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Linda Elsegood: Thank you for joining us today, Dr Saleeby.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: It's very good to be here, Linda.
Linda Elsegood: Wonderful. I wonder if you could tell us first of all, about yourself and how you got interested in medicine.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, that started at a very young age, while I was living in Beirut Lebanon. I was very close to the AUB hospital. My father worked for a pharmaceutical company, so I always had an interest in medicine and science. And then I had a very pivotal moment in high school with a fantastic biology botany teacher who got me really ramped up about the sciences and about biochemistry and botany and biology.
And all through high school and undergraduate I always had my eyes on medicine. At the time I was in Atlanta, Georgia and went to premed at Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, then onto medical school in Augusta, and I did my postgraduate training up in North Carolina and then kind of settled into the Southeast, covering the Carolinas and Georgia. Mostly the first part of my career was in emergency medicine. So I had a very traditional conventional medicine career as an ER doctor.
Linda Elsegood: Okay. So how did you get involved in therapies such as LDN?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, in my 20 plus years in the emergency room, I saw on a daily basis, the ravages of chronic disease, a lot of which I perceived as being completely preventable. And so during my last 16 years in the emergency room, I sort of developed a curriculum to learn about what I could possibly do for patients before they reach that end-stage of chronic disease, whether it's cancer, congestive heart failure, autoimmune diseases.
It was terrible. It was depressing seeing these folks come into the emergency room. So for 16 years, I developed a curriculum where I looked at other options outside of allopathic medicine, in the integrative field and functional medicine. So I kind of built on that, with members of different organizations and going to different conferences, I kind of developed a passion for functional and integrative medicine. And that's what I've totally dedicated the latter part of my career to. I retired from emergency medicine five years ago, and I do strictly functional medicine now.
Linda Elsegood: And how long would you say you've been prescribing LDN?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, I've read about it peripherally, heard of it in some of the conferences I attended, but nothing until about three or four years ago, when a patient of mine who was suffering from Hashimoto's brought it to my attention and passed along a big stack of papers that she acquired doing research online.
So I've also learned from my patients. I'm never afraid to learn information from my patients. So I decided this was interesting enough for me to go after and learn more about it. A good friend of mine a couple of years ago - he's a PharmD, a pharmacist, and does some research in North Carolina. I attended last year's conference in Orlando and came back with a wealth of information, and he was very excited. So that actually ramped up my prescribing. I dabbled in it for a couple of years, but then as about a year ago I started writing heavily for LDN and implementing it in some of the programs and protocols that I have established for my patients, especially with Lyme disease.
Linda Elsegood: And you were telling us before we came on air, where you practice from, and you're going to have a new centre soon. Would you like to tell us about that?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Sure. So my first centre - I'm kind of headquartered in a little coastal town just North of Charleston, South Carolina - it’s called Murrells Inlet, and we opened up a second satellite office in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. That was about two years ago. And last year we opened a small satellite office in Charleston, South Carolina, a little area called Mt Pleasant.
I was approached by another holistic provider and also a licensed acupuncturist and TCN specialist about a year ago about collaborating on an effort in Savannah, Georgia. So I'm happy to announce that in March of this year we'll open up another office in collaboration with another integrative healer for functional medicine practice.
Linda Elsegood: Could you tell me what's the satellite centre?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, we say satellite office - it's a smaller office, kind of a micro office. We don't have a large space nor do we have a large number of staff. It's actually a very personalized one-on-one, and it allows us to actually go to where the needs are. I find that with my practice I was getting referrals from all over the Carolinas because I'm one of the very few practitioners in ILADS members. So I had to kind of position myself to where a lot of patients were coming from, to make it more convenient for them.
Linda Elsegood: Talking about Lyme disease, how many Lyme disease patients do you think you've seen in the last five years? Has the number increased?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Hundreds. I think because it's been over-politicized and it's very difficult to make a diagnosis, I think there's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about Lyme disease. And I think a lot of people just don't get diagnosed.
The CDC is saying within the last two years that the numbers are around 300,000 new cases in America alone. That was up from about 30,000 prior to 2013. So there's obviously some issues with their counting new cases, but ILADS estimates that there's anywhere between 800,000 to a million new cases of Lyme disease each year in America. Worldwide it’s much higher. That's pretty significant.
