The Hidden Cause of Your Chronic Illness (It's Not What You Think) | Dr. Neil Nathan

Neil Nathan (0:00)

What makes the nervous system so sensitive? And once you understand that, you also know how to trade it. So when people have developed chemical sensitivity, they're often told, oh, you just have to learn to live with it. My message is, no, you don't. We can fix that for people who developed EMF sensitivity, we can fix that. We've been at this for 20 plus years. We have slowly filled up our toolbox in such a way that we really can help the majority of people who are really sick.

Mark Hyman (0:29)

All right, Neil, welcome back to the podcast. So good to have you and see you again. We've known each other for decades and decades in dealing with complex patients who are struggling often to find a way out of a whole set of symptoms that nobody can help them with that are persistent and debilitating. And you really have mapped out an incredible framework for understanding complex chronic illness, whether it's mold, Lyme, chemical sensitivities, environmental illness, chronic fatigue. The whole spectrum of things gets sort of dismissed by traditional medicine, or it gets ignored, or it doesn't have great tools for, or any of the above. You really spent your life dedicated to trying to understand why these people don't get better, and what the challenges are in treating them, and how to actually think about resolving these issues.

You have been one of my mentors, one of my teachers, and I think I really appreciated your wisdom and insights and intelligence over the years. It's all particularly important for me, because I personally have had chronic fatigue syndrome. I personally have had Lyme disease and Babesia. I personally have had severe mold illness and almost died. I have really had these problems, heavy metal toxicity, mercury toxicity, and I've had to figure that out for myself. And now I feel healthy and good. I just went for a 15-mile bike ride this morning. I'm almost 67 I feel great. My time is about the same as it was 10, 15 years ago on the loop. So I think the reason I share the story is I think there's hope out there, and you provide a lot of hope. So, Neil, why don't we start out by kind of framing the issue of like, why are so many people struggling with all these unexplained symptoms, and why are they so sick without any kind of clear diagnosis?

And often they're told their labs are normal, you know, that this is just, you know, psychological and why is medicine sort of missing the boat on this?

Neil Nathan (2:24)

The way conventional medicine works is based on a concept that is great for simple issues, and absolutely doesn't work for chronic illness of almost any kind. It's based on the concept that, okay, I come into my doctor and I've got a sore throat, he does a strep culture, it's positive, he gives me penicillin and I get better.

Right. Nice, simple.

But chronic illness doesn't work that way. In the body, everything is connected to everything else, and conventional medicine is based on a one-cause, one-diagnosis, one-treatment model that simply does not fit any more.

The world we live in is absolutely complicated. As I know you know, many of the people who come to see us have been gaslit by the medical community. They've been told, this is in your head, there's no such thing as Lyme disease, there's no such thing as mold toxicity.

Mark Hyman (3:22)

Yeah.

Neil Nathan (3:23)

And we have helped thousands of people recover their health by knowing that there is another model, there is another way.

But another part to your question is, we live in an increasingly toxic world.

It is now known that there are 350,000 new chemicals in our environment in the last 70 years. The vast majority have never been studied in terms of whether they affect our health or not. And we add to that the increasing exposure to electromagnetic frequencies, EMFs. And so people are rolling out 10G now, with no concept that we're being exposed to massive amounts of an energy that our bodies were never designed to deal with. So we have an increasing amount of toxicity. Our livers have to deal with things that 100 years ago no one had to deal with, and they're overworked. And so slowly the toxins continue to accumulate in our bodies. They trigger inflammatory reactions which become chronic, and we are off to the right races in the wrong direction. So I think that's what's happening, and it's really tragic.

Mark Hyman (4:38)

It is tragic, and I don't know if you ever experienced any of these problems yourself, Neil, but I suffered it from the inside out, and I almost died from mold. My whole immune system collapsed. I got tremendous amounts of inflammation. I went into a terrible catabolic state. With Lyme disease, I had severe fatigue, brain fog, cognitive issues, and I developed sensitivities to foods, sensitivities to chemicals. I would get rashes when I would eat certain things. It was just really strange how my body completely broke down. And I think I felt so disabled by it, and traditional medicine offered no solutions. And that's really how I got into functional medicine 30 years ago. And I think that a lot of people out there listening have these issues, whether it's chemical sensitivities or histamine responses. We call MCAS now, basically an advanced form of histamine intolerance. We have all these weird autonomic symptoms, these long COVID issues. We have people getting so many tick-borne infections that aren't even diagnosed properly.