181- Strengthen Your Immune System with Dr. Gary Kaplan

[00:00:14] Bryan Carroll: WHether you know it or not, your immune system is working hard all of the time to keep yourself healthy and to keep pathogens from impacting your. And it seems like in the last couple of years, we have had way more interesting immune challenges and we've had in previous times.

[00:00:31] And so in this episode with Dr. Gary Kaplan, we'll be talking about how to strengthen the immune system and what you can do to make your immune system as resilient as. What's up everyone. I'm Bryan Carroll and I'm here to help people move more, eat well and be adventurous. And with Dr. Gary, we're going to be diving into the immune system, how the immune system works and how to strengthen it utilizing different methods and natural remedies as well.

[00:00:59] So, Dr. Gary Kaplan is a pioneer and leader in integrative medicine and is board certified in family medicine and pain medicine. He is the founder and medical director of the Kaplan center, where they use integrative medicine to heal chronic illness and address the underlying factors, driving other health conditions.

[00:01:16] Now, before we dive into this episode, if you are not utilizing an electrolyte to hydrate your tissues and your body, then I highly recommend that you check out element, which is my favorite electric light that I use every single day. First thing in the morning, I pour a packet into a glass of water, and then I drank that before I do anything else in the morning that just really hydrates my tissues after a long night.

[00:01:38] And gets me ready for the day. It helps to energize me and it prepares me for my upcoming workout later in the day as well. So to learn more, go to a summit for wellness.com/l M N T to check out the different flavors they have and other ways that you can use electrolytes to enhance your. Also in this episode, Dr.

[00:02:01] Gary has a book that was just released a couple of days ago. So if you go to summit for wellness.com/ 1 8 1, you can see the links to the new book and his other resources as well. So let's dive into my conversation with Dr. Gary. Thank you, Dr. Gary, for coming onto the show. 

[00:02:19] Dr. Gary Kaplan: It is my pleasure to be here.

[00:02:20] Thank you for inviting. Of 

[00:02:22] Bryan Carroll: course, and I'm really excited to talk to you because we're gonna be diving into the immune system and what makes up the immune system and how to strengthen your own immune system before, before we do that, let's learn a little bit more about you and what is your. 

[00:02:37] Dr. Gary Kaplan: So I'm a physician.

[00:02:39] I specialize in treating people with chronic illness. So I treat people with chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic pain syndromes people, kids who have what's called pans, pandas, pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders and treat people with chronic. I treat people essentially who have inflammation in their brain on boarded and family medicine.

[00:02:58] And I'm boarded in pain medicine, but I'm also boarded in acupuncture and I'm trained in functional medicine. So we kind of bring it all to you. 

[00:03:08] Bryan Carroll: Yeah. So you're working with very complicated immune system reactions, which is we'll make this conversation even more interesting, but let's learn a little bit about how the immune system works first.

[00:03:19] A lot of people think you can just take vitamin C, maybe a little vitamin D here and there, and then that's all you need for your immune system. Is that. 

[00:03:27] Dr. Gary Kaplan: Would that it were, so now vitamin C is important and vitamin D is important. You need to have healthy UMass and vitamin D by the way, if we're going to talk about it for a sec, you need to have the proper amounts of vitamin D 30 micrograms per deciliter is not enough.

[00:03:41] You need to really have 50 to 80 to help with optimal immune functioning. So vitamin D is important. You know, what are we measuring? Vitamin D three. That should be part of a physical what's your vitamin D level. And so that should be measured vitamin. Take 1000 milligrams, three times a day, not a bad idea.

[00:03:59] So those things are important for health, but the immune system is a great, big, complicated thing. First and foremost, the immune system's about friend versus fault. Alright. It protects us. Its job is to check for invaders pathogens. Viruses COVID anybody issues with other bacteria issues with parasites.

[00:04:21] And so the immune systems looking out for this stuff all the time, and by the way, the immune system's also looking for abnormal cell growth, such as cancer. So the immune system is about protecting ourselves and regulating us to make sure we stay healthy and to make sure that we don't get overwhelmed by something environmental coming in like a bug potentially doing damage to us.

[00:04:45] When there are two great big pieces of the immune system. So there's, what's called the innate immune system. The innate immune system is the first responders. They're the guys who you call in as centers that has been damaged and their job is to, if there's an infection, they want to blow up. If there's been cell damage, what they want to do is clean up all that.

