Episode #148: Resolving Chronic Viruses Through Immune Modulation with Dr. Frank Shallenberger, MD

Why You Should Listen

In this episode, you will learn about how to resolve chronic viruses through immune modulation.  

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About My Guest

My guest for this episode is Dr. Frank Shallenberger.  Frank Shallenberger, MD has been practicing medicine since 1973 and has been a pioneer in alternative and integrative medicine since 1978.  He is one of only 16 physicians in Nevada that are licensed both in conventional medicine as well as alternative and homeopathic medicine; allowing him to integrate the best of both approaches for optimal results.  Dr. Shallenberger has revolutionized the practice of anti-aging and preventive medicine by developing a method to measure mitochondrial function and oxygen utilization.  He has written two popular books describing this method: "The Type 2 Diabetes Breakthrough" and "Bursting With Energy" and has authored numerous papers in the international peer reviewed literature on ozone therapy and oxygen utilization.  He is also the editor of Second Opinion alternative medical newsletter.  He is the developer of Prolozone®, an injection technique that has been shown to regenerate damaged joints, herniated discs, and degenerated joints, tendons, and soft tissues.  He published the first paper on Prolozone Therapy in the Journal of Prolotherapy entitled “Prolozone – Regenerating Joints and Eliminating Pain”.

Key Takeaways

• What is a virus? Do they contribute to disease?
• Should the focus be on killing or on immune modulation?
• Can some viruses be health-promoting?
• Can antivirals be helpful in dealing with chronic viruses?
• What is the role of Th1 and Th2 in response to chronic viruses?
• What are some of the factors that lead to Th2 dominance?
• Where do antibodies come into the discussion? Are high IgG levels relevant?
• How do "factories" and "missiles" help to explain the situation with chronic viruses?
• How big of a foe is EBV?
• Does the body itself produce ozone?
• Can ozone help to address both the "factories" and the "missiles"?
• What are some top "missile defense" tools?
• How might NK cells be stimulated in shifting the system towards Th1?
• How might medicinal mushrooms be helpful?
• Can melatonin be immune-modulating?
• How might hydrocortisone be helpful in addressing chronic viruses?
• Is it important to address parasites before downregulating Th2 response?
• How might immune tolerance tools like LDI be helpful in balancing the immune response?
• In chronic illness, would more ozone passes be less often or less passes more often be more effective?

Connect With My Guest

http://AntiAgingMedicine.com 

Interview Date

June 25, 2021

Transcript

Transcript Disclaimer: Transcripts are intended to provide optimized access to information contained in the podcast.  They are not a full replacement for the discussion.  Timestamps are provided to facilitate finding portions of the conversation.  Errors and omissions may be present as the transcript is not created by someone familiar with the topics being discussed.  Please Contact Me with any corrections.  

[00:00:01.07] Welcome to BetterHealthGuy Blogcasts, empowering your better health. And now, here’s Scott, your Better Health Guy.

[00:00:14.06] The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today’s discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority.

[00:00:0:34.25] Scott: Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode number 148 of the BetterHealthGuy Blogcasts series. Today’s guest is Dr. Frank Shallenberger, and the topic of the show is Resolving Chronic Viruses Through Immune Modulation. Dr. Frank Shallenberger has been practicing medicine since 1973 and has been a pioneer in alternative and integrative medicine since 1978. He is one of only 16 physicians in Nevada that are licensed both in conventional medicine as well as alternative and homeopathic medicine; allowing him to integrate the best of both approaches for optimal results. Dr. Shallenberger has revolutionized the practice of anti-aging and preventive medicine by developing a method to measure mitochondrial function and oxygen utilization.

He has written two popular books describing this method: “The Type 2 Diabetes Breakthrough” and “Bursting With Energy” and has authored numerous papers in the international peer reviewed literature on ozone therapy and oxygen utilization. He is also the editor of Second Opinion alternative medical newsletter. He is the developer of Prolozone®, an injection technique that has been shown to regenerate damaged joints, herniated discs, and degenerated joints, tendons, and soft tissues. He published the first paper on Prolozone® Therapy in the Journal of Prolotherapy entitled “Prolozone® – Regenerating Joints and Eliminating Pain”. And now my interview with Dr. Frank Shallenberger.

I am so excited today to have a medical legend on the show, while maybe best known for his groundbreaking work in the ozone therapy and being the creator of Prolozone® which was tremendously helpful last year for me when I had a fall and ended up with a frozen shoulder. Today, we’re going to talk about chronic viruses. I heard Dr. Shallenberger present this talk at The Forum for Integrative Medicine earlier this year. And his perspective on chronic viruses really resonated with me and was one that I found very interesting. Thanks so much for being here today, Dr. Shallenberger.

First, what is a virus? How do they use our own cellular machinery to survive within us? I’m seeing more and more people suggesting that viruses are not real, that they do not cause or contribute to disease. And I have to say that doesn’t really resonate with me at this point. So are they living? Are they real? What are your thoughts?

[00:03:06.24] Dr. Frank S.: Well, as you know, a disclaimer, I’m not a virologist. That said, I have looked into this and read a lot about it and studied it. Viruses are just pieces of genetic information. Typically RNA. There are some DNA viruses as well. But they’re typically genetic information. In a sense, they’re not alive because they can’t reproduce on their own. They can’t actually do anything on their own except just exist as a particle. What they have to do is they have to intrude themselves into a cell. And in the cell, they can use the genetic information – well, not the information, but they use the mechanisms in the cell that the cell uses to transfer information from the DNA into protein making, they can use those mechanisms to reproduce themselves. So in a sense, they’re not alive and you can destroy them but you can’t kill them, technically because you can’t kill something that’s already not alive. But the point is they need our cellular mechanisms to be able to do what they do.

[00:04:28.11] Scott: Let’s start then by talking about how much of a role do you feel chronic viruses play in complex chronic health conditions. If we look at things like chronic Lyme disease or neurodegenerative conditions, or even all timers, my personal perspective has been that these chronic viruses like Epstein-Barr and HHV-6, Cytomegalovirus, Herpes zoster and so on, that they really can play a significant role in many of these conditions. So what is the role that you feel chronic viruses play in many of the modern plaguing chronic health conditions?

[00:05:01.01] Dr. Frank S.: Okay. So – Scott, I’m gonna look at chronic infections in a completely different way, than I look at acute infections. I look at an acute infection where you’re healthy, you get sick, and eventually, you’re over it in what, two, three weeks or whatever it takes. But you’re over, you’re done with it. That, in my mind, that is primarily caused by the organism. So I get exposed to the organism, let’s say it’s an influenza virus. I get exposed to the influenza virus and the influenza virus inserts itself into my cells, it starts multiplying using my cellular structures, releasing itself into the – into my bloodstream.

Now, my immune systems are going to immediately start to respond to this, my immune system is immediately going to start making cytokines and other materials that are going to do two things, basically, at least in the sense of a virus. One, it’s going to kill the cells that are making the virus so that they can’t make the virus anymore. And two, it’s going to kill the free-floating virus, so it can’t go infect any more cells. But when that happens, it takes the immune system maybe what, just 7–14 days for it to actually accomplish that; to get rid of the cells that are affected, and to kill the free-floating virus. It takes it about two weeks to do that.

In the process of being able to contain that acute infection, the immune system makes all these substances, basically we call them cytokines, but the cytokines are what orchestrate this response. The cytokines themselves cause symptoms. In fact, the aching that – we’ll stay with a flu infection, but this is true for anything. But the aching, the fever, all the other symptoms, the rash, all the other symptoms associated with the flu infection are not really caused by the virus per se. They’re caused by the immune system’s response to the virus. And they go away once the immune system has contained the virus and that response stops, then the symptoms are gone.

We’re led to believe that the symptoms are gone because the virus is gone. That’s not true. The virus is still there. The symptoms are gone because the virus is now contained by a perfectly functioning immune system. And that immune system no longer needs to respond in an acute manner, therefore, the symptoms are gone. In other words, the symptoms are caused by the immune system’s response, not the mere presence of the virus. And once the immune system response is finished, and the acute infection is contained, they don’t need that, so you don’t get the symptoms.

But a chronic infection, totally different. A chronic infection is where the virus comes in and I amount an acute response to it, and the acute response is unable to contain it. So 10-14 days later, I still have the symptoms. A year later, two years later, 20 years later even, I still have the symptoms. The fever, the aching, the chills, the fatigue, that’s not due to the virus. That’s due to the way my immune system is responding to the virus because it’s not responding in a way that can contain it. It’s just responding to it as though it were a chronically acute event, which it’s not. It’s an inability for my immune system to contain that. And we can talk about, you know, why that happens to certain people and not to other people, because that’s really what this comes down to. But that’s the main deal.

So with an acute infection, if I can kill the germ while my immune system is busy working, I can get over that acute infection pretty well, pretty easily. So if it’s a strep for example, strep bacteria, I take some penicillin, it’s going to kill the strep bacteria knock it down, so my immune system doesn’t have as much to respond to, and therefore, the symptoms are less and ultimately, I don’t need to keep taking that antibiotic. Because at some point, seven to 14 days into the infection, my immune system is going to come along and contain the strep. The strep is not gone. The symptoms of the acute infection are gone, but the strep is not completely gone. The antibiotic has knocked the level of the strep down to a point where my immune system can now easily contain it. And now I can take the antibiotic away, and I’m good to go. We got an immune system that’s containing this strep.

A chronic infection, therefore, doesn’t really respond to antibiotics in the way acute infection does. If I get an acute strep, take the penicillin, bang, symptoms are gone, things are pretty good, because my immune system is taking over. Chronic infection not so. I can take the antibiotic all day long, I can take it for weeks, I can take it for months, I can take it for years, I need to have an effective immune system response to eventually take over again, or that antibiotic is completely, utterly useless. And that’s the difference between a chronic infection and an acute. So to use probably the best current example of this, at least in my mind, would be Borrelia and Lyme disease.

