing. So it's a direct effect on the mast cell, which is really fascinating.

21:13Gary Brecka:That is super fascinating. And I think so many of these chronic low-grade underlying infections, Lyme, mold, mycotoxin, fungus, You know, there's a whole class of allopathic physicians that think that mold is completely nonsense. And, you know, I've been mismerged for that too, that everybody has mold, mold exists in our body. It's been around for centuries. Mold's not the issue. I would take the polar opposite side of that coin. Miami happens to be the mold capital of the world. So congratulations, Miami. I have a lot of patients from Miami who come up to see me and they don't know why they're sick.

21:48Gary Brecka:Your clinic's in New York, right? Yeah, we're in New York, yeah. We're in Westchester County. Westchester County. Okay. So, and you have this lab in there and you do blood, urine, saliva? Just blood and urine. Blood and urine. And look for these mediators. We do all this, you know, we do these other kits that are saliva kits. You know, we do a lot of different things, but the mast cell stuff is blood and urine. But a really good reliable test is something you should probably do in office. Yeah. Right. So that you get the proper treatment of these things. I like to make a diagnosis because it opens up treatment options, right?

22:21But sometimes you just can't. And, you know, I think like you have to treat the patient, not the lab work, right? And that's the problem with medicine in general, right? Everyone looks at labs and they say, oh, yeah, your thyroid looks normal. It's in the normal range and this is in the normal range, right? And we have to be careful. The same thing with mast cell activation syndrome. If I'm measuring 10 mediators and they're negative in this patient, but there are 1 ,200 mediators that their mast cells could make, but I can't measure all of them. but they have all those signs and symptoms of it right i have to treat the patient yeah so so

22:52Gary Brecka:what's your what's your frontline defense like where do you start on a course of treatment um so do you then once you decide that they have mast cell activation syndrome do you then start looking for the villain like are you now are you going on a dive for metals for mold for mycotoxin maybe an underlying uh lyme virus which is probably the most mismanaged virus in all of modern medicine it's probably the most pissed misunderstood yeah the bacteria the parasitic co-infections um and and how tricky the virus is itself dorsal reganglions you know hiding in the dorsal reganglion it's it's capacity to undulate you know um go asymptomatic for periods of times and be symptomatic i think it doesn't behave like a normal viral infection um well lime is a bacteria but you mean viruses in general.

23:41Gary Brecka:The viruses in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So now that you have somebody with mast cell activation syndrome, what's the next course of action? Exactly what you said. We have to identify triggers. I would say step one is you need to know why they're reacting this way. Now there are definitely gonna be people who had triggers years ago and their mast cells just never stopped. And so I can't find any current triggers That's a small number. Generally speaking, we find, you know, they might say, oh, I had Lyme 20 years ago. I was treated. I don't think that's the problem now. And then I test them and they have chronic Lyme, chronic Bartonella, chronic Babesia, chronic Epstein-Barr, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right?

24:26Gary Brecka:Epstein-Barr is another one that for, I don't know for what reason, maybe it's long COVID. Maybe it's related to the, you know, everybody emerging from the pandemic and having weakened immune states. but even the level of titers in dormant, what we would consider dormant EBV are off the charts. Yeah, I've never seen so many positive PCR tests for Epstein-Barr. Neither have I. Pre-COVID, we would make some assumptions if they had something called an early antigen antibody, we would say, maybe it's reactivated. It looks like, but now we have PCR that's showing that the virus is actually replicating in the blood and one after another after another, I've never seen so many.

25:11Yeah. And that's proof.

25:12Gary Brecka:And recurrent and dormant and recurrent and dormant. And I mean, and these cycles go on for years. Exactly. And they just wreak havoc on their daily life. I mean, they're exhausted. They've got brain fog. It interrupts their sleep patterns. It disrupts their hormones. It gives them sort of non-viral symptoms that seem to be like mood and mental disorder kind of related symptoms, exhaustion, vertigo. I mean, the number of symptoms that I've seen come out of these patients that have these reactivations of that Epstein-Barr is probably just as broad as mast cell. But it's the virus. The symptoms are really, I think, through the mast cell.

25:57Gary Brecka:Because all those symptoms - It's just the virus triggering the mast cell. Triggering the mast cell. The mast cell triggering the vertigo, the fatigue, and all these others. because all those symptoms are actually caused by the mast cell. Right. So I think it's the infections that are constantly spurring the mast cells on, you know, just like, please, you know, just keep going, keep going, keep fighting. And so it keeps these people in this, you know, inflammatory soup constantly. Yeah. And do you see this on their like CBC? Do you see that on their white blood cell count? Where do you find this chronic low grade inflammation?

