The Lyme Solution: A Functional Approach

• A sneak-preview of Dr. Ingles’ 5-step plan for healing Lyme Disease
• The specific diet that works best for Lyme Disease patients
• The top targeted herbal therapies to treat the infection, reduce inflammation, improve circulation, address autoimmune-related conditions and more
• Key environmental factors that exacerbate Lyme Disease, suppress the immune system and can even masquerade as Lyme
• How to get a copy of Dr. Ingles new book: The Lyme Solution: A 5-Part Plan to Fight the Inflammatory Auto-Immune Response and Beat Lyme Disease
• And much more…

Despite the growing prevalence of Lyme Disease, there are very few practitioners―integrative or otherwise―who understand how to detect it, diagnose it and address its insidious symptoms and co-infections at their roots.
Whether you’re a practitioner or patient, the information in this show will help you better understanding Lyme Disease and the most effective, up-to-date therapies to help you beat it.
Resources mentioned in this podcast:
The Lyme Solution: A 5-Part Plan to Fight the Inflammatory Auto-Immune Response and Beat Lyme Disease


Announcer:  Welcome to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, the place health professionals come to hear from innovators and agitators leading the charge. We cover the latest clinical breakthroughs and health technology as well as practical tools to help transform your practice and the health of your community. Now, here’s your host, James Maskell.
James Maskell:  Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week we feature Dr. Darin Ingels, an naturopathic physician from Connecticut who has a new book called The Lyme Solution. In this podcast, we talked about a number of things that are relevant to the modern, integrated and functional medicine practitioner. We talked about the surprising impact that Dr. Ingels had on the genesis on the Functional Forum. We talk about the way in which his five step plan sets out a basic framework for reversing Lyme disease and recovering from chronic Lyme. Then we also just talked about how Lyme has end up being similar to a number of other chronic autoimmune, inflammatory conditions that can all be really helped by functional medicine. It was a really great half an hour. Lots of great clinical tips in here. Enjoy.
So a warm welcome to the podcast, Dr. Darin Ingels. Welcome, Doc.
Darin Ingles, ND:  Great. Thanks, James. Thanks for having me.
James Maskell:  Great to have you here on the podcast. I guess I just want to start with a story. You probably don’t know this, but actually one of your talks actually had a serious impact on the beginning of the Functional Forum. Have I told you this before?
Darin Ingles, ND: Actually you did, but you can say it again.
James Maskell:  Yeah. So it was the 2013 NYANP conference, the New York naturopathic conference. One of the speakers was Mark Bertolini, who was the CEO of Aetna, still is the CEO of Aetna. We ended up getting Dottie Wilson to the first ever episode of the function forum because I just thought it was super interesting that he was the CEO of a big insurance company who sees in naturopath and has a lot of value from naturopathic medicine, but doesn’t really pay for naturopathic care very well. I thought that was an interesting person to put on the first Functional Forum. But one of the things that I also got from that conference was as part of the format, they have these 15 minute talks in between the longer talks, and I think you did a 15 minute talk on your allergy protocol. I basically realized like all the best stuff gets done in 15 minutes or in an hour. So you might as well just give everyone 15 minutes. That was sort of like the beginning of the forum. So you had quite an impact on me.
Darin Ingles, ND: Oh, well that’s good to know.
James Maskell:  So really excited to have you back on the forum and to talk about Lyme disease because it was actually our fifth Functional Forum in June 2014 that we did a forum on lime disease. We had a number of different speakers talking about different things. So you have a new book out and I just wanted to … You live in Connecticut so you’re right in the heart of the action there. So I know that previously I know you’re well known for working with kids on the spectrum and you’re also helping a unique allergy protocol. What sort of lead you down the direction in writing the Lyme book and sharing your knowledge here?
Darin Ingles, ND: Well, back in 2002, about three weeks before I opened by own practice, I got infected with Lyme disease. So nothing like a little personal experience to give you a pretty quick education on how to deal with the problem. So I went down a very conventional treatment path of antibiotics and after a handful of days, I actually felt pretty well. But being in a new business, I was the doctor, the bookkeeper, the receptionist, really doing everything, and working 12, 14 hour days. So after about eight months of doing that, I started to get symptoms again. It was in the dead of winter time so I was pretty sure it wasn’t a new infection. But I went back on conventional treatment and it wasn’t helping. I changed treatments, it didn’t help. I really went through about eight or almost nine months various antibiotic therapies that actually left me worse and worse.
