Hidden Infections and Fertility (Episode 328)

Full Transcript: Episode 328

Lisa: Welcome to the Fertility Friday podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and all things fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery Charting Journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health, because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health, because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys — I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I manage to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health, and I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

Lisa: I’m really excited to share my episode with you today. Today I’m sharing my interview with Dr. Jessica Peatross, and we really get into some of the underlying factors related to health — things that are typically not the first place that you would look, but that can cause significant health challenges and result in diagnoses related to unknown, or those kinds of situations that happen where there is something wrong, you have physical signs of an issue, but you don’t necessarily have the concrete lab test to verify what it is. So we are talking about underlying infections, we’re talking about parasites, we’re talking about this aspect of health that often shows up on the menstrual cycle chart in women who are experiencing these issues in a sense in an unspecified way sometimes. And after you’ve ruled out a lot of the common factors, then for some women this is where they actually find answers. Of course, it’s a challenging area, however, because even if you have certain gut infections or underlying issues, it’s not even to say that it’s so straightforward that doing a lab test is, in every case, just going to give you all the answers. So this interview is truly, truly fascinating. Dr. Jess is a wealth of information, and so I’m so excited to share our conversation with you. Without further ado, let’s jump right into today’s episode.

Lisa: And I’m really excited to be here today with Dr. Jessica Peatross. Dr. Jess is a Western-trained medical doctor who began her journey into healing in 2009 when she graduated from the University of Louisville internal medicine residency program, and she’s been practicing as a hospitalist. She worked in hospitals for six years before she felt that patients deserved more than a pill for every ill. So she decided to train in functional medicine with Gerson therapy, ozone, herbalism, and regenerative health. And I invited Dr. Jess to the show today to talk about hidden infections, pathogens, parasites — because this is one of those topics that’s really important to know about, especially in my line of work, when I’m working with women through the menstrual cycle. We’re charting the menstrual cycles, showing signs that there’s something wrong, potentially signs of chronic stress — that’s typically how some of these things present — and doing all the testing: thyroid’s okay, everything keeps coming back okay. And so there’s times when it’s like a puzzle, you don’t know what it is. So it’s really important to know what else could be contributing to these problems. So welcome to the show.

Dr. Jess: Well said, well said. Thanks for having me, I’m really honored.

Lisa: Oh, I’m glad to have you here. Before we jump into the topic of the day, I’d love to hear about what drew you into medicine in the first place, and what also prompted you to switch your focus.

Dr. Jess: Well, you know, I come from a family of healers. My mom is — or was — a dietitian until she retired. My dad was head of nuclear medicine, so I grew up in hospitals, actually. And in that environment, my brother is an ICU nurse, my sister works in hospital risk management, so we all just went that health route — it’s kind of what we grew up with, what our family was focused on. So I grew up eating healthy food and learning that food was medicine because of my mother, and then it was just sort of second nature for me to want to go to nursing school or medical school. I actually got accepted to a few nursing schools and decided to go all the way to medical school. When I was there I really loved it, I made lots of friends, and residency was super hard — that’s when I started to realize, man, they’re working us like 100 hours a week, is this really okay? And then when I got out of residency, which was a little more of a hazing, by the way, I was a hospitalist, which means that I had to know a little bit more — a lot about everything — and I would admit anything that came in through the ER that wasn’t appropriate for general surgery. So you have to know a lot about that to serve those patients and really be the quarterback of the team. I did that for six years. I just saw that they fed people sick food and we gave them pills to treat symptoms rather than seeing why they had these diagnoses, and at that point I really became just sort of disillusioned with what I was doing and how the medical system, the perspective that they held and gave to the patients, was really disempowering for most patients, I think. And at that point I just started to feel like I was part of the problem. That’s what prompted me to go get extra education and to find, is there a way that I can practice medicine that’s a medicine I can believe in?

Lisa: Well, I mean, I’m not sure in what order I will air these interviews, but this morning I recorded an interview with Dr. Kieran Dunston — I just want to make sure I said her name right — and it’s very interesting because she said a very similar thing, she had a similar realization, that question of “are we really helping anybody?” And I thought that was a really powerful moment when she said that, when she had that realization and then took it upon herself to take additional education outside of what she was trained in in medical school so that she could really start seeing the results. I mean, this is why I love talking to all health professionals, but particularly doctors, because on this show we’re really critical about medicine — we’re talking about the problems and how medicine doesn’t treat the root cause. But the challenge is that we’re all in this together, and I don’t believe that anybody goes to med school because they want to destroy the human body. I think you go to med school because you want to help and heal, and so I really appreciate you sharing that experience with us. And there’s just one other thing I wanted to touch on, because I also did an interview a little while back with a doctor who also described residency as like a grueling heuristic — you called it a hazing — so I would love for you to just talk a little bit more about that.

Dr. Jess: Oh, I could tell you such stories, seriously. So yeah, you know, the very first rotation I did in third year of medical school, which was really the first year that we were out of the classroom, we were hands-on doing rotations, and I just decided to get the worst one out of the way, which I thought the most grueling one was going to be — general surgery. My very first surgery I passed out — it was a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, at least I fell away from the sterile field — and they called anesthesia overhead on me, so the whole month I was known as “that girl that passed out in the middle of her surgery,” and it wasn’t even bloody. But you know, hours and hours in surgery, 12 hours helping to hand the surgeon utensils or hold things open. And when you’re on your ICU rotations or CCU rotations, with your intensive care or cardiac intensive care, you’re on call for 30 hours every four days, and you have four days off for the entire month. So it was really — a lot of the older physicians felt like we had worked 120 hours a week, so that’s what you have to do. About the time I was in residency they passed a law where you couldn’t work the residents over 80 hours a week, but it was still well known in the general surgery rotation that they worked 120 and had them change their hours online to 80. So it was just sort of one of those things that you put up with, and really, whenever people are broken from adrenal dysfunction and fatigue and lack of being able to use the bathroom or eat on certain rotations, then they will buy certain information and a perspective in that state of mind.

Lisa: That is a really interesting perspective. Yeah, wow. So it reminded me — because I’ve now interviewed quite a few doctors, and I’ll link these episodes — it reminded me of the interview that I did with Dr. Nathan Riley, who’s an OBGYN, and also Dr. Aviva Romm.

Dr. Jess: Oh, yes.

Lisa: And they both described similar to what you’re describing — essentially the opposite of health, right? Because you are forced to take your body and drill it through, like — hazing is the appropriate word for that — and then getting into, like, what does that mean? So putting someone through something like that and then expecting them to then care for the population when they’re basically being taught not to care for themselves properly. It’s just a conundrum, it’s just absolute — it’s a hypocritical conundrum.