[00:05:06] It's not. So think of them as the guys that you you're going to renovate your house, right? You need somebody to come in and do the demolition work first, get rid of all the stuff that doesn't belong there. Then they're supposed to go away and call in the repair crews. Now, if there's damage to that innate side of the immune.

[00:05:24] Then what happens is they look at your living room and go, okay, we finished that, but your dining room looks like it could do some work also. And maybe your kitchen and the next thing you know, it's demolition, demolishing everything in sight. Well, the living room, dining room and kitchen are your brain.

[00:05:43] So now what's happened. Is your brains all in flight? What does that look like? It looks like focus and concentration is a problem. Headaches, generalized pain, depression, anxiety disorders general feelings of malaise. Yuck. Okay. I can also look like problems with temperature, regulation, and sweats.

[00:06:01] There's a lot of things that can go wrong with that. That's one piece of the immune system where that breaks by the way. COVID breaks per certain part of the immune system and the bug isn't still in. You it's broken the immune system and the immune system is now the problem. So we have to figure out how to fix the immune system.

[00:06:21] Then there is the acquired immune system. That's the antibodies. Okay. And that's a very specialized force. Those guys are geared toward FIC toward if a measles virus is coming into you, they're geared up in ready to take on the measles virus. If another virus comes in, that's not measles. They ignore it until they've been trained to actually go after that one.

[00:06:49] So all the immunizations, we're getting our training, our acquired immune system to be ready to fight off new invaders. And that's why COVID was such a problem because. We've not seen it before. Our bodies were, had not had time to build antibodies against it and did not have time to build defenses against it.

[00:07:07] And they came barnstorming in and doing huge damage to us. So the immune system are these two great big areas. They're absolutely essential for us to be healthy, not only fighting off viruses bacteria, but also to fight off the development of cancers. And so we want to do everything we can to keep our immune system.

[00:07:30] Bryan Carroll: When it comes to different viruses, that's it seems to be an easy one to focus on. If there's little tiny bit of changes in them, different variants of the same main virus, will your immune system be able to recognize that or does a little change like that trick it enough that the virus can get in and do some damage before it recognized.

[00:07:53] Dr. Gary Kaplan: It's a crucial question that we're grappling with every day now, a COVID cause the thing about viruses is what they do is they nutate right. They have a bay and opportunities to experiment. And so as they're going through the population, they shift a little here and a shift, a little there on the spike protein, as long as they shift a little bit here and there, we can still the immunizations work beautifully against them.

[00:08:19] If they start shifting too much, which is what Alma chronic. The immunizations are not as effective, but they're still effective because they don't allow the immune system to overreact and kill us. Cause that's what that's actually, what's doing the damage with people who've been dying from, COVID is that the immune system gets so over-reactive, it now starts attacking ourselves our own tissue and starts doing this.

[00:08:44] And so to a point we can, there's a point at which the virus can mutate so that no, the the antibodies we have are not good enough. And we're going to have to come up with better strategies in order to fight this. 

[00:08:59] Bryan Carroll: Is that how a lot of viruses work do you get the initial virus in there and then your immune system rubs up and what you experienced, those symptoms you experience is actually your own body, trying to fight it off instead of the viruses.

[00:09:11] Dr. Gary Kaplan: Yes. For the most part, it is about the immune system response to the virus in terms of getting rid of it. So yes, you're absolutely correct. That does wrap it up. And every virus does this by the way. So flu, we have to get new flu shots every year because a few flu virus new dates. And that's, you know, and what happens is a group of infectious disease specialists for the world health organization meet every year, they roll a bones and say, okay, this is the strains of virus we need to protect against this year.

[00:09:41] Sometimes there are. Sometimes they're wrong. We've had years where we've given flu vaccines that were pretty much ineffective and other years where we had flu vaccines that were maybe as much as 80% effective. So we're always trying to watch viruses as they mutate and you know, for what gets decided for what we're going to use.

[00:10:01] Cause flu doesn't. Do well in the summer, it does well on the winters. So we can have the advantage of always watching the Northern hemisphere during the during the summers and the Southern hemispheres during the summers and see what we need to do in modifying the backseat. We don't have that advantage with COVID cause coven doesn't seem to give a damn about the weather.

[00:10:24] Bryan Carroll: How does your body react towards something like a bacteria or a parasite? Does the immune system function the same way? And does a parasite or bacteria have the same amount of damage that it's doing inside your body? Or is it a completely different 

[00:10:37] Dr. Gary Kaplan: mechanism? No, the mechanisms are pretty close to the same.