So I kind of went back to my naturopathic roots, and started working with a doctor in New York City who was treating me with Chinese herbs and acupuncture. That really pulled me out of the weeds. So that was really kind of the beginning of realizing that there’s a different way to approach Lyme disease and for me I had to find something outside of the conventional standards to really start to feel well. From there it was really a three year journey of getting my health back. Really doing various things that I kind of outlined in the book.
So the book really stemmed from my own experience as being a patient, and now having treated thousands of live patients, I’ve been able to draw on that experience as well and finding out what I think works well for people that really supports the body, supports the immune system, helps the tissue heal itself. In naturopathic medicine, we kind of recognize that we’re built with this innate wisdom to heal. We just need to give the body the tools it needs to do that. So I really tried to develop a program that I think works with them, the aspect of naturopathic medicine, and is working with the body instead of against it.
James Maskell:  Yeah. Absolutely. I really appreciate you sharing that because we had a similar experience in my family where my wife was bit. I think it was summer of 2009. Between the early antibiotics and then clearing out some stuff with herbs and the building up the immune system with the microbiome and then specific herbs and some herbal toxicology stuff. We were able to get her to a point where she’s never had any other symptoms. I’m quite proud of that because that’s not a typical story. Lyme is not typical. That was when we lived in Connecticut too. But Lyme is everywhere now. I know that you fly out to California and you treat patients out in Orange County too. This is now a country-wide phenomenon, right?
Darin Ingles, ND: Yeah. It’s always been kind of condition that we’ve pegged as being a New England/Central Midwest problem, but what we’re finding is that it really is epidemic in North America and really throughout the world. Western Europe has become endemic. Asia’s becoming endemic. So even the state of California, if you look at the numbers, even over the last decade, you’ll see there’s been a significant increase in the number of reported Lyme cases. I think what ends up happening in states where Lyme isn’t considered epidemic, doctors just aren’t looking for it. If you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. So I’ve sort of been on a mission to start educating other practitioners that are in areas that aren’t necessarily Lyme endemic areas to keep their eyes peeled when you got these patients. They have these chronic, long term nagging symptoms and you’ve done every other test under the sun and nothing really shows up positive. It’s probably something that should be on people’s radar.
James Maskell:  Yeah. I’d love to just talk about the difference. It seems like there’s … I was in this world a lot. When I was in the supplement world, the supplement company that I worked with, we had a really interesting Lyme protocol. So we were working with some of the top people in the country. People like Kristine Gedroic. People like Anne Colson. There’s a good crew up there that were using the products. So I was sort of in this world. It seems like for the average MD, who understands there’s sort of like a three phase thing. First of all, you don’t really know anything about it and you think of it as an acute infection. You don’t think there could be any chronic kind of thing. Then you realize Lyme is a thing and you realize, “Oh, maybe I do need to take antibiotics for longer. Maybe there are cases where people take …” That’s what they call like the Lyme literate MD, right?
Darin Ingles, ND: Right.
James Maskell:  Then there’s another level when you realize, “Oh, actually there’s a downside to long term antibiotics and actually we have to repair the body.” Then you start looking outside of the box into nutrition and lifestyle and sort of more naturopathic interventions. I think you end up coming to a point most of the physicians that I saw that were super, super competent realized there’s value in all those tools, and end up just having to sort of apply them uniquely depending on sort of basic the individual terrain of the individual. Am I getting that about right?
Darin Ingles, ND: Absolutely. I’ve come to the same conclusions that the terrain is really the key. I think for most people who’ve been diagnosed what we call either chronic Lyme or post Lyme syndrome that the infection has evolved to something that’s more than just an infection. I think there’s pretty good evidence in the literature that it really mutates into sort of this autoimmune problem. So I think when you’re dealing with chronic Lyme especially if you’re only focused on treating the infection, you’re going to miss a big part of what’s going on in supporting that terrain to help overcome autoimmunity. Again, there’s some pretty good evidence that there’s specific proteins in the brain, they get targeted when you’re been infected with Lyme.