Dr. Jess: And really, I can remember you’re jerking awake every time you’re trying to go to sleep, or people would be worried about you post-call driving home because you had 30 admissions and didn’t have time to eat a bite or even relieve your bladder the whole time you’re on the shift. I mean, this is very common — very common.

Lisa: Well, yeah. And then what you said too was something to the effect of, in that particular state, there’s certain things that you might be more willing to accept, partially because you’ve kind of been mentally broken down, whereas if you were in a healthy, calm, logical type of state, certain things wouldn’t fly. So it’s very telling — you’re living, and maybe you’re not unhealthy, but you’re living in a state of performing and doing things that are unhealthy for your body, like lack of sleep and lack of nutrition. So who are you to argue with these people who aren’t promoting that stuff as health?

Dr. Jess: Well, and it’s very interesting within the context then of — if you look at medicine as a paradigm, allopathic medicine as a paradigm — this is again something we critically talk about on the podcast, because the paradigm is not really to look at those foundations of health and to support those. The paradigm is really to diagnose quickly, usually, and then to do something — to prescribe a medication, to perform a surgery, something is done, right? Get rid of the symptoms, but the paradigm is clearly not designed to support the body to reach optimal health. When you look for disease, that’s what you’ll find — you don’t find health, you find disease when that’s what you’re looking for.

Lisa: It’s absolutely true, and yeah, it’s a whole perspective change. Not that a lot of the things they’re doing don’t work — you know, if I broke a leg I’d go straight to the emergency room for surgery — but with chronic medicine, putting someone on 30 to 50 pills and just measuring their blood sugar and vitals and telling them that they have achieved health is a lie, is a downright lie.

Dr. Jess: Well, and it’s so interesting because that’s an important point to bring up as well.

Lisa: So I always go back to the boardroom analogy — any of my listeners who’ve been listening to the show for a long time will be familiar with that. If you have a health condition or a health problem, one of the ways to look at it, as we move toward an ideology that supports health, would be to understand that all these different healthcare providers are coming from their own training, their own framework in which they were trained. Medicine is one of those, and so, as you mentioned, for acute conditions — if you get injured, if you need your body to be physically put back together — obviously we’re very thankful for medicine. But if you have a chronic condition, this paradigm has a lot of limitations, because it’s not necessarily designed to get your body back to this optimal, balanced state of health. We have a perspective where if the body has a faltering or some sort of a wayward communication, we say it’s the body’s fault rather than looking at what the body is trying to tell us and how that might be a warning sign.

Dr. Jess: They say the body is sinful and wrong, and it’s all in our genes, we don’t know what causes it. That’s just not true. That’s just not true, and that whole perspective is confusing people, because if you look at the body as just yelling out with a constellation of symptoms rather than being quick to label it — labeling shuts doors, it doesn’t leave lines of communication open about what the body may be doing. It’s black-and-white diagnosis: this is what it is, this is how you treat it, because they have to be able to label it to give you a medication.

Lisa: Well, and what came to mind when you said that is this idea that your body is inherently weak, defenseless, useless — that there’s something inherently wrong with our bodies. And that can create a lot of fear, because then you really feel powerless — “this thing happened to me and it means that my body is broken, and there’s something wrong with it, and so I need to go to this healthcare professional for this surgery, for this drug, for this cure, to fix me, because if I don’t get it I’m going to die.” That’s essentially the model.

Dr. Jess: And that’s exactly it, and it’s the model for everything — look outside yourself rather than looking within yourself, even outside of medicine. And I tell my mold and Lyme patients all the time, or my multiple chemical sensitivity patients who react to everything: your body is not wrong. It is actually everything that you’re exposed to that is hurting you — your body doesn’t react, you’re a canary in a coal mine, you’re warning everyone else, “hey, look, this isn’t very good for our bodies.” And that makes them feel so much better, because so many of them have been just disgruntled by the system as well, who’ve told them they’re wrong and they’re depressed or anxious and there’s nothing wrong with them.

Lisa: Well, I feel like this is a great segue into the topic of the day, because it’s also an area that a lot of people don’t get that support with, to that foundational root cause. So let’s talk just about — I feel like, well, kind of define it as a category — these are kind of those hidden issues that affect us deeply but we might not be aware of. So things like mold, things like parasites, things like underlying infections, hidden pathogens — things that can wreak all kinds of havoc in a non-specific way that can lead us to feel unwell but have a very difficult time to figure out what is the cause. So tell us about how some of these things can present, and how they can be kind of missed by our traditional medical system.

Dr. Jess: Well, for example, let’s just take mold. I’m not quite sure if the article was published in 2017 or 2018, but it garnered a lot of attention and respect from the medical community. They found that type 3 inhalational Alzheimer’s — there’s three different types of Alzheimer’s, and type 3 was actually connected to mold. And all this time people have been saying “we don’t know what causes it, we don’t know, we don’t know” — they have these neurofibrillary tangles and tau proteins in the brain, and it looks like that’s what the brain forms to protect us against the mold that’s there. And so here we go with all these labels we give people without looking at what may cause it, and this study kind of broke the news that hey, there’s this connection here, and we’ve scientifically proven it — this needs to be further investigated. So things like that — they found things like herpes viruses in the brain of certain neurodegenerative patients too. So although we think 25 to 30 percent of cancers or so are connected to pathogens, that’s what we know are connected — I actually think it might be a much higher load that’s connected. And it’s connected to autoimmunity, it’s connected to neurodegenerative conditions or chronic medical conditions in general. Parasites are a huge one too, that the medical community just seems to turn a blind eye to for most patients.

Lisa: It’s really interesting. So let’s start by talking a little bit about mold, because that’s something I haven’t talked about on the show a whole lot — actually, I think this is the first time that we’ll be talking about mold on the show. So for anyone who’s kind of unsure — where would we be getting this mold exposure from, what are some of the common symptoms, how would you know that this could be affecting you, and how could it affect your health?

