Latest / Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill Carnahan, MD / 332: Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill: Infections & the Brain: The Overlooked Drivers of Chronic Inflammation with Nikki Schultek

Transcript

332: Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill: Infections & the Brain: The Overlooked Drivers of Chronic Inflammation with Nikki Schultek · Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill Carnahan, MD

• 0:00
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Welcome to Resiliency Radio, your go to podcast for the most cutting edge insights integrative and functional medicine.
• 0:07
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I'm your host Dr. Jill and with each episode we dive into the healing heart of functional medicine.
• 0:13
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I bring you innovators, medical experts and today a researcher that you may have not heard about but who is doing great work with collaborations on infections and chronic illness, especially as to do with the brain.
• 0:26
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with dementia or you're concerned about your brain health, look no further.
• 0:33
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: You are going to love this episode with Nikki and all of her collaborations.
• 0:38
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: She talks about herself as a collaborative architect bringing people together to do the research to give us as clinicians foundation.
• 0:46
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So stay tuned.
• 0:46
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: You're going to love this interview.
• 0:48
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Before we jump into the interview, I want to remind you that you can find products and services for your brain health, for your gut health and all things in between@doctor Jill health.com Some of my favorite brain products are the BDNF Essentials and the Cognicare.
• 1:03
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I also love the Brain Mag which is part of our pink drink.
• 1:07
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Dr. Jill's pink drink.
• 1:08
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: The thing I drink every single morning.
• 1:10
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Check those out@doctor Jill health.com and if you haven't yet seen the documentary, you can check that out@doctor patient movie.com.
• 1:18
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: It's now also streaming.
• 1:19
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: If you have Amazon prime, which who doesn't nowadays, you can catch that Doctor Patient movie there with your subscription to Amazon Prime.
• 1:28
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And finally, if you are looking for a functional medicine provider for complex course qu complex chronic illness or mystery symptoms, you can call our clinic.
• 1:38
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: We are accepting new patients.
• 1:39
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Our number is 303-993-7910 or you can email info@flatiron Functional Medicine.com okay, let me introduce Nikki who is Executive Director of the Alzheimer's Pathobiome Initiative alzpl.
• 1:57
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: She's also principal founder of Intercell Research Group and founding Director of the Pathobiome Research center at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic.
• 2:05
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: She earned a BS in Business Administration and began her career with Pfizer and Genentech following her own recovery from Lyme disease, which you'll hear about in this episode.
• 2:13
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Nikki dedicated her work to advancing research into infection associated chronic illness including Alzheimer's disease, pan and Pandas, and asthma.
• 2:22
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: You're going to love this interview.
• 2:24
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Let's jump right in with Nikki and join the show.
• 2:27
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Nikki, I am so excited to have you on Resiliency Radio.
• 2:31
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: We talked just briefly before we started this interview.
• 2:33
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And what I love about you is you're bringing this whole other area.
• 2:37
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I deal with a lot of medical doctors and experts on the brain and Alzheimer's, but we're all in this field seeing these clinical manifestations and trying to make sense of it with the current research.
• 2:48
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: You're out here making a difference in the world of research, giving us data and actually validating what we're observing in clinical science, which is the brain is so much more complex than we thought.
• 3:00
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Plaques are not the whole answer, and there's a whole brain microbiome that's affecting our brain health and many other things that you'll talk about today.
• 3:07
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I couldn't be more excited to have you on to talk about your research.
• 3:10
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And I get especially excited to talk to researchers because, again, I'm in my clinic doing patients one one.
• 3:16
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But you're out here paving the way for what we see in clinical practice.
• 3:21
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And one of the things you talked about that I'd love to start with is how you're really this hub of bringing together people who might not otherwise talk to one another.
• 3:29
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: How did you get into this field?
• 3:31
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Give us a little bit of your journey.
• 3:33
  Nikki Schultek: First of all, thank you, Dr. Jill, for having me.
• 3:35
  Nikki Schultek: I'm thrilled to be here.
• 3:37
  Nikki Schultek: Just absolutely love your energy and I love the way that you just anchored at the start of our conversation.
• 3:43
  Nikki Schultek: So you're seeing patients, right?
• 3:45
  Nikki Schultek: You are a practitioner, clinician, boots on the ground dealing with the type of patients that our team, our global consortium, is studying.
• 3:54
  Nikki Schultek: Right.
• 3:55
  Nikki Schultek: But in fact, how I got here is I'm a patient.
• 3:58
  Nikki Schultek: So I was extraordinarily sick and was misdiagnosed for about a year.
• 4:05
  Nikki Schultek: I ended up finding out that I had multiple chronic infections, including one that people commonly know as Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted by tick bites and other means that I contracted along with co infections.