Using antibiotics to kill the Borrelia can be helpful, there’s no doubt about that. And I’m talking about a chronic Lyme, not an acute. Using antibiotics can be helpful because you’re reducing the amount of the organism to some extent anyhow, which means that your immune system doesn’t have to respond as much, so you don’t get these symptoms associated with the immune system response as much. So it seems like the antibiotic is helping and indeed, it can help. But it’s useless. It’s not going anywhere until that immune system comes online and starts behaving appropriately. Because the whole reason it went from an acute Lyme to a chronic Lyme has to do with the immune system not being able to do its job. Not being able to one, finally contain the organism and not being able to two, respond in a way that limit symptoms, where you don’t have symptoms.

[00:12:11.04] Scott: Yeah, I think that’s an incredibly helpful explanation. And then kind of coming back to understanding the chronic viral piece, do you feel that chronic viruses do play a potentially significant role in these complex long term chronic health scenarios?

[00:12:28.07] Dr. Frank S.: Yes, Scott. It’s a great question. I’ve come to – My point of view now, after being in this field for so long, is that literally, probably every single chronic disease has as its bottom line, one of the factors is a poor response to an infection, or multiple infections. I don’t think…absolutely all the time, from heart disease to cancer, to you name it, all of them; underlying that is an infection, a germ, or a microorganism to which we had a poor response, and that sets the stage for the rest of everything else to fall into place.

[00:13:10.18] Scott: So my next question you essentially answered, but it was: should the focus then be on killing strategies or more immune modulation, immune tolerance, immune integration with our microbiome, with our virome? And the way I interpreted what you said was with acute viruses, or acute infections, the killing strategies can be helpful. But once we’ve shifted into that more chronic infectious scenario, we then want to focus more on the immune modulation and creating tolerance and integration within our microbiome.

[00:13:44.11] Dr. Frank S.: Absolutely. Yeah. So totally.

[00:13:48.03] Scott: Do you think that it’s possible that some viruses could actually be health promoting or do something beneficial within us that maybe we have a symbiotic relationship with some viruses? Or are they all bad?

[00:14:05.06] Dr. Frank S.: You know, that’s a great question again. And recently, I heard a very prominent virologist talking about this, and basically saying, yeah, some of these viruses that have infected us, and I mean, maybe over centuries, or, you know, maybe over a millennium, actually. But some of these viruses that infected us actually perform some useful effects. The main thing with the virus is it has to be contained, but it’s not gone. It’s still there. And it’s still doing something and it’s doing it in a contained way. But that something that it’s doing could be really helpful to us.

[00:14:49.01] Scott: You have been known to say that antivirals are not an effective treatment for viral infections. And so it sounds like that’s in the chronic scenario that those antivirals are not necessarily going to be the complete and total answer, though they may help to reduce some of that stress on the system, so you then can work with the immune system. Is that a reasonable way of thinking of it?

[00:15:14.09] Dr. Frank S.: You know, again, you gotta remember, you got your virus, which is not a living organism, and then you’ve got your bacteria, which is a living organism. So there aren’t really any antivirals that can contain a viral infection because all those antivirals are good for is killing the circulating virus. They don’t kill the cells that are making the virus. And the way I – I don’t know if you’ve heard me explain it this way, but I think this is a pretty good analogy. And that’s like, suppose you’re the leader of a country and the country right next door to you starts lofting missiles over into your country. And so your guys say don’t worry about it, we have a missile defense system. Every time they launch a missile, we’re going to launch another missile, an anti-missile that gets rid of that, and we got it covered, don’t worry about it. Except what happens is that the country sending these missiles over starts making hundreds of factories. They’re making so many missiles, way more missiles than you can make to counteract their missiles.

So sooner or later, you start losing this game. They’re sending over a thousand missiles a day, you can only do what, hit 500. So you’re gonna lose this game. So eventually, you know, the defense minister says the only way we’re going to deal with this is we got to go in the country and knock out the factories. We knock out the factories, we can win this game. And that’s the way it is with viruses. This is different than bacteria, it’s different. But with a virus, the only reason – The factories are our cells, so we have to have a way of identifying a cell that’s infected with the virus and is cranking out these viruses and killing it. We got to kill the factories. And that’s exactly what the innate immune system does. And the problem is that so many of us who, you know, ostensibly would be healthy, but many of us walking around today, in one study I unearth, says something close to 30, maybe even 40% of the American population, somewhere in that zone, though, it’s a scary zone, are walking around with an inability to control a viral infection if they get it.

[00:17:48.10] Scott: Wow. Wow. I have heard you use that analogy, and it really resonated with me. It helped me to think about these chronic viruses in a different way. And that’s what I’m really hoping to communicate to listeners today, and to think about it differently. So I know as part of that conversation, you’ve talked about the Th1 and Th2 immune response arms. Talk to us a little bit about what each of those does, what are some of the challenges when there’s an imbalance? And in your experience with chronic illness is that imbalance, often a shift towards Th2 away from Th1?

[00:18:25.09] Dr. Frank S.: Exactly. So listeners might as well get used to this term, Th1, Th2, because you’re going to have to know it if you get all involved in this because this is the critical part. The Th1 – the Th, by the way, stands for thymus, indicating immune and helper cells, that’s where the Th comes from. So you have a Th1-type cells, they’re regulating a certain aspect of the immune system called the innate immune system. The innate immune system – I’m going to simplify this a little bit, but the innate immune system is the one that’s charged with killing the factories. The innate immune system has the capacity to go up to a cell, identify that that cell is making viruses and kill it so it can’t make any more viruses. Then on the other hand, you have a Th2 system, which is the system that activates antibodies. What those antibodies do is they can kill the free-floating virus. So you got your factory over here, it’s releasing the virus into the bloodstream. Now you got free-floating virus, the antibodies can come over and get that. But once again, you can have all the antibodies in the world, if you’re not killing the factories, it’s just not going to work, and that’s going to turn out to be a chronic infection. Ultimately, the way you get over a chronic infection, is you get that innate immune system, that Th1 system back online so it can go ahead and kill these factories.

[00:20:02.25] Scott: So the antibodies that you mentioned are the anti-missile defense system, essentially. But it becomes overwhelmed. And when we have these chronic conditions like Lyme disease or mold illness and really have a difficult time with viral infections, it sounds like that’s really due to Th2 dominance, and that when we’re dealing with chronic viruses, we then need to do things to shift more towards Th1.

[00:20:29.22] Dr. Frank S.: Well, okay, so what the listeners got to understand this, and here’s the thing that blew my mind, when I read about this in 1993, I’ll never forget it. I’m reading about this and this made me crazy. And that is that we know this – what I’m about to say we know this, this is not controversial. The Th1 and the Th2 systems suppress each other. So when the Th1 system is activated, it basically sends over suppressive cytokines to the Th2 system, which tends to suppress the Th2 from making antibodies. I think of it this way, I think of – the sort of the body says, you know what, the antibodies are what cause all the symptoms. The antibody’s reaction with the organism, that’s what’s causing the rash, that’s what’s causing the fever, that’s what’s causing all these symptoms. So it’s sort of like the body says, you know, my innate immune system is going to take care of this without causing symptoms. So I don’t really want the antibodies to kick in, unless somehow the innate immune system isn’t doing its job fully well.

So what’s going to happen is when the innate immune system is kicked in and starts killing the factories, it sends a cytokine message over to Th2 saying, you know what, don’t make so many antibodies. I basically have this covered. I’m on this. I got it covered. I’m containing these factories, everything’s good. We don’t need a lot of antibodies. But then it works the other way around too. If the innate immune system is down for some reason, and really, why is it down? We can cut – That’s the crux of the whole issue. But if the innate immune system is down, for some reason, the only thing we have left now is the Th2 system, the antibody system. So now it’s going to make progressively more antibodies. And here’s the pisser, that Th2 system makes cytokines that further suppress the innate system. So you use the term dominance.

An immune system, in my mind that’s very healthy and ready to take on any kind of microbial exposure is an immune system where the Th1 system is dominant, it’s activated, it’s dominant, and it’s suppressing the Th2 system. An immune system where the Th2 is dominant, is now suppressing the Th1 system, and that’s a bad scenario. If you’re a person walking around with a Th2 dominant system, and you get exposed to Borrelia, or Lyme disease or herpes or whatever the heck you get exposed to, that may very likely turn into a chronic disabling and – what we call a chronic disabling infection. 

[00:23:29.05] Scott: So the Th2 dominance then, what are some of the factors that lead us to a more Th2 dominant state that allow these chronic viruses to remain chronic? I know earlier in the conversation, you suggested a fairly high percentage of the population is likely in this Th2 dominant state. So how do we get there? What are those triggering factors?

[00:23:52.00] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s cutting right to the crux of everything. And because you don’t want to be that person. So what we know so far is petrochemicals, petrochemicals stimulate the Th2 system, not the Th1. So again, you get exposed to a lot of petrochemicals, it’s going to upregulate, your Th2 and your Th2 is going to downregulate your Th1 and you’re now in that imbalance. Another one that will do it is parasites. So parasites are known to do that. A third factor in this is large inoculums. So a lot of virus or a lot of an infection, for example, a good example of that would be you’re getting a transfusion of blood in the hospital for some reason, and that blood is contaminated and your direct intravenous introducing all this contamination. You’re overwhelming the Th1, it can’t work. Th2 is kicked in and can establish a dominance. So, drug users that are using dirty needles or things like that, any kind of activity where you’re getting exposed to an overwhelming amount of a microbe will stimulate the Th2.