Dr. Jess: Well, first of all, if you guys go to the regular doctor, an MD, they won’t think to look for this — they look for black-and-white diagnoses. Like, you can’t have adrenal fatigue or dysfunction without having Addison’s, you can’t have candida without having a systemic infection, you can’t have mold unless it’s life-threatening — and that’s just not true. There are gradients to these things, and there are certain people who are more sensitive than others. For example, if I walk into a moldy house, I will not know the difference, and that’s based on my genes. But we estimate that about 20 to 25 percent of the population has a genetic predisposition where, if they are exposed to mold, they’ll have a lot of trouble dumping the mold spores or the mycotoxins — the really toxic byproducts that mold produces, specifically mostly black mold — out of their body. There are lots of different types of mold, and for most people you’re not just going to walk into a house and see it — it’s pretty hidden. Landlords don’t see a problem with it, so they paint over it. There’s been floods in people’s houses and they just clean it up and think nothing of it. But the way mold works is, if it seeps into anything porous — the baseboards, underneath anything at all — it can grow mold spores in as quickly as 24 to 48 hours, and 80 percent of houses have had previous water damage. So for the 20 to 25 percent of people who may be sensitive, this may be a big missing link for why people are having this constellation of symptoms. Doctors really code in the insurance for things like brain fog, difficulty with clarity of thought, static shocks on their skin at night, difficulty holding their urine — and this is because mold gets inside the brain cavity and inhibits the brain’s communication with certain hormones and endorphin levels. People with mold exposure will come in and say “I feel like I’m getting Alzheimer’s,” and quite frankly, that is what it can lead to, according to the study. These people are really in touch with what’s going on in their body, and then doctors who aren’t taught about mold and how toxic it can be for some people really kind of dismiss these patients and make them feel crazy for feeling the way they do. But some of them are canaries in a coal mine — they walk into a building like a hound dog and can smell it and say “I have to leave right now.” I have patients like that.

Lisa: That also speaks to the concept of bio-individuality. I think, for some reason, we kind of have this idea that we’re all the same — and I understand, from a deeper standpoint, yes we’re all one — but each individual human body is not the same. And just in the work that I do, charting the menstrual cycle, you can see it with your own eyes — some women can’t even look at bread because it causes such severe intense bleeding or stool issues, and other women can eat all the bread all the time with no difference. So that’s one of a million examples of how we’re all so different. Well, when it comes to mold, my initial thought is “well, geez, you’ve got to get out of there” — but that might not be the first thing, right, because it’s not always easy to abandon your home. So how do you support clients to address mold from that perspective — the practical side — are there things you can actually do if you know that you’re regularly being exposed?

Dr. Jess: Well, first of all, bravo to anyone who — I feel like a lot of people cave to peer pressure and feel like they’re crazy and their bodies are crazy, and they chalk it up to not believing themselves for so long. So bravo if you’re out there and you’ve believed your body and listened to yourself, because no one knows your body better than you do — not me, not any other physician, you’ve got to trust yourself. Second of all, if you really feel like or know that there is mold in your home — this is the worst part of my job, to be honest with you — is to talk to people and be quite frank with them: “we know this is here, let’s get a test to confirm,” and if it does show high levels of mold, I tell people feel free to totally remediate. But there are very few remediation companies out there that understand the gravity of mold and mold toxicity — no one knows this is such a hidden missing link for people’s health, that even the companies doing remediation don’t understand the health consequences. I’ve had a couple of patients tell me a mold remediation company came through and afterward their house was still not appropriate. So it is a little bit of a risk to do remediation in the house, because anything porous, anything that has mold on it, must be ripped out and replaced — floors, everything, walls. It’s a big undertaking, but again it is possible if you’re really attached to your home. Most people choose to leave if possible; some people are just so sensitive that if there has ever been a flood in the house, it’s almost like they can’t stay there.

Lisa: Is there anything a person can do to minimize the effects — let’s say they’ve had the conversation, they’re on board, but they’ve got to sort out their stuff and it’s going to be six months. What can a person do to minimize the effects, if anything?

Dr. Jess: Great question. You know, it’s always, like you said, everyone’s bio-individual, so it’s sort of a touch-and-go balancing game to see where people fall, because everyone’s so different. But I’ll tell people — some people I can get percent of the way better even in their house, but then they’ll hit a roadblock; and some people it’s really hard to even get them improved at all until they’re fully out, and that’s really based on how many genetic markers or haplotypes you have for mold. If you’re one of those people, you cannot leave — it’s not an option — you really want to look at maybe closing off a room that flooded, don’t go back there, don’t sleep in that bedroom if it’s the bedroom. Think about replacing mattresses if they have any issues — sometimes small spores will get into the porous aspects of the mattress too. Even people who have chemical sensitivity, which mold can cause, things that block EMF waves, making sure you have a water filter, all those types of things help keep your health in order. Binders and sweating are a great way to keep people healthy — binders are things like bentonite or zeolite clay, activated charcoal, even silica, fulvic and humic acid, which come from the soil — all these things are really beneficial to remove mold. So for some people who don’t have too many bowel issues, it’s great to try a binder and then get in a sauna or go break a sweat, because people tell me all the time they can’t sweat, and you really want to make sure that all your pathways are open. If you can’t, it’s a bad omen — how do you get toxicities out, how do you get mold out — you sweat.

Lisa: I remember hearing a doctor talk about — this just crossed my mind — when he found patients that were severely deficient in iodine, often it was one of the things he would find, that they couldn’t sweat anymore. And I thought, that would be grounds for a really great research study, right?

Dr. Jess: Yeah, I’d love that research study actually — there’s so many, I’ve got so many in my head, maybe at some point I’ll write them all down. With mold it’s so challenging, because as you said, in some cases you would know — if it was severe and you had mold growing up the wall you would know, but if it was hidden away, or if there had been previous damage that was painted over, then it’s much harder to tell.

Lisa: So the thought that comes to mind as well is — okay, so you identify this problem and you decide to move — how do you make sure that the place you’re moving to doesn’t have the same problem?

Dr. Jess: This — and you know what, I have so many of my patients tell me, “I’m okay here, and I’m afraid if I go somewhere else it’ll be worse.” I’ll go ahead and tell you about the test. There’s a home test you can order on your own — RealTime Labs does a great one called the ERMI test — ERMI, it’s an acronym — and then there’s the famous ERMI test, which stands for Environmental Relative Moldiness Index, and it’s a test created by the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. I love the ERMI, but it doesn’t give people a framework to understand it — it just gives you all these numbers of mold spores and doesn’t tell you what’s pathogenic or not, you have no idea what that means for your body, so people really need a doctor to help them interpret it, or someone who knows what an ERMI is. I love the EMMA test by RealTime Labs, because it’s just like an ERMI but it gives you a framework to understand — it says this mold spore is probably bad, this one is not, this is probably dangerous for someone who’s sensitive. Really you want to look for an ERMI score of less than five or six if you’re sensitive — for some people that’s really low, but if you’re genetically susceptible you’re going to need something like that. And then when you move you really want to maybe take an online test with you and test the place — which is just swiping air samples and vacuuming and swiping samples. You also want to maybe invest in something that isn’t too expensive, like a moisture reader that you can take on the walls, and it actually beeps if there’s a problem with too much moisture inside the walls. Because really, if you think about why you’re sick, and you understand that 90 percent of it is environmental, then your perspective is different — when you move into a house and you start to feel poorly, you won’t think “what’s wrong with my body,” you’ll think “what’s wrong with this house.”

