Episode 141|Lyme Disease, Mold Toxicity, and the Tests Your Doctor Doesn't Know to Order.|Dr. Marty Ross

I know that, you know, as you work through your career and I'm kind of at this place now, like 20 years in where it's really interesting to put together frameworks and, you know, sort of the patterns that you've seen for many, many years and, and, start to develop some kind of structure and mind frames and frameworks around things.

So you've developed something called the Big Four.

And I wanted to see if you could take us through what the Big Four is and how it's a part of how you view the work you're doing.

So the Big Four that I consider with my patients are hidden infections, toxic burdens, system dysfunction and brain body feedback loop or brain holding of symptoms.

I'll call it that way.

And so, you know, I just kind of use this as a way of making sure that I'm taking care of all of these areas or thinking about all these areas.

Now, all of these areas may not be something I got to work on with everybody, but so when somebody comes to see me and they're coming in Often these days, because of my having worked in the world of Lyme disease, tick-borne infections, mold toxicity, which seems like forever now, but people are coming in already with some sense that they may have one of these conditions.

You still get the rare person that comes in with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, that no one's really broken it down to see what's under that.

No one looked to see if it was tick-borne infections.

No one looked to see if it was too many yeast in their intestines, or nobody looked to see if it was mold toxicity, right? just didn't look for it i'd still get those people periodically but most of the time we're going to start in the hidden infections because they're either bringing in testing that shows they might have it and i don't always think some of the tests that comes in are valid tests i sometimes go back and want to reconfirm already thinking about toxic burden meaning mold toxicity so when people come in and see the first thing i do i just get a good history what happened to you tell me about what was going on in your world when everything fell apart.

And yeah, they may describe, I got a tick bite and a bullseye rash and I got sick.

They may also say, you know, I got that tick bite five years, 10 years, and then I got sick 10 years later.

And I'm like, oh, well, tell me about what happened.

Where were you living at that time? And I hear these stories of people that they were doing well and they moved into a house and suddenly their health fell apart.

And I'm like, okay, well tell me about your house.

What was going on in that house? And kind of learned some crazy things.

So one time I had a patient that came in, brought in by his mother that was a nurse.

She's probably about 70 or so.

He's mid forties.

And she brought him in because a doctor here in town had, had done Lyme testing on him.

He had severe cognitive dysfunction.

I couldn't think.

He had lost his job.

He'd lost his kids.

He'd lost everything, too fatigued.