[00:10:41] I mean, basically always the first responders come in. Right? So you skin your knee and it gets infected. And so what happens is it gets red? Well, the reason it gets red is that's the first responders coming in there. They want to get rid of all the dead cells. They want to kill any bacteria that are there.

[00:10:56] And they're designed to three chemicals that literally. Reactive oxygen species, reactive nitrogen species that literally blow up the bugs. So there's all kinds of chemicals that come up there and also clean up the dead cells. Cause the dead cells become food for other bacteria to get in there. So we need to make all that go away.

[00:11:13] And then after they've cleaned that up new, new parts of the immune system come in and repair and regenerate and thus your skin, knee heals over beautifully. That skin works lovely. And you're able to go about doing. 

[00:11:28] Bryan Carroll: How do we know where that fine line is between letting your body do what it's supposed to do and giving it some extra support?

[00:11:36] For instance, like if, if you get a little bit of a temperature increase, then your body is trying to burn out something, but once it gets to an extreme level, then you can cause a lot of brain damage and other damage to the body. Where is that line? And when it should be w w when should we be worried?

[00:11:54] Dr. Gary Kaplan: Again, a really excellent question. And one that I, as a physician and other physicians grapple with all the time, at what point do you intervene? Cause what are you going to do more harm than good. So what point do you say it's time for an antibiotic versus now let the body run this one through and you'll be fine because when we give antibiotics, they disrupt the gut microbiome.

[00:12:14] Okay. That second brain in our gut and it erupts it for as much as a year. So you don't want to just hand out antibiotics every time you run off. Because first off antibiotics, aren't going to work against a virus. And secondly, you need to make sure you've got the right antibiotic for the right bug.

[00:12:32] Cause not all bugs are sensitive to all the same antibiotics. So you want to be really thoughtful about when to intervene. When is somebody look like they're getting overwhelmed by the infection or when is it that you can in fact, sit back, let the body heal. And just do what you need to do. So there's plenty of times where we'll prescribe Chinese herbs for instance, and just rev up the immune system to let it do its thing.

[00:12:56] There are other times when we'll turn around and we'll guide them. Now, this one you're going to need an antibiotic for, or an antiviral for, 

[00:13:03] Bryan Carroll: Going back to your scraped knee reference there. If you do, let's say you fall and you scrape your knee and then immediately. Is it better for you to allow your body to get a little taste for the bacteria or whatever else that might get into that scrape and then develop a memory towards.

[00:13:23] Where would you rather clean it up and just not allow your body to have to mess with it in the first 

[00:13:27] Dr. Gary Kaplan: place? I think one of the problems is we live in too sterile and environment, and I think that as a result of that, our immune systems don't get the practice that they need in order to be able to really be robust and fight off infections, little kids get sick all the time.

[00:13:44] And they get these really nasty bugs that they're sick for a day or two, and then they're bouncing them and they run it around. You get it. You're lucky if you live. Okay. I, I was an emergency room physician for a number of years, and I still remember this adorable little four year old who came in barking from a croup.

[00:14:04] And she pulled my stethoscope down and I was nose to nose to her. And she coughed in my face. Three days later. I'm hospitalized. I am still looking for her. So, you know, the, the little one's immune systems are so robust and they're going bring it on. Let's let me learn. I want to know, I want to know how to get better.

[00:14:25] And that's exactly what happens as we get older. The immune system's not quite as robust, which is why it's so crucial that we do everything we can to keep our immune system strong and robust, to be able to. 

[00:14:38] Bryan Carroll: Yeah, it does. What are some ways to keep your immune system robust? Does hanging out around little kids.

[00:14:43] Is that one good way to do it? Or is that going to put you at more risk as you age? 

[00:14:48] Dr. Gary Kaplan: Well, I think hanging around little kids is a good idea. Anyway, there are a lot of fun and they have a wonderful view of the world, so that's worth doing, but the reality of the matter is. You know, my associate is become a grandmother and she's got two little ones that she gets to go play with and they're darling, or they're lovely.

[00:15:08] And she's sick all the freaking time. So luckily, so far they haven't killed her, but, but the reality is she will get sicker than they will because their immune systems are much more robust as far as what you want to do to keep your immune system. It gets down to really the basic things. And we all know you want to make sure your diet is good.