And here’s the pisser of it all: vaccines. Vaccines are – the definition of a good vaccine is it stimulates Th2. It stimulates Th2. So I’m thinking the biggest single reason we have people walking around now, especially said the under 40 crowd, the under 40 crowd has been exposed to something like – it’s more than 10, it’s 10, it’s 20, it’s about 20 times more vaccinations as children than the over 40 year old group. So I am quite sure that a lot of the problems that we’re seeing in society today from the allergies, to autoimmune disease, to the Lyme disease, to all these kind of stuff, especially in these young people. And I can’t tell you how we see stuff in the under 40 group like stage four cancers that I never saw before. I never saw – that would be like weird if I’d see something – It’s like every day normal now. And I’m pretty convinced that the very heart of it is this over vaccination that we have gotten into since what, the late 70s, early 80s.

[00:26:36.24] Scott: Wow. So lots of contributors there that can really create that immune dysregulation. Lots of our listeners are dealing with mold illness from water damage buildings, dealing with mycotoxin exposures. Do you think that mold from a water damage building could be an environmental antigen or the mycotoxin and environmental toxic, and that then also supports this immune dysregulation? Does living in a moldy home potentially perpetuate chronic viruses?

[00:27:08.06] Dr. Frank S.: When I was just quoting parasites and petrochemicals and vaccines and all that, that’s all the stuff that’s in the literature. I have not really – I haven’t really pursued the literature greatly to look for what mold could do. But let’s face it, if you’re in a mold-infected building, and you’re in there long enough, what are you doing? You’re getting a large inoculum of something. I mean, and it’s 24/7 maybe. That’s large inoculum. I’ll never forget a patient I saw once and I was asking her, “How did you get sick?” She said, “I’ve been sick for decades.” I said, “How did you get sick?” She says, “I remember the day.” She said, “I was going to put some chlorine in my pool and it was very hot out. And I went and I opened the container of the chlorine and because of the heat it somehow outgassed and I had my face a little bit too close to the container when I opened it up. And all this chlorine gas shot out into my face. And you know, it got on my skin and my eyes and I inhaled it. And I’ve been sick ever since then.”

So, you know, chlorine is not going to hurt you. But a huge exposure of it in a person who’s maybe susceptible, yeah. Maybe you know, if she had a Th2 dominant system, and then that chlorine, that’s enough to just push her over, she never recovers. And I’m thinking the same thing is true for mold. I mean, these people that are mold – have mold problems either one, get it from just antibiotics – antibiotics and steroids – they could be introduced by the doctors. Or two, they live in this environment where there’s a huge amount of mold, not just a little bit, it’s a huge amount.

[00:28:49.01] Scott: Right. Are there tools where we can measure the Th1 versus Th2 balance to get a sense for the degree of immune dysregulation? And then extending on that, what are some of the tests that you would find helpful when we’re exploring this chronic virus scenario to determine if a virus is an active issue contributing to health challenges or a past issue that we don’t need to think another thing about?

[00:29:17.04] Dr. Frank S.: Okay. So one tool would be to just look at antibody levels. Early in my career, I don’t do this anymore, because I don’t see a reason for it anymore. But early in my career, and I’m talking about in the early 80s or so, it was quite the thing to get antibody levels on everything you can get antibody levels on. So you get antibody levels on yeast, you got antibody levels on HIV, you got antibody levels on Herpes, Herpes 6, Cytomegalic, Epstein-Barr, you just got all these antibody levels on everything. And I noticed pretty early on that my sick patients had high antibodies to almost everything I tested. And I thought at the time, I thought these got to be the most unlucky – lucky people in the world. I mean, normal people are walking around not infected with all these things and these people are infected by everything. What’s the story with them?

And then I realized the reason they have all the antibodies is not because they’re more infected than the people that don’t have the antibodies. The reason they have all the antibodies is because they’re in the Th2 dominance, and that’s why they’re sick. So if you go to see your doctor and your doctor runs a bunch of, you know, antibody titers on you and he comes back and he says, “Oh, yeah, you got Bartonella, you’ve got Herpes 6, you got Epstein-Barr, you got Cytomegalic.” I don’t look at that and say oh, yeah, that poor person just happens to be infected with everything that nobody else is infected with. I look at that poor person is just infected the same way we all are. We all have Epstein-Barr, for example. And yet, only certain people have a negative response to that. And that brings me back to that Th2 dominance problem. So that’s one way to look at a bunch of antibodies.

The other way Scott is, and I don’t know that this is a perfect way. But outside of experimental situations, there really isn’t a good way to evaluate this imbalance. But one way is you look at your NK cells, the natural killer cells, you look at their activity. They are Th1 cells. So you look at the reference range for NK activity. Now that reference range includes all those people with the Th2 dominance. So it’s not a real accurate reference range. So what I want to do is I want to look at NK activity, and I want to see me and my patients beyond the very high end of that reference range. If they’re on the high end, I’m assuming they’re in the subset that are in Th1 dominance.

[00:31:58.07] Scott: And we’re not talking necessarily about natural killer cell count, but talking about function or activity.

[00:32:04.16] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they’re alerted.

[00:32:07.19] Scott: So one of the challenges that I have a lot of times as I see practitioners order antibody testing for viruses, particularly IgG, and maybe the Epstein-Barr and Herpes zoster titers are 10 times higher than the upper end of the reference range. And yet, the practitioner then says, “Oh, IgG is just a past issue. We don’t need to do anything with it at all.” And my understanding is, that’s not necessarily true. That if you’re really four to 10 or more times higher than the reference range, that’s an indication that something is wrong. And it may not be that you then throw antivirals on it, but it may be is an indication that there is immune dysregulation that’s constantly reacting to – it’s essentially the anti-missile system is overloaded is how I would think about it. Is that right?

[00:32:58.11] Dr. Frank S.: That’s exactly how I see it. And that’s why the doctor’s saying, look, there’s nothing we’re gonna do about it because it’s not really a problem with the bug itself. The problem is with you and your immune system response.

[00:33:12.07] Scott: And so these antibodies, then they’re not really able to protect us from the viruses, any more than antivirals in terms of leading us towards resolution, and at the same time, they’re perpetuating the inflammatory cycle and leading to many of the symptoms that chronically ill patients experience.

[00:33:32.04] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah. You will never, ever get over an infection with antibiotics. That’s not happening. Ever. If it’s a bacteria like Lyme, it can hide under a biofilm, it can hide in cells where you can’t get to it. And so these antibodies, and even the antibiotics are not going to wipe that out. You actually have to go in and contain it with a Th1 system. The antibodies can be helpful to get you there, but if that Th1 system doesn’t come back online, you’re stuck. 20 years later, you’re still sick.

[00:34:10.03] Scott: So that Th1 system coming back online is what’s supporting then the – addressing the factory side of the conversation. Once someone starts working more on the factories, which we’ll talk about later, do you commonly see then a lot of these antibodies start to reduce or go away, that the tests are no longer as high for the antibodies and over what period of time? Is that months or years?

[00:34:36.04] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, it could take a really long time. You will see them go down. But it might take a whole year. You don’t necessarily – people that are chronically this way – See, if somebody gets bitten by, say, like somebody gets infected with Borrelia and they got through the acute phase, and that maybe they get treated, maybe they don’t, either way. And then you know, three-four months down the line, it’s apparent something’s wrong. At that point, you may fairly quickly be able to turn this antibody thing around. Because it’s fairly acute. It’s not super chronic. But 20 years later, it could easily take a year before you even start to see the antibodies fall. It’s not a quickie, necessarily.

[00:35:21.07] Scott: Epstein-Barr virus is such a common focus for people. Some people have, you know, initiated or started their years-long chronic condition by getting Mononucleosis, which is the same as Epstein-Barr as you know. Many people feel that Epstein-Barr plays a significant role in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Some think it’s a primary player in many chronic health conditions. It sounds like you don’t necessarily think that Epstein-Barr is this big foe, but that if we have this immune dysregulation shifted in the direction of Th2 that it then can become an issue. Talk to us about how big of an issue is Epstein-Barr in your opinion?

[00:36:05.06] Dr. Frank S.: You know, most of the statistics show that something like 96% or something way up there of people over the age of 24 are infected with Epstein-Barr. So almost everybody is. And yet, the majority of people, you know, aren’t walking around with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or problems with Epstein – but they’re infected with it, but it’s not doing anything. Why? Their Th1 system is containing it. And similar, you see these school outbreaks, the measles outbreak, whatever. You see all this stuff they report. And you got like 50 kids in the classroom and it’s a big epidemic because 30 of them come down with whooping cough. Well, what about the other 20? They’re infected, too. There’s no way they sat in their class with 30 other kids and didn’t get infected. So they’re infected, but they never came down with whooping cough. What’s up with that?

As you start thinking this through, you start understanding it’s not the microbe, it’s the response to the microbe, could be any microbe for that matter. I’m sure there’s some microbes easier to eradicate than other microbes. So maybe you pick on certain microbes, like Borrelia, which are really hard to get to. But that said, it’s really if you wanted to think what’s causing the problem, you better figure out the right cause or you’re not going to figure out the right treatment. And in my world, the right cause is Th2 dominance, you have to fix that. You can do whatever the things you want, but all your therapy should be focused on the cause, which is the Th2 dominance. So find therapies that deal with that.

[00:37:44.09] Scott: We’re going to start bringing ozone into the conversation a bit around the viruses. And then maybe towards the end, we’ll talk about ozone a little bit more in general, but you’re the world’s expert on ozone. Do antibodies produce ozone and even hydrogen peroxide in response to these microbes within us? I mean, it seems so ironic that people think of ozone as a toxic poison or substance. And yet, my understanding is that our bodies actually make it.