26:29Cytokine panel? That's a good question, right. So again, like these mast cell tests that we do, You know, we can identify, you know, we'll look for histamine. We'll look for metabolites of histamine in the urine called methyl histamine. You know, so those are inflammatory mediators. But sometimes you have to look elsewhere. You have to look at other, you know, inflammatory markers. Interestingly, a lot of mass cell patients don't have elevated, let's say, high sensitivity C-reactive protein, for instance, right? Sometimes it will be elevated, but I'm surprised at the level of inflammation some people have, and they have normal CRPs.

27:05Sometimes you'll see a little bit of like the SED rate, ESR, you know, maybe that will bump up a little bit. But still, the level of inflammation that they feel and have, it's not always so detectable in the blood. You know, there are other markers. Sometimes I'll look at a VEGF. That's an interesting marker that can sometimes tell us a little bit about mast cells actually release VEGF. Some people believe Bartonella also makes the body release VEGF. Wow. So we can kind of use some markers as a gateway to understand, like, what other things we have to look at. That's kind of how I look at it.

27:38Gary Brecka:So what would be the typical villains that you would start to test for as soon as you saw, as soon as you confirmed the MCAS diagnosis? So what I usually do, you know, when I see a patient, I'm not only thinking about MCAS, I'm also always thinking about the triggers and the other things that could be in that soup in them, right? So, you know, I take a history and if there's any history that suggests exposure to animals, exposure to cats, exposure to fleas or ticks or lice or, you know, there's all these questions that I ask. I make an assumption that they could have a vector-borne infection. And so I'm sort of testing almost simultaneously.

28:11I'm saying, you know what, I think you have mass activation syndrome. Let's prove that. But you have risk factors for vector-borne infections. So let's test, you know, Lyme, Babesia, Bartonella, maybe some other infections. You have fatigue. You have some of these other things. Maybe they have a history of feeling worse after COVID. Then I'll do all the viruses, Epstein-Barr and CMV and HHV6. Many of them are reactivated. And so I'm kind of like casting a pretty wide net because I know that these patients are not going to, it's not going to be a simple process of like identifying MCAS and treating it.

28:45I know that there's all this other work that I have to do. I'm also going to concentrate and help put them on things to calm those mast cells down. But I know that I won't achieve that until I get rid of this other stuff, right? The toxin load, the mycotoxins are always, I get that history of, you know, were you ever exposed to mold? Do you have water damage? Do you have any, you know, evidence to believe that you might be exposed? A lot of people will say no. And you have to dig. Sometimes you have to show them the test to prove that they have something for them to go the next, you know, the next step.

29:19But it's, you know, because people don't want to believe, you know. And also mold doesn't always show up. It's not like...

29:25Gary Brecka:It's not always that pungent smell of mold. No, sometimes there's no smell. And that's usually bad, bad, bad. Right, by then it's bad. But it could be in the HVAC system, you know, blowing in, you don't even know it. That's the most commonplace, right? So you'd have a beautiful house, brand new, no water damage, but it's in the HVAC system because it hasn't been cleaned properly. And it's literally blowing throughout the house and now making you sick. And again, people don't recognize that because they don't know what to look for. So what do you do when you, I'm always curious about how you address EBV.

29:56Gary Brecka:These are current EBV infections because I'd love to talk about EBV and Lyme specifically. So in Epstein-Barr, It's not really a virus that you caught. It's sort of one you've had for a long time. And it can be mono being, you know, showing up as Epstein-Barr later in life. So what makes it reactivate? And is that a weakened immune state? Is it, you know, it doesn't necessarily need to be a full-blown autoimmune deficiency, but just a weakened immune state that doesn't allow the, you know, the virus to stay dormant. I mean, there's a lot of replicatory cycles. And I think, you know, a few people realize this is actually wound into your DNA, right?

30:39Gary Brecka:I mean, the virus is in there. And every time it's zipping and unzipping, it has a chance to raise its ugly head. And so it... And potentially cause cancer and other things too, which people don't appreciate. I think so too. I mean, there's a whole thread of evidence now of viral links to cancer because all cancer, regardless of its form or its origin, was at one time a healthy cell. So something caused the metabolic shift, right? It could cause the metabolism of that cell to break down and now you have a cancerous cell. So the question is what broke the metabolic machinery of the cell? But when you see these recurrent EBV infections, you know, I've used a lot of these homeopathic remedies, eight-week EBV remedies with some level of success.

31:28Gary Brecka:how are you addressing those chronic viral reactivations? Yeah. So, you know, so just to give a little background, right? So most people, by the time they're an adult, have had mono, mononucleosis, right? Some people remember it. Yeah, everybody's got EBV. Right, but some people don't remember it, right? And so they say, how can this be? I don't remember ever having mono. It could be a very mild respiratory infection you think is a cold, right? Some people have it more severe, some people have it more mild. So you have it. And then these types of viruses, Epstein-Barr is part of a family called the herpes virus family.