[00:15:30] You want to make sure you're eating foods that are healthy for you. You want to eat organic. You want to make sure that you're not eating foods that you're allergic to and you want to be protective of your gut microbiome. That's that second. And that gut microbiome is made up of the DNA of bacteria and made up of the RNA of viruses and parts of parasites and all of that information interacts with our gut wall.

[00:15:53] It's about two pounds of that, and it interacts with the gut wall to keep the gut wall healthy, 75% of your immune system sitting in your gut. So that's there to make sure cause the inside of your gut is outside of. Right. So there's this wall that says, okay, I'm going to let this stuff in and keep everything else.

[00:16:13] If the gut microbiome is disrupted, then what happens is if it gets inflamed, then what happens is you start letting in things that you shouldn't be letting in. And now the body goes, okay, we're going to make an antibody to that. And you're going to have suddenly a lot of food allergies. You're going to have problems with bloating and gas.

[00:16:30] You may have constipation, you may have diarrhea. Okay. You're going to have trouble putting on weight or you're going to have trouble getting way too. Because your gut microbiome has been disrupted. That means your immune system is also getting disrupted. Bottom line is you don't have a healthy gut.

[00:16:44] You don't have a healthy brain, so you need a healthy gut. So what you're eating is extremely important. And we, and I want to say a little bit more about this, give you an example of how crucial it is. I had a 17 year old who is came into the practice with severe depression. He tried to hang himself and he's been through, he's been hospitalized psychiatrically.

[00:17:08] He's been through all kinds of different medications, trying to control his depression without any success at all. So they bring them to me because I'm a brain inflamed kind of a guy. And so my, I sit back and I go, okay, he's depressed. That means his brain. Why is this brain inflamed? And then you start going through.

[00:17:26] One of the things we look at is their diet. Okay. And one of the things we look at as part of the diet is do you have celiac disease? Celiac disease affects 1% of the population. It's a true autoimmune disease to gluten. Okay. And what 5% of people who have celiac disease won't present with any intestinal problems you're telling me is, are fine, but.

[00:17:50] They will present with psychiatric problems or neurologic problems. As soon as we took gluten out of his diet, as soon as we did a few more things to clean up his gut within a year, the depression completely gone off all medications, a hundred percent. And I've seen him for a number of years since just for checkups.

[00:18:07] He's doing great. So diet is really crucial to us. Now there's another piece of diet such as gluten and total. I think gluten intolerance, which affects somewhere between six to 18% of the population. I think gluten intolerance is really about glyphosates pesticides herbicides, because what happens is we have GMOs, we take the the seeds that are resistant to these herbicides and the resistance to the pesticides and that increases crop.

[00:18:40] But the other thing it does is because they're resistant to it. These plants suck up all those herbicides and they end up in your Cheerios. So now it turns out that the herbicides, the pesticides probably aren't good for us and that's reacting to. And then one of the things I see is that people go to France.

[00:19:03] My wife has one example who cannot tolerate gluten in any way, shape or form in this country. Take it to France. They don't allow GMOs. They don't allow glyphosates. She can eat by guts. She can eat across ons. So we have to be attentive to our diets in order to keep our immune systems happy in order to keep us healthy.

[00:19:27] Another thing is sleep right. Sleep is crucial to us. If the sleep is disrupted, meaning that we're not getting asleep on a regular basis, we're not getting adequate sleep. And the answer to adequate sleep by the way is if you're a teenager nine and a half hours, and how many teenagers are really getting that.

[00:19:43] And for the rest of us, the answer is seven hours leads to optimal performance. You can go half, hour, hour in either side of that, but you don't want more than that because that actually creates problems. And you don't want less than that because it creates problems. Sleep is necessary for our brains to detox.

[00:20:01] We have to sleep and we have to get the right kind of sleep. So it's not just a matter of, there are stages of sleep. Stage three for a 2, 3, 4 REM, and REM is the dream states. If I wake you up at night, every time you go into REM inside of three, four days, you'll be psychotic because you'll start seeing dreamlike things occurring during the day.

[00:20:23] If I wake you up during stage 3, 4, 6, By putting an EEG on you. So I can measure the brainwaves inside of a week. You will have generalized pain, everything will hurt. And so the stages of sleep are extremely important. So the quality of our sleep is extremely important. Now, one of the things about sleep is a thing called sleep apnea.