So everything has its place and it’s really just meeting the patient at where they’re at. I think depending on what stage … I mean, look, if someone comes in and they’re acutely ill with Lyme disease, please take antibiotics. Again, good evidence it works. I, myself, benefited. Fortunately, I think as everything else going on in my life at the time, my circumstances were such that my body wasn’t being supported after the antibiotics. I think if there are things you can do to support people when they’re on antibiotics, you can prevent that kind of thing from happening. But I see so many people who have been antibiotics for years and years and years. It really had no benefit at all. I do worry about what it’s done to their terrain. What has it done to their gut microbiom? What has it done to their pH balance, and all those things will more than likely have an impact on their health.
James Maskell:  Well, I think we can all know exactly what it’s done to that gut microbiom. But it’s not good. Yeah, well, look, that’s a really interesting point. I was interested to see that you had on the title of the page, on the front page the book, you mention the inflammatory response, you mentioned sort of the autoimmunity piece. I saw that Amy Meyers wrote the forward. It seems like Mark Menolascino when he came on to speak about Lyme on the Functional Forum definitely talked about, “Look, this is not just a single infection approach. This is not really an infectious at that point. When you’re treating people who have been through the mill, you’re really treating them as sort of a really poor terrain, sort of functional medicine case,” right? Building up the terrain and building up the systems, building up the function of the gut and so forth. We used to have a strategy that was really focused on building up back the function and then sort of retargeting at the chronic infection. It seems as though that yeah, there’s more in common with almost like the autoimmune, functional medicine protocol than say like an infectious disease protocol at that point.
Darin Ingles, ND: Exactly. That’s what’s happening. I kind of laugh and I saw Susan Blum this weekend at IHS and we were kind of laughing. She just wrote a book called Healing Arthritis, which is fantastic, and Amy Meyers two books, one on autoimmunity and one on thyroid. We’re all kind of writing the same book from a different perspective, but I think the underlying fundamental issues that we’re trying to address are really the same. We’re talking about what kind of foods should you be eating to help reduce inflammation. What kind of nutrients can we use to support tissue repair? What can we do to help remove toxins, mycotoxins, mold and so far from the environment? So I think we are all understanding that any of these chronic illnesses at some level become this fundamental terrain problem, and what are all the different steps that we need to do from a functional medicine standpoint or a naturopathic standpoint to really help the body recover and heal?
So at the end of the day, I think for anyone who’s been dealing with really any kind of chronic infection. Whether its chronic strep, chronic Lyme, chronic Epstein-Barr, at some point the infection becomes a smaller part of that pie, and it really is trying to address all these other pieces that are effecting the way that that organisms interacting with the body.
James Maskell:  Absolutely. So yeah, also on the front of the book, you call it a ‘five step plan’ so I don’t want to … It’s not a spoiler alerts on the podcast, but ultimately you have a lot of people here who are sort of either dealing with chronic disease in their practices. One of the reason I wanted to have you on is being like almost four years since we had Lyme related content on the Functional Form, I know a lot of practitioners are dealing with it. Why don’t we just jump into sort of the Ingels method here?
Darin Ingles, ND: Sure. The first step of the plan is sort of naturopathic medicine 101, and that’s how do we heal the gut? Anyone whose been in practice for more than 10 minutes does learn at some point that the gut is the foundation of the immune system. About 80% of our immune function comes from the gut. So any type of gastrointestinal disturbance ultimately affect how the gut functions. So it’s really looking at everything that we know impacts the microbio gut health. So I think starting that fundamental, how do we repair the gastrointestinal tract, how do we help reduce inflammation, and so I talk about in my book very specific nutrients that can help facilitate that, whether it’s using probiotics to help balance the gut ecology, whether it’s using an amino acid like glutamine to help with small intestinal repair, whether it’s a function using digestive enzymes to help break down your food or something even like Resveratrol that can have some healing effects on the gut. It’s really just the function of using these things to make sure that we’re not getting what we call leaky gut that’s going to help facilitate more inflammation. So that’s the first step.
James Maskell:  Yeah, well, that’s a critical first step. You’ll see no argument from that across the practitioner community. So what’s the second step?
Darin Ingles, ND: So step two is looking at diet. It’s interesting. I think if you talk with different naturopathic and functional medicine practitioners, we all have our own take on what diet we think is best. Having worked with a lot of Lyme patients and myself, I found the diet that seems to work best for most people is really what’s an alkaline diet. It’s kind of interesting, an alkaline diet’s been talked about at least in the natural medicine world for decades. Yet, when I was writing the book, I was surprised to find that there’s actually been very little research on an alkaline diet. However, the studies that have been published have all been very favorable.