[00:38:11.03] Dr. Frank S.: That’s right. Yeah. So what, it was 2004, Scripps published some studies, where they were able to identify that when an antibody comes along and grabs an antigen, like a virus or bacteria or whatever it’s grabbing, when it grabs that what it’s going to do is neutralize that antigen, it’s going to neutralize it. So let’s say it’s a virus. So your antibody comes along, grabs the virus, neutralizes it so that it can now take that virus along with itself into a macrophage where the virus gets killed. That’s how the antibody works. But it has to neutralize the virus. If it takes the live unneutralized virus into the cell, the virus just makes a factory out of the macrophage. So it has to neutralize the virus. And what Scripps discovered way back when was that in order to neutralize that virus, the antibody releases, as you said, hydrogen peroxide, and ozone. And that’s what it uses to do that. So when we talk about ozone therapy, we can think a little bit about that particular aspect because ozone therapy obviously involves ozone, but it also generates hydrogen peroxide. And you could see that being used in a large enough dose in an acute situation to knock off – to make those antibodies work better.

[00:39:39.06] Scott: Let’s talk a little more about the Th1 or cellular mediated immunity and Th2 or humoral mediated immunity. If the goal is to shift or strengthen Th1 immunity, how might ozone be a helpful tool in addressing the viral factories? And then extending on that, does ozone itself act as an antiviral independent of that immune shift? In other words, does ozone work on both the factories and the missiles?

[00:40:09.08] Dr. Frank S.: Yes, so exactly. So years ago back, I think it was the very early 90s, Velio Bocci at the University of Siena, Italy, went and took some serum from patients. And he bubbled ozone gas through that serum. And then what he had was a test tube now of serum that had been oxidized by ozone. And so what’s in there is oxidant lipids, that’s what’s in that serum. He vented and he took that serum and put it on Th1 and Th2 cells to see what would happen. What he found out was that it stimulated Th1 cytokines, namely gamma interferon and Interleukin 2. Now, it also stimulated some Th2 cytokines. In fact, it stimulates lots of cytokines. But the predominance was to stimulate gamma interferon, that was the one that most stimulated and Interleukin 2, which are Th1 cytokines and which activate the Th1 system simultaneously suppressing out the Th2. So it’s going to tend to bring the dominance back to Th1 again.

The other thing that he was able to show – Well, not him so much but another guy named Carpendale, Carpendale did this with HIV actually. Carbpendale took the plasma that had the ozone bubble through it, and put it on cultures of HIV, and it kills the cultures. So you’re absolutely right. When you treat with ozone, you’re one, trying to stimulate the Th1 more to get back online, and simultaneously, almost like an antibiotic, knocking out the free-floating virus and free-floating bacteria.

[00:42:03.04] Scott: That sounds pretty good to me.

[00:42:04.11] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah. You add it to what’s already going on. And you know, I really don’t want people out there to think that I’m saying that this is the ultimate panacean cure for everything. Clearly it’s not. But I tell you what, whenever you’re doing, maybe it involves antibiotics, maybe it involves herbal therapies, maybe it involves detoxification, whatever you’re doing, your results are really going to be synergistically positively affected by adding some ozone therapy into that.

[00:42:34.10] Scott: One of the things that I hear people talk about with ozone is that ozone is more oxidative, that we should not use Vitamin C or glutathione around the ozone therapy, that it could potentially negate it. Talk to us about Vitamin C and glutathione, and how those might actually reduce or enhance ozone therapy.

[00:42:57.02] Dr. Frank S.: Okay. So let’s say you take a really large dose of one of these antioxidants, let’s just say with Vitamin C, glutathione, same principle. But let’s say you take a big old dose of this, maybe an intravenous dose or huge oral dose, now you have a lot of this ascorbic acid in your system. When you expose ozone to your system, it’s gonna pr…it’s going to a large extent, interact with the ascorbic acid, because it’s an oxidant, ascorbic acid is a reducing agent, it’s gonna immediately react with the ascorbic acid. And when that happens, there’s not as much ozone left to react with the lipids and generate those lipid peroxides that are going to basically start correcting everything. So it decreases the efficacy of the ozone to take, you know, antioxidants before your treatment. Now, so the next thing is, well, what if you give it after your treatment? It’s not before, so I’m treating my patient with ozone, ozone is going to go in. And since I didn’t give them a whole bunch of Vitamin C, it’s going to really make the lipid peroxides as like I wanted.

Now after it’s made those lipid peroxides, the ozone is, by the way, instantly gone. It doesn’t take but 5- 10 seconds, whatever, probably less than one second, actually, for the ozone to immediately react with something and either react with Vitamin C or react with lipids, or whatever it’s going to react to. It doesn’t take but seconds. And it’s out of the picture now. All we have now is lipid peroxides. They’re going to run around and do all these things. So let’s say I give you an ozone treatment, you now have a bloodstream full of lipo peroxides running around. If I had given you the Vitamin C beforehand, you wouldn’t have as many of those peroxides because it would have reacted with the C. But what if I give it to you afterwards? You would think well, yes. So I’m going to give them Vitamin C now, it’s going to interact with those lipo peroxides, and kind of diminish the effect of the ozone. That’s what you would think. And that’s what we thought for the longest time.

And then over about the last 10 years, just clinically, people started experimenting, and I was one of them. And we discovered that for some reason, when you – after you give the ozone, if you give a glutathione IV, or a sodium ascorbate IV, it actually works better. It works better clinically. So what the heck is going on? Ostensibly, you think it might diminish the ozone. But here’s what I think, and I can’t prove this, but here’s what I think. I think that ascorbic acid and glutathione are such powerful redox molecules that the body monitors them. So the body, at all times, my body at all times knows what the redox potential in my glutathione is, whether it’s reduced or oxidized; what the balance is, and it knows the redox potential of my vitamin C, and it responds accordingly. If it sees that my redox potential for either one of those two items is skewed towards oxidant stress, it immediately responds by activating Nrf2 or other mechanisms to suppress the oxidant stress. So I think it potentiates the ozone in a slightly different way, by changing the redox potential of glutathione and vitamin C. And I think that’s why we see that the two are actually synergistic, provided that the C and the glutathione always come after the ozone and never before.

[00:46:45.11] Scott: That’s very, very interesting.

[00:46:47.03] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. But that glutathione and those vitamin C levels are so critical to our health, that it makes sense to me totally, totally reasonable, that my brain and nervous system and immune system is going to monitor that redox potential of those substances, and respond accordingly.

[00:47:04.21] Scott: You talked about the studies with AIDS and the fact that it’s a fairly high percentage of people that have HIV, and later convert to AIDS that have that Th2 dominance. So question is, does shifting back towards Th1 improve the outcome for those people that are dealing with HIV or AIDS? Or does it prevent the conversion from HIV to AIDS?

[00:47:29.18] Dr. Frank S.: Uh, maybe both. Yeah. So it’s interesting, but they published studies now of health professionals that got stuck with a needle that was known to be contaminated with HIV. And they publish the results on this. And what they find out is they never seroconvert; they never develop antibodies. So what’s that all about? What it means to me is they got infected with the virus but their innate immune system, their Th1 system was so operative, and so optimal, it just gobbled up and contain the virus before it even had a chance to make antibodies. So I’m pretty darn sure that that is a lot of what happens with any kind of infection. If your Th1 system is up, you might not end up making antibodies to it.

[00:48:20.24] Scott: How does hypogammaglobulinemia fit into this discussion on managing chronic virus if someone has low immunoglobulins? If they have maybe chronic variable immunodeficiency or CVID, does that change how we might approach these chronic viruses?

[00:48:36:25] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, you know, if somebody were to listen to me long enough, they kind of get the idea. I think Th2 is bad and Th1 is good. I don’t. Obviously we need both. So when they have a hypogammaglobulinemia, their Th2 is now compromised. So that throws a different wrinkle into the whole thing. And that’s a potential problem. I mean, that has to be dealt with it in its own way. But that does make things more difficult. 

[00:49:09.11] Scott: And is then the introduction of IV gamma globulins or IVIG, is that predominantly then supporting the Th2 system or does it help in balancing or modulating the immune response?

[00:49:23.05 Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, I think it’s definitely going to give some more life to the Th2 system. Because without those globulins, they can’t make the antibodies.

[00:49:34.08] Scott: Let’s talk about some of the therapeutic tools that we can use to modulate the immune system in the direction of Th1 and to plug the hole in the bottom of the boat essentially, rather than bailing out the boat with paper towels when we’re really focused on the missiles and not considering the factories. So many of our listeners asked were in the therapeutic order you might consider addressing viruses? And someone with mold illness and Lyme and co infections, parasites, environmental toxins, mast cell, the whole thing is that immune modulation or shifting back towards Th1, something you would explore early or later in a protocol.

[00:50:16.25] Dr. Frank S.: Now, back in the early 80s, a colleague of mine by the name of Steve Levine, wrote a book with Parris Kidd called “Antioxidant Adaptation”. It’s a classic. And in that book, they just opened all our eyes to the way oxidant stress created such huge problems. And Steve, later on, you know, he told me that the way he got into this is he became very sick, chronically ill. And the only way – he tried all kinds of stuff. The only way he got better was to go in some primitive old cabin off in the middle of nowhere and stayed there for a long time. I forgot how long but easily – maybe a year, maybe two years, maybe nine months. I’m not sure, but a long time. In other words, he got away from all the environmental influences that kept him in that hole. And he did a bunch of other stuff that he didn’t know at the time, I don’t think. But he did other things like take selenium, I remember he used to taking a lot of selenium and he took vitamin C and all this kind of stuff, to bring back his Th1 system. But he had to get out of the mess.

And today, it’s not easy to get out of the mess. We’ve got 5G, we’ve got 4G, we’ve got 3G, we’ve got 2G in our houses, in our environments. You go to the hospital, you’re getting all those electromagnetic frequencies, you’re in the hospital, your kids are getting it at school, then you go out and get a bunch of vaccines. And then you’re working with environmental chemicals, and you’re breathing the air, and God knows what’s in the air. And you’ve got contrails and you could go on and on and on where you think to yourself, how can I possibly get well? I’m just overdosing with all this stuff that’s activating this Th2 system. You might think I gotta go get in a bubble for a while, I got to get out of here, get away from all these influences. And I swear, I could tell you stories about patients who did that, got well, and then went back home prematurely, and bang, right back in it in a couple of months. So a huge part of it is this cleanup operation. And, you know, it could be really life-disrupting for a while, you know, if you’re going to get away from 5G or 4G, that could be life-disrupting just that.