[00:20:47] 5% of the population has sleep apnea. That means they stop breathing at night, multiple times a night. And. And 85% of those people haven't been diagnosed yet. So what is sleep apnea look like? It looks like snoring, really loud. Snoring. Okay. It looks like you get nine hours of sleep and you were exhausted.

[00:21:09] It looks like you're falling asleep, sitting in a movie theater, sitting in moot in meetings. You're falling asleep, sitting at a stop sign when you're driving home or you're having trouble staying awake while you're taking a patient here. Such as I was doing. And it turned out that I, myself had very severe sleep apnea.

[00:21:34] I got that treated where the C-PAP while I, you know, six and a half, seven hours of sleep, I'm ready. We're going to go. Life is great. Again, not treating sleep apnea will take 10 years off your life, which were risk for heart disease, hypertension for diabetes, for obesity. Okay. And it dramatically impairs the functioning of your meals.

[00:21:55] So there's lots of things we need to pay attention to. And if you're suspicious, you've got sleep apnea. There's a thing called an Epworth scale. E w R T H. You can go online, Google Epworth and take the test. And it's like a minute and a half of answering these questions. Maybe not even that much. And if you're scoring nine or above, you need to chat with your doctor about the possibility of having.

[00:22:21] There are also devices such as the watch, pat, which can be sent to you at home. And you can do a sleep study in the comfort of your own home. That's an FDA approved device, so that's kind of cool. And so there are things, lots of things you can do for yourself in order to repair and keep your immune system in optimal health exercise.

[00:22:42] One of the single best anti-inflammatory for the brain and the body, regular exercise. And you don't have to do 10,000 steps, do something, get up, move around. Ideally we want you working out 20, 30 minutes every single day, but something is better than nothing. The body's meant to move. The more you move around, the healthier you're going to be, and you don't have to do rigorous exercise.

[00:23:06] A walk will do the trick plus going to get you job major, which is a lovely thing. The other thing that doesn't get paid enough attention to is child abuse. People who have grown up in, in a high stress environments where they have been abused, where they had been neglected, have lifelong risk of developing auto-immune diseases of developing heart disease, developing diabetes, developing obesity.

[00:23:34] And if these issues are not addressed, then you're set up for a lifetime of misery. It's really crucial that this is as important. This psychological component is as important as any medical component of what we're doing. And we don't pay enough attention to that as physicians. And we need to be far more respectful of the fact that it's about addressing the entirety of the individual to help keep their immune systems in optimal shape.

[00:24:03] Keep them an optimal health. 

[00:24:07] Bryan Carroll: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that one. But it makes sense because just being in high stress environments alone, Taxing on the body. So if you're growing up and that's all, you know, as a little child and you're setting yourself up for long-term success or your household is setting you up for a longterm failure with that.

[00:24:28] Now there's a lot of different things that you talked about there. And it brings me back to a question where when you're looking at someone, a patient comes to see you and they're presenting certain symptoms. How do you start differentiating where to go with this person to figure out what is the root issues and how to treat that 

[00:24:49] Dr. Gary Kaplan: person really excellent and challenging question.

[00:24:54] What you need to do is you need to sit and listen. You need to get the history. The very first question I ask people is when would the last time you were an excellent health? And the very first thing most people do is like, I was lasted excellent health until five years ago. When I got bit by this tech, then I got Lyme disease and I've been horrible ever since they're now in their twenties.

[00:25:17] All right. I take a history. Never have any history of headaches. Oh yeah. Migraines. Oh yeah. When did you start getting migraines? Oh, when. Okay. But yet in three, four migraines a year? Yeah. That's about average. Okay. So since 12 you've had migraines and then how's your digestion? I've always had problems with my digestion, constipation irritable bowel syndrome.

[00:25:42] Really? How long have you had that for? Oh, it started in high school. Okay. And so now you're getting a whole, much more of a picture and then I will also go, what was it? And my parents got divorced when I was five years old. My mother is a narcissist. My father was abusive and alcoholic. Now you got a whole different picture going on.

[00:26:03] So now you're starting to flesh out a complete picture of what's going on. And so you're looking not simply at the symptoms that are there, fatigue, pain, headaches, but rather you're now trying to understand how the person got here. What's their. Then eventually brought them here. And what are the things I'm going to need to pay attention to?

[00:26:25] Now, if they got a Lyme disease, I got to pay attention to that. I got to kill bugs, but I also know that I've got trauma early on that I've got to make sure I'm addressing psychological issues that are part and parcel of getting their whole immune system to recover. I need to see have there been toxic exposures in their lives.