• 4:21
  Nikki Schultek: I also ended up learning in this crazy journey of a year of horrible one after the next autoimmune diagnoses, that I also had a chronic respiratory tract infection that I had never heard of called Chlamydia pneumoniae.
• 4:37
  Nikki Schultek: And that's really that one bacterial infection is sort of how I arrived on the scene and decided to start bridging silos.
• 4:46
  Nikki Schultek: And it all began, of course, figuring out that I was sick with these infections, right?
• 4:53
  Nikki Schultek: Finding a doctor that could accurately test and diagnosed me, treated me using antimicrobial therapies in a manner which, frankly, at the time initially made me very uncomfortable.
• 5:05
  Nikki Schultek: The idea of aggressive antimicrobial therapy.
• 5:08
  Nikki Schultek: I had a background working for Pfizer and Genentech.
• 5:11
  Nikki Schultek: And at one time I worked in anti infective space, calling on microbiology labs in hospitals.
• 5:17
  Nikki Schultek: So I.
• 5:17
  Nikki Schultek: A lot of people hear the word resistance, right?
• 5:19
  Nikki Schultek: Which is antimicrobial drugs not working any longer because the germs figure out a way around it because they've been exposed to it.
• 5:28
  Nikki Schultek: So I had these concerns, yet I was being faced with life threatening symptoms.
• 5:33
  Nikki Schultek: And my kids were three and five, right?
• 5:35
  Nikki Schultek: I'm a mom.
• 5:37
  Nikki Schultek: I was completely incapacitated.
• 5:38
  Nikki Schultek: One of the things in my diagnosis that was disturbing, the differential diagnosis was they feared I had multiple sclerosis based on my symptoms.
• 5:47
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yes.
• 5:48
  Nikki Schultek: Now, I do not have Ms.
• 5:50
  Nikki Schultek: I didn't have lesions on the mri.
• 5:51
  Nikki Schultek: But the neurologist at the time in Connecticut said, this doesn't mean you won't get it.
• 5:55
  Nikki Schultek: I see patients like you all the time where you smolder and you have these symptoms and the symptomatology leads to lesions.
• 6:02
  Nikki Schultek: And so I left just like absolutely terrified, anxious.
• 6:06
  Nikki Schultek: And I had developed cognitive symptoms, too.
• 6:09
  Nikki Schultek: Now, I was in my early 30s.
• 6:11
  Nikki Schultek: So what I decided once I got on treatment by an infectious disease specialist and medical microbiologist at Vanderbilt named Charles W. Stratton, who specialized in this chronic bacterial infection of the lung called chlamydia pneumoniae, not the sexually transmitted chlamydia, but a cousin of that germ that you get when someone coughs and you inhale it, you know, he had looked at that germ from the vantage point of, not just an acute infection, but chronicity.
• 6:40
  Nikki Schultek: So the idea that it could take up residence, and now you have in an area of the body, whether it's the lung or the bladder or the brain, that it could be creating inflammation.
• 6:50
  Nikki Schultek: And we all know inflammation is bad, right?
• 6:52
  Nikki Schultek: Most diseases go back to inflammation that are chronic.
• 6:56
  Nikki Schultek: So I got treated by Dr. Stratton.
• 6:59
  Nikki Schultek: And it was funny.
• 7:00
  Nikki Schultek: As soon as I started to feel better, I said to him, he asked me to call him Chuck.
• 7:04
  Nikki Schultek: I was reluctant at first.
• 7:05
  Nikki Schultek: I'm like, okay, fine, if I must.
• 7:06
  Nikki Schultek: He's like, please call me Chuck.
• 7:08
  Nikki Schultek: Don't call me Dr. Stratton.
• 7:09
  Nikki Schultek: So it's like, okay, Chuck.
• 7:11
  Nikki Schultek: He said, you know, what I basically said was, what are we going to do about this?
• 7:18
  Nikki Schultek: This is major.
• 7:19
  Nikki Schultek: I had multiple devastating conditions, including this severe and refractory asthma go into remission with antimicrobial drugs.
• 7:27
  Nikki Schultek: And it turned my perception of autoimmunity on its head.
• 7:30
  Nikki Schultek: And I said to him, don't you just want to scream from the mountaintops with all These publications you have and other people, autoimmunity is under, you know, under poorly understood, poorly characterized.
• 7:41
  Nikki Schultek: We have chronic infections.
• 7:42
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yes, right.
• 7:43
  Nikki Schultek: Not a hit and run, right.
• 7:44
  Nikki Schultek: It's a continual hit.
• 7:45
  Nikki Schultek: It's an accident, over and over.
• 7:46
  Nikki Schultek: So he said, yes, but he said, take it easy, you're not all the way better yet.
• 7:50
  Nikki Schultek: This treatment is going to be a long road.