So now with more recognition, there are the folks wearing green ribbons for Lyme awareness, there are people marching on Washington and Capitol Hill, and lobbyists trying to fix the wrongs that have been for so long with regards to diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. There's not even an ICD-10 code, which is a coding system we use to record a diagnosis for submitting claims to insurance companies. There's not even one for chronic Lyme disease. It's really quite a shame. And a lot of people have suffered for protracted periods of time.
But with all this Lyme awareness, the floodgates have opened, and it's less politicized. The medical boards historically have gone after doctors who have practised on the fringe if you will, and taken on these patients, and have been reprimanded by medical boards. It still happens a little bit, but that's going away too. So now doctors are less fearful of losing their license and are able to treat and practice and take care of Lyme patients.
So to answer your question, hundreds and probably if it's exponential now. Three years ago, I'd get one or two patients a month. This week I've made three diagnoses of new cases of Lyme just this week.
Linda Elsegood: Goodness. I know it's very tricky to get diagnosed. There are people that are telling us regularly. We have many, many, many members with Lyme disease, but they had such a hard time getting the diagnosis. If anyone is listening and they suspect they've got Lyme disease, how do they get a diagnosis? Who do they go to? Who do they turn to?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Some resources, at least in the United States, and I know internationally, there are other resources, but in the United States, one of the premier organizations that advocates for Lyme awareness and also does some training to train doctors to be what they refer to with LLMD, which means Lyme literate medical doctors, doctors who are familiar with the caveats and the intricacies and the limitations of our testing. And can actually make a correct diagnosis. And then after that, correctly treat people, to put them in remission. I don't know that you can actually say there's a cure for Lyme disease if it's caught in the chronic stages, but you can certainly put it in remission so that people can regain a fairly normal life.
There are some that have flare-ups from time to time. So the organization that offers a lot of information and good information that's evidence-based and that's reputable, is an organization called ILADS. ILADS.org would be the website. And if you go to that website, there are the sections for some videos for patients to watch and there are videos by Dr Horowitz, a prominent doctor in the field of Lyme treatment. There's also a video by Dr. Shor, who's the new incoming president of the organization. And there are some other video documentaries. Under Our Skin is a documentary that was filmed about 10 or 12 years ago. And that's a very good immersion for the average person to get a little exposure to what is involved with Lyme disease.
Linda Elsegood: How do you go about diagnosing somebody with Lyme disease?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, it's a little tricky. There are no good direct tests for Lyme. It's difficult or impossible to culture out. So historically the Center for Disease Control has set up a one-two punch, if you will, on diagnosing. They used the Elisa test followed by a confirmatory Western Blot for a line for borrelia. However, that works great for the diagnosis and confirmation of HIV infections, but really falters when we talk about hunting down and detecting the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. The Elisa I don't even do in my practice. It is a worthless test. The Western Blot can miss up to 50 or 52% of positive cases. So we rely on other more sophisticated Western Blot technology tests that look at different bands in different species, not just one single species of borrelia. It's estimated there are about a hundred.
And then there are other surrogate markers that we look at. Usually, if it's a chronic case of Lyme, people have immune dysfunction or a weakened immune system, and we can look at a particular type of T-cell or lymphocyte called a CD57. The CD57 test is a marker for the health and wellbeing of your T lymphocyte cells, and I use that in my practice to kind of help make the diagnosis, along with monitoring the therapy. So every three months or so we'll draw another, and hopefully, we see that number rising. The normal range is between 30 and about 300 for most reference labs. And I have seen patients coming in with numbers well under a 60. This week I had a patient with a level of 19 who was severely impaired and debilitated. So that is one tool we use.
There is a relatively new test, that's a direct test called the Nanotrap LA - LA for line antigen. That's a direct test. In other words, it measures directly the antigens, which is independent of your body's ability to produce antibodies, which is where the Western blot falls short. So the Nanotrap LA iS a relatively new test, and it takes two large samples of urine to run. And I've had some success with ironing out a diagnosis based on this new test.