[00:26:43] So did you, what was it like growing up? Did you have water damaged buildings that you were living. Why water damage? Cause I'm worried about mold toxins, right? And so mold toxins, environmental toxins can be some of the things that are going to injure your immune system and prevent you from getting better.

[00:27:01] Because if you get Lyme disease and we treat you 80% of people get better.

[00:27:09] Y. So it's about what unique about that set that didn't fully recover because clearly their immune systems were impaired. Genetics certainly plays a role into it, but so do epigenetics, all of these things in the environment that turn on and off are different genes. And so we want to get the whole picture so that we can treat the whole person and not just the part that's complaining makes sense.

[00:27:34] Bryan Carroll: Totally makes sense. And 

[00:27:36] Dr. Gary Kaplan: that is Jake, by the way, it takes me about two weeks. 

[00:27:39] Bryan Carroll: Which makes sense, because I was going to say a lot of people with auto immune issues, it can take 10 plus years for them to fully finally get a diagnosis. And I'm assuming it's a mixture between a lot of physicians. Don't have two hours to spend with our patient following insurance protocols, which is like six minutes.

[00:27:57] And then you have to bounce to the next person. And I'm, I'm also going to assume that this is starting to become more well-known and now they're starting to. I understand this might be stuff that they need to be looking for, but probably in the past, they didn't know to look for celiac disease and all this other stuff that could be causing issues.

[00:28:16] Dr. Gary Kaplan: Yeah, you're absolutely correct. I mean, one of the problems is our medical training increasingly is training us toward the insurance system and not training us to treating patients. What are we going to get reimbursed for? And that's a disaster because that says you're allowed to look at one thing, nothing else.

[00:28:34] And they'll pay you too. I was talking with a doctor this morning. He's an anesthesiologist. He's a pain specialist. He gets paid to stick the needle in the spot where it hurts and fix it. Okay. Doesn't matter if there's 16 other things wrong with the patient. And if there are other things wrong with the patient, a hasn't got the time to do the blood work to test it.

[00:28:54] And he hasn't got the the capacity to handle the problem. So maybe he'll ship him off to this specialist or that specialist, the end result is your care is highly fractionated and no one's seeing you. They're seeing the pieces of. And that's what's happening in our healthcare system and it's a disaster.

[00:29:12] It's a very big problem. The end result of which is we have over 20 million people with ongoing disability because psychiatrists don't think about medical stuff. They don't think in terms of maybe it's Lyme disease. All right. I saw a young woman this morning. Very interesting. She's complete sweetheart.

[00:29:32] She's had problems. Wait a condition called pans, pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder. These kids can present with really bizarre presentations. They get an infection. Your immune system goes a bit haywire, the immune system, as opposed to just attacking the bug. And this, the acquired immune system now starts to build antibodies to their brain.

[00:29:54] What happens? They get obsessive compulsive disorder. They get weird ticks, you know, who, who right. That does a lot for your social. But yet the pseudo seizures where they'll suddenly start having seizure like activity. But if you put any EEG on them, there's no evidence, something the neurologist say, you're crazy.

[00:30:14] You shouldn't walk through those higher trust. They develop rage attacks. They develop little regress, so that they're 15 years old, but now they're behaving like they're five years old and then you'd go in and out of these states, I had one kid stop walking for three weeks paralyzed. Neurological workup completely normal.

[00:30:36] Now, fortunately, I have seen this in a number of my kids. And so I reassured the parents said, let's just make sure there's nothing else going on, but otherwise she'll be walking in three weeks. She was walking into, and this is what happens because their brains get on fire and they get all Ms. Wired and lots of weird things happen.

[00:30:54] And if you don't step back and say, okay, could an infection have caused this? And the infection caused the immune system to start attacking our own brains. You miss the diagnosis and worse is you leave a kid thinking they're crazy when they're not crazy, they're sick. And I think there's a lot of these kids out there.

[00:31:16] I think that, you know, and I see this over and over again, imagine that you're a 10 year old, young. And you get sick in this develops. And now what happens is that treating you like you're crazy. And now what happens is they send you to the psychiatrist and you're getting more upset and being told that you're crazy.