If you look at how the body functions at a sterile level with the exception of the stomach, the bladder, and for women the vaginal area that tends to be very acidic, the rest of our body actually functions best at an alkaline pH. When I talk about this, people sometimes give me this cross eyed look and they think I’m talking about blood pH. This will have absolutely no bearing on your blood pH. Blood pH is very tightly regulated. If it deviates too high or too low, you’re dead. So this isn’t about changing blood pH. This is really more we’re talking about tissue pH. So what that really means is about eating foods that help change the pH at your sterol level, and it’s not about the pH of the food. I think some people don’t understand that.
So for an example, lemons themselves are very acidic, but when you drink lemon juice, it actually has an alkaline forming effect on your body. So what we’re really trying to promote is getting people to start eating foods that are going to start changing their cellular pH, and in a nut shell what that encompasses is it’s mostly a vegetarian diet. I think where this deviates a bit from the Paleo diet is the Paleo probably tends to be a little bit higher in animal protein. So on an alkaline diet we try and keep your animal protein down to about less than 20% of your total dietary intake. Then of course we remove any pro-inflammatory food, which is junk food, processed food, candy, things of that nature. It also includes removing gluten and dairy from the diet. The one is a good stickler from most of my Lyme patients and they hate me for it is coffee. I love coffee, but I found when I would drink coffee, my neuropathy would flare up in a matter of minutes. So I really encourage Lyme patients to starting weening themselves off coffee.
James Maskell:  Well, look, obviously the pain of Lyme disease, I know from being in my family, is much greater than the pain of not having coffee. So you’re probably going to get a pretty compliant population, right?
Darin Ingles, ND:  Yeah. If you’ve been a heavy coffee drinker for most of your life, you can’t just up and quit it without getting a monster headache. So we do work on weening people off slowly like any other drug, but most people find that they can substitute with green tea or herbal tea and that sort of fits the bill. So it’s a healthier option for you anyway, and most people can handle it.
James Maskell:  How do you deal with people who are going to be starting to go onto this protocol who are working with a doctor whose sort of not in okay with this? I mean, I want to get through the other three areas, but now you’re sort of your taking things off things that doctors, regular doctors not going to know anything about coming off coffee. I mean, this is just your experience from doing this and obviously it’s super valuable. But do you have ways to sort of have a conversation with your regular doctor included in the book because ultimately we’re going a little bit off pieced here, right?
Darin Ingles, ND: Yeah. Well, the book itself is really written for Lyme patients. So everything you need to do is spelled out. I even give you a two week meal plan to get started on everything you can buy and cook and prepare. I actually do have some tips in the book on how to make these changes. Really it’s about making it slowly, do it in a way that works for you. Don’t feel like you have to do all of this overnight because in reality that’s not going to work for most people. Look, I think if you’re working with a conventional doctor who knows very little about nutrition, you’re probably no going to get a lot of support from them. If you’re working with a naturopathic or functional medicine doctor, you’ll get a lot of support. Most of those practitioners have some familiarity with an alkaline diet, so that won’t be a terribly difficult. But I think if you’re working with a conventional doctor who really doesn’t know much about diet or nutrition, you’re probably going to feel like you’re on your own with it.
One of the things that we’ve created as part of this total plan is that we do have an online forum that people can come and share recipes and share ideas. Plus, I have a couple of nutritionists I work with that can even do one on one meal planning for people who need assistance and making that transition.
James Maskell:  Awesome. Yeah, I mean, ultimately people who are dealing with these kinds of issues, we’ll get back into the numbers, but I know it jumped from they thought there was 30,000 and then they realized there was 300,000 and most people in the space probably think there’s more like three million, right? It’s like another 10x. So you kind of have had to go at it alone, but I can see how working with this kind of book in association with maybe a functional medicine doctor locally or someone who can help to implement it, might be a good solution while we’re still building the army of practitioners.
Look, I don’t want to stop you at two. Let’s go into number three.