I also use the Horwitz questionnaire. Dr Horowitz developed a fairly lengthy questionnaire that is a good diagnostic tool. An analogy would be the diagnosis of a headache. So you can have a normal spinal tap. You can have a normal CT or MRI, but a person still has a headache, even though there's no physical finding or test other than their subjective complaint. So in a way, a diagnosis of Lyme disease can sometimes be a kind of a subjective clinical diagnosis that confounds the testing for it. So the Horwitz questionnaire is something I use in my clinic all the time, along with some symptom scores, like the SSS-8 symptom questionnaire, and the FACIT questionnaire, which is for fatigue. So it gives me a way to quantify and put a number on their complaints. Instead of somebody saying they’re just tired or fatigued, I can put a number and then watch that number improve or not based on our therapies.
Linda Elsegood: How does one catch Lyme disease?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, historically Lyme, of course, was named after the town in Connecticut where it was supposedly first discovered by a concerned mother who prompted the local health department to get the CDC to come up and figure out what was making all the kids in the neighbourhood sick. So it was named after the town. It was associated with a deer kick. We know now that there are other ways besides getting bitten by a deer tick that can transmit Lyme. There are researchers in Europe, the Netherlands in particular, who believe that the flea and the mosquito might also transmit Lyme.
And there are co-infections too, like the Babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia - there are about a dozen or so other co-infections that the tick can actually carry, so one bite from a tick can actually infect people with more than just one infectious organism.
The other ways you can get Lyme is congenitally through the placenta. We do know, and it's been confirmed, that Lyme disease can cross the placenta and you get a newborn who can have Lyme disease because mother had it. And also we're finding out that very likely it is sexually transmitted. So you have partners who are sexually active who can actually transmit that spirochete from one to the other.
Again, there's a lot of research going on, mostly in Europe. Our research dollar is not very strong here in the United States because of the politics behind the diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease. And that's very unfortunate. So the researchers in Germany and the Netherlands have sort of taken it to the forefront of a lot of really good research.
Linda Elsegood: Well, we will just have a quick break, and then we'll come back, and we'll discuss this further. To listen to individual radio shows and interviews, go to www.Mixcloud.com/LDNRT. Today's show sponsor is CareFirst Speciality Pharmacy. They are leading compounders of LDN and other custom treatments, servicing patients in over 18 states, coast to coast. They're widely accredited to provide you with the highest quality demanded by the industry, and the expert service you expect. To learn more, call (844) 822-7379, or visit www.cfspharmacy.pharmacy. Thank you.
Welcome back. It's very interesting talking about Lyme disease, and I know many people will find this very interesting. You talked about it being sexually transmitted. If you think that you've caught Lyme disease from your partner, what is the first thing you should do?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, first of all, Lyme disease infection is the chameleon of infectious diseases. In the 17th, 18th century it may have been syphilis - in other words, it had different manifestations. And then I think the baton was probably passed to HIV.
So with HIV/AIDS patients, you had a plethora of symptomatology and presentations. And I would say today that baton has again been passed to Lyme disease. So Lyme disease can affect many, many things. It can affect the skin; you have dermatological manifestations. It can affect the heart - I actually lost a patient in the ER about 15 years ago, and that's what really sparked my interest in Lyme disease. She had a bullseye lesion, and she had complete heart block and died two days after she presented to the emergency room. I always remember that case in particular. The other manifestations are neuropsychiatric, and that's a big one because a lot of people when they get infected with the Borrelia species, will instantly have that organism burrow into their neural tissue, so they present with things like MS - Multiple Sclerosis, with plaquing around their brains and spinal cord. They will present with ALS type symptoms or Parkinson like symptoms or severe depression or bipolar or even schizophrenia. And unfortunately, years can go by before the correct diagnosis is made, and these poor souls will get put on all kinds of psychotropic medications, which often don't work.
They kind of maybe mask the symptoms, or are very minimally effective until such time as they're diagnosed with Lyme; and then the appropriate therapies are rendered and then their situation improves, the plaques go away. So their MS improves and their gait comes back, or their vision comes back. They stop acting crazy. The schizophrenia seems to just melt away, and they come off of their typical poly-pharmacy where they present on multiple medications - that can go away too. Once we get their Lyme disease in remission their symptoms clear up, we can pull them off of all their antipsychotic medication and antidepressants. So when one suspects it based on a plethora of weird symptoms that haven't been diagnosed, where conventional doctors can't come up with a reason for it, it's time to get checked out.
