Dr NicolaMcFadzean – 6th June 2018 from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.
Dr Nicola McFadzean who's actually English and she grew up in Australia. She's now in San Diego and is sharing her experience with Low dose Naltrexone.
In America, you can actually be a naturopathic doctor but that qualification just doesn't exist in Australia and I think not in England either so I went to Seattle and I studied for four years and got my doctorate of naturopathic medicine and then moved to San Diego in 2003.
I was invited to work in a clinic where the medical director was a fairly well-known autism doctor and so I was introduced to Low dose Naltrexone around that time through him.
I started LDN mostly autism then I started seeing Lyme patients. And today, the majority of my practice is Lyme, probably 95% is chronic Lyme.
I experienced pretty good success with LDN in autism patients.
I did the treatment in conjunction with dietary changes, addressing candida and all those kinds of things. I think with any of these sorts of chronic health issues, there's not one thing that's going to be like the be-all and end-all there.
There's just no one thing out there on the planet like that.
With Lyme disease, there is a chronic infection and it is complex because the immune system is suppressed.
I see a lot of Hashimoto's thyroiditis patients with Lyme which is another area LDN helps and then mold toxicity, heavy metals etc.
So it's a question of trying to gather as much information from the patient to do as much functional diagnostic testing as possible.
Sometimes testing for Lyme can be a little bit unreliable. So we have to just kind of put all the pieces together and figure out what makes sense.
I typically will start people on natural therapies. First I do prescribe antibiotics and some patients I'll actually prescribe LDN right out the gate in the first visit.
I do have some patients that I put them on some herb and they come back six weeks later, like pretty much symptom-free. That's the exception, unfortunately, so I usually tell them anticipated boots two years or more of treatment. But it's not actually taking that long to get them on the road to recovery but to really get to that point that we can confidently say they're in remission.
We never say we cure Lyme once it's chronic, but if someone's just being bitten by ticks, they get antibiotics and we can potentially eradicate Lyme at that point when it's a very young new infection. In chronic Lyme, we do use the words remission. I do have some patients that are sort of 90% of where they were before. I do have some people that just do have flares along the way, and we need to go in and do a month or so of treatment just to knock it down and then they're okay again.
And I've seen that a few times with people have come back feeling like they're having symptoms, but once we did adrenal work, then those symptoms went away.
Sometimes patients do not follow all the treatment because they start feeling better and want to do all things that they haven't done for a while and they get adrenal fatigue in the gut health. The first thing to do is to remove anything that's causing inflammation in the gut. So I get people off gluten, dairy, whatever food intolerances they might have. So I do a lot of IgG food sensitivity testing, just to see if there are any foods that are inflaming a person's gut, that they might not be aware of. Some people are sensitive to garlic or bananas or pineapple and they wouldn't necessarily know that. So I do check and sort of work on the diet first and then I'll usually do a combination of stool testing. And I like a test called a microbial organic acid so I do stool testing to check bacterial imbalance, make sure there are no intestinal parasites showing up, do the microbial organic acid to look at candida and work on getting the microbiome back in balance.
Then at the same time, we want to work on healing the gut. So I've use Colostrum liposomal claustrum, L-glutamine to calm the gut and heal the leaky gut. Usually between gut bacterial imbalance, parasites, yeast, getting inflammatory foods out then, that starts to put things in the right direction.
There's a number of different ways to test for candida. Just looking at symptoms in the body of somebody who's got gas bloating, white coating on the tongue, foggy brain fatigue. They're all kind of indicators of candida. From a testing standpoint, you can do blood antibody testing. So IgG, IGA, and IgM markers to candida. You can do a stool test. It's like a comprehensive stool analysis and it will often show up there but my favorite is this microbial organic acid test.
If the results are high I do antifungal therapy and then you check it again and it's down. You're on the right track, not finished yet, but you're on the right track.
Whereas to me, you don't get that clear cut feedback through the stool testing or the blood test
The treatment for candida. I use a lot of herbs like grapefruit and Pau d'arco. We all have candida, but where is the overgrowth coming I do use some prescription antifungals in my practice, especially if I do have patients on longterm antibiotics. I put them in antifungals that don't cause a lot of side effects. Some patients with Fibromyalgia are very sensitive to medications and I think that probably comes down a lot to genetic issues with methylation.
But the trick is always just to start with very low doses of things and work people up gradually because especially with candida they can be that die off kind of effect.
And I'll use a lot of binders too, with my patients, activated charcoal to help draw toxins out of the body, especially if we are doing any kind of therapy, that's killing bugs, whether they are bacteria or candida. So doing binders can help to get them out and then obviously replenishing with probiotics.
I have also patients with depression and it's based on looking at depression from a couple of different angles. So I see this sort of two elements of depression in my patients.
One is depression is a very natural response to being in pain, chronically to being homebound, bedbound, not being able to be out in the world and in life and enjoying friends and family and children. And then as a reaction to two circumstances, depression and anxiety, a fairly understandable emotion.
Then we have the other half that the infections themselves, cause depression and anxiety just as realist symptom as knee pain or fatigue.
These infections through inflammation in the brain miss neurotransmitters working on their central nervous system and kind of creating depression and anxiety as well. To some extent, it's just a matter of treating the infections to help the depression.
I do have some patients who do antidepressants while waiting to treat the underlying causes. I strongly encourage my patients to get counselling, something to help them deal with navigating their illness and just the sense of loss and sense of grief and the fears that come up.
And I'm a strong believer that a lot of Lyme patients have PTSD because of what they've been through in the medical system so far on their way to getting to the right doctor. I also use amino acid therapy and natural agents to help take the edge off depression and anxiety as well.
Another one that my patients talk about a lot because Lyme is kind of an invisible illness and they look fine, you don't look sick by close family and friends too.
Some of my patients come into the office and they look like a million dollars, she's done the nails but if I really sat down and asked them about it, they could be in bed for days, just recovering from the effort it took to do that.
If people want to find me I do give telephone or Skype consultations
The biggest restriction on doing that is I can't prescribe anything for a patient I've not met in my office at least one time but a lot of people if they have a local doctor to do the prescribing, I can still give recommendations.
Summary of Dr. Nicola McFadzean interview. Please watch the video for the full interview.