Lisa: So I gotta tell you, even a moisture reader — whatever people get — nothing is as sensitive as someone who is sensitive to mold’s nose. That is — I love how you describe that, because it’s not the superpower you want, but it would be a superpower that you have. And if our world was different, more heart-centered, that would be something where we would all be genuinely concerned that if somebody was — I mean, even if anyone has ever worked in an office, there’s always someone super sensitive to perfume, to the point that if someone put on cologne and there’s the slightest hint, that person could actually flare up. And when you said the person is a canary in a coal mine, if we lived in a different world where we had a different orientation, that would be a sign that — well, we know it’s obviously not good for this person, but that means it’s not good for any of us.

Dr. Jess: Amen, seriously. I mean, you would look at this person and be like, “wait a second, what is wrong with the perfume that your body is reacting this way?” That’s what we should be saying. And then we would know that perfume has upwards of 70 different trade secrets known as “natural fragrance” — and that’s not natural, that’s an artificial flavor, that’s not anything close to being good for us. These palettes made by all these different perfume and cologne companies are actually toxic, have volatile organic compounds — which is what mold produces too — and this is really damaging to us. And these people’s bodies aren’t stupid — they have multiple chemical sensitivity, their toxin buckets are so full that one more toxin added in through their nose and inhalation is pushing them over the edge. We should all be paying attention.

Lisa: Definitely. Well, so I just want to ask about the tests that you described — so those were tests to test the environment, is that correct?

Dr. Jess: Yes, to test your home — you can even test your work, wherever you think you’re reacting to. It’s about 300 to 400 dollars online.

Lisa: Okay, well it sounds like you would be able to continue to use some of those.

Dr. Jess: Oh yeah, you buy the tester and then you can use it whenever.

Lisa: Well, and so then the other question is — if somebody has these again kind of non-specific symptoms, some of the flags to think about, if you’re listening to this for a reason, would be — when did your symptoms start? I mean, often we don’t think to ask those questions, but you know, in my line of work it’s like the first thing — when did your stool stop being solid — you know, it’s been a couple years, but can you actually think to a time when it began, and if it coincides around either the time that you moved into this place or after that thing that happened with the water?

Dr. Jess: Exactly. And by the way, before we get there, one other symptom I want moms to look out for is children who are potty trained and then start bedwetting again — that’s a sure sign that you’ve moved into mold, because their antidiuretic hormone in their brain is being inhibited, and then they pee all the time and can’t hold their urine any longer. That’s what mold does. So moms are onto it too — that’s a good sign, watch your kids, because their bodies won’t lie to you either.

Lisa: So for your body, how do you test for that?

Dr. Jess: So there’s a number of different tests. Vibrant Labs just has a new micro mycotoxin test out that I really love; my old favorite is Great Plains Lab’s MycoTOX test — these are both urine kits, so really convenient, they can be shipped or drop-shipped to your house, and the instructions are pretty thorough inside. They take about three weeks to a month to come back, and all of them range around 300 dollars or so — but correlated with symptoms, this is really important. It’s much easier for some people to do a urine drop-ship kit than it is to do the blood work, and the blood work is pretty expensive. The famous Dr. Shoemaker came up with a serum panel to diagnose CIRS, which stands for Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, and it’s a very severe case of mold toxicity — so much so that all your hormones are spun out in the blood work, and that’s what they’re looking for.

Lisa: And I could see how — correct me if I’m wrong — but it sounds like that test, because it’s testing for the severe condition, if someone hasn’t reached the point that their entire body is breaking down, would it still be sensitive to them or not so much?

Dr. Jess: This is such a great question, I have wondered this so many times myself about the gradients. Really the serum blood work is looking for CIRS, so they’re looking for a bunch of different chemical communicators and immune markers, and sometimes people don’t have all those abnormal — there are gradients to this, but they still have symptoms. And so I think that you can catch people before they get full-blown CIRS — I’ve seen plenty of people with symptoms that improved after I treated them for mold toxicity that didn’t have CIRS. Now, do I think that only one pathogen is ever responsible for anyone’s health? Absolutely not — it’s a soup of pathogens that make you up and determine whether you have a symbiotic relationship or a pathogenic relationship.

Lisa: Interesting. Well, and you mentioned that obviously genetics can play a role, so there are certain individual differences that could increase one’s susceptibility. So another question for you — because obviously no one should be living in a mold-infested house, this is the preface to this question — but if somebody has a really strong immune system, really good constitution, does that offer them some degree of protection from experiencing as severe symptoms — like the actual health status of an individual who’s exposed to this mold, as opposed to their genes, regardless of their genes?

Dr. Jess: So let’s say, for example, people who are mold sensitive have a genetic predisposition in their HLA — and let’s say someone had those genes and they still had a really great constitution — you can have gradients, there are a number of different alleles you can have of that gene, so yeah, definitely people can have one or two copies and take really great care of themselves, be really well educated and have a great diet and stay pretty healthy. Usually what I see is people already have stealth pathogens or a couple of issues, whether emotional traumas or physical issues in their life, and then the mold is like the straw that broke the camel’s back — it activated their whole cascade, sort of like that.

Lisa: Okay, yes — I mean, our bodies can handle a lot, because I think what I’m getting at with the question is there’s this idea that we’re totally defenseless against germs, and it’s a really interesting concept, because there’s germs everywhere all the time — if you leave out a banana or an apple or any type of food, like meat, and leave it out for a couple of days, it’s done, totally destroyed, and it’s grown all kinds of stuff everywhere. So we’re surrounded by pathogens all the time, but does that mean we need to be afraid of everything? No, it doesn’t — because if we can work toward strengthening our immune function, then I feel like there’s some degree of protection. This is not talked about enough.