32:02These herpes viruses reactivate. You know, people who have, let's say, herpes virus, you know, herpes simplex one or two, you know, they get cold sores or whatever, right? They reactivate. They go quiet and they come out. Epstein-Barr is the same way. So they're supposed to just sort of sit around and sit in the cell and not do anything, right? But as the body gets stressed, as the immune system gets dysfunctional, if the immune system is trying to fight something else, if it's trying to fight Lyme or it's exposed to mold or you have a really traumatic event or stress in your life or you're not sleeping, right?

32:36There are all these different factors that then allow the Epstein-Barr to start replicating and leaves the cell. And once it leaves the cell, it activates the mast cells and activates other parts of the immune system. So actually the immune system becomes more dysfunctional, right? This is the problem. It becomes a vicious cycle of immune dysfunction becoming worse and worse with more and more of these infections kind of taking hold. And so I always think about Epstein-Barr and Lyme and all these other infections as really the way to get to it. We could talk a lot about protocols and things that I use, but the reality is what I say to patients is that you're never going to kill all the Epstein-Barr.

33:15You're never going to kill all the Lyme. You're never going to kill all your Bartonella and all the stuff in your body. It's there. We carry it all through our lives. Even strep, by the way, which is interesting. You never really get rid of it. It can live in your gut. But the key is to build your immune system up so that it can handle the infections. So how do we do that? So we think about, I think about, because, you know, my lens is the mast cell, so I'm a little bit obsessed about the mast cell.

33:42Gary Brecka:No, I love this. I mean, it just explains so much. Oh, I'm glad. Yeah, I mean, it really, it really does. One of my favorite biohacks outside of breath work by far is mineral salts, Baja Gold Sea Salt. It's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient or fatty acid deficient. We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this in water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today. I actually made a grass-fed steak with grass-fed butter, and I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary, and I sprinkled Baja Gold Sea Salt all over the top.

34:19Gary Brecka:Try it. It'll be your new favorite for cooking, too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks. I don't know, a$15 or$20 bag of this will probably last you five years. It's literally the world's best biohacking secret. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. So, you know, I think about it as if I can stabilize the mast cell, then I'm going to also help the immune system handle the infections better. But I also have to lower the load of the infection so that the mast cells and the rest of the immune system can recover. So I think of it as a dance. You know, we have to do a little bit here and lower the load.

34:52We're not going to kill all of it, but we've got to get them back into hiding. But we also have to work on that immune system so that it recognizes that it just can keep it at bay, right? so that the body can recover and heal, right? So that's really like my approach to all infectious diseases at this point. Sometimes we have to lower the load and we have to go at it with, let's say, antivirals. Yeah, we can use medication antivirals. If we're talking about Epstein-Barr, we have herbal antivirals. We can do homeopathic things. We can do a variety of different types of IV therapies that we use that have antimicrobial properties.

35:27Ozone, you know, IV ozone, and we use a couple of different ways that we do it. That is, it's a, you know, disinfectant essentially, so it kills. We, you know, we can use other things to help, again, the immune system recover by lowering the load. And that's, you know, that's what we do. Now, the other, one of the treatments that I'm really excited about that I think is really has a more holistic kind of way of approaching this, but also a really molecular scientific way is to use a technique called supportive oligonucleotide technique or SOT therapy. It's also now called Q-Restrain. And it's basically a lab that's able to create an RNA to match the DNA of the virus or the bacteria or the parasite or whatever you're trying to focus on.

36:17And you actually can directly bind to that infection and cause it to stop multiplying. And actually they die. That's my favorite treatment, actually.

36:28Gary Brecka:So it's like a trained mRNA. Yeah, essentially. Wow. And they make this synthetic mRNA? Yeah, to match specifically the infection that you have. Where do they do that? Well, I do it. You do it? Come to New York, yeah. You're like the Elon Musk of viruses over here. Well, I have a lab that I work with. I'm not the only one, but this is like, to me, really exciting because - No, it's super exciting. It allows me to avoid a lot of anti-microbials, a lot of medication, especially in my patient population, that they're very sensitive, even to herbs. And a lot of, there's very little in the way of targeted immunotherapy out there in the world right now.

37:05Gary Brecka:I mean, there are a lot of blanket immunotherapies, but nothing that is targeted like this. And do you ever use things like peptides, like thymusin alpha to build the immune system? Love, love, that's my favorite one. I'm a big one too. I'm a huge peptide fan. By the way, I'm working to get the FDA to allow that back on the bulk list. Yeah, awesome. Marty, if you're listening. It needs to be accessible because peptides are a game changer for so many patients. So you put some people on thymus and alpha, you know, there are different ways to dose it sometimes, you know, twice a week, but it just, it really does allow, you know, their T cells to come online for the body to start working.

37:46And sometimes I even see people feel their fatigue get better just with thymus and alpha, which is not specifically supposed to help fatigue directly. No. But the immune system is recovering. It's indirectly good.