• 7:53
  Nikki Schultek: So he, you know, encouraged, was encouraged by the fact that I wanted to help.
• 7:57
  Nikki Schultek: And as soon as I was well enough, I decided I need to just start contacting these people, studying infection and chronic disease and introduce them to each other because they reference each other in their papers, you know, they'll write a scientific paper.
• 8:11
  Nikki Schultek: And so I said to Chuck, have you ever had a meeting with Dr. David Hahn who studies asthma in the same bacteria?
• 8:18
  Nikki Schultek: No, we never sat down for a meeting.
• 8:19
  Nikki Schultek: What about John Carter in Florida?
• 8:21
  Nikki Schultek: No, we haven't.
• 8:23
  Nikki Schultek: You know, he's like, yeah, I did meet Dr. Brian Balin once who studies the role of that bacteria in Alzheimer's.
• 8:28
  Nikki Schultek: So we started getting together, the main cast of characters, studying that one bacteria and chronic disease.
• 8:37
  Nikki Schultek: And from there I start, of course, becoming tangential in the reading.
• 8:41
  Nikki Schultek: And I myself knew that I had been diagnosed with Borrelia burgdorferi, which can also cause some of the same disorders that chlamydia was linked with, including bladder pain.
• 8:51
  Nikki Schultek: I had a diagnosis of interstitial cystitis that was brutal.
• 8:54
  Nikki Schultek: But it went into remission.
• 8:56
  Nikki Schultek: I remain in remission.
• 8:57
  Nikki Schultek: I don't have it anymore.
• 8:59
  Nikki Schultek: So that's how this all sort of began.
• 9:02
  Nikki Schultek: And the idea to be a collaboration architect to bring scientists together and physician scientists that have patients and people in the lab and data scientists in all different types of domains.
• 9:15
  Nikki Schultek: People studying fungus, bacteria, viruses, parasites, animals, you know, veterinarians.
• 9:22
  Nikki Schultek: We work with Dr. Ed Breitchworth at NC State.
• 9:25
  Nikki Schultek: The idea behind it was that everything is so siloed and the body is not.
• 9:33
  Nikki Schultek: It's an ecosystem, right?
• 9:35
  Nikki Schultek: And we are very much.
• 9:37
  Nikki Schultek: The brain especially has been thought of as this sort of like off limits area, right?
• 9:44
  Nikki Schultek: And this blood brain barrier is this impervious shield.
• 9:48
  Nikki Schultek: Nothing can get through it.
• 9:49
  Nikki Schultek: It's not really the case.
• 9:52
  Nikki Schultek: And the brain is interacting with the gut and the brain is also subject to insult from infections.
• 10:01
  Nikki Schultek: And not just things that create a cytokine storm and hurt the brain from the outside, but things that can actually, like a Trojan horse inside the very cells that are made to protect us, our immune cells.
• 10:13
  Nikki Schultek: It can enter some of these pathogens and then go right through, like they're just crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan.
• 10:20
  Nikki Schultek: So.
• 10:22
  Nikki Schultek: So the idea of bringing these different people together was really like, okay, no one's listening.
• 10:28
  Nikki Schultek: You know, decades, you know, there have been so many different research teams publishing papers.
• 10:34
  Nikki Schultek: Let's just take the example of Alzheimer's and infection since literally the 1980s.
• 10:42
  Nikki Schultek: And even actually before then, Dr. Alzheimer himself, you know, the gentleman from which the disease is named, published a paper in the very same year as another scientist named Oscar Fisher.
• 10:55
  Nikki Schultek: 1907.
• 10:57
  Nikki Schultek: Most people don't realize that this could have very easily been called Fisher's disease because their results were neck and neck in publication.
• 11:05
  Nikki Schultek: They both were living in a time when syphilis, sexually transmitted infection in the same family as Lyme disease.
• 11:13
  Nikki Schultek: These are spirochet, correct.
• 11:15
  Nikki Schultek: Early, you know, like a corkscrew.
• 11:18
  Nikki Schultek: Everyone knew that if you got syphilis and it advanced to tertiary syphilis or severe infection, it could get in the brain and cause a dementia.
• 11:27
  Nikki Schultek: Well, it was really interesting because Dr. Oscar Fisher and even Alzheimer himself acknowledged the possibility that there was an infectious component when they went ahead and saw the brain of someone that died with the disease and saw plaques.
• 11:40
  Nikki Schultek: Yes, these tangles, they said these almost resemble bacterial colonies.
• 11:45
  Nikki Schultek: And isn't it's very ironic because today on my team, you know, we have this Alzheimer's pathobiome initiative consortium, a global multidisciplinary team, purposely as diverse as it can be, with backgrounds, even patients, you know, like myself, people that have lived, experience and also expertise in these fields.