[00:52:45.01] Scott: Yeah. And then I think another piece of that, since you brought up the environmental piece is, you know, what exposure does someone have to mold and mycotoxins and that whole soup of things living in their home or their school or their workplace, and then they get to an environment that’s cleaner from all of those influences, right, mold, EMF, all of that. I mean, I think that the better the external environment the – Maybe said differently, we’re not ever going to make our internal environment healthier than our external environment, right, that that external environment is such a big influence.

When we understand that the clear goal is to shift the immune system towards working on the factories and not focusing on the endless missiles, can doing both of those simultaneously be helpful? And can we potentially benefit from antivirals? And when I say, antivirals, I’m thinking, you know, herbal things as well, not just the pharmaceuticals. Can we benefit from antivirals in the short term while we’re working on the immune modulation, the Th1 shift for longer term benefit? And if the answer is yes, what are some of your favorite missile defense tools?

[00:53:53.25] Dr. Frank S.: You know, part of the problem is when you look at antibiotics that we can use, they’re toxic themselves. That’s part of the problem. The other part of the problem is they stimulate mold infections. So you get on an antibiotic long enough, you don’t have to go somewhere to have a mold infection, you got it in you. You see it typically in your sinuses and in your intestines. So antiviral, same thing. Antivirals are potentially toxic. Some of these antiretroviral drugs are potentially toxic in certain individuals. So you got to really very carefully balance that and try and find a way that you can get around that. Every case is different. So yeah, you’re gonna find some cases that do fairly well on the antibiotics. And you’re going to find other cases just get worse. They never do well at all, all they do is get worse because now they got mold infection stacked on top of that. And other cardiac arrhythmias from the antibiotics and all the other complications you can get from these newer generation antibiotics. So ultimately, I don’t look at that as much of an answer. In fact, in my world, I don’t much like antivirals. I don’t much like antibiotics. And I try to avoid them as much as is humanly possible. I will use them but I try to pulse it and I try not to use them very often for these reasons.

[00:55:23.05] Scott: And when you say you don’t like antivirals, is that primarily the pharmaceuticals? Or would you also then not even explore herbal antivirals?

[00:55:31.11] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, I’m talking about the drugs. Valcyclovirs and all that stuff.

[00:55:36.07] Scott: Are there some maybe natural tools that are missile-defense interventions that you might find helpful for that short term focus on the missiles?

[00:55:47.05] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah. And you know, a lot of the herbs that people talk about have that capability.

[00:55:55.19] Scott: So then let’s talk about the stimulation of the NK cells to shift us more to a Th1 response. What are some of the tools that you might use to stimulate the NK cell activity or function?

[00:56:11.06] Dr. Frank S.: Probably the one that’s known the most is going to be the mushrooms. You know, certain mushrooms are known to be very stimulating to NK cells, a lot of published stuff on this. So, for me, I tend to rely a lot on mushroom extracts to activate NK cells. Another thing that for me is quite interesting is the SpectraCell test. And the SpectraCell test, what they do is they take the person’s white cells and examine them for how much NK activity they have. And then they expose those white cells to various nutrients, a lot of them; B vitamins, fat soluble vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, a bunch of different natural things. And they come back and they give you a report and they say, you know, when we expose this person’s white cells to zinc, they started activating more NKs than they did before we expose them to zinc. In which case, you would look at that and say, well, zinc sounds like a pretty good idea for that particular person. So I like the mushroom extracts. I like the SpectraCell sort of approach.

What else can do that? You know, I’m reminded a lot and this kind of touches a little bit when we’re talking about having to get away. But at the turn of the 20th century, back in the early 1900s, big killers were diphtheria and tuberculosis, they were running rampant. And there was another one, Erysipelas vulgaris, I think they call it, a bad skin infection. And this is pre-antibiotic era, nobody knew what the heck to do. They were knocking off a lot of people with these particular problems.

Then a guy named Fincen in the 20s, went up high in the Alps, above the cloud layer in the Alps, and set up some clinics up there. And he took the patients up there with unbelievably advanced cases of TB and Erysipelas and took them up there. And he exposed them to sunlight. He had them sunbathe. He started them off the first day, like 10 minutes. And then after about six months they were out there for eight hours, but he had his clinic and I’ve seen pictures of that’s pretty well. The clinic was set up with the patient rooms, had doors that would open up, you can roll them out onto a terrace and sit there and sunbathe.

At the same time, he’s doing things like giving them pure water. He’s giving them organic foods and such like that. And of course, where they are it’s away from everything. There’s no pollution of any kind up there. They’re not living in society. They’re not doing – they’re isolated. And they’re getting the sunlight, and the sunlight is a dramatic stimulant for Th1. And he published just incredible cases on how this could be done. So, you know, I’ll often think about, you know, sunlight, sunbathing, and you know, I used to think Vitamin D. But what we know, by the way, that sunlight is more immune stimulating than just with Vitamin D, by stimulating Vitamin D. Sunlight has its own immune stimulating thing regardless of Vitamin D. There’s something in those UV lights. And if you stop and think about it, what do we generate ozone with? We run oxygen through UV lights, and it turns ozone, it turns into oxidant stress. So I’m sure what He was doing is giving a controlled oxidant stress to those patients starting off with a little bit, which is just what we do in medicine. And then as they got more and more used to it, and more and more adapted to it, he could increase the dose until, basically, they got well. It’s a fascinating story.

[01:00:19.11] Scott: Yeah, amazing. So some of the things then that can help support NK cell activity, Vitamin D, you talked about things like Beta Glucan, Selenium, Vitamin C, astragalus, the mushrooms, echinacea. I’m going to ask you a little bit more about one of my favorites in a minute. Melatonin is another one that can support the natural killer cell function as well. But I want to talk a little more about the mushrooms first. In your experience, clinically, do people that have had mold illness or fungal overgrowth or Candida, can they tolerate the medicinal mushrooms? And can mushroom isolates like AHCC, can that be used to help shift us back to Th1? What are some of your favorites in your mushroom toolbox?

[01:01:04.25] Dr. Frank S.: I think it’s interesting. But yeah, so people that are yeast sensitive, can often tolerate other forms of yeast. Not all – not everybody. Some people do have some problems with this. And so you always want to start off slow but exactly. Normally they can tolerate it really well. It’s not a problem.

[01:01:29.09] Scott: And so are there specific mushrooms that are among your favorites for stimulating Th1 like Reishi or Lion’s Mane or Mottaki? Or what kind of mushrooms do you like the most?

[01:01:40.21] Dr. Frank S.: Yes, Scott. So I’m not, you know, any kind of herbalist. I don’t know any of this stuff, okay. But I do have a company I work with, that makes a 10 mushroom extract. It has all that stuff that you talk about maybe and herb biologist really knows a lot about, which I don’t. I just use that one particular product. So it’s a colleague of mine by the name of Isaac Elias. And so he makes a great product. And that’s – I’ve been using it for years and it works great for me. There’s probably other good ones out there too.

[01:02:10.25] Scott: So let’s talk then about Melatonin. Melatonin can stimulate natural killer cell activity in the direction of Th1 it can be anti-inflammatory, which as I understand then can down regulate Th2. It’s been my drug of choice for many, many years. I think we’re really just beginning to understand how important Melatonin probably is. Dr. Klinghardt was the first person I was exposed to that uses really high dose Melatonin. I understand you also do in Dr. Klinghardt’s realm for things like supporting detoxification, even the antimicrobial properties of Melatonin. So what are your thoughts on the role of Melatonin in dealing with chronic viruses? And how high do you feel is reasonable to dose Melatonin? Could long term use lead to the body no longer producing it?

[01:03:01.11] Dr. Frank S.: The literature is replete with experimental studies published on the use of high dose Melatonin in animal viral infections. I don’t know of any studies on human viral infections. But if animals are any indicator, it’s going to work well for us. And so they have all these viruses that did affect the veterinary world and some of them fatally. In fact, a lot of them fatally. And what they’ll do is they’ll take a group of animals, the control group is no Melatonin, the experimental group is high dose Melatonin and Melatonin various doses. They infect them all with the virus and you know, all of the control group dies, and maybe 10% of the Melatonin group dies. And they do this over and over again, with just some amazing – Some of these viruses are just slam dunk gonna kill the animal. And they don’t kill the animal. So yeah, I mean, no human studies, but you got to extrapolate from that. And you got to think if that’s what it does so dramatically with animals. Why wouldn’t it do that with humans?

The other thing I can say is and I have this a good word from Russell Reiter who is probably the most well-known Melatonin researcher in the world, ostensibly.  Anyhow.

[01:04:36.01] Scott: From Texas, I believe, right?

[01:04:38.05] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, he’s at University of Texas at Auburn, I think. And Russ told me, he says number one, there’s no negative feedback inhibition for Melatonin. It doesn’t behave like a hormone in that way. He says it’s more like an antioxidant he said if he wants to come around to it. But he said doesn’t – With hormones, if you get too much of a hormone, your body shuts down production of it because they don’t want too much. It doesn’t do that with Melatonin. It’s sort of like it wants as much as it can get – There’s no negative feedback inhibition. So you can take massive doses of Melatonin. A physiological dose would be in the order of one, maybe two milligrams a day. You can take thousands of milligrams of Melatonin. In fact, Dr. Reiter told me that, you know, the Melatonin world, whenever they – they’ve been trying to find an LD 50 toxic dose, meaning a dose that would kill 50% of the animals of Melatonin, they can’t find one. For decades, they’ve been trying to find a dose that’s so large, it’s going to kill some animals, they can’t find that dose.