Linda Elsegood: I know after speaking to many patients with Lyme disease, there seems to be a wide range of treatments available. What do you normally have as a protocol, or does it vary from patient to patient?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, I believe in very personalized healthcare. So almost every one of my Lyme patients doesn't get a cookie-cutter sort of prescription. I do align myself with the ILADS protocols and some that have been developed by Dr Horowitz and others, although I also embrace some protocols developed by Dr Cowden and Dr Buner, which utilize less of high potency antibiotics, synthetics, and more into some natural anti-microbial and immune-enhancing herbals and supplements.
And that's the big thing - immune enhancement. So all the heavy lifting that the body does to fight an infection, whether it's Lyme disease or anything else, is done by our immune system, our innate and humoral immune system. 90% of it is done by a healthy immune system. The additional five or 10% can be done and accomplished by antibiotics or herbals.
So my sort of philosophy as a functional medicine doctor is to get the immune system back in its optimum health so that it can be healthy enough to fight off and suppress the Borrelia microbes. That is not necessarily the philosophy of conventional doctors who like to blast away with high doses of antibiotics for protracted periods of time, leading to other issues like dysbiosis and overgrowth in the gut microbiome and things like that.
So LDN has found its way into my practice as an adjunct therapy for many of my Lyme patients, because I know it bolsters the immune system. I don't know how many of the people listening today know what and how LDN works, but obviously this drug has been around since 1963, I believe it was created, and FDA approved since the mid-1980s. And this compound binds to certain opiate receptors, the mu kappa and delta. Receptors. But it's the mu receptors where its usefulness was first recognized in treating people with opiate addictions, and then later alcoholism. But I guess doctors were finding people returning to their clinics for refills on this higher dose of naltrexone that had some of their symptoms and signs of other chronic illnesses dissipate or disappear. And so there were some researchers like Dr Bernard Bihari who noticed this and some researchers in Europe who said, well, let's look at lower doses because what lower doses of naltrexone do is they actually can upregulate certain opioid receptors. So there's this something called opiate growth factor and opiate growth factor receptor, which when upregulated actually has a very positive effect on the immune system on what they call T helper cells - Th1 which is your cells that actually gobble up bad bacteria and viruses. And then also has an effect on the Th2 cells, which are the ones that produce antibodies. So I'm using LDN aggressively in my Lyme patients who show up with the CD57, which is a surrogate marker for the health of their B cells or their antibody-producing cells.
And I'm using the LDN in conjunction with other therapies, to enhance it. I'm finding on a regular basis people who come in with subtherapeutic CD57 counts are returning to my clinic, even in one to three months, with a marked improvement. And then, of course, that correlates with a marked improvement in their overall health because now their immune system is healthy. Their Th1 and Th2 cells are reactivated. They're healthy, they're more focused and directing the battle against these invading spirochetes, these microbes, and there's less need for the use of really high doses and protracted courses of antibiotics,
Linda Elsegood: Having fewer antibiotics has got to be good, hasn't it? I wonder if I could just ask you to answer a few questions and then we'll come back to Lyme disease. We have a question from Kim, and she says, does LDN directly or indirectly affect dopamine levels? I know it increases endorphins.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Right. So Kim, yes the LDN can enhance dopamine. It does enhance endorphins and enkephalins just because of the nature of how it works on certain receptors. I think I previously mentioned OGF are receptors on the surface of cells, and that can actually lead to enhancement of the cells to fight off cancer, especially on the lymphocytes, on the immune system cells. But LDN actually plays a pretty big role in something called PONC, which stands for pro-opiomelanocortin. That's a mouthful. It's actually a big fat protein, a precursor to ACTH, which stimulates the adrenal glands. So you get your DHEA and cortisol amongst others. And also POMC is a precursor to the endorphins and enkephalins. So when you stimulate that system with LDN it binds and has a very positive effect on the release and production of endorphins and enkephalins, and also on the HPA axis, which encompasses your adrenal glands and also some neurotransmitters in the brain and even in the gut.
Linda Elsegood: That's a really good answer. Thank you. So thank you for your question there, Kim. We have another question here from Donna. She says, “I'm a CRPS patient with autoimmune disease, mixed connective tissue disease. I've been in remission. CRPS is extremely painful, and I started at 1.5 LDN two months ago. I've been at 4.5 for a month. I was taking it at midday. Dr Bihari said to take it at night, and so far it hasn't worked. My pain management doctor thinks it's a wonder drug. Do you have any suggestions?”
