Two steps forward, are we taking a step back?
I recently shared in my masterclass, The Healing Shift, about my journey with chronic eczema on my hands. I thought that it was especially important to note that of all the symptoms that I’ve dealt with over the years, this was not one that I grew up with like the migraines, hormone imbalances, or gut issues. This particular problem did not show up until after I was diagnosed with a leaky gut and Candida, began cleaning up my diet, and using targeted supplements to help with my gut and hormones.
On the surface, one might say that the supplements that I started must have caused the eczema, because I certainly never had this issue before. After all, that’s how side effects from drugs work, right? But then why didn’t it go away once I stopped taking those supplements?
As we continue to dig deeper into the Foundational Medicine model I’m going to keep bringing up this healing mindset shift that truly causes you to question everything you once knew about the human body. I think it’s important to consider that the body is a lot smarter than we often give it credit and that so many things can be going on under the surface that we aren’t even cognitively aware of in a constant effort to bring us back to homeostasis.
Come to find out, the particular type of eczema that I experienced is actually very common with parasitic infections, and I was one of the few people to gain knowledge of my intestinal parasites through a gut stool test. Parasites are pretty sneaky little critters, of which there are many types, and they can take up residence literally anywhere in your body. Many times they aren’t found on stool tests because they either burrow into the gut lining or are covered in thick, protective biofilms that keep them from being eliminated for a sample. It could also be because it is estimated that about 70% percent of all parasites in the body are microscopic and reside outside the gut, so naturally they won’t show up in your stool, we just don’t really have a way to test for those.
As an aside, parasites are still considered a bit woo-woo in today’s medicine and therefore there has not been a lot of reason from the traditionally-minded medical community to improve upon the sensitivity and specificity of parasite testing. We just keep telling people that they’re crazy and it must be all in their head. But I digress…
The fact that I was able to identify intestinal parasites from my own stool testing speaks to my overall parasitic load, which was huge. Unbeknownst to me, I had likely been harboring these little buggers for much of my life, and they had plenty of time to proliferate and take over my gut. It wasn’t until I began opening up my drainage pathways using this foundational approach and targeting the thick intestinal biofilms that I began getting rid of them. That was when I truly began to notice a correlation between the full moon and my eczema flares, not necessarily just the foods I was eating. This is believed to be because of the changes in serotonin levels around the full moon that make them more active, thus flaring my symptoms.
Once I began really targeting parasites with the CellCore protocol, my hands kept improving each month, and I used the eczema as the main indicator of my progress. Well, that and I kept going as long as I was still seeing evidence of their elimination. Yes, it’s gross and weird to be talking about with strangers on the internet but we need to be discussing this!
It is so very common and most of us have absolutely no clue that this could be a big piece of the healing puzzle.
If we think back to when my eczema originated, it was over 10 years ago after I began taking supplements to support liver detoxification and target Candida overgrowth. I didn’t understand at the time that Candida, a fungus that can reside in small amounts in a healthy body, really only proliferates when the body’s terrain is toxic and seldom overgrows in isolation. This means there is usually another pathogen hanging out with it, and that Candida isn’t ever the true root cause, which would explain part of why I couldn’t just get rid of it, even after years of anti-Candida protocols and eating extremely low-carb trying to “starve” it out. Turns out I was just starving myself of really important nutrients.
I also didn’t know that parasites like to hang onto Candida and other pathogens and toxins as a way to help clean up the body. This helps explain why people dealing with things like Lyme or Epstein-Barr can have a really difficult time overcoming the infection, oftentimes going into periods of improvement before relapsing all over again. Because if the parasites haven’t been addressed, you’re not fully eradicating the pathogens.
It also helps to understand why sometimes we begin experiencing “new symptoms” after beginning a healing protocol. Suppose you’ve never addressed drainage pathways before and you start taking supplements to support the elimination of toxic junk that your body has been storing for a long time. In that case, you could be “stirring up dust at the construction site,” causing your body to express “symptoms” of those toxins or pathogens shifting or coming out of hiding. Kind of like poking a sleeping bear and aggravating him. The bear was always there, he just wasn’t bothering you until you started messing with him. Now that he’s mad, he’s going to let you know.
If you start a regimen to address parasites or other pathogens but haven’t fully supported the opening of your drainage pathways first, you’re likely going to experience even more of these “symptoms” because the toxins you’re stirring up have nowhere to go. In my case with a particularly weak link in my drainage funnel at the colon and liver levels, my system was utilizing the “emergency hatch” from the liver to dump these toxins back into the bloodstream and they were showing up on my skin because they’ve gotta go somewhere.
The goal is always to support drainage first so that we can minimize these effects as much as possible, but it is unrealistic to expect that the body wouldn’t experience some type of shift as we undergo such massive changes at the cellular level. I think when you think about it this way, it's actually kind of cool that we could see some sort of proof externally of the many minute little changes that are taking place internally as the body works to repair itself.
What makes this approach different from anything else is that we are supporting fundamental repair systems to allow the body to uproot and eliminate whatever has been stored away over the years, perhaps decades and decades of stored pathogens and toxins. We disrupt the thick, quorum-sensing biofilms that help bugs evade and become resistant to antibiotics. We disrupt the parasites, not just in the gut, but systemically– examples of which are so numerous that I will have to save them for my next blog post! Then, once those downstream issues have been addressed, we go and uncover stored toxins like glyphosate, heavy metals, and radioactive elements that are so ubiquitous these days and their effects so detrimental to our body’s terrain that we would be fools not to be regularly cleansing and supporting detoxification in this way.
I hope that this topic has sparked your interest and that you’ll stick around for part two, where I’ll go into more examples of how we could be experiencing dis-ease and dys-function because of toxins and pathogens, not just genes and a poor diet.
If you haven’t taken my Detox Detective quiz yet, it’s a great place to begin to identify where your “weak link” in your drainage funnel might be. Once you’ve identified which area to begin, then I’ll send you specific guidance and tips straight to your inbox about how to support your particular area(s) of opportunity. Go check it out!