Dr. Jess: Totally, I thank you for bringing this up. I mean, this is what one of my posts on Instagram has been about lately — do you think that you have an inept immune system that doesn’t function without man-made concoctions? Do you really think that God, or the universe, or whatever you believe in, created human beings and said, “eh, man, you’ve got an immune system — I forgot that one”? That’s not what happened, and we’ve been brainwashed and fear-mongered into thinking there’s only one way to keep ourselves healthy. You have to pull back the curtain on Oz and see who’s writing that, are they benefiting in any ulterior fashion from giving you this information — and until people decide to not accept that authority at their word and do their own research, this nonsense will continue.

Lisa: Well, I was always this inquisitive child, so I’ve been reflecting a lot about that, because in many ways I’m not the same as I was when I was five, but in some ways I am. And so one of the questions that I always had throughout my life when it comes to pathogens, viruses, infections — if you’ve got a group of a hundred people, and you expose all of them to the same pathogen or virus or whatever, all 100 will not get sick — ever. Don’t take my word for it, look at the research. And the question that I always wanted to know was — why do some people get sick and some people don’t when they’re all exposed to the same thing? What is different about the people who don’t get sick? If we could figure that out and study that, we would have a more nuanced conversation. Bill Gates is studying it right now.

Dr. Jess: I’m telling you, right, wrong person to study it. Yeah, I agree with you completely — I also want to know that too. And really what I think it is, is we’re more pathogens and bacteria than we ourselves — even parasites, even though people freak out about parasites, they evolved with us for many, many millennia, they live in us and we don’t even know because they’re so stealthy, viruses the same way. These microbes are part of our life, they make up more of us than our own cells do. So what does that mean? I’ll just kind of reiterate my point with a story: there was this guy on Dr. Oz once, and he had a lot of autoimmune conditions or cancer that had really ruined his life. He started this raw meat diet — he ate raw meat live on the show with Dr. Oz — and what happened was he was living and flourishing. And what they thought had happened was the parasites he was picking up from the raw meat were destroying the bacteria and other autoimmune-eliciting problems that were in his body — so there was this balance between these parasites, which inherently can cause their own issues, but he had an imbalance in the pathogens or microbial diversity in his body, and that’s when disease started to show up.

Dr. Jess: And then you look at today, how we are obsessed with sterility and just cleansing everything down — even look at chemo or antibiotics wiping out the good bacteria, and then you see autoimmunity and other problems come about. It’s the same type of thought pattern. So not all pathogens are bad, not everything is bad, and why some people get sick and some people don’t is dependent on their microbial defense system that’s innately built in.

Lisa: Well, it’s interesting, because we are not sterile — that’s not a thing in the human body, and it’s super interesting when you get into the weeds — I forget how many trillion bacteria we have in our body. It’s really fascinating, because it makes you realize, if there are more bacteria in your body than actual human cells, and if everybody had a test right now — like, there’s viruses in all of us.

Dr. Jess: The viral load would differ for the particular virus, so it’s a different way of looking at it.

Lisa: So let’s switch gears a little bit — we talked a lot about mold, I mean we could have talked about mold the whole time, but I feel like we at least provided some context for the listeners. I would love to talk a little bit about underlying infections. I know there’s more than we can talk about right now, but I can refer the listeners to a couple of episodes I did about Lyme disease. But one of the things that I’ve seen over the years working with women, looking at the menstrual cycle, identifying what a normal healthy cycle looks like versus a problematic one — stress shows up in different ways in the menstrual cycle. If you have a really stressful day or week at work, it can delay ovulation, but if you have a chronic underlying stress, or something that’s triggering your immune system, like an underlying infection — if you’ve got a gut issue creating some degree of inflammation all the time — then you see a different pattern on the chart, what I call a low hormone profile. So once you’ve turned over every rock — is it thyroid, is it this — if you don’t know that you could be looking at an issue like mold, or parasites, or an underlying infection, you kind of hit a wall. You might be told by your practitioners that there’s nothing you can do, but you still don’t feel good. So enter Dr. Peatross, who knows about these underlying factors so that we can at least rule these out. So maybe talk to us a little bit about the underlying infections or parasites and how they can wreak havoc.

Dr. Jess: Correct — so, I have a personal patient who cured her Hashimoto’s when she did parasite cleansing. I’ve had a couple of patients like that, I’ve had people reverse a lot of autoimmunity based on herbs, just cleansing, just doing detoxes. And a lot of these herbs cover more than just parasites, they cover some pathogenic bacteria, some viruses — so it’s really hard to know what pathogenic load we’re completely eradicating out of them. You think about something like hypothyroidism, totally linked to H. pylori — these are well steeped in medical literature. I encourage people to do their own research, but I fully believe that some of these parasites that are hidden well in the body cause a lot of problems and autoimmunity within people. And if you know what signs and symptoms to look for, you can kind of look outside the box. Let’s say you have Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism, you normally struggle with weight gain, or thin, dry hair, or fatigue, something like that — your doctor probably screened you for those. But did they ask you about — are your symptoms worse around a full moon, or do you have rectal itching, or do you have grinding of the teeth at night? This might be a parasite or something else that’s linked to causing your autoimmunity, and unless doctors know the right questions to ask, they may miss something like that, because we’re just not taught that’s possible — “even in America, we don’t get parasites.”

Lisa: Okay, so I have to ask about — I want you to elaborate on the full moon thing, and then I want you to elaborate on the grinding teeth thing. I want to know how those two things can be linked to parasites.

Dr. Jess: So, what parasites have — for example, Strongyloides is a parasite that has a full life cycle within the human body, from egg to larva to worm. It’s really gross and it freaks people out so bad — and they’re often missed on testing, there’s really not a great test for parasites out there, it can miss every one of them. So you really need a doctor who’s savvy about symptomology and questioning. And when that life cycle in parasites — they often replicate and reproduce during the full moon, this is also well steeped in literature — so not only are they nocturnal, but during a full moon people will be so much worse, with insomnia, anxiety, heart racing, racing thoughts, they may have a full-body humming or vibration in the body, muscle twitching, bladder issues. A lot of these cysts form in the muscle and then migrate to the intestines later on. So these pathogens, like parasites and worms, actually have a full life cycle in the human body over the course of a month, and during the full moon they’re most active because they’re nocturnal — it’s a stress on the body, so the body will actually grind its teeth at night because of that stress.

Lisa: Well, just to put it out there — every time I have a conversation about parasites and worms, every time my stomach does that thing where you feel like it’s a worm, every time it flips on you — if anyone’s listening and you had that, I did too, you’re not alone.

Dr. Jess: It’s the grossest of the gross, guys — literally, you know, something living inside you stealing your food, literally.