• 12:05
  Nikki Schultek: What some of our teammates have discovered is that the bad guys, the plaques, the amyloid plaques, or you know, the kindling of.
• 12:14
  Nikki Schultek: And then the tau tangles, these tangles in the brain, you know, that have been referred to as flames, like kindling in flames, right?
• 12:24
  Nikki Schultek: These one, two, punch.
• 12:26
  Nikki Schultek: And the people that we lost to this devastating neurodegenerative disease may actually be antimicrobial responses that are your body's way of fighting something that hasn't been appreciated.
• 12:39
  Nikki Schultek: And the research demonstrating that has now been repeated.
• 12:44
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Hey guys.
• 12:45
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Just a quick interruption of this episode to remind you if you have not yet got my book unexpected, I dive into the healing journey that I went through with cancer and Crohn's disease, complex chronic illness, mold related illness, Lyme disease and more.
• 12:59
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Be sure and check it out@readunexpected.com you can get it anywhere books are sold.
• 13:04
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: It's right behind me here on the shelf if you want a signed copy.
• 13:08
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Hop on over to Dr. Joel health.com and order it there.
• 13:11
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Just Put in the memo who you want it signed to and I will personally sign and send you a copy of the book.
• 13:17
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Unexpected.
• 13:18
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Okay, let's get back to our show.
• 13:19
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Now.
• 13:20
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Nikki, it's so great because a Perlmutter and any colleague of mine that are really in the weeds like you are, we know those are just baringers of what's happening underneath.
• 13:30
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And we know that any drug that targets that is not even effective because we're dealing with these underlying inflammatory issues like infection and toxin.
• 13:39
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: It makes so much sense.
• 13:40
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And again, we have a lot of providers here that listen to.
• 13:42
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: They're going to love this episode with what you've already said because so often in my complex chronic patients that many of them neurodegenerative cancer, autoimmune are the top three things we see.
• 13:53
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Infection is always intoxin are these things that play into the immune system and create these autoimmune responses and inflammatory responses.
• 14:01
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And I love that you started your journey with chlamydia pneumonia.
• 14:05
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I check every single patient, I suspect, with infection for mycoplasma and chlamydia pneumonia because these co inf.
• 14:11
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: They're actually more common than Borrelia burgdorferi and they are insidious, they've been associated with chronic fatigue, autoimmune and all those things.
• 14:18
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: You can keep going, but I wanted to just interrupt and kind of validate what you're saying from a clinical perspective because every day in my practice I'm seeing that and when I see that chlamydia pneumonia, I know we have to be treating it.
• 14:30
  Nikki Schultek: Yeah, I really so appreciate that because like you said, Dr. Jill, it's so prevalent.
• 14:36
  Nikki Schultek: So by the time people reach middle age, like 50 to 80 years old, the prevalence, like if you do population wide studies of blood, indicates that it's similar to herpes viruses, which are ubiquitous, meaning everybody, nearly everyone, has them upwards, 80%.
• 14:53
  Nikki Schultek: And then as the older you get, you know, one of my colleagues cracked a joke and said, yeah, you get old and wheat, you're becoming a germ bucket year over year.
• 15:02
  Nikki Schultek: So it's like, and I certainly feel that way with my own experience with Mycoplasma cnemoniae.
• 15:09
  Nikki Schultek: Yep.
• 15:09
  Nikki Schultek: Like lifelong asthma that was way out of control.
• 15:12
  Nikki Schultek: And you know, these, it's so key to look for these infections, but yet it's not something that the average practitioner even thinks about.
• 15:23
  Nikki Schultek: They're not testing for titers to chlamydia and mycoplasma.
• 15:26
  Nikki Schultek: We really need better direct detection tests for cnemoniae and then, you know, the.
• 15:33
  Nikki Schultek: The thing that.
• 15:34
  Nikki Schultek: That's wild about that bacteria as an example, is just how it really lines up with Alzheimer's, specifically in terms of its behavior.
• 15:44
  Nikki Schultek: So to kind of geek out on that bug, it goes inside.
• 15:48
  Nikki Schultek: The building blocks of the body, which are the cells, regardless of.
• 15:52
  Nikki Schultek: Essentially any cell type can be vulnerable to this particular pathogen.
• 15:58
  Nikki Schultek: It preferentially infects the lining of your veins and vessels and arteries.
• 16:05
  Nikki Schultek: Like endothelial cells.
• 16:06
  Nikki Schultek: Yes.
• 16:07
  Nikki Schultek: And it absolutely loves immune cells like monocytes.
• 16:12
  Nikki Schultek: And it, once it's in there, it, like, you know, steals energy.
• 16:16
  Nikki Schultek: It's like it plugs its little plug into your mitochondria, your powerhouse of your cell, and takes the very fuel that we rely on for survival cell division and for your immune cells themselves to work properly.