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, you know, in all, honestly, there's no magic bullet. There's no panacea for everything. I've seen LDN work very, very nicely and very well for folks. And then there are some people who don't tolerate it very well. Sometimes in dosing, I am very conservative, and my protocol is to start out low and go slow. I sometimes start out with one or two milligrams and then slowly, every month titrate up, and sometimes cap at around four and a half milligrams, although I do find that sometimes a lower dose actually works better than a higher dose of. For instance, I had a patient that did marvellously at two, and then as we started to escalate the dose, we hit three, three and a half, four. She didn't do so well so we backed down to two, and she did fine.
With Hashimoto's patients, I found that starting even lower is better, at maybe a half a milligram. I've had some mixed feelings about LDNs place with Hashimoto's in that I've seen PPO titers actually climb once people have been on it.
But I think there are other factors involved. Some of it is genomics. There is a genetic mutation or variant of a particular gene that actually enhances the ability of this drug to work on people. So what I'm going to be doing in my practice is checking people's genomic profiles for their ability to tolerate naltrexone, and also if it's an effective therapy. So sometimes we can not just do trial and error on a patient, but actually look at their genomic profile and predict whether naltrexone is going to work better for you.
I have had complaints of things like headache, insomnia, feeling wired up, some nausea, and on occasion, some Herxheimer reactions, what some would call a healing crisis. A Herxheimer reaction is when there's a big die-off of Lyme bugs, people get feverish, chills, achy, and that's called a Herxheimer reaction. So, occasionally we have some of that going on when we have folks on LDN, and it's just a matter of titrating the dose up or down or sometimes discontinuing it for a while and making sure that it's not some other factor that's getting in the way and kind of falsely blaming LDN.
Linda Elsegood: Okay. I hope that answers Donna’s question. Then we have another one which fits in nicely with what you were saying. I don't know who it is, but they said, “I've been told by my doctor today that I'm now hypothyroid. I had a blood test yesterday. The last blood test in November 2016 showed that I was borderline as other tests done earlier in 2016. I've been taking 1.5 of LDN since April and had expected my thyroid levels to improve, but the opposite seems to happen. Do you have any idea why?”
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, I have one question for clarification. Are they saying they are hyper or hypo?
Linda Elsegood: Hypothyroid.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: So first of all, there may be other factors. One, we have to establish that they may have an autoimmune disorder, like Hashimoto's. So along with their thyroid function tests, they would need to determine their TPL, their thyroid peroxidase titers, and the thyroglobulin antibody titers. And if it's a hyper going to hypo like Graves' disease - you can cross over from hyper to hypo - the TSI test, the thyroid-stimulating immunoglobulins - might be helpful. So we have to quantify the type of thyroid disorder that patient has and not just throw LDN discriminately at them because there may be other things in place. There could be a selenium deficiency, an iodine deficiency, there could be a conversion problem where people are not converting the T-4 thyroid hormone to the T-3 active. They may be converting to their lazy brother if you will call the reverse T three. I used the analogy of their “lazy brother “ if you will, that sits at the dining room table, eats all the food and doesn't do the dishes. It's not something you want to have a lot of around, so one has to check for that because if they're feeling worse, subjectively, that must mean that there's something going on with their thyroid that maybe the LDN is not addressing. So if it's a Graves' disease or Hashimoto's thing, you would tend to think that the LDN would have a big part to play in that. But if it's another issue, there may be other therapies.
It could be what type of thyroid replacement therapy you're on. If we're using Armour that might be a problem. If we're using Synthroid, which is T-4 only, that patient could actually be converting too much of the T-4 to reverse T-3, instead of T3. It could be a methylation problem, so methylation pathway analysis, looking at their genomics, looking at methylation testing panels to see where they're metabolizing things. Maybe the introduction of select adaptogen herbs can help with T-4 to T-3 conversion, and blocking down things like reverse T-3. Also, deficiencies and some of the B vitamins and also vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency can lead to a problem with conversion and reverse T-3 being escalated or high.
So just because the LDN is not working, it could be that it's possibly the wrong therapy for you. Or again there could be many issues that need to be investigated.