Lisa: Okay, so I’m still on this moon thing — so that’s like super creepy, right, we’ve all seen these movies where like werewolves come out on the full moon, and we all kind of know, if you have a menstrual cycle, or if you have a human friend of any kind, or you’ve ever been around other humans or animals — the moon seems to affect us.

Dr. Jess: Absolutely, that is so. And that’s how it could affect the grinding of the teeth, because it’s causing your body stress. A lot of times people will get diagnosed as TMJ, a lot of times they’ll wake up and their jaw will be sore the next morning — where they were just grinding away. People in general around the full moon will complain about not sleeping well or being moody, frustrated. If you have pinworms or anything like that, they often will — like I mentioned, the anal itching, especially, because they come out and look around — I’ve heard that they’re most active at night, around the full moon, at night.

Lisa: I am not laughing because that’s funny, because it’s not — it’s like stranger than fiction, I mean you can’t make this up. So okay, the obvious question in my mind then is — where the heck do these things come from?

Dr. Jess: Good question. Well, like I said, everyone always tells me “we live in America, this doesn’t happen here” — you know, when you read in medical school about all these parasites, they’ll say they’re in Asia, in South America, which really puts people’s guards down about looking for this stuff in humans in the United States or Canada. But that’s just not true, because is our food any cleaner or healthier than the rest of the world? I vote no. And you have to think — we’re farming fish, we’re adding heavy metals to the farming of fish, and heavy metals have an affinity for parasites, so often this is a bound-up conglomerate inside of people, because heavy metals are allowed in the body, and parasites have a free pass in the body as they’re collected up and taken up with heavy metals. So this is part of the problem — if you eat raw fish that’s farmed, think about it, raw fish is often mislabeled in sushi restaurants too, if you look at some of the studies. So raw fish, letting animals lick you in the face, is a great way to get parasites too, undercooked meat in general. If you read medical books, they’ll say it happens in third-world countries, and only with a “fecal-oral route” — what the heck does that mean, no one is going around sticking poop in their mouth — but when you break it down, how this is happening in other ways, people are like, oh wow, that makes a lot of sense.

Lisa: Yeah, well, and I mean people travel — a lot of people, I’ve heard the story a number of times, I’m sure that you have thousands of times, where “oh, I went to wherever, and then I had this crazy traveler’s diarrhea, and my digestion has never been the same.” I’ve heard that story so many times.

Dr. Jess: Yes, me too — they’ll say “I got food poisoning and we don’t know what it was, but I got food poisoning, and then I was never the same.” I mean, that is a dead ringer that you need to look at a stealth pathogen that you picked up — just because you get over the initial acute vomiting episode doesn’t mean the pathogen still isn’t a problem that can go underground and really cause issues for you later.

Lisa: Well, okay, so this is an uncomfortable conversation, but we talked a little bit about certain signs — which are not what I thought you were gonna say, and I am officially creeped out for the rest of my life, or at least for today. But so for someone who’s listening who has some gut issues, never considered that they could have parasites, or even had all the expensive tests — because I’ve also worked with a number of women who have gone the gamut, done all the testing, and there’s a lot of people out there who say that they specialize in gut health, and I don’t know if they do or not, but not all their clients get better. So how — what would be some of the key signs, and then let’s get to what can you actually do?

Dr. Jess: Great question. So I love things like the GI-MAP — that’s my test of choice for a stool test, it uses PCR, polymerase chain reaction, which uses DNA to look for the different pathogens — but even tests like that can miss parasites, they’re just that stealthy, they don’t always show up even on PCR. It’s just like Lyme disease, guys — Lyme disease gets missed how many percent of you? Ninety percent of you — that’s because the tests are lacking, there’s nothing wrong with you. So with that being said, you really have to either do something like autonomic response testing or muscle testing, or you have to look into symptomology based on what patients are going through, and if you have ruled out other things. So, I mentioned the teeth grinding, the jaw clenching, the anxiety — a lot of other things: humming vibration in the body, a lot of people develop a dairy sensitivity when they have parasites, that can happen. A lot of people will have inappropriate sweating, which means at night especially they’ll just start dripping sweat, have an emotional response and start dripping sweat, then when they try to intentionally sweat in a sauna or working out, they can’t — that’s known as dysautonomia, the inability to control the autonomic nervous system, and that is absolutely caused by parasites, Lyme can do it, mold — that whole mix of big guns can do it. So there’s lots of things to look for.

Lisa: This is really fascinating. Okay, so one of the biggest challenges for women, or men, who are facing these challenges, or anyone really, would be finding a practitioner who knows this. You have a really in-depth knowledge of these things — how did you develop your specific knowledge of this, and how can someone find a person who does actually legitimately specialize in this area?

Dr. Jess: Totally, I know exactly — this is a problem, there’s not just food deserts in the country, there are doctor deserts too. So there are a lot of docs now who do virtual consults — myself was one, I’m booked out now, but there are lots of people, my colleagues, who do online consults especially now during the quarantine, which is now, people do a lot of virtual consults. So I encourage you to seek out a functional medicine doctor, or someone who really means it and gets to the root cause — I have a lot of respect for naturopathy as well, they have been the OG root cause doctors for years without being called that. So really a lot of naturopaths are super skilled too, of course everyone is different, so you really have to search out for a knowledgeable provider. The way I know about so much of this is because I decided I was going to believe my patients over what the system taught me, and listened to their bodies and what they said, instead of just calling them drug seekers or malingering. And so when I did that, I started to see a whole new world of information, of studies that were tucked away and not published in things like JAMA or the British Medical Journal — they were published in foreign medical journals that still held just as much weight but weren’t broadcast through the mainstream medical media. And so I started to see these patients get well, and there was scientific weight behind it — at that point I just decided I wasn’t going to take “it’s in your head” for an answer, I was going to keep searching for why people were sick, and when you have that perspective, things change.

Lisa: Well, what’s interesting — so I’ve been at this podcast thing for five years, this is the sixth year — I’ve interviewed hundreds of health professionals, I’ll get to a hundred doctors, that’ll be fine — but what I’ve found over the years is that you can really tell when you’re working with someone who is at the point that you’re at. When you go to medical school, or any type of profession, you learn the information that they tell you — but if you want to be an amazing practitioner who’s actually seeing those results in your patients, that’s not going to be enough. So it’s not just about experience, it’s about what you said, because this is a consistent thing that I’ve heard from these doctors who I so deeply respect and admire — that they listen to their patients. When the patient says they’re not well, or that it’s not working, they hear that — even if it goes against what they were told in medical school. So if they were told in medical school that this is supposed to work, and it’s not working, they actually hear that and then start to listen and do that research. So it’s this combination of researching, increasing your knowledge and awareness, plus listening to the patient, and then adapting your practice — and then you start to get those results and actually have a better understanding. Something I’ve started to say recently, because I believe it is the truth, is that the truth is the truth regardless of what you think — so if you went to school and it taught you something, but it’s not actually the truth, it won’t work, because it’s not the truth — not because you believe it or you don’t.