• 16:28
  Nikki Schultek: And.
• 16:28
  Nikki Schultek: And then it does something else nasty.
• 16:30
  Nikki Schultek: Once your cells are supposed to die so that new ones can take over and they can divide and we have a fresh set of cells, it delays that programmed death.
• 16:39
  Nikki Schultek: Because now it's sort of like, I crack the joke.
• 16:41
  Nikki Schultek: Like that show the Walking Dead with the zombies.
• 16:44
  Nikki Schultek: You now have like a zombie immune cell that should have died 72 hours ago, but it's got a passenger aboard that wasn't welcome in the first place.
• 16:54
  Nikki Schultek: That's taking energy.
• 16:55
  Nikki Schultek: And a lot of the things we see with Alzheimer's are mitochondrial dysfunction.
• 16:59
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yes.
• 17:00
  Nikki Schultek: Depletion.
• 17:01
  Nikki Schultek: Well, you have a mitochondrial parasite.
• 17:03
  Nikki Schultek: Right.
• 17:03
  Nikki Schultek: And other organisms can do this.
• 17:05
  Nikki Schultek: Yeah, you have dys homeostasis with certain metals.
• 17:09
  Nikki Schultek: You know, like the findings of, like, aluminum, for example, calcium.
• 17:13
  Nikki Schultek: This pathogen can do that.
• 17:14
  Nikki Schultek: Dys homeostasis of iron.
• 17:16
  Nikki Schultek: It does that.
• 17:17
  Nikki Schultek: And then you start saying, you know, neuroinflammation.
• 17:22
  Nikki Schultek: So chlamydia releases something called a heat shock protein number 60.
• 17:28
  Nikki Schultek: And when it does that, it's really bad because we have that in our cells in our brain, and we begin to release our own.
• 17:37
  Nikki Schultek: Like a matching campaign in a bad way instead of like fundraising.
• 17:41
  Nikki Schultek: It's like a nasty toxic soup.
• 17:44
  Nikki Schultek: And so when people talk about these things, these infections, that their job is to become chronic because they can't live outside a human cell, it literally can't survive without us.
• 17:58
  Nikki Schultek: You know, the idea that the pathogen has been cleared, when we know that it's as persistent as it is, and the assumption that it's gone from a short course of, let's say, a Z pack, is really a fool's errand.
• 18:12
  Nikki Schultek: And so, you know, it's.
• 18:14
  Nikki Schultek: It's been something that our team, one of the pathogens, and it's not the only one that we're focused on because there's definitely a pathobiome and a lot.
• 18:25
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Of research too just to validate your point on me.
• 18:27
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: CFS with these extracellular pathogens as a primary.
• 18:31
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So, and just to clarify, a lot of people out there, a lot of docs, a lot of patients know about Lyme disease.
• 18:36
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: That's very real, very present.
• 18:38
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But I often see these co infections being just as big of a deal.
• 18:41
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Kind of like the case where you presented your own journey and if they're missed, I mean literally, docs should be checking.
• 18:48
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Let's just talk briefly about if you know any of the research around right now.
• 18:51
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: We do titers and the that we have are some pcr, there are some other specialty labs, but the General Quest Lab corp, whatever we have IGG and igm and typically if it's an older infection, you're not going to see the igm, although sometimes you see that reactivate and pop up.
• 19:07
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But if I see both of those really high levels and a whole infectious burden, I start to suspect is there any more research on better ways of diagnosing versus just seeing those high IGG titers?
• 19:18
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Is that.
• 19:19
  Nikki Schultek: Yeah, so it just depends on the pathogen.
• 19:21
  Nikki Schultek: Right.
• 19:21
  Nikki Schultek: So in the tick borne illness space you have some fabulous labs I'm sure that you use.
• 19:26
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: You know, you, I'm talking just mycoplasma, chlamydia.
• 19:29
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Because the tick borne.
• 19:29
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yeah, we've got.
• 19:30
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: No, we've got.
• 19:32
  Nikki Schultek: Yeah, no, and we've had.
• 19:35
  Nikki Schultek: Honestly, Dr. Jill, like I've had numerous meetings with different, you know, diagnostics companies highlighting the importance and you know, chlamydia and mycoplasma would make a phenomenal respiratory panel for chronicity because they've both been strongly associated with asthma and asthma is now second to long Covid the most common pediatric autoimmune diagnosis.
• 19:55
  Nikki Schultek: And thus I think if we caught kiddos early in life before their lungs remodel and get filled with mucus and end up with lung damage like what I have from years of untreated asthma and mucus and inflammation and infection, then you know, we would have, if we had a better direct detection test, we don't have something like that.