So I started asking him, you know, what dose do you take? He says, well, based upon the animal studies, it’s my opinion, and this is completely anecdotal. But it’s – Dr. Reiter told me his opinion that roughly one milligram per pound. So a 170 pound person would take 170 milligrams per 24 hours. With a lot of my patients, especially the stage four type cancer patients, the real serious ones, I have then taking Melatonin all day long all around the clock. And we could easily be doing 5-600 milligram doses over a 24 hour period. Just, you don’t see any problems except I will say two things. For some reason I haven’t sorted this out, quite out yet. Certain subset of the population is going to have just very disturbing dreams with Melatonin. They could also be feeling drugged up in the morning. So if they take it at night, they feel drugged in the morning. If they take it during the day, they can feel drugged during the day. Another subset of the population if they take Melatonin at night, stay awake all night long. So I just have them take it during the day, and it’s actually like a cup of coffee for them. So there’s some weird sorts of unusual responses to the way different people process Melatonin. But nothing serious can happen. Except if you’re one of those people that for some reason are sensitive to these higher doses, I haven’t figured out a way to get them into yet.

[01:07:26.11] Scott: And it’s interesting because I’ve seen in some in the chronic Lyme community, for example, I know with Dr. Klinghardt’s work that if you jump to a super high dose really quickly, some people seem to have either a detoxification reaction or possibly even an activation of some viruses. I know I take 20 milligrams a night and have for a long time. And when I tried a 50 milligram Melatonin suppository, more than once I repeated the experiment. When I would wake up the next morning, I actually felt really dizzy and had to like reach for the side of the bed so that I didn’t kind of fall over. And so I kind of thought maybe that was a, you know, detox type reaction. I mean, do you see those types of reactions in people that maybe have to titrate up slowly or not commonly?

[01:08:17.25] Dr. Frank S.: I think, yeah, you’re gonna see that. But I think also there’s just idiosyncratic reactions, just like there are with almost anything. You know, if you’re in medicine long enough, somebody’s told you they can’t take X, or they have some kind of weird symptom. You just hear that all the time. So on the one hand, it could be a detox type reaction. On the other hand, a lot of it is just somehow their systems just process the Melatonin in a different way. Maybe metabolize it into a metabolite that has a special effect on them or something like that.

[01:08:50.14] Scott: So for people listening, we are certainly not urging you to use high dose Melatonin without collaboration with your doctor. So please don’t do that on your own.

One of the other tools that I learned about from your lecturer at TFIM that was really interesting to me was hydrocortisone, which many people benefit from. We commonly think of it as, “Oh, hydrocortisone is supporting my adrenals.” Obviously, we’re talking here about lower dose hydrocortisone, not in the realm of steroids that could then suppress the immune system even further and lead to more proliferation of microbes that are already in us. But how does hydrocortisone suppress Th2 activity and actually help us then get a handle on these chronic viruses?

[01:09:39.08] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because hydrocortisone is so absolutely – almost critically important to getting people over these chronic infections. You could almost make a blanket statement like without adequate hydrocortisone dosing, they’re not going to get well. You could almost say that And now of course we make hydrocortisone. It’s a hormone we make. So if you’re going to get over a chronic illness like this, either somehow you get your body to make it or you take it in the form of a pill. But you’re going to have to get some hydrocortisone somehow rolling in order to get over this. Because hydrocortisone, it keeps a cap on Th2, it holds Th2 down. So when they say it’s immune suppressive, that’s what they’re talking about. You give a high enough dose of hydrocortisone, it’s gonna knockout the antibodies. You can see it right after a test. Give somebody a shot of say 80 milligrams of Solu-Medrol, do some antibodies before, some antibodies about three days later, you’ll see it’s dramatically falling down. And so that’s one thing that hydrocortisone does. But of course, it does a lot of other things.

And my point really, is this. When you’re sick like this, chronically ill and sick and disabled for anywhere over six months, your adrenals are shot. And I just kind of joke a little bit with people to say, “Well, how do you test, how do you know that your patient’s hydrocortisone deficient?” And my answer is “Because they’re in my office.” If they were making enough hydrocortisone, they’d probably feel good enough not to be here. And then the other way, of course, is you just give them a trial. You say, okay, you still feel sick and miserable. Let’s give you some hydrocortisone now, and let’s see how you’re doing and it’s works pretty quickly. Another 7, 10 days if you’re a whole lot better, that’s pretty good evidence you didn’t have enough. And so let’s work around that.

[01:11:42.24] Scott: So what I loved about the hydrocortisone then is by inference, you said that it suppresses Th2 activity. You also said that when you suppress Th2 activity, you’re then up regulating Th1 activity. And so could I then come to the conclusion that hydrocortisone is helping address the factories?

[01:12:03.05] Dr. Frank S.: Exactly. That’s exactly right. The other thing I just have to mention, because this is another thing I think a lot of people don’t appreciate. And that was a doctor by the name of Paracelsus back in the 1400s. And Paracelsus is famous for coming up with what I’m about to say. And his, what he basically said is the – any substance is poisonous in a high enough dose, and good for us in a low enough dose. So in other words, what Paracelsus was saying is there’s no such thing as a bad substance and there’s no such thing as a good substance. Vitamin C’s not a good substance. Cobra venom’s not a bad substance. It’s the doses. Obviously, too much cobra venom and that can’t be good for you. But a little teeny bit, homeopaths use that.

[01:13:04.25] Scott: I’ve used it actually. Vipera beris - snake venom.

[01:13:09.01] Dr. Frank S.: So the poison is always in the dose. Even radiation, a Canadian man about 20 years ago was able to demonstrate small doses of ionizing radiation stimulate the immune system. It’s the same thing. It’s the dose. So when people think oh, but too much cortisone is really bad for you. That’s true. But there is a dose that’s not, that is actually good for you, find that those. And for some people. And I would venture to say people with autoimmune disease, people with, you know, progressive Lyme disease, that dose can be fairly high, the dose that’s supportive.

[01:13:50.23] Scott: Yeah. And autoimmunity is also a Th2 shift, right? So, if you have autoimmunity..

[01:13:56.16] Dr. Frank S.: Well, they do have Th1 autoimmune conditions as well. So that is true.

[01:14:03.04] Scott: Let’s talk about transfer factors. So transfer factors are said to also shift this Th1, Th2 system. Are transfer factors a supportive tool in the context of shifting to Th1 to deal with the viral factories?

[01:14:19.11] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, I think theoretically, they really should be. That said, how do you know you’re getting a good transfer factor, and you know, it’s really working? That would be my dilemma. But yeah, no doubt, breast milk is full of transfer factors. You know, colostrum is full of transfer factors. So how do you get the good stuff? That would be my question, but we know that it’s really stimulating for that innate immunity.

[01:14:45.14] Scott: Could we then say that colostrum is supporting Th1?

[01:14:50.03] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, that’s what I would draw. Yeah, absolutely.

[01:14:53:19] Scott: Okay, beautiful. If Th2 is more of potentially autoimmune allergy is inflammation, Mast Cell Activation, do anti-inflammatories or mast cell stabilizers, do they have a role in reducing Th2 dominance, thus rebalancing the immune system? Is inflammation another factor that essentially is contributing to the suppression of Th1 activity? And if so, what are some of the tools that we can use to suppress Th2 activity in this realm?

[01:15:27.09] Dr. Frank S.: I look at anti-inflammatories as kind of band aids, I don’t think they’re anti-inflammatories other than by the way hydrocortisone, which is a potent anti-inflammatory. I don’t think that by and large, they shift us back from Th2 to a Th1 dominant state. But they’re awfully useful clinically. They make people feel better, they maybe set the stage for other things to create that environment better. And so I have no problem using anti-inflammatories with my patients. I don’t think it gets in the way. And I think it can clinically be helpful. But I don’t think that or at least I don’t know if any evidence that shows that it’s going to move you into a, you know, a more of a Th1 dominant state.

[01:16:14.07] Scott: What about something like Quercetin or Licorice? And like Quercetin, we think of in the mast cell world but maybe there’s other reasons. Can Quercetin or Licorice in addition to hydrocortisone potentially help suppress Th2 activity?

[01:16:28.11] Dr. Frank S.: Quercetin is one of my most favorite nutritionals that I’ll use in large doses, in almost anybody with a chronic condition, whether it’s a cancer, an autoimmune disease or something. There’s just something about Quercetin. I’m no expert on Quercetin. I just know clinically, when I give it in doses in the order of say 600, 1,200 milligrams a day, it’s pretty, pretty amazing for mast cell issues, it’s amazing for inflammatory issues, amazing for prostate issues. There’s solid evidence that it pushes you back into a Th1 state, that’s all published type stuff. And so yeah, I really liked the Quercetin a lot. Stinging nettle is good for that, stinging nettle, Bromelain. These I found to be active just kind of clinically.

[01:17:16.07] Scott: If mast cells respond to parasites, for example, and we know that parasites are more of a Th2 response that they’re shifting us to Th2, is it important to address parasites or treat parasites before we attempt to down regulate or suppress the Th2 response? 

[01:17:37.22] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, you know, I think you’re right on. And you look at the antiparasitic drugs. And our colleague, Dr. Klinghardt is, you know, he mostly taught me this. But you look at the antiparasitic drugs, they’re pretty harmless. I mean, you could take an antiparasitic regime for three days out of every month, typically during the full moon, which is when the parasites are most active. And I mean, you could make a case for just all of us doing that. The drugs are harmless, it’s almost impossible – it’s ridiculously hard to find parasites and people that are loaded with them. You could do the stool tests, you can do all kinds of antigenic tests, and they still got the parasites. Now what that’s all about, I’m not sure. But I mean, you can’t test for them. They’re probably are there and they don’t necessarily – they’re not always symptomatic. So just because you have intestinal parasites, doesn’t mean that you’re gonna have diarrhea or something. You might be okay that way. And so it makes total sense to me to just empirically, for at least three or four months when you start to treat some chronic condition, just do the antiparasitic drugs. Just kind of clean them out in case there’s something there. They’re so benign, what do you got to lose?