37:57Gary Brecka:You know, it's interesting. I got asked a really introspective question on a stage talk a few months ago. Somebody asked me, they said, if you were to put the top 50 experts in the world, top MDs, PhDs, researchers in longevity and aging in a room and ask them to agree on one theory of aging, what do you think that theory would be? I was like, wow, that's a really good question. I think we would all agree on the theory of immunofatigue. You know, this, I'm not saying it's the only theory in aging, but a slow progressive overwhelming of the immune system. You know, back to the fish in the tank analogy.

38:31Gary Brecka:Little algae grows in the tank, fish is a little tired, fish is doing just fine. You know, you add two drops of chlorine, he's fine. Then you add four drops of chlorine and then you add a little bit of bromide and then you clog the filter. And, you know, eventually this microtoxicity overwhelms the immune system and the tank, the environment is too dirty for the immune system to properly function. And now - I love that analogy. You may use that freely if you'd like. Yeah, no, I've heard you use the fish tank before. I love that. It's just to get people to start thinking about their environment and toxicity.

39:07Gary Brecka:And like, you know, I'm a big fan of a lot of these new blood filtration technologies in use for ESYS, therapeutic plasma exchange. Therapeutic plasma exchange, we're doing it in my office. Are you? You guys need to do everything. I know that's why my kids are always like, oh no, what's she going to come back with? Her kids are off camera, but she's always been the mad scientist. I can see you guys growing up and mom's in there with the chemistry set. Pretty much. It's like a Back to the Future movie. Yeah, and they were my subjects, right? They've tried a lot of things. They look pretty good, though.

39:41Gary Brecka:They're looking pretty healthy. Yeah, they're healthy. I mean, he's got a little bit of a foot coming out of the side of the head there, but I'm sure we're kidding. No, but I think that, you know, finally the frontier of medicine is opening up and we're actually starting to believe more in what God gave us and less in what man makes us. Meaning like the best defense we have to live a long, healthy, happy life is our God-given immune system. And when it gets run down and disabled, it not only can't protect us, it can't police us, right? I mean, because it does a lot of functions internally to regulate cellular autophagy and cellulose in essence.

40:16Gary Brecka:And so this really is like, you know, as a single source, healthy immune system is really our best defense against all cause. Mortality and infection and disease. So you have a patient that's positive for mast cell syndrome. You begin to start looking for the villain. You find Epstein-Barr, maybe underlying Lyme. a lot of people had Lyme years ago they did the doxycycline for whatever 21 days they felt better and they're like okay I don't have Lyme anymore just like when I get influenza and I'm down for a week and then I'm back up I'm like okay I don't have the cold anymore not realizing that you may still have it and be asymptomatic and it may just be waiting for its opportunistic moment for the immune system to get run down again so we can again rear its ugly head So these therapies of walking somebody out of these syndromes, I want to read some of the links to this mast cell syndrome because up to 17 % to 20 % of the population may have mast cell syndrome and not know it.

41:26Gary Brecka:It mimics dozens of other conditions, allergies, IBS, anxiety, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, POTS, skin issues. And this is why patients kind of ping-pong around to different specialists because medicine is hyper categorized. You know, you go to a neurologist for this, you go to internal medicine for this, you go to infectious disease for this, and nobody's actually looking at the whole picture. And so for these people that find themselves in this myriad, where do they start? What other conventional therapies are you using? Are you using things like sauna, gut binders? Do you look at diet, gut microbiome?

42:04Gary Brecka:Is this all a part? Yes, yes, yes. Okay, great. This is all a part of. It's all a part of it, yeah. But I think it also has what I love about, you know, my center is called AIM Center for Personalized Medicine. So it's all personalized, right? So not everyone is going to be able to tolerate a sauna. You know, mast cells can be very heat sensitive. So I have a subset of patients, interestingly, that do really well in sauna, but I have a lot of patients who don't do well in sauna, right? So maybe some of them just need to work up, you know, to it. So we have to start slower. Sometimes we're never going to be able to get them into a sauna.

42:36So we have to find other ways to detox. And so we're always looking at ways to, again, approach the toxicity load that we have to deal with, right? Because the reality is we're all constantly dealing with this. No question. Yeah. I mean, this is the life we live. And so a lot of people will say, well, why do you need all these technologies? Like why do you need to do all this stuff? And it's because even if we're as healthy as we think we can be, even if we eat, you know, perfectly, even if we sleep perfectly, even if we do all those things, right, we still have to fight against what we're constantly breathing in and being exposed to, right?

43:08So I think like people should know that even healthy people still have to keep up with our bodies. But for people who are sicker, obviously it's a little bit more advanced, a little bit more complicated. So yeah, so I do all those things. What I love is we do red light therapy. We have a red light bed. I saw that you have a red light bed as well, right? So for a lot of mast cell patients, that has actually been really, really helpful in reducing inflammation,

43:34Gary Brecka:helping mitochondria. Interestingly, that was, not to cut you off, that was one of the biggest things that we implemented for my daughter when she had POTS. Interesting. And which the more I'm talking to you, the more I think it was mast cell activation syndrome by far, and we just inadvertently calmed them down by getting toxicity out of everybody. Correct, yeah. And then, you know, I pointed to the mold and the metals, but really those were just the triggers, not the actual issue. Not the root. Not the root. so I didn't go deep enough into the soil. But red light therapy was amazing for her.

44:09Yeah, yeah, and it is for a lot of patients. So that's why I bring in all these different modalities because I have to figure out what's going to be the easiest way, right? To get to the root, to all the roots. I love therapeutic plasma exchange as a detox. I know it's a little bit aggressive.

44:25Gary Brecka:It is aggressive, but I am - Have you tried it? I've done it twice. Okay. And I've also done inus phoresis where they return the plasma. Yeah, yeah. So they filter the plasma. was fascinating to me. So my wife and I did it for our anniversary. I mean, talk about nerd. That's definitely something I would do too. Say, hey babe, I got you something great for your anniversary. You're going to love this. We're going over to this clinic and we're going to get these dual cannulas put in and we're going to, but we'll have side-by-side beds and they'll play nice music. But we did it in Dubai and unfortunately you can't get the inusphoresis here.

44:56Oh yeah, yeah. Not yet, it's coming.

44:58Gary Brecka:Yeah, I hope so. No, no, they're working on it. Oh really? I really hope so because this whole idea of subtractive medicine to me is very fascinating, right? Not adding anything to the body, removing what it's dealing with. You know, that's why, you know, sweat, stool, urine, detoxification, binders, you know, therapeutic plasma exchange, inesphoresis, EBO2 ozone with filtration. And I'm always fascinated by how much stuff comes out of that collection tank. and you know what we did was we sent it to the lab as urine. Okay, oh, right, right. So we collected in there because they actually wouldn't run the sample.

45:41Gary Brecka:They won't run it, yeah. Yeah, they won't run it. So hopefully the labs aren't watching this. So I sent it as urine. It shows that you're in kidney failure. So you have to ignore that part because it's not actually urine. But the list of toxicity that comes out of those e-blue treatments that ends up in that collection tank and causes all that foam and everything. Sometimes the top comes right off and it's foaming out of there. That has got to be good for you to take that out. And the same with the plasma. We're still trying to find, I have a lab that I think is gonna help us test the plasma that we're getting out of people.

46:19But you could see sometimes -

46:20Gary Brecka:That's really good too, because right now they don't do it. Like Switzerland does it. Yeah, we don't do it, but I have somebody who may be interested in doing a study with me. Wow. But you could see the color of the plasma. And the more you do the treatment of TPE, you'll see the plasma starts to get clearer and not as cloudy. But we're doing blood and urine analysis on patients pre and post. And actually, so we may not be able to directly test the plasma yet, but we will. But we can test the body and we can see the level of toxins go down. You know, BPA comes down, PFAS, Forever Chemicals. We're doing a study right now on Forever Chemicals.

46:54And it looks like, you know, it is removing - Microplastics, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It looks like it's removing it. So that's what's amazing.

47:01Gary Brecka:It's exciting now too, because you can actually test the levels of microplastics too. Yes, that's what we're doing. I've been reading a lot about the presence of microplastics in these fibrinogen bonds that are in these atherosclerotic plaques that are causing hardening, narrowing, soft blacking in the arteries. And biofilm for people who have long COVID and some of these other infections and they can't get rid of it. Everything is sort of like clumping together in the blood. And what do you do for those kinds of things? Natokinase? Balaki, lumbar kinase. So all the kinases, you know, great. And, you know, therapeutic plasma exchange actually does pull out some of the biofilm, which is really, I think, exciting too.

47:43Because some of them are just really resistant. So I love the supplements. I love being able to break them down, but they don't, sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes we have to use anticoagulants actually.

47:52Gary Brecka:Like a heparin? Like heparin or Eliquis. there are a bunch of different ones that you can use. Sometimes you have to just really kind of thin the blood out as much as possible to get the bugs out of these biofilms. I think of biofilms as like a spider web. It's just holding on to everything until we can get them out. All the treatment in the world, all the ozone and all the antimicrobials, even this SOT therapy, like nothing is going to work If everything is in this kind of fibrinogen, platelet, it's just like a soup of, yeah, exactly. And a lot of these pathogens are attracted to heparin. I mean, heparin binding sites, there are filtration technologies, one called Xterra, which I've also done, that use heparin binding sites to draw out certain pathogens, fungi, mold and mycotoxins, certain viral pathogens, even CTCs circulating tumor cells that like to bind to these heparin binding sites.

48:55Gary Brecka:It doesn't put the heparin back into the body, but they do clump around these heparin binding sites. Isn't that interesting because mast cells make heparin. Okay. It's the one cell in the body that actually releases and manufactures heparin. Really? Yeah, that's one of the mediators that we can actually test for. So then it makes me wonder, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it does make me wonder too. So you see elevated levels of heparin in the blood because these mast cells are... Yeah, that's how we identify. Which makes a lot of sense because you don't want clumping and clotting if you have a pathogen, right?

49:33Gary Brecka:You don't want to wall it off or seal it in. You want to actually thin the blood. Yeah, I mean you wonder like why the mast cells make all these things, right? So maybe that's part of it. But what I think it manifests very often, not to get too off topic, but I think about women who have really like heavy menstrual periods. High estrogen, you said, can activate as well. Yeah, it can activate, exactly. So I think with the mast cells, what's happening at the level of the uterus is they're releasing heparin. And so these women are like hemorrhaging. They're having these really, really heavy periods because the mast cells, which are being, yes, are being triggered by changes in estrogen levels or other hormone levels that are releasing heparin, now that blood is thinner and it's coming out faster.

50:15Gary Brecka:Wow, so they have these menorrhagia. Menorrhagia. It's such a hard word to say. Amenorrhea, amenorrhagia, whatever it is. But lots of bleeding during their menstrual cycle. Again, so fascinating. I mean, especially given the percentages of the population that may have mast cell syndrome. Yeah, like 20 % is tremendous, right? Think about that. It's like one in five. And that's probably more. I think there's more, more than 20. But, you know, that's the study was like 17%. Listen, there's what I share on this podcast. And then there's what I share with my inner circle. If you've been following me for a while, you know how I hold nothing back here.

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51:59Gary Brecka:Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. So for folks that have this things like, like thymosin alpha, binders, saunas, obviously cleaning up the diet, testing for metals, mold, mycotoxins, viruses and parasites, these panels that will actually look for things that could be hyper-exciting the immune system and therefore these mast cell syndromes. That's kind of the place to start hiking. Yeah, that's a good starting place. So we do a lot of stool analysis, we do microbiome analysis, as we do parasite testing in the blood and in the stool. And yeah, parasites are actually quite pervasive.

52:41Gary Brecka:They're pervasive and they're very real. In fact, I was reading a study on multiple sclerosis on this parasitic theory. They call it the clean hands theory where the over-sanitation and reducing the healthy parasitic colonies may be causing the immune system to hyperactivate to some of these cestodematodes and these helminth parasites in MS patients. And at least this one study that I looked at, which was postmortem autopsies, they found similar or identical deficiencies. And I want to misquote the study. I'll actually put a link to it in the show notes in case I misquote it. They found similar or identical colonies that were vastly missing from these patients with MS.

53:33And they hypothesized that this over-sanitization,

53:38Gary Brecka:where you actually don't have the healthy parasitic colonies, were actually causing the immune system to have this autoimmune reaction to myelin. And they found corkscrew parasites in some of the locations where the immune system was attacking. Because if you think about it, why the immune system can dissolve myelin or attack myelin. Why isn't it sort of uniformly attacking it everywhere? Why does it seem to be taking rifle shots seemingly randomly around the body or maybe concentrated in areas of the brain? I mean, there's myelin covering all of our nerves. So why is it not affecting or evenly dissolving this?

54:17Gary Brecka:And I thought it was very interesting that there could be a bug theory behind it. Yeah, I'm one of those people. I think there's a bug theory behind almost all the chronic diseases we see. I won't disagree with you at all. Just every single patient. Every single patient I test for who has Parkinson's or Parkinson-like infections, or I mean conditions, Alzheimer's. You know, I can look at different manifestations of mental illness, OCD, anxiety, depression. They almost always have gut issues. Yeah. All of them. And they almost all test positive for vector-borne infections. I find parasites in them and I find Bartonella almost across the board.

54:58Gary Brecka:Yeah, our clinic director had a Dr. Carrie Sarda. She had a patient she was treating that came down to see her for Parkinson's. Been six years diagnosed with Parkinson's, completely unresponsive to traditional therapies. Neurologists couldn't figure out what was going on. The mood collapsed, the dystonias, the dysdiaticokinesias, the whole sequence of events. and when she did the viral testing, it was one of the highest, not Lyme titers, West Nile titers that the lab had ever seen. Oh, wow. And ironically, he had an office in South Beach and was commonly visiting South Beach when the largest Zika mosquito outbreak in South Beach is coming back 12, 13 years, 11, 12 years.

55:46Gary Brecka:There was a period where even Customs was not allowing pregnant women, you know, that were coming through to go to Miami Beach because the Zika mosquito was so prevalent. They got it under control. But that's what carries the... It also carries West Nile. West Nile. And it was one of the highest titers that they'd ever seen. It was active. Never tested for it. And so she went after the, you know, the virus. and I won't say all of the symptoms went into remission, but I would say 75, 80 % improvement in his symptoms because he didn't have Parkinson's. He had Parkinson-isms from the viral infection.

56:26Gary Brecka:And a lot of these viruses seem to have very similar etiologies or at least presentations to things like Parkinson's, which are very often diagnosed by observation. Well, it's an inflammatory response. It's just I think that there's a vulnerability. I always think of it like people will say, well, why did I get this condition, Parkinson's-like condition, and somebody else got, you know, different, you know, got Crohn's or colitis or got something, you know. So I think there's a vulnerability that people carry. And maybe it's genetic, maybe it's hard to find, but then there are these, you know, infections or triggers or toxins or whatever that then triggers that genetic vulnerability to come out.

57:04Right. And it's presenting in this way. And so you have to, you know, alleviate or remove the triggers. you might still have some symptoms left because some of that is maybe even genetic to some extent. It got already turned on.

57:19Gary Brecka:You mean like methylation pathway issues or poor waste elimination or things like that? Yeah, like some things you're just never going to be able... Let's say the damage is done. I like to think that I can reverse all damage in everybody, but it's impossible, right? Right. So some damage is already done, but if you remove, let's say, that infection, maybe you can heal a lot of the damage. Right. That's the... Yeah, calm them down, boost the immune system, because immunodysregulation, you know, the consequences of that encompass all of the things that we've talked about so far. And it mimics so many other pathologies.

57:55Gary Brecka:These poor people are just literally running around the country or running around the world sometimes trying to figure out what could be causing this. And I wouldn't disagree with you at all that I think, you know, the bugs are related to a lot of these issues. Let's go into the gut for a minute, if you don't mind. How important is gut dysbiosis, the gut microbiome, you know, that single cell layer of protection that we have on the luminal wall of our gut, sort of separating our inside environment from our outside environment? What can we do to care for it? And how often do you think that there is a gut-related anomaly in Maslow syndrome?

58:40I mean, again, I don't like...

58:41Gary Brecka:You're probably going to say 100%. Yeah, right. I was going to say like 99, 98 or whatever. And it's interesting because I do have patients who swear they have no gut problems at all. And the gut is not their problem. They have all these other neurologic and other systems involved, right? And I go, really? You have like no, nothing? Like I almost never see it, right? So then I'll have them do a test, you know, do some stool testing, right? And I'm like, well, you actually have it. I don't know why you don't feel it, but there's definitely something going on there. That's where the bulk of your immune system is, right?

59:1470 % Yeah. So it's hard to imagine. There's so many mast cells that line the entire GI tract. Oh, yeah. So, you know, you have to think like if they have a mast cell condition, the mast cells in the gut are involved on some level. Maybe some people are more sensitive to feeling it and some aren't, right? But I think, listen, in the toxic world we live in, it's very, very difficult to maintain, you know, a proper digestive system. I would agree with that. Right? The food that you eat, you know, the pesticides on the food, the toxins, the glyphosates, things like you could be so careful and still get exposed to things that are going to eventually like break down that layer.

59:51Early antibiotic use, you know, as children, right? Frequent strep infections very, very commonly will cause a dysbiosis, right? So people may not notice anything until it's sort of like the straw that breaks the camel's back, right? So they're living with some dysbiosis. They're not, you know, they don't have a lot of symptoms yet. But there's usually then something that then brings it out fully. They get another course of antibiotics or they get, again, they have a stressor in their life. They get, you know, they get COVID. They get something and then all hell breaks loose. And now they have major gut issues.

1:00:31issues and so you know it's about um you know feeding the good uh microbiome there right so a lot of them um a lot of the good stuff is gone there's a lot of bad stuff right so it's actually finding that balance between killing some of the bad right and getting more of the good right and so there are a lot of tools and what does something like that look like what is a what would i do

1:00:53Gary Brecka:typical protocol look like i know it's not a one size fits all i mean and in terms of gut testing Are you doing GI maps? Are you doing like a Viome stool test? I'll do like Gutsumer from Vibrant Wellness. I like that one a lot. Sometimes the GI map, I don't want to say anything bad about it. I've just found some inconsistencies with their testing. You've got to be really careful with the testing. And they're actually, I know several people who are trying to do comparison studies between the different labs to see, you know, why, you know, some labs are picking up parasites and some labs are not picking up parasites.

1:01:30They're the same samples, right? Wow. So we're just trying to, we're trying to, so the testing is actually in some ways a little bit rudimentary, but I, but I've, I've been, you know, pleased with some of the GI tests that we've, we've tried.

1:01:43Gary Brecka:Yeah, ID is vibrant a lot. Yeah. No affiliation with them. They have a lot of good panels. Detox challenges and things. Yeah. And we use their urine test for the Total Tox before we do the therapeutic plasma exchange, you know, and after. So we like a lot of their stuff. So gut summer could be a good place to start. I love doing specific parasite testing. I don't rely on any one lab to pick up the parasites because parasites are really hard to find. They are, yeah. I think of it, I use this analogy with patients, right? I think of parasites like they're like Spider-Man. They have like suction cups on their hands.

1:02:20They don't have hands, but you know, like the imagery. So they're like sticking to the wall of the intestine. And so when you have a bowel movement, they may fall into that stool. They may not. And so you may not find it until you test and test and test. So I have a lab that I really like that has been really good at finding a lot of these parasites. Wow. And I am really shocked at what we're finding. And not to go too off topic, but you know what's really interesting to me as a, when I was doing my residency at NYU in the city, we saw a lot of HIV patients, patients with that type of immunodeficiency, immunocompromised states.

1:02:57And they used to have this, we used to find this parasite in them all the time called cryptosporidium. And I was taught that cryptosporidium is a parasite that only infects people with really suppressed immune systems, cancer patients, HIV. I see it probably in 75 % of my patients.

1:03:15Gary Brecka:Wow. but they're not HIV or cancer patients, right? So that tells me that part of this mass cell activation syndrome and all the other things that I'm seeing is suppressing the immune system so much that we're seeing parasites that should not be in relatively healthy people. Wow. And are you doing regular frontline things, ivermectin, venbendazole, memendazole? Okay. Those are really effective. Alinea and all the, yeah. I usually do a sequential type of protocol with them. I find, listen, I love herbs and I love natural stuff, but for parasites... Yeah, I've heard the same thing. You need the drugs.

1:03:52Gary Brecka:You got to bring the big dust. So again, so when I'm approaching a patient, if they have the parasites, I'm going to do a parasite protocol. If they don't have parasites, maybe I'm going to start with some other stuff, right? I'm working on a diet. A lot of the patients have low short-chain fatty acids, so I may use a butyrate. Sauerkraut, even fermented vegetables. Sometimes, but some of my mast cell patients can't tolerate it because it's high in histamine. So, you know, so it's again, very personalized. That's true. That's a good point. Yeah. We're a little challenged because we like things that we think are good may backfire.

1:04:23So, but we have to, you know, kind of inch towards that. I have a patient right now who is able to, had really bad mast cell stuff, but like started to be able to introduce sauerkraut and stuff. So that's amazing, right? Like, wow.

1:04:36Gary Brecka:For the free fatty acids and then. Yeah. Yeah. But we can use butyrate. We can use some other things. We can, you know, again, it's about balancing the gut. We can use immunoglobulins like, you know, like an IgG type of product that has, you know, it's basically bovine serum immunoglobulins. You can use colostrum if people can tolerate dairy. All these things, I mean, again, there's like, there's no perfect way to do it. It's just finding it the right way for the patient. So it's about balance and it's about killing sometimes. And then it's about quieting those mast cells down in the gut directly.

1:05:09so that the immune system is not constantly in this kind of cycle.

1:05:13Gary Brecka:Hyper-inflammatory state. Yeah. Dr. Dempsey, this has been absolutely fascinating. I really hope you'll come back on the Health of the Human podcast because I want to follow this. All right. My VIPs are so excited for you in the VIP room. We've got a whole litany of questions for you. And I appreciate you too also agreeing to stay today to speak to them in a live format. This is such a fascinating, I think, underserved area of medicine where we start looking at really looking at root causes and how symptoms don't necessarily link back to the pathology that people are diagnosed with. It may be something even deeper that has caused this immune system, mass cell activation, but caused the immune system to be so run down that it's, you know, essentially can't protect itself anymore.

1:06:08No, exactly. And it's more pervasive than we can imagine, right? This is the thing. I think the more people, the more toxic our world gets, the more COVID and all these other things that people get or the more like, you know, weird infections, like this winter was kind of crazy with a lot of severe infections.

1:06:24Gary Brecka:Oh my gosh, monkey pot, I mean, you name it. Yeah, so the more that immune system just gets revved up and revved up, you know, unfortunately, I think this is like really a pandemic in a way of mass activation syndrome. And so like, I think everyone really needs to know this, right? Because the thing is like people listen and say, well, this doesn't apply to me. You know, I do all these things and I'm healthy, but it may apply to somebody that's close to you. Yes. And it may apply to you eventually, hopefully not. Right. But also I want to give hope because I think there's so much that we can do.

1:06:53And that's why I do the work that I do because I help people every day.

1:06:55Gary Brecka:Yeah, this is so fascinating. For my audience that wants to know more about you or where they can find you, where can they find you? Okay, so my center, AIM Center for Personalized Medicine. My website, drtoniadempsey.com. Instagram, drtoniadempsey.com. Facebook, drtoniadempsey.com. You know, like all that stuff. I have YouTube. I'll put all that in the show notes for you. Yeah, I'm trying to think what I'm missing. And then my podcast, Mast Cell Matters. I saw you had a podcast, Mast Cell Matters. I love that. I'm going to have to have you on that too. I would love to be on there. Yeah. We see eye to eye on a lot of things for sure.

1:07:30Gary Brecka:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so absolutely fascinating. guys please I'll put all of that in the in the show notes below I'll put the study that I referred to earlier in the podcast and until next time that's just science