• 20:16
  Nikki Schultek: Now there are hospitals if someone has a pneumonia, so this is important as you know, you can get a bad pneumonia which requires hospitalization from chlamydia pneumonia or mycoplasma pneumoniae.
• 20:29
  Nikki Schultek: And if you are fortunate enough, you know, in the sense to be in the hospital, they can do direct detection like they can look for those organisms.
• 20:39
  Nikki Schultek: Okay.
• 20:40
  Nikki Schultek: And so that would really be the only context in which a patient would access it is if it's going to be like your average laboratory testing with Quest and LabCorp, it's going to be chlamydia and mycoplasma, immunoglobulin G and immunoglobulin M. And a lot of times if providers like, so let's say I'm talking to a patient that has concerns and I say, well that's kind of suspicious for these certain infections.
• 21:05
  Nikki Schultek: And then they go to their primary care doctor and ask for the test.
• 21:08
  Nikki Schultek: The test comes back with extraordinarily high levels of immunoglobulin G for clumpy, our mycoplasma.
• 21:14
  Nikki Schultek: That practitioner is likely to say this is a historical infection.
• 21:18
  Nikki Schultek: You fought this infection at one time.
• 21:20
  Nikki Schultek: It does not indicate active infection or chronic infection.
• 21:24
  Nikki Schultek: And people that study those organisms might disagree.
• 21:28
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I would agree with you 100% because I'm checking these and I obviously.
• 21:33
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Well, first thing is in my clinical experience, anyone with borrelia, I bet 90 to 95% of them have these CO infections, one or both of them.
• 21:40
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So it's super common.
• 21:42
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But I think many practitioners are focused on the Lyme and Bartonella babesia and they're forgetting that these also are huge players like in your case.
• 21:50
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And if I'm seeing that there's this piece that's not because really right now we are a little limited with the science.
• 21:57
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So if I see these really high, like 4 times normal hiders, I suspect, and a clinical, you know, symptomatology and they're responding to either intracellular antimicrobials or sometimes natural agents.
• 22:09
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: All that together puts a clinical picture.
• 22:11
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Even though all I really have is a really high igg.
• 22:14
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Right.
• 22:15
  Nikki Schultek: And you're not, and you're not doing something wild or horrific.
• 22:19
  Nikki Schultek: I mean it's patient centered care.
• 22:22
  Nikki Schultek: Right?
• 22:23
  Nikki Schultek: Because if we go back to a time before were so sophisticated, I'm going to put that word in quotes, and we had all of these fancy tests to rely upon.
• 22:32
  Nikki Schultek: Practitioners did have to use in some way, shape or form a little bit more leaning on that clinical picture, you know, hearing that patient story, listening to the etiology of like the onset of it.
• 22:43
  Nikki Schultek: For example, with asthma, a lot of patients will say, you know, doc, my asthma began, I got a respiratory infection, I got like a cold, I got a nasty bronchitis and I never got better.
• 22:54
  Nikki Schultek: Now I've wheezing and you wouldn't Believe how many people's asthma starts that way?
• 22:59
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yeah.
• 23:00
  Nikki Schultek: So we, you know, myself and my coworker, Dr. David Hahn, who is an absolute pioneer in the infectious asthma space, you know, we publish on that and we call it an easily identifiable syndrome, infectious asthma syndrome, where if the patient's story lines up with this and those patients, many of them, most of them, will respond to azithromycin therapy longer term.
• 23:24
  Nikki Schultek: You know, in the dosing regimen that Dr. Hahn and others have used in their studies is like anywhere from 250 milligrams Monday, Wednesday, Friday to 500 milligrams, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, three times a week, because the drug builds up in your system and remains steady.
• 23:41
  Nikki Schultek: But it just.
• 23:42
  Nikki Schultek: If infections are treated early.
• 23:45
  Nikki Schultek: Yeah, it's so important.
• 23:48
  Nikki Schultek: And then in the future, obviously we know that broad spectrum antimicrobial drugs have impact too, that may not be positive on constituents of the gut microbiome and otherwise, you know, may leave people vulnerable to certain fungal infections like Candida.
• 24:03
  Nikki Schultek: So we do need better solutions.
• 24:05
  Nikki Schultek: And that's part of, like, what we do in our team is with basic research, right, showing how do these infections work together to lead to a disease?
• 24:14
  Nikki Schultek: Well, we can figure out how to intercept.
• 24:17
  Nikki Schultek: And in the future, targeted therapies will be amazing, and I really believe we'll get there or therapies that are supporting the immune system.
• 24:26
  Nikki Schultek: You know, there are different angles and ways of going about this that we don't have yet.
• 24:31
  Nikki Schultek: And unless somebody really underscores this problem, you know, we won't have those solutions.
• 24:37
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I love that you mentioned that because I've always talked about with like Borrelia, I believe I would just go out on the street and test 10,000 people for Borrelia Burgdorferi.