[01:19:05.02] Scott] And it’s interesting that some of the main antiparasitic medications like Alinia and Ivermectin are said to also have antiviral properties. And so, it seems to me then that these can be helpful in that we’re working both on the missiles with the antiviral properties, but we’re also indirectly working on the factories because if we’re addressing the parasites, we’re removing another contributor to Th2 dominance, thus shifting back towards Th1.

[01:19:35.12] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t see how you could go wrong with that.

[01:19:39.22] Scott: Nice. If we have known allergies to foods or to the environment, pollens, molds, can things like low-dose allergen therapy or low-dose immunotherapy or other sublingual immunotherapies, things of that nature that are helping them to dampen that that heightened Th2 response; is that also then shifting us in the direction of balance from Th1, Th2 perspective?

[01:20:06.10] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. And well, you’re bringing that – Yeah. So the desensitization drops. There’s various desensitization techniques, the LDI therapies. There’s a number of interesting ways to do that. Ty Vincent, I’m not – you familiar with that LDI therapy he has, that’s awfully – I don’t know how much work he’s done with that. But I can almost promise you he’s shifting people from Th2 to Th1 with what he’s doing there. But all those sorts of desensitization therapies are great. And there’s one I want to mention, in case listeners aren’t aware of this, and that is what I call U-B, U as in urine, B as in blood isotherapy. And what this amounts to, is we take a little bit of the patient’s urine, take a little bit of their venous blood, mix the two together, ozonate the heck out of it, and then inject that liquid back into their buttocks. And that’s fairly astounding for even the worst allergies.

And the reason is, because the substances that are creating the allergies, the antigens that are creating the allergies are in our blood and in our urine. They’re there. And so what’s creating an allergy in me today may be different than what’s creating an allergy for me in two months. Maybe different pollens, different – or whatever. But the urine and the blood always tells me exactly what’s going on. So I take a little of urine on that blood, we, you know, do various things with and process it. And you inject that back into the buttocks, that’s a desensitization procedure that you don’t have to do any tests to and doesn’t change over time. And it’s so easy to do. It’s almost – it’s free. It’s almost like nothing to it.

[01:22:01.00] Scott: And it sounds like that then is shifting the system back to being able then to address the factories when we’re talking about the chronic viruses.

[01:22:10.25] Dr. Frank S.: Yeah. So, like atopic dermatitis, I see a lot of that these days more than they used to. And that’s kind of where the patient, not necessarily hives, but they’re breaking out in this very intensely itchy rash, and could be all over their bodies, it could be in certain areas of the body, it’s just just crazy looking stuff. That responds so well and that’s a Th2 problem. But that response so well to this UBI cell so I’m pretty sure that’s what they do.

[01:22:39.05] Scott: Wow, very cool. If someone’s coming down with an acute virus, a cold or a flu, what would be some of your go-tos to deal with these acute scenarios? We think about things like nebulized hydrogen peroxide, can that be helpful for acute viral conditions?

[01:22:56.08] Dr. Frank S.: Yes. So basically, you know, with all this COVID thing and everything I’ve got – I’ve sent out emails to all my patients and all my patients know, they’re supposed to do – know of three things, three levels of treatment. First level is don’t get sick. And that’s the level I think most people are looking at. And so that involves Quercetin that involves Vitamin D, it involves Selenium, it involves Melatonin, a little Vitamin A, and not necessarily a whole lot. What am I forgetting? I don’t think I’m forgetting anything there. But mostly those sorts of things besides that, and good living, sunlight, sleep, etc. And so that’s the part you do right now so that you don’t get sick to keep your Th1 dominance. So if you do get exposed to the virus, you’re what they call an asymptomatic infection, you don’t even know you got it. That’s first level. Now that usually works pretty – Well, it works great, but it’s not a hundred percent.

So at some point, I want all my patients to have level two available in their house. What level two refers to is having a hydrogen peroxide solution that’s special. I’ll tell you how you make that in a sec. And having a nebulizer that you talked about, having some hydrocortisone, and having some zinc acetate lozenges. And so that’s the follow up. So, if you’re doing all the first things and despite all that you still managed to wake up one morning and you got the scratchy throat and you’ve got, you know something’s up, then you go into phase two, which you already have at your house. So, you haul out the hydrogen peroxide solution, which is easy to make. People can just go on Amazon or whatever and you buy 34% hydrogen peroxide, you get a liter of what they call normal saline. And you take one CC of the 34% hydroperoxide, shoot it into the 100 CCs of normal saline.

So one CC 34% of hydroperoxide, 100 CCs of saline, keep that in the icebox, it’s good for a good three-four months. And you take three CCs of that solution, stick it in a nebulizer and nebulize it every waking hour. And while you’re doing that five times a day, you suck on a zinc acetate lozenges. Reason that is, is because zinc acetate ionically kills every virus that happens to be up in here. So you’re inhaling a gas that kills all the virus, you sucking on zinc lozenges that kill viruses, and by the way upregulate the immune system too. And that nebulized hydroperoxide is getting into your lungs. And, you know, whatever gets into your lungs gets into your bloodstream, so you got a systemic treatment going on there too. And that’s a lot, you’re doing it every waking hour, you throw in your hydrocortisone and continue the other stuff. And pretty much you’re going to get over the virus in say, three-four days maximum.

Now, if that doesn’t happen, if you’re, you know, like, I’ll tell you a great case – of a case I treated maybe four months ago, where that didn’t happen. This lady, a patient of mine for many years, 76-years-old, uncontrolled diabetes, just completely uncontrolled insulin-dependent diabetes, off the charts. And overweight, had a heart attack last August, had two stents put in, after that was put on a bunch of drugs, developed heart failure. And so she’s not your healthiest lady. And so she calls me up maybe four or five months ago and says, “You know, I’m bad here. I’m having trouble breathing. I got a fever. I feel achy, I’m pretty sure I got the COVID thing.” I said, “Okay. Come down to the office.” So that lady in all likelihood would have died if she had gone to a hospital, there’s a pretty good chance, there’s a good chance that she would have died.

She comes down to the office. And we gave her the Ivermectin, we did the hydrogen – not the hydrogen peroxide. But we did the ozone treatment, followed by Vitamin C, and started initiating that hydrogen peroxide thing. She comes back the next day, she’s 50% better. We do it once more, she comes back the third day, she’s actually asymptomatic at that point. But I did a third one just for the road, had her continue on the hydrogen peroxide and in seven days, she’s totally normal, feeling perfectly well. And it’s a dramatic case that shows you that, you know, just because you’re doing all the first two things doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in pre, you might need to have a doctor there that knows how to do intravenous ozone and Vitamin C and knows how to give you some Ivermectin to, you know, knock out that particular virus and you know, but that’s true for any virus, and I’ve treated a hunk of virus. Obviously, both kinds of influenza. I’ve treated West Nile virus, I’ve treated bird flu. I’ve treated – it’s all documented by the way. I’ve treated documented COVID, herpes, and meningitis, I’ve treated meningitis viral infections; 100% never had anybody that didn’t get well.

[01:28:15.06] Scott: Beautiful. So good to have that information for preparing for what could happen. So as we start wrapping up, listeners obviously know you’re working ozone. So I had a couple questions here on ozone. The first one being if someone has a chronic condition like Lyme disease, how much might rectal insufflation in a home environment, obviously, something they’re coordinating with the practitioner and learning from. I’m not advocating people doing these things on their own without knowledge and training. But how much might rectal insufflation at home be useful compared to other ways of introducing ozone like major auto-hemotherapy or direct IV and things of that nature?

[01:28:59.00] Dr. Frank S.: I’m probably not the best guy. In fact, I’m sure I’m not the best guy to answer this question because in my world, I just go straight to the blood. And I don’t have that much experience going the other way, except for people whose veins are bad and that kind of thing. I will say at those times where I can’t go to the blood, for whatever reason, usually lack of a vein I can get in, that the rectal ozone works pretty well if you do huge doses of it. Normally, we talk about giving a 200 CCs at about a 50 gamma concentration, which is going to give you 10 milligrams into the intestines. But you might need 100 milligrams in those intestines to get the same effect that we get from 10 milligrams in the bloodstream.

I do believe it can work really well. I’d love to hear from somebody that just does only rectal infusions to hear what their experience is. But I don’t think it’s as good as the blood, but I think it’s awfully darn good, and I use it a lot in my clinic. We use it in the form of colonics where we’re pump – and we pump a fair amount of gas in there during those colonics, because they’re in there for 45 minutes. We pump the gas in, take the gas out, pump the gas in, take the gas out. And you know, as soon as that gas goes in there, it’s going to react instantaneously so that the ozone will react instantaneously. So actually the only gas that’s in there, after about five seconds is just oxygen. So no more ozone, so we can just take it out, and then shoot some more ozone in.

[01:30:34.20] Scott: And does ozone have any negative effect on the healthy microbiome or is it selective?

[01:30:41.13] Dr. Frank S.: A guy named Paul Ahlberg in the 1920s published a really cool paper on massive doses of ozone therapy given rectally, he was using huge doses. And he was using a fluoroscope, which is a way to use an X-ray to determine where the gas was going. He used such huge doses that he could visualize on the fluoroscope that the entire colon all the way over to the cecum was inflated with this gas. And so massive doses. And he was very particular to look at the microbiome to see how it was affected, and it was not affected in a negative way by those huge doses. And he does a technique that’s pretty close to exactly what we do today. So I would have to say that if there’s any influence on the microbiome, it’s in a favorable way.

[01:31:34.03] Scott: Beautiful. And someone with a chronic condition like Lyme disease, which lots of our listeners of this show are dealing with chronic Lyme disease, would you be more inclined to do more ozone passes, like a 10 pass less often? Or would you do fewer passes more frequently?