Darin Ingles, ND: Yeah, so number three is now starting to target the infection. So whether you’re in the acute phase or in the chronic persistent phase, I think there’s a lot of really great therapies out there that can help bring the load of that organism down. I think the question comes up, do we ever completely eradicate Lyme from the body? My personal opinion is I don’t think we do. I just seen plenty of patients including myself that have relapses, recurrences often when the immune system’s under duress. So I’m not sure we ever completely get rid of it, but I certainly think we can get to a point where we live with it, it lives with us, and we don’t bother each other. We know you can get chicken pox as a five year old and then get shingle as a 55 year old. It’s the same virus that’s been in your body for 50 years. Usually shingles will come out when, again, the immune systems not functioning well.
I have sort of outlined in the book on different herbal therapies that you can do to target the infection. I like the herbal therapies just because I think they’re very effective at treating Lyme with less side effects than often you’ll get through antibiotics. Again, I want to reiterate, I’m not against antibiotics in certain cases. They certainly have their place, but again, my own experience plus that of many others I’ve treated is such that you get to a point where the antibiotics aren’t quite doing the job. I think the big difference is that antibiotics really only target killing the bug. One of the things you’ll find with a lot of the herbs is in addition to killing the bug, they do a lot of other beneficial things in the body, like reduce inflammation, improve circulation. Some of them have analgesic effects or painkilling effects. So we’re certainly getting a lot more out of whole plant material than sometimes we’re getting through concentrated antibiotics.
So if you go out there in the internet and read about different herbal protocols, there are probably seven or eight of them I can rattle off of the top of my head. I won’t go through because it’s a lot of time, but I’ll just sort of highlight the to that I talk about in the book the most. The two I use the most is I use a variation of Dr. Calvin’s protocol. Dr. Lee Calvin was a cardiologist in Dallas. He’s retired I believe at this point, but he started working with a group of herbs that all came from the Amazon and South America. What’s kind of interesting is there’s a researcher at the University of New Haven, Dr. Eva Sappy, who herself actually had Lyme disease, and she started studying these herbs and found that these herbs actually work better than antibiotics. So I hear the argument sometimes, “Gosh, herbs just aren’t very effective. They’re not very powerful.” Her research has actually shown that’s quite the opposite.
James Maskell:  One of the things I think about, Darin, is the all naturopathic principle, which is looking at the therapeutic order. So although let’s say antibiotics can be more effective in a very short period of time for a very specific thing, if you’re looking for someone to be on for something for a period of time, you’re looking for something that has a greater mechanism of action than just one thing, then over time will out perform because the downside of the antibiotic catches up with you very quickly on the plus side of the very short term, whereas the herb, because it has more broad effect, can be used for longer periods of time and has more of a sort of a systemic effect. Ultimately, when you’re looking at chronic disease, you want to have a systemic effect.
Darin Ingles, ND: Absolutely. The other protocol I’ve used a lot is Dr. John. He’s an acupuncturist in New York City. He’s a medical doctor by training in China but he works as an acupuncturist in New York City. He’s who I saw after I had Lyme and had been on antibiotics for eight or nine months. He has a series of Chinese herbal formulas, and in Chinese medicine, if you’re not familiar, they never use herbs by themselves. They’re always used as formulas. So the combination of formulas that he put together, many of them are based on traditional Chinese medicine formulas that he’s tweaked a little bit based on the understanding of what these herbs do chemically.
So I think he calls it modern Chinese medicine, but I found that his protocol I think cast the widest net on all the different things that Lyme can do to the body. So again, it helps improve circulation, reduce inflammation, reduce the formation of immune complexing, which can create autoimmunity. It really just has a broad type of activity. So I’ve probably used his protocol more than anybody else’s, but I talk about Steven Brunner’s protocol. He’s a very well known herbalist, and his protocol works very well. I talk about Byron White and Beyond Balance. So there’s a few other herbal protocols out there that, again, sometimes work better for one person over another. So if someone started down one path and they don’t feel like they’re getting the results they desire, then there’s no harm in switching to a different protocol, and again, sometimes people just do better with one over another.
But the ultimate goal, as you just mentioned, is to try and catch the broadest space of dealing with the infection, keeping this organism at bay, but at the same time still supporting the body and its healing process.
James Maskell:  Beautiful. Yeah, I love that. All right. Let’s finish off the protocol because I like where this is going and it seems obviously in seven years as a supplement guy, I would see a lot of different people, and obviously you’ve got some strong fundamentals. I’m interested to see where this is going to go in the last two phases.