Dr. Jess: It’s so simple and logical — like, the truth doesn’t need defending. If a treatment works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it’s just that simple. It also doesn’t care if your feelings are hurt.

Lisa: Yeah, and something can actually be true if you don’t believe it — if you adamantly believe that it’s wrong, it can still be true, if it’s the truth, that’s the end of it. So I’ll get off my soapbox — that was great. This is so important, because what you’ve described also resonates with me when I’ve heard other doctors who practice what I would call real medicine — because you’ve got all these levels of medicine you can perform, right, so you can do the testing — and testing isn’t perfect, even the greatest tests aren’t always perfect — but then you have the human being in front of you, and if you can gain that knowledge and awareness where you’re listening to what the person says, taking a really detailed history about the symptoms, and also have the experience that you’ve gathered so you know what to ask for — because what you’re describing to me, this humming vibration and this full moon thing and the grinding teeth, is that in a medical textbook?

Dr. Jess: Yeah, you can connect some of it — there’s maybe one or two studies, but not a whole lot — you really have to dig through the studies and know what search terms to look for. It’s really an investigative game, if you will, it’s not right out there in broad daylight. I’ve definitely been called a quack before for even putting that out there, when the studies do back this up — it’s just that people haven’t done their own research about things. So you just have to dig, you have to not believe authority and believe your own research, and believe the science that’s out there when you dig and do your own research.

Lisa: Well, and as a medical professional, I understand the importance of science, and I will to the end of my days say that we — my understanding of science is that we have hypotheses, and then if you’re a medical professional you should have the freedom and leeway, once you see something in your practice, to have this hypothesis, and many doctors do go on to do case studies first, and then perhaps gather enough to do an actual small-scale study, to try to move toward a bigger one. Anyways, I’m going to stop — the one thing I wanted to ask, because I could go on for days, is you touched on muscle testing as one of the ways to test, because you’ve mentioned that some of these issues with parasites in particular, and often with Lyme disease, are not showing up on tests, so then there’s other ways to do that — history, and you mentioned muscle testing — could you tell us a little bit about what it is and how it would help when other tests aren’t showing anything?

Dr. Jess: So I am not by any means a professional muscle tester, I have been trained in it but I haven’t done the advanced courses — I was trained in NET, Neuro Emotional Technique, which is amazing — this is the most “woo” of the woo, guys, so please be prepared to take the red pill. Basically, the premise of autonomic response testing, or NET emotional testing, is that our body is smarter and has an innate memory that the conscious mind can’t pick up on — which I think is on the very basis that everyone would agree, our body knows when to take insulin into cells to regulate blood sugar, it knows if we’ve got a tumor growing way before we do, so the body is super intelligent. And so this is what the premise of muscle testing is — you hold someone’s arm out, you test them to make sure they’re able to understand what’s going on, and then you test the body — you don’t ask questions, you say statements, and if the person can’t hold their arm up, that is not a truthful response for the body. And it’s only as good as the practitioner, so there have been many practitioners who’ve been super successful with this — one of them, namely, is Dr. Klinghardt, who’s very famous for Lyme and hidden infection information, he has his own Klinghardt Academy in Seattle, and I believe one in Austria as well, and he does a lot of autonomic response testing with his patients successfully.

Lisa: Well, yeah, it’s fascinating, and it flies in the face of our understanding, but at the end of the day, what I always say is, similar to what I was saying about science, we have to be able to ask these questions and look at the results — if a person is getting better, and even something that seems really “woo,” out of the box, you can still structure scientific tests to test the woo. That’s the thing about science — even if something is really outside of the box, there’s no reason you couldn’t assemble a really decent study to test it and continue to gather more information, a test that others are able to replicate in different parts of the world, and it’s not so “woo” anymore if you’re able to do that.

Dr. Jess: Right, you have to have people that have vested interest, and when there is a for-profit driven medical system, they’re going to drive studies in a fashion that drives profit for them — and things like natural substances don’t make a lot of profit for the industry that’s in place, so they get thrown or tossed to the wayside because there’s not profit there. We all know this.

Lisa: But okay, well, back to parasites, underlying infections — like Lyme, Epstein-Barr, I’m sure there’s lots and lots. I suppose the question would be, for someone who really has been struggling, what are some of the common symptoms of something like that? I know they’re all different — H. pylori, SIBO, I know these are all very different from Epstein-Barr, Lyme — that’s what I was going to say, because these are things where, in some medical circles, they’re barely acknowledging that they exist and that they could really be causing these types of problems, and then if they don’t show up on a test, it might be like “it’s in your head.” So for someone who has been struggling with these kinds of unknown symptoms, what are some of the signs that it could be something like this, and what hope can a person have to get better?

Dr. Jess: I would almost tell people — if you’re feeling sick and it’s not a hidden pathogen, it’s something like an environmental toxicity, herbicides, pesticides, a heavy metal, or emotional trauma or physical trauma that you’ve experienced — because those are really the only things that make people chronically ill. So if you have really vague symptoms that no doctor can pinpoint — pins-and-needles sensation, insomnia, severe anxiety or panic attacks that seem free-floating, nocturnal jaw clenching, static shocks in the body, inability to hold urine, symptoms that flare worse around your period — that’s a really big one for women — joint pains, fatigue, all these very vague symptoms, even racing heart, or POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardic syndrome — that goes hand-in-hand with a hidden infection. Those are all very vague symptoms, and each one of these little patterns has its own little explanation that doctors have to tease out, but these are signs and symptoms that there’s something wrong, your body’s warning you — you’re not sleeping, you’re not feeling rested, you’re moody, your gut is bloated all the time, you can’t digest things, you see food in your stool — this is an issue, guys, and it will catch up with you later. So really find someone who’s able to answer your questions and respects that your body has a problem, doesn’t call you crazy, doesn’t tell you everything’s normal, doesn’t do run-of-the-mill blood tests that haven’t changed in 30 years and tell you nothing’s wrong. You really need to find a doctor who listens to you and is your advocate that you don’t have to fight against, and then, you know, you can heal naturally — you really can, if given enough time, the body really can, with the right recipe. So I really love companies that use organic herbal products who really try to get to the root cause — I love Microbe Formulas and CellCore Biosciences, who treat Lyme and mold and Epstein-Barr and all that stuff. I really love coffee enemas, as you know, I really love liver cleanses, I really love castor oil packs and infrared saunas, any way to wake the body’s detox and drainage pathways up so people can dump toxins and their body can return to itself — that’s my remedy for people. There’s no magic pill, guys, it’s a lot of work.