[00:31:35] And now you start doing cutting behavior and suicidal ideation. I get hospitalized psychiatrically. And now you're 16 years old on all these psychiatric medications. And what do you think that does for yourself? What do you think that does in terms of traumatizing this poor child? When in fact what they missed was she had Lyme disease and it was the Lyme disease that set off an autoimmune reaction that caused the brain to get set on fire.

[00:32:05] So now what you've got to do is you've got to treat the Lyme disease, but you also have to treat the immune system. So you have to treat both and there's, I want to do a study looking at kids. Psychiatric hospitals and also again, kids in juvenile detention and find out what percentage of those kids are actually sick and we've missed the diagnosis and we're not treating them properly.

[00:32:30] And at a low end for what I've seen in the studies, it's probably going to be at least 25%, maybe as high as 45%, but we need to get that data so that we can convince people my profession, that they have to be thinking differently about this so we can get people.

[00:32:49] Bryan Carroll: Is there any like maps or anything that people can look at and see different risk levels of certain diseases in different zones. For instance, like where I live right here in Washington, we have less likelihood of developing lime. We don't really have techs on this side. If I go across the mountains, there's a lot more ticks.

[00:33:09] If I go to California, there's a lot more to. But we have a lot of instances of being exposed to. Because of the high moisture, high humidity, high rain. So is there any maps that people could look at and see in their region? What is more common or is this something physicians should know or 

[00:33:28] Dr. Gary Kaplan: what?

[00:33:28] Well, physicians should absolutely know it, but absolutely everybody can look at this. The CDC has maps online disease that will tell you where. We're D and it's not just lie by the way, because it's tick borne diseases. So Rocky mountain spotted fever. We don't see it much here, but you're sure to out west.

[00:33:46] All right. And the other thing is Lyme is a bunch of different types of Lyme disease, Miyamoto For coffee. And so it's, you may see a different strain of Lyme in different parts of the country. The amount will be much more common on the west coast, California. Al's obviously on the west coast and that requires, so it makes it harder for the testing sometimes to diagnose it.

[00:34:11] So looking at those maps are there, the CDC has those maps line. If you just, again, Google prevalence of tick-borne diseases, because there's also a Bartonella, there's also. Tick-borne relapsing fever. And so you want to be aware of what other bugs are available in your Swan fever so that you can get a proper diagnosis.

[00:34:33] Cause you're right. Common things occur, commonly and uncommon things occur uncommonly. And so what are the odds that you need to go? That'll increase your sensitivity, your thought process. The going up, this is probably going to happen here. 

[00:34:46] Bryan Carroll: No, I'm curious. Cause you mentioned that Chinese medicine acupuncture, et cetera.

[00:34:51] Typically when you use herbal medicine, it might take a little bit longer to get into your system and it's a longer approach to things. So I'm just curious about your approach and how you integrate the two utilizing medications and herbal medicine and what that would even look like in a practice.

[00:35:08] Dr. Gary Kaplan: So I don't actually know how to practice without doing it. It, it dramatically increases the repertoire of what I can do for people, but it also dramatically increases what I can here. So what I mean by that is because somebody comes in and says, I'm waking up at three 30 in the morning, every day, right?

[00:35:31] From a Western standpoint, give them a short acting hypnotic Sonata, and you're done. From an Eastern standpoint, you got him three 30 in the morning. That's transition period between liver and lung. So you're not making that transition appropriately. Is there, is there a problem with liver congestion? Is there a problem with long axis what's going on there?

[00:35:52] And so I can step back and help rebalance the. Without just pounding on it with a drug to say, you know, just go do this. I can instead do something that will allow me to more gently correct the system and rebalance the entire system. So I love it when I can do that. I just, today I had a young woman in today who had a pseudo seizures as a result of her pants.

[00:36:18] She has Lyme disease. No, that was good. It's been seizing on and off for the last two days. So one of the things I did with her was I gave her a bowl of some steroids because I need to quiet down the inflammation in our brain. But the other thing I did with her was I did acupuncture and it's when I put the needles in, she stopped seizing and she started bawling and crying because she was so upset about some things that had happened at school that had really wounded her.

[00:36:49] And now. Now I've got access to a more important piece of information in terms of what's going on and how she's processing her emotions. And we know by the way that when your brain's on fire processing stresses comes out, all kinds of weird ways, such as the seizures doesn't mean she's faking. Cause she's not faking in any way, shape or form, but her body is reacting to this because her brain's already in place to begin with.