Darin Ingles, ND: Well, step four is really about cleaning up the environment. So this is about getting rid of all the things, our toxins, our toxicants that undermine your immune system. So this is going through your household, getting rid of any cleaning chemicals, personal care products that potentially can be damaging to your immune system, and I think the one piece in there I probably talk most about is mold. Certainly living up here in the northeast where mold is epidemic and everyone has exposure. Both mold allergy and mycotoxicity, which are specific toxins that are excreted by some mold species, all that can be very damaging.
What’s really interesting about mold is that the symptoms of mold toxicity almost look identical to Lyme disease. So I think those of us who have been in the Lyme world for a while will recognize that our mold patients and our Lyme patients look pretty similar and most people with Lyme also have mold issues. So often you’re treating both problems concurrently. But making sure that you’ve got an environment that’s clean and safe is really paramount into getting well because you might think it’s just Lyme. You come to find out that they’ve got water damage in their home or their office. You can treat Lyme til the cows come home and it’s not going to really get you to your desired result because you still have this underlying mold issue that hasn’t been addressed. So it’s really important that people take stock of what they’re putting on their skin, putting in their mouth, putting on their hair, all of that potentially has an impact on their immune system.
So we worked very closely and I outlined it again in the book to get people very specific guidance on how they can make their environment safer.
James Maskell:  Ultimately yeah. Yeah. You see that a lot of people … One of the things I always see is like you can have someone who got bit by a tick and didn’t get the symptoms of Lyme, and you have someone who had never been bitten but gets Lyme and ultimately there has to be some other factor that’s going on. A lot of times it was like this terrain and the toxicants that were playing a key role. Is that something you’ve noticed?
Darin Ingles, ND:  Yeah. Exactly. In fact, I just saw a child that came in this morning that definitely got bit by a tick. The parents pulled him off. He’s a three year old boy, and the tick tested positive. We did his blood test. His test shows antibodies so we know he had exposure to it. But he’s never developed a single symptom, but I think the rest of his terrain … Again, he was a very healthy child going into this tick bite. They did actually treat him on very short term antibiotics as a precaution. It’s now been three months since then and he’s had no symptoms. So we’re going to be very conservative with him and watch and wait. But again, I think if the body and the terrain are in a good working space prior to that tick bite, there’s a good chance their immune system will do what we want it to do and eradicate the infection before it ever goes deeper into the body and becomes more problematic.
James Maskell:  Awesome. Love it. Okay. Cool. So what’s step five?
Darin Ingles, ND:  So step five is all these other things in your life that impact your immune system. So this is where we talk about getting good quality sleep, getting your body moving, and how do you mange your stress. I think we really underestimate the impact of these other lifestyle factors because they really play a huge role in our immune system. So most people is see with Lyme, they don’t sleep very well so we’re trying to encourage them to get better, deeper, quality sleep. So again, I outline very specific nutrients to help facilitate deeper sleep. We talk about various exercise regimes that you can do with people. Even if they are feeling bad, they got joint pain, they’ve got muscle aches, even something as simple a stretching is something that most people can do even when they don’t have a ton of energy.
Then we also talk about stress management, having a chronic illness, it’s very stressful. It’s stressful for you. it’s stressful for your partner. It’s stressful for your caretaker. It’s stressful for your family. So I think it’s good to engage other people. Whether it’s like a group therapy, individual therapy, or just having an outlet that you can help manage that stress becomes critically important for allowing both your physical body and your mind to heal. So kind of putting all that together, that lifestyle management, that’s sort of that final pillar of helping the body get over Lyme.
James Maskell:  So it sounds like this is, like you said, pillar there. So it sounds like these are the five pillars of treatment rather than necessarily like an order.
Darin Ingles, ND:  Yeah. It sounds like we do kind of one after another. Certainly it’s step up that was really just for ease, but in clinical practice, we’re kind of doing all of them at the same time because all of these things are in some way, shape and form having an impact on someone’s immune system, their health, and if you kind of just did one at a time, it’s just a slower process to kind of get the body to recover. So in clinical practice, no, we’re really kind of doing this all at the same time.
James Maskell:  Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it looks like, if I’m just seeing it right, some of those areas, like you talk about the delivery of this kind of care at scale. Certainly that last pillar, the last two pillars, right? Helping people to optimize their exposures and then the lifestyle stuff. I mean, ultimately you can see that it doesn’t need to be a doctor to do that, right? That could be just a health coach helping you to implement the recommendations of the doctor. So it just seems like that’s pretty management, and that’s why we’ve seen the clinics that have a nutritionist and a naturopath or a doctor, naturopath, nutritionist, health coach like combinations of those kind of practitioners can really start to deliver this in an effective way because ultimately the functional medicine doctor or the well trained naturopathic doctor who understands root cause resolution is in pretty high demand. So finding ways to be able to sort of use other providers to take care of their specific areas is going to end up in a way that you can be delivering these kind of protocols in an efficient, cost effective way in your practice.
Darin Ingles, ND: Well, exactly. I wrote this book very specifically for patients. Again, I wanted someone to have … What I didn’t see at the time and I think now it’s changed a little bit, but was really a step by step guide that people with Lyme could follow. There’s just so many people out there that are doing this on their own. Perhaps they live in an area where they don’t have a good functional medicine doctor or they’re getting a lot of resistance from their primary care physician. So I really wanted this to be something you could just pick up everything, dosing, timing is done. There’s really only one chapter in this book where you need a practitioner. These are practitioner guided therapies. If you’re really starting to get stuck, but I want this to be something that anybody can really pick up and do it on their own.
Plus, I think there’s something to be said for being self empowered in taking stock in your own health. You’re not just relying on your practitioner to get well. This is something anybody who’s got the motivation can do on their own. Everything in here is something that’s accessible no matter really where you live in the country. If you’ve got a doctor whose not really knowledgeable, you can always bring him a copy of the book. They can read it and it’s something they can very easily follow and certainly help guide people along the way.
James Maskell:  Beautiful. Look, I love it. Look, I’m really glad to take this time and to get it out there. When is the book out, Darin?
Darin Ingles, ND:  So the book will be released on March 27th. So it’s available now on pre-order through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, any of your favorite book retailers. But March 27th will be the official date that they start shipping it out.
James Maskell:  That’s great. Well, look, lots of great, great information here. I just want to come back to one thing you said that I think is really, really important is that the people who are doing autoimmune disease, the people doing Lyme disease, people doing arthritis, it’s ultimately the same thing. That’s one of the things that I really think is so important for our community to understand is that we are capable of delivering better outcomes at lower cost for a range of chronic diseases and it might be called Lyme, it might be called fibromyalgia, it might be called arthritis or otherwise, but we’re dealing with like these chronic, autoimmune, inflammatory type diseases, and ultimately there’s no solution for those in the marketplace.
I met with an employer just a couple weeks ago with 16,000 people and they don’t have any plan. They’re running their thing. They don’t have any … No one’s ever told them that there’s any other plan for their super high claimant disease people in their pool apart from just take these drugs forever. That’s like a serious cost burden on the company. It’s horrible for the patient, and ultimately what I’ve seen in my world is that people can recover if you can get the right underlying fundamentals. I think what you’re saying here, Darin, is you see those people all the time too. Ultimately, I just want our community to gain some confidence from the fact that many, many issues that are facing humanity as these real problems and chronic disease are ultimately very solvable by our community, but it does take understanding the root cause resolution. It does take making sure that there’s someone in the practice that can execute on the dietary changes and on the lifestyle delivery. Ultimately, I think we can really make an impact.
So I appreciate you sharing that because I think that’s a really important point.
Darin Ingles, ND: Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure.
James Maskell:  So check out The Lyme Solution in stores. It’s available on Amazon. Thank you, Dr. Darin Ingels. If you want to find out more about his work, you can check out the website in the show notes. Check out the book. Get it into your practice. Get it as part as the lending library. When a patient comes in, if they read this book, they’re going to know that they’re in the right place in your practice because you, as a practitioner and functional integrated medicine, have all the resources available to do the root cause resolution stuff that they’re recommending but ultimately, they can get. If someone who gets Lyme read this book, they’re not going to have to go through three years of like ongoing antibiotic hell only to have to be brought back from the brink by a talented practitioner. We can hopefully … We can stop some unnecessary suffering in the mean time.
So thanks so much, Dr. Ingels, for being part of the podcast. This is The Evolution of Medicine podcast. I’m your host James Maskell, and we’ll see you next time.
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