Linda Elsegood: Thank you. And the next question runs into the last really. Dana sent this question in and the question says, “I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and AE. I was taking Synthroid for seven and a half years. And the current dose was 112 micrograms In March last year, I was diagnosed with AE, and I started the IV steroid protocol, which is very effective. I didn't believe the diagnosis and didn't think steroids were the best course of treatment. I saw a functional medicine doctor who ran tests and couldn't find any other cause for my symptoms. He prescribed LDN, but I didn't start it. The main reason was that the steroids really work to stop the symptoms I was having. My husband was concerned for me to try anything else as everything read suggested that untreated AE could result in seizures, coma, or death. I went to the Mayo clinic last year. The diagnosis was confirmed, and IV steroid treatment protocol was prescribed. It was very effective and mostly eliminated all of my symptoms. She's been taking a thousand milligrams of Solu-Medrol every three weeks, reducing every four weeks. The treatment will stop in mid-June. Steroids have cut my thyroid antibodies in half. And the last time I went to see the endocrinologist, I told him I felt my thyroid was becoming overactive and suggested that my Synthroid be reduced. He said the numbers looked good and he wasn't alarmed. It was possible the symptoms I was having were side effects from steroids: heart palpitations, sweating and sleep disorders. I started reading on LDN and see that many people are able to get completely off Synthroid after starting LDN. My question is, should I wait for the steroid treatment to be over before starting LDN? I stopped taking Synthroid last week because my heart rate was getting a hundred some days, and it would skyrocket with any activity at all. Normal for me is 55. The script I have is 1.5 milligrams, and I've read that people with Hashimoto’s should start very slow, very low. Any directions you could provide would be appreciated.”
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: That was quite a question. So a couple of things to address, first of all, steroid therapy. The Solu-Medrol, which is a potent corticosteroid, is downstream treatment. In other words, it is treating the symptoms of the underlying cause of the autoimmune disease and the other issues she has, and yes, while it is effective - we do use steroids in short bursts for symptom relief - you are not really addressing the underlying cause. There's no way to ever reverse what's going on with steroid therapy. It'll basically mask symptoms. It's like a paint job on a rusted car. You're still going to have rust underneath the paint unless you do do a full rehabilitation of a car. So by just masking it over, just by slapping paint over the top, it might look shiny and bright for a while, but it still has rust underneath.
A same analogy for upstream. You have to use a functional medicine doctor to make a diagnosis of an upstream root cause reason for your symptoms or your disorders. I don't really care what you call it. You can call it lupus. You can call it MS. You can call it ALS. You can call it Hashimoto's. Essentially from a functional medicine perspective, autoimmune diseases are the same downstream. They may just affect different body organs or systems, but the root cause can be just a handful of things that can trigger this. An infectious disease, genetics, heavy metals, overgrowth or dysbiosis of the gut microbiome.
So some very rudimentary, very basic things can actually trigger off the cascade that winds up as an autoimmune disease of different natures, of different flavours, if you will. So the steroid therapy is basically masking your symptoms. Yeah, you're going to feel better, but it can also lead to euphoria. It can lead to bone loss. It can lead to thin skin Cushingoid like fat retention and certainly you don't want it. And there are some very detrimental side effects from long-term steroid therapy. So is my advice to my patients to try to limit the amount and length of time they're on steroids and really find the root cause and address root cause issues for your autoimmune disorders and never try to let it go so long that it really becomes a debilitating disorder.
So hopefully that answered some questions. There was a lot to that question, but I think she would be very well served by having a functional medicine doctor to look at her, and analyze her for antecedents, mediators, and triggers, uh, through what we call the timeline and the matrix, which tools we use in functional medicine to help our patients.
Linda Elsegood: Thank you. We'll just have a quick break, and then we'll come back with some Lyme disease questions for you. Thank you. The LDN Research Trust has an LDN Vimeo channel. I have interviewed over 550 LDN prescribers, researchers, pharmacists, and patients from around the world. For many conditions, you can find the link from the LDN Research Trust website. If you'd like to be interviewed, sharing your experience, please Contact Us. I look forward to hearing from you.
Today's show sponsor is CareFirst Speciality Pharmacy. They are leading compounders of LDN and other custom treatments, servicing patients in over 18 states, coast to coast. They're widely accredited to provide you with the highest quality demanded by the industry, and the expert service you expect. To learn more, call (844) 822-7379, or visit www.cfspharmacy.pharmacy.
Welcome back. We have a question from Chris, and he says he has Lyme disease and co-infections and does LDN work from 0.5 to 5 milligrams a day with Suboxone? He takes that at four milligrams a day.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: So he's on Suboxone as well as the LDN? I have very little, um, experience with the concomitant use of naltrexone and Suboxone. The mechanism of action is slightly different when we're dealing with opiate addiction. We're looking at a blockade of the mu and kappa receptors, and maybe to a lesser extent, the delta-opioid receptors. But when we talk about the use of LDN to treat Lyme disease, we don't want any interruptions or anything in the background to impede its ability to work. And it does work differently. Again, the lower dose works much more effectively on the OR receptors and what they call the toll-like receptors or TLR4s, in exacting their effect on the immune system.
I don't have any patients in my practice that are on Suboxone. I usually wash out those kinds of drugs at the onset when I see folks. I try to take them off as many of the toxic drugs. I have very, very few patients who are taking any type of opiate, centrally acting medications. We get them off that fairly emergently so that we can open up the field of our herbals and some of our selected shortlist of good meds, if you will, to help them with their conditions. So I'm sorry, I don't really have a good answer about the interactions between Suboxone and LDN.
Linda Elsegood: Okay. That was still a good answer. And we have a question from Kathy, who has got Lyme disease co-infections and chronic fatigue. Now she's rather concerned. She's going to go and have some allergy testing, and for food allergies as well. And she says, should she stop LDM prior to the testing? She says I ask because since taking LDN, her allergy reactions and sensitivity to food has much reduced. She's very glad about that, but she doesn't want it to affect the testing she's about to have. She wants it to be accurate. What should she do?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Oh, it sounds like she is looking for a big reaction for the food allergies. If she's looking to get the maximum reaction and she's found through her personal experience that while on LDN it has suppressed her allergic reaction to foods, that's probably by a mechanism of LDNs effect on the and also the Th2 and also the Th17, which has to do with allergy and autoimmune.
So if she stops the LDN and waits for a washout period, she could pretty much realize a stronger reaction to the food testing or the skin prick testing, if they're doing topical testing for allergies for pollen and environmental allergens. But what's the point? Is she trying to look for a bigger reaction, or is she trying to take something to help with her symptoms? So if she's trying to figure out what maybe are the offending foods or environmental allergens, yes, stop it for a bit to see if it would cause a more severe reaction. But again, she's throwing her Th2 or Th17, the T helper cells into chaos again. Because obviously there's something going on that's causing her to have these environmental allergens, whether it's the methylation problem, a vitamin deficiency, toxic heavy metal, an infectious organism, a smouldering infection causing her to be hyperactive. It could be her gut microbiome. She could have an obliterated crazy, unbalanced gut microbiome that needs to be put in balance to avoid leaky gut and gastric permeability, which can lead to food allergies. So skin testing is a way to determine some of these things.
In my practice I don't do so much of the testing like IgG testing or skin testing for allergies, as I do more of an elimination diet. It's a less expensive, more comfortable way, in my opinion, to do things. And you can isolate certain foods that are problematic and eliminate them, try to eliminate them for a period of time where the antibody titers diminish, and you don't mount a response to these foods any longer. It's you sort of becoming desensitized if you will, to it. And when you are exposed to these antigens again, they don't necessarily cause the same kind of chaos or reaction.
Linda Elsegood: One last question. Jack says that he's taking LDN and high doses of vitamin D and his question is, does LDN change the laboratory results of PTH in any way?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Parathyroid hormone, PTH?
Linda Elsegood: He doesn't say what PTH stands for.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, I'm going to assume that it's parathyroid hormone since he was talking about vitamin D and how high doses of vitamin D can certainly affect parathyroid hormone. I haven't had any issues with high doses of D affecting PTH or bone turnover markers for that matter. In my practice I check parathyroid hormone, calcium levels, and things like osteocalcin and Beta-Cross Laps, which is a CTx, a C telopeptide, which is a bone turnover marker, to assess if the thyroid therapy is appropriate. In other words, we don't want to overprescribe thyroid medicine because it can cause osteoporosis and it affects the bone turnover markers. Likewise too low thyroid can also, so you have to have the right amount. It's kind of the Goldielocks principle, where too much or too little can have detrimental effects. But I have not experienced in my practice, nor do I know anything in the literature necessarily, that LDN can affect the parathyroid hormone levels.
Linda Elsegood: That's very good, thank you. So people now know who you are, what you do, and where you operate from. How do they contact you?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, we make it pretty easy. We have a very interactive, information-filled website. Our URL is carolinaholisticmedicine.com. So that would be one of the first, exposures. We're getting a lot of folks coming through IFM, the Institute for Functional Medicine website, ifm.org; and there's a physician finder. If they're in the area of the Carolinas or Georgia, they'll find me. ILADS also has a physician finder. So ILADS.org for anyone with Lyme disease should visit that website and they can send you to your closest Lyme doctor.
Then we have a toll free number in the United States. It's (800) 965-8482, and that again is on our website. For those calling from overseas, we do some consultation work for people outside of our region, and that number would be 843-651-9944. But the best way to get ahold of us is via our web presence, our carolinaholisticmedicine.com website.
Linda Elsegood: That's interesting. My geography is getting better - you are on the east coast. If somebody on the west coast wanted to see you, would you do a Skype consultation, that kind of thing, if they couldn't travel to see you?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: The laws in the United States are very different from state to state. Some have frowned upon telehealth outside of the state in which you're licensed. And we adhere to strict compliance with those laws in South Carolina and North Carolina and other states, too. Very often people come in for an initial visit, face to face with one of our providers, at our three different locations. Once that physical contact has been made, we can then comfortably meet the criteria of taking care of patients by the standard of care, at least having met them and examined them. We can do that via Skype. We use Zoom Meeting or Go To Meetings where we can screen share. So a lot of the followup is done even within our state and state of South Carolina. There are people that travel four hours to see me, and after their first encounter, we can sometimes do followups via telehealth.
There are people that come in from Buffalo, New York, from Fort Myers, Florida, that drive eight hours to come up to our office and see us. Once they make that initial contact, then we are okay. Some folks have done consultations for folks overseas, and one in particular in Brazil. We did this via telephone, and it was as a consultant only; I was not a prescribing doctor. I was only giving a second opinion on some things. The rule is at least a one-time physical encounter is required to proceed as an active patient
Linda Elsegood: And at your practices, do you have a waiting list or can people get an appointment quite quickly with you?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: We've built our infrastructure up pretty rapidly. I'm not the sole provider. I have a staff of highly trained - by me, and also focused on especially thyroid and now starting with Lyme - mid-level providers, a naturopathic doctor. So there's a group of us. We take a team approach. We're also bringing in health coaches to help people with remaining compliant and adherent to our programs and protocols. So to answer your question, we have positioned ourselves with keeping our infrastructure up and our staffing with very highly trained advanced providers and doctors so that there's not a huge waiting list. I know there's some practices that have a two-year waiting list and that's not us. We get people in pretty quickly.
Linda Elsegood: Well, that's reassuring to know. Well, it's been an absolute joy to speak to you. I'm sure everybody has learned so much. I know I have, and it's really a shame that so many people are getting Lyme disease and the way it's spreading. But with more and more doctors like yourself who are helping people to find out they've got Lyme disease, and to help start treating them, surely has to be the way to go.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Well, Linda, it was a pleasure speaking with you tonight, and yes, I think allied advocacy groups are making great strides and gaining ground on a lot of disinformation. And I think we see the politicization of Lyme disease kind of slowly melting away. And hopefully, the result will be more people getting this diagnosis and therapies they need, so they don't have to suffer.
Linda Elsegood: And you've seen that starting to change already. Have you.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: I have, yes, I've felt it in my neck of the woods. And I know that on a national scale that's happening. There's much more awareness. It only takes a couple of celebrities to contract Lyme and write books about it to push it to the forefront of people's consciousness.
Linda Elsegood: Indeed. And that's sad, isn't it? But a famous face really helps. Doesn't it?
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: Yeah.
Linda Elsegood: Okay. Well, thank you very much, and we'll have to invite you back another time.
Dr Yusuf Saleeby: My pleasure. Thank you. Bye. Bye.
Any questions or comments you may have, please contact us. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciated your company. Until next time, stay safe and keep well.