• 24:46
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I might find 20 to 30% of them walking around with Lyme, a true infection.
• 24:51
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And yet they're not super symptomatic.
• 24:52
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: They may not know they have it.
• 24:54
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Maybe they feel really good.
• 24:55
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And what I've observed is it's not a combination of just infection that they've been exposed to a tick bite when they were 12, but it's that plus a weakened immune system.
• 25:04
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And like these senant cells that aren't, you know, doing their job, that become inflammating or immune, you know, resilience, all of this thing.
• 25:12
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But what happens is, just like you said, you have this antibiotic or antimicrobial therapy.
• 25:17
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Absolutely core.
• 25:18
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But at the same time, sometimes ivig, sometimes beta glucans, sometimes astragal, all These other things that are actually supporting that natural function of T cells and B cells to help you.
• 25:30
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I find that's kind of the perfect combo of really getting someone off the antibiotics and onto a optimal life, you know, without that infection weighing them down.
• 25:40
  Nikki Schultek: Absolutely.
• 25:41
  Nikki Schultek: And, you know, and again, to bring it back to, like, you know, point of vulnerability for me, I've been playing whack a mole with this thing for 10 years.
• 25:49
  Nikki Schultek: And I've had, you know, it's been such an incredible journey of not only learning, you know, and becoming a member of the scientific community and, you know, going from being a patient to studying for like a decade and diving in and, you know, now writing grants and papers and.
• 26:08
  Nikki Schultek: And getting research projects funded for teams all over the place, but also going through this journey, aging with these infections and how, you know, for example, perimenopause and.
• 26:21
  Nikki Schultek: And has affected, you know, some of the things.
• 26:23
  Nikki Schultek: Things that never were addressed properly.
• 26:25
  Nikki Schultek: So, for example, Dr. Jo, you've probably heard this before.
• 26:29
  Nikki Schultek: I initially, when I got sick, I had this air hunger, and I kept describing it to the asthma and allergy doctor, and I was like, this isn't like asthma.
• 26:36
  Nikki Schultek: This is different.
• 26:36
  Nikki Schultek: Yes, this is new.
• 26:37
  Nikki Schultek: I've had asthma forever.
• 26:38
  Nikki Schultek: This is not, you know, quacking like a duck, barking like a dog.
• 26:42
  Nikki Schultek: This is something else.
• 26:43
  Nikki Schultek: And I had rib pain, and then I had this bout of dizziness that was disturbing, and I was like, oh, my gosh, am I having a stroke?
• 26:51
  Nikki Schultek: And I had all these other symptoms.
• 26:53
  Nikki Schultek: Well, fast forward to now.
• 26:55
  Nikki Schultek: I'm a part of an IRB study at North Carolina State University.
• 26:58
  Nikki Schultek: And with newer detection methods, blood that I gave in 2021 revealed that I have Babesia microti.
• 27:05
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I knew it.
• 27:05
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I was gonna say Babesia.
• 27:07
  Nikki Schultek: Yes.
• 27:08
  Nikki Schultek: So, yeah, it's been, you know, and then.
• 27:10
  Nikki Schultek: So I never, like, you know, to my community of chronic illness patients that.
• 27:14
  Nikki Schultek: And people that might be listening that, you know, relate to a story like mine in some ways, you know, as a patient, is that I'm still learning and the science is catching up.
• 27:25
  Nikki Schultek: And, you know, I started working with an ILADS doctor in December, or, I'm sorry, last August, in December, initiated treatment for babesiosis very slowly, because when you're treating for this red blood cell parasite, you can actually lose too many red blood cells.
• 27:41
  Nikki Schultek: Right.
• 27:42
  Nikki Schultek: Because, like the chlamydia organism, this is living inside a red blood cell.
• 27:46
  Nikki Schultek: Yuck.
• 27:47
  Nikki Schultek: I don't want anyone hanging out there.
• 27:48
  Nikki Schultek: Thank you very much.
• 27:50
  Nikki Schultek: So I had some of these symptoms that.
• 27:52
  Nikki Schultek: Dr. Jill.
• 27:53
  Nikki Schultek: Because I think of perimenopause and the reduction in estrogen and the changes my body is going through, plus a term I want to throw out there that we think is really important.
• 28:02
  Nikki Schultek: And you alluded to it, but immunosenescence, which is my immune system's getting older.
• 28:07
  Nikki Schultek: Everybody is by the day.
• 28:09
  Nikki Schultek: So, you know, my husband and I joke, you know, he's healthy as a horse, doesn't take, you know, participate in any of my vitamins that I'm suggesting no pills, runs these races, has likely been in contact with just as many tick bites as I was in Connecticut and may have Borelli on board.