[01:31:55.06] Dr. Frank S.: Okay. So I’m not so sure I like this high dose technique. When you use the high doses that you do – now each pass, just so the listeners understand what we mean by this pass thing. Each pass, if it’s done, the way we normally do it, each pass is in the order of 12 milligrams of ozone. So 10 passes would be 10 times 12 or 120 milligrams of ozone. If the smaller dose, remember Paracelsus, the smaller doses are stimulating. So what is traditionally been used for decades in ozone therapy for chronic illness is small doses. And typically in the order of anywhere from a tiny dose of three milligrams to maybe a higher dose of six, eight milligrams. And for the most part, the traditional ozone therapists have not wanted to go over 10 or 12 milligrams, they think it’s too much. You’re going to have an immune suppressive effect. And which is basically what Paracelsus and others have told us that small doses do this, you keep increasing the dose, it stimulates a little bit more, but you’re going to find some point where it stops stimulating, you keep going above that now it’s actually suppressing.

Now you might want a suppression, that’s the interesting part. So if you have an overactive Th2 system, you might actually want to suppress it. That said, I’m very leery of immediately going to a large dose. And the general rule of thumb in homeopathy always has been from days of Hahnemann right up till today, chronic ill aesthetic type patients, small doses, big husky vital patients with acute infections, large doses. So that’s the way I look at it. So if I have somebody come in to see me with an acute case of something, say shingles, bad case acute shingles just came on last day or two, I’m going to hit them with 120 milligrams, and I’m going to knock it out, it’s gonna be all happy.

But if I get a chronic individual in there, that tells me you know, I’m sick, I’m rundown, I’m weak, I’ve been this way for 10 years, I’m not going high with that person. That’s too dangerous. That to me doesn’t make sense. Now what I might want to do is come on with a six milligram dose, see how they do, if they do well on the six, that point I might go to a 10 next time, and I might gradually escalate it, because that makes sense to me. But to just go on with the big dose. I hope a lot of my colleagues rethink that and start off tiny and only go to bigger doses in certain situations, especially the acute ones.

[01:34:42.08 Scott: I love that that’s kind of been my intuition about 10 pass. Lots of people have gotten excited about it even in the patient community. You’re thinking that, you know, I need a bigger hammer. If I can just kill the bugs, I’m going to get better. And it makes sense to me to do the fewer passes more frequently rather than, you know, hitting it with a hammer all at the beginning.

[01:35:04.17] Dr. Frank S.: And the analogy I use is you got a clock with a pendulum. If you just go up with your finger and touch that pendulum, that’s a stimulating dose, clock’s work and fine. It’s not going to be so good if you take a baseball bat and hit the pendulum, it’s not probably going to work as well as your little finger. So just be careful.

[01:35:26.05] Scott: Another area that many people with chronic conditions deal with are dental issues, particularly the cavitations. My thought process has been and I had two of them eight years ago that were surgically addressed, and then also did some ozone. Wondering what your thoughts are currently. Do you think we’re getting to the point that we can use ozone or other tools to avoid surgical procedures to deal with cavitations?

[01:35:54.01] Dr. Frank S.: You know, I think in some few fairly selective cases, you don’t have to do the surgery. But there’s going to be sometimes when you just have to do the surgery. And you know, it makes sense to me to start off conservative, and just inject ozone around the cavitations. At the same time, you’re using systemic ozone or doing whatever else you’re doing. We have had dentists send me X-rays of before and after with the cavitations gone, and all they really did was just inject ozone around the cavitation area, and they didn’t really go into it. But mostly the dentist have to take a little drill, go into the cavitation area, and then start injecting ozone right into the bone. And if that doesn’t work, then you’re off to surgery.

[01:36:42:15] Scott: One of our listeners wants to know how you never seem to age and guesses it has something to do with ozone, which leads me to my last question, which is the same for every guest. And that is, what are some of the key things you do on a daily basis in support of your own health?

[01:36:59.01] Dr. Frank S.: Well, you know, I’m that guy that walks the talk. And I’m no saint, but I’ve just – it’s personal, I don’t want to get sick. For the last 50-some-odd years, I sit in with patients and they tell me stories. And I’m thinking to myself, geez, if you’d had just done this, you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t be so miserable. So I’m highly motivated myself to take really good care of myself for personal selfish reasons. That said, so I actually walked the talk, I do the exercise, I measure my mitochondria annually every year to make sure I’m up to snuff. I, you know, get to bed on time. I drink really good scotch. I stay away from Coca Cola and, you know, Twinkies, you know, all the junk. Do all this stuff that you’re supposed to do, everybody already knows anyway. But to just make things extra better, what I do, now I’m 75 years old now. So at this point, I got some hormones going, I got some, you know, testosterone pellets going on, I got some thyroid going on. Hormones are really important in the older age group. I’ve used peptides. Peptides are very stimulating to the anabolic process, keep my lean body mass growing, my collagen levels up. And I do one or two passes of ozone every week. I either do that rectally in the form of a colonic, or I’ll do it into the blood. And I tend to rotate them a little bit. And that’s my secret.

[01:38:34.05] Scott: That’s amazing. How are you measuring mitochondrial function?

[01:38:38.07] Dr. Frank S.: Oh, it’s fascinating. So about 20 years ago, I developed a system that you basically wear a scuba mask. And as you’re breathing through this scuba mask, it is connected to an analyzer, and what that analyzer is going to tell me is two things. Number one, how much oxygen I am processing into energy. All that oxygen I take in only does one thing, goes down in my mitochondria, and the mitochondria, the mitochondria can process the oxygen into a utilizable form of energy. Most people know this is ATP. Another one is NAD. But these are molecules of harness that energy, and then the cells use that energy to do whatever they do. So that’s the way this thing works.

So if I’m measuring how much oxygen I’m processing, and I’m processing a lot of oxygen, that means I have a lot of mitochondria, which is good. Because as you get older, your mitochondria levels don’t go up, they go down. So what we can do is I can measure the amount of oxygen I’m not consuming, throw that measurement into some equations. The equations are going to tell me how many mitochondria is in my body. I can then go to look at the age related publications that have been done. And I say well, what age did my mitochondria match up to? So I’m 75 right now, the number of mitochondria in my body match up to a 32 year old man. So that’s pretty good. So you know, I’m feeling pretty good about that.

Now the other thing that I’m measuring though is that I’m measuring CO2. So I’m measuring oxygen consumed, and I’m measuring CO2 produced. Now, what that’s going to tell me is how efficient my mitochondria are. The first number tells me how many mitochondria I have. The second one tells me how efficiently are they working? Are they sick? Are they down for some reason, they’re not dead, because I got a lot of them, but are they working efficiently? And the way I know they are, is for every molecule of oxygen I’m taking in, I produce less CO2, that’s the efficiency. If I’m producing more and more CO2, and you see this all the time with sick people, then I’m mitochondria less efficient. So I can actually measure how many mitochondria I have, and how efficiently they worked with this simple analysis. I just put a scuba mask on, get on a stationary bicycle, run through this thing for about 20 minutes. And it’ll tell me all those things, and I can monitor my mitochondria, year after year, and make sure they’re not falling down like traditionally they would be doing.

[01:41:14.18] Scott: Wow. That’s amazing. And I’m assuming that’s something people have to do at your clinic and not very many practitioners actually do.

[01:41:21.09] Dr. Frank S.: There’s not enough of us. We need to get the word out on that because in my world, that should be a test everybody has every year almost, everybody for whatever, you’re healthy, you’re good, whatever, you check your mitochondria out. Because at some point, they’re going to go down. And you want to know that point before you find out about it 10 years later with a disease. Patients – people can go on www.BioEnergyTesting.com, BioEnergyTesting.com, and that lists all the practitioners in the US, which is where they mostly are. And even in certain places around the world that are using this technology to test their patients mitochondrial function. And if there’s any doctors watching this, really, you should think seriously about getting this test to work with your patients. Because it’s so handy. It just enlightens you in so many ways. It gives you a huge tool to not only prevent illness, which is my bag. My best day is when nobody gets sick, not when I fix people that are sick. I just love it when nobody gets sick. And two, it tells you how you’re progressing. So if you’re treating a patient that’s sick, and their mitochondrial function is actually getting better, you know you’re doing the right thing. If it’s not back to the drawing board.

[01:42:46.01] Scott: You are so passionate about the work that you do. You’re a personal hero to me and to many. So I just thank you for, you know, being a voice, for speaking your truth, for being a factory of knowledge. And this was the most fun I had in a conversation all week, probably all month. And so I just want to thank you so much for sharing this information. And I think it’s a different way of thinking about these chronic viruses that’s really going to help a lot of people. It really resonated with me when I heard you earlier in the year and loved learning even more from you today. So thank you so much, Dr. Shallenberger, for being here, for being generous with your time, and for all that you do to minimize the suffering of others.

[01:43:27.25] Dr. Frank S.:  Thank you, Scott. I appreciate that a lot. And again, I’m going to pass it back to you. Thank you for the good work that you do to get this stuff out because I could be sitting here all day long. If it’s not getting out it’s not really helping anybody. So thanks, goes the other way too.

[01:43:43.04] Scott: To learn more about today’s guest visit AntiAgingMedicine.com, that’s Anti-Aging-Medicine.com. AntiAgingMedicine.com.

[01:43:54.04] Thanks for listening to today’s episode. If you’re enjoying the show please leave a positive rating or review as doing so will help the show reach a broader audience.  To follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or MeWe, you can find me there as Better Health Guy.  To support the show, please visit BetterHealthGuy.com/Donate. To be added to my newsletter, please visit BetterHealthGuy.com/Newsletters. This and other shows can be found on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

[01:44:29.24] Thanks for listening to this BetterHealthGuy Blogcast with Scott, your Better Health Guy. To check out additional shows and learn more about Scott’s personal journey to better health, please visit BetterHealthGuy.com.

Disclaimer

The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority.