Dr. Anderson: In the very beginning when I was treating tick-borne illness, in the 90’s, we had this idea of a full court press. We treated everything all at once, and we did five different antibiotics, and a few people survived that. Maybe 10%, 15% of people got better with that approach, the rest of the people it blew them out of the water.
So, I gradually developed a system of treatment where I appreciated that the immune system was like this great triage nurse. He or she was scanning the body and looking for what the most threatening pathogen was for the system. It’s never about one pathogen. It’s always an accumulation of pathogens, and they are all intermingling, and so many of them share similar symptoms.
And, in the moment, the immune system is telling us what it needs to do through the symptomatic presentation. Teaming up those symptoms with the pathogens helped me to appreciate, tuning into those symptoms helped me appreciate what needed to be treated first, because I was able to peel that off and weaken that dominant pathogen. Then the immune system was able to re-prioritize. This is the story that I told myself about it, the immune system would reprioritize and come up with another focus and that would have a different symptom presentation, often slightly different, but different enough to be able to tell the difference.
The Infectolab testing has given me results that reflect this way of thinking. It’s very important in how we deal with these infections, because in my experience, if we go at one pathogen at a time, and treat the most dominant pathogen and then the secondary pathogens, that’s the quickest way through treatment.