Lisa: Yeah, I think that’s really helpful. We live in a really fast-food type of situation, and we want everything right now — obviously one of the big challenges with chronic issues like this, chronic infections, underlying infections, parasites, is that it’s often just not this easy road where you take a pill one time and then it’s all gone. So as we draw to a close — I mean, I could continue talking to you the rest of the day, but I think we’ve got to get on with it — for the listener who, I’m thinking of a few clients if they’re listening, there’s not just one client but several who’ve really struggled with gut problems and different digestive issues, and different symptoms that would indicate a possible pathogen or parasite that’s not letting them go, it’s hanging on, but it’s not identified — perhaps they’ve done a specific course of treatment that hasn’t worked, or it made things worse, which is terrible. So for anyone in that situation who’s really tried a lot of things and is feeling disheartened, what, if anything, would you want them to know?

Dr. Jess: Well, if they’re really getting worse with detoxes that are natural, that lets me know their drainage pathways aren’t open — either their liver is blocked, their bile is blocked, their bowels are blocked, their sweat pathways are blocked — something is not letting them release toxins, and when you don’t release toxins you feel really sick. So I want people to know that if you have tried detoxes and that’s happened, then you need to go back to your drainage pathways — my education course, “Detox Pathways,” will help you, but basically it’s really easy, guys — you have certain questions you can ask to figure out what’s blocked. For example, the liver breaks down only coffee and alcohol — so if you really can’t tolerate either one of those, if you’re a “cheap drunk” and you’re a “tweaker” after you have coffee, then it’s a sign that your liver is screaming, it needs a lifeline, and I can’t expect to give you any kind of “kill” part of the treatment and expect your liver not to react violently, because it can’t dump toxins for you. So you really need to go back to that — does it take you an hour to sweat? That’s not normal — work on that, get in a sauna every day for 10 minutes, and add a minute each week to what you can tolerate, and one day you’ll be drenched after 10 minutes — that’s how this works. Are you not able to go to the bathroom? I can’t give you a detox, you’re going to be constipated; if I give you binders, we won’t be friends anymore. So there are certain things that need to be addressed for these people, and sometimes you need to really do a cleanse for six months — if people have been sick that long, it takes that long to get them well. These things are not easy, and healing is not linear, and sometimes it takes months — it really does, it’s a war.

Lisa: Yeah, well, such important information — I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show, Jess, and sharing your knowledge and information. And I’m not sure if you’ve already done this, or if you’re planning to, but we are all anxiously awaiting your book, whenever you are ready to write it.

Dr. Jess: Thank you, thank you — yeah, that’s still on the deck to happen next, so you may see some supplements launched through another company, through me, soon too. So we’ll see, big things coming, and I hope to really help more people along the way, and I’m really honored that you had me on here.

Lisa: Well, thank you again for coming on the show. Please let our listeners know where they can go to learn more about you — you mentioned your eight-week live education program, I’m not sure if this will fall in line with that, but definitely everyone can check it out anyways — but where can everyone go to find out more about you?

Dr. Jess: So my new website has not launched yet — it’ll be drjessmd.com, it comes out probably this month, in the next couple weeks, so look for that, my education will be there, as will be lots of other live events and information for people. I’m also on Instagram, I’m big on there, I do a lot of posting — it’s doctor.jess.md — and then for my live — well, my education platform is now pre-filmed with professional videos, so they’re evergreen courses, there’s eight different courses there, anything from drainage pathways, like we mentioned, to hidden infections, to how to heal yourself — I even give protocols, although it is not medical advice, please talk to your practitioner. You guys can find that landing page at education.jessicapeatross.com — that’s up until the website launches.

Lisa: Okay, great — well, I will make sure that we link all of those resources for everybody to access, and thank you again for being on the show.

Dr. Jess: Thank you so much, Lisa.

Lisa: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend — you’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/328. I hope that you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Jess — isn’t she just a wealth of information? Thank you so much, Dr. Jess, for coming on the show and for educating and informing us — this is such an incredible area of expertise, and it really comes from listening to your patients and trusting what they’re telling you, looking deeper and even looking beyond the lab work. Sometimes when you speak to doctors who are truly innovators in their field, and who are truly experts in whatever area they’re looking at, they often will talk about looking beyond just the information on the piece of paper — on the lab test — looking at their patients physically, looking at their patients, looking at their symptoms, taking a detailed history, and really taking the whole picture into consideration. So what this means is that human health is complicated, and it’s not always easily summed up on a piece of paper — and it’s possible that if you have certain symptoms, even if the lab tests are showing everything is fine, that doesn’t mean that everything is fine — it means that whatever the labs are testing for, the parameters are within whatever the labs are supposed to be, but that is not the same thing as the physical human being that you are, in front of the practitioner. So I really hope that you enjoyed today’s episode — I’m sure that there were so many tidbits, I know my mind was blown several times just with the knowledge that Dr. Jess shared with us, and I hope that it gives you hope and additional information, especially if you resonate with some of the symptoms that she’s been talking about, or if you’ve been struggling with certain underlying infections or conditions and haven’t really found the answers or experienced the results that you were looking for. So if you know somebody who could benefit from hearing today’s episode, please do share it — again, the link to share is fertilityfriday.com/328. And I hope you’re having a wonderful week or weekend, whenever you’re listening to this episode, and I want to thank all of you for taking time out of your busy days to tune into the show, to share Fertility Friday with your friends, and to really help spread the word about fertility awareness, and of course about this podcast, because this is really the way that we are going to get this information out there — this is really the way that we’re going to take back control and power of our health and start making the decisions that are best for us, and it’s also what helps to give us the confidence in our own knowledge of our bodies. And if anything should come out from this episode, it’s that your body, your symptoms, your experiences are all real. The only problem, I suppose, that many of us face is whether or not we’re being listened to — it’s a shame when we encounter situations that cause us to question our own feelings and our own experiences. So if you know that there’s something wrong inside of your body, trust that, and trust those symptoms, and don’t stop until you’re able to really get the support you need to get to the bottom of it. So thank you once again, and of course, as always, until next time — be well and happy charting.