[00:37:14] But as much healthier, if we get this. The emotional stuff more directly, right? The acupuncture gave us access to that almost immediately. And it was just a brilliant way to watch that happen. People who have headaches chronically sometimes the problem is liver congestion. And so I can treat that with herbals in addition to any other medications or therapies that may be doing, cause we'll also do manual therapy.

[00:37:39] I'm trained as an osteopath. So I do, there's plenty of room for doing bodywork on people in the process of doing this as well. So we integrate all of this stuff so that we're doing the most subtle inputs possible to get the biggest results, but we've got the full range available to us when I need the antibiotics, the antibiotics, when I don't need them.

[00:38:00] And I can do more subtle approaches. I have those available also. 

[00:38:06] Bryan Carroll: Yeah, it's a very unique approach. Being able to utilize both Eastern and Western. And I, I wish more physicians did that because I think there's a lot of things that could be a remedied. By incorporating both of those and that, not everything needs medication and not, everything will be solved with herbal medicine.

[00:38:25] And that's just the reality of things. So having access to both is fantastic. Well, is there any final things you want to make sure we cover when it comes to your immune system strengthening your immune system and how to fend off a disease and illness? 

[00:38:42] Dr. Gary Kaplan: The basics that we just talked about, you got to watch your sleep.

[00:38:45] You've got to watch your diet. You've got to be respectful, kind and loving to yourself. And you've got to listen to one other story. I just had a woman. I was talking with she's an excruciating pain. She has a chronic headaches. And as I'm getting the story out, I'm finding that where she is, sickest is in her house.

[00:39:07] She leaves the house goes in the backyard. Actually the pain goes down by 56. She went out on a retreat. The pain was gone for a week and she was active and excited. Okay. She loves the people at our house. He loves her husband, loves her kids, but ever since she's been in that house, she's been sick. She has no business being in that house.

[00:39:31] I don't know what it is in the house. That's the problem, but she's not listening to her. She's listening. She says, well, you know, this is fine. This is fine. You know, but her body is screaming at her saying, get out of here. What's going on? Is there electromagnetic radiation that I don't know what the problem is in the house.

[00:39:52] She doesn't have mold toxicity. But there's something about the house. That's really, her body is saying leave. We need to listen to ourselves. So, first, second, and third, what I want everybody to know. Be kind, gentle and loving to themselves. Listen to yourself, be respectful to yourself and then everything else will start to be using.

[00:40:16] Bryan Carroll: Awesome. I love it. Dr. Gary. Well, you have a new book that just came out. Can you tell us what the name of it is and where people can find it? 

[00:40:25] Dr. Gary Kaplan: The book is called why you were still. The whole purpose of this book is to educate about all the stuff you and I have just been talking about. And more importantly, to give people the tools, they need to be able to do the testing and be able to get the diagnosis.

[00:40:38] So there's a lot of this self-help book, a lot of stuff they can do for themselves. Cause there's only one of me and there's easily 20 million people out there who need access to this stuff. It's also written in such a way that you can take it to your physician and say, what about this? Because there's several hundred references that I put in there to make sure that.

[00:40:57] People understood. This was real medicine it's available on Amazon. And it's there. I'm trying to help as many people as I possibly can because there's only one of me and the book is there to try and help people figure out what's going on with them, get them on a path to health and get them to be perhaps their own best.

[00:41:18] Bryan Carroll: And you also have your website, Kaplan clinic.com. You're also on Facebook and YouTube. Thank you so much, Dr. Gary for coming onto the show. I don't think people have been nearly as interested in their immune system as they have been the last two years. So this is a perfect time for a self-help immune book to be able to really dive into your own immune system and learn how it works.

[00:41:38] So thank you. 

[00:41:40] Dr. Gary Kaplan: Bryan. It's been a privilege being here with you today and thank you for what you're doing, helping to educate people, helping them to obtain true optimal. 

[00:41:48] Bryan Carroll: I hope you learned a lot from Dr. Gary. And if you want to check out his new book, why you are still sick, then head on over to summit for wellness.com/ 1 8 1.

[00:41:57] And the links to his new book are in the show notes. And if you use those links, it does help to support this podcast and it comes at no extra cost to you. You can also see other resources in the show notes as well that Dr. Gary has provided. And as a reminder, if you are looking for an electrolyte, that is just purely awesome, then head on over to summit for wellness.com/l M N T to try element today.

[00:42:23] All right, until next time, keep climbing to the peak of your health.