• 28:29
  Nikki Schultek: We haven't tested him.
• 28:31
  Nikki Schultek: Some people tolerate infections, and we know this already, right?
• 28:35
  Nikki Schultek: So it's just like, you know, there are certain individuals who got Covid.
• 28:40
  Nikki Schultek: I guess the most modern example or poignant one now is people that got Covid, barely got a sniffle, got better, moved on with their life, no problem.
• 28:48
  Nikki Schultek: Fine.
• 28:49
  Nikki Schultek: Some people got Covid and are debilitated still.
• 28:52
  Nikki Schultek: They're in bed, they're in a dark room with a new diagnosis of ME CFS or, you know, some horrible chronic disease.
• 29:01
  Nikki Schultek: And, you know, many of the practitioners have noted that these people have co infections.
• 29:06
  Nikki Schultek: And so with COVID it appears that there's a level of immunosuppression.
• 29:11
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yes.
• 29:12
  Nikki Schultek: And, you know, when you bring the immune system down just that much, and let's say you are somebody tolerating your bartonella, your Babesia, your, you know, chlamydia, you were coexisting with it at one point in time, and that's why we're called the Pathobiome Initiative.
• 29:26
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: By the way, I so love that Nikki and I want to speak to.
• 29:29
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: If you don't know Amy Prowl, she's got a research.
• 29:35
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yes, Yes.
• 29:36
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I bet you either know each other or should know each other.
• 29:39
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I've interviewed her on the podcast.
• 29:40
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But what I loved is she was bringing validity to what were again, just like you are to what we're seeing in clinical practice.
• 29:47
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And one of the things we saw post Covid was I kind of call it the triad.
• 29:50
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: We would have decreased in cortisol and adrenal dysfunction.
• 29:54
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So often fatigue, specifically associated with thyroid axis, like hormonal access.
• 30:00
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But T cells, kind of like this inflammation, would retain spike protein and these macrophages would hang around.
• 30:06
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: They should be dead and dysfunctional, but they're just hanging around like ghost zombies and dysfunctional.
• 30:11
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So this T cell ability to fight the native immune system, these infections keep them down, was really impaired post Covid.
• 30:17
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And Then B cells would get overactivated, start the autoimmune chain.
• 30:21
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So it was real common.
• 30:22
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And then Amy brought to the forefront with her research that typically there was this reactivation of Epstein Barr or Bartonella, Babesia or Borrelia.
• 30:32
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: All the big B's, right?
• 30:33
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: The triad that we see so often and so often when I'm seeing this long Covid, I'm like, okay, do you have retained dysfunctional macrophages where your T cells aren't working?
• 30:41
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And do you have rectivation of Bartonella?
• 30:43
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Do you have.
• 30:43
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And when we find that, or even these atypicals like mycoplasma, chlamydia, those are some too.
• 30:50
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And so very Frequently, I'd guess 80% of these long COVID patients are this combination of exactly what we're talking about, someone who was functioning over here and then dropped below the way radar.
• 31:01
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And then it started doing the whack a mole that you described of the infections popping up and their immune system has just been kind of trashed.
• 31:08
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And so then we try to figure out, okay, do we need to treat those infections or restore immunity or both.
• 31:13
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But it's so relevant.
• 31:15
  Nikki Schultek: And yeah, I'm super familiar with their work.
• 31:18
  Nikki Schultek: I think what polybiomy are doing is phenomenal.
• 31:21
  Nikki Schultek: We're thrilled to have them out in the ether with us.
• 31:24
  Nikki Schultek: You know, we have very synergistic work and you know, it's just, it's like an incredible time, honestly.
• 31:31
  Nikki Schultek: Like I, in 10 years have never had more genuine hope that we are sitting on the verge of a tipping point of things changing.
• 31:40
  Nikki Schultek: But, you know, the pathobiome concept that we talk about, people will be like, well, what's the pathobiome?
• 31:47
  Nikki Schultek: And it's a great question because it's a relatively new word, hasn't been around forever.
• 31:51
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Describe that and talk, because we talk about brain health and stuff, we talked about all this stuff that is so fascinating.
• 31:56
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But let's kind of focus the last, you know, 10 minutes or so.
• 31:58
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: This, I want to know, what is the Alzheimer pathobiome initiative?
• 32:02
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And then also help us link this to the brain because I know a lot of people are wondering, could I get Alzheimer's, Could I get dementia?
• 32:09
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Is there an infection involved?
• 32:10
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I'll let you go with it.
• 32:12
  Nikki Schultek: Yeah.
• 32:13
  Nikki Schultek: So this Alzheimer's Pathobiome Initiative, Global consortium, it's multidisciplinary and we actually don't just study Alzheimer's disease.
• 32:20
  Nikki Schultek: So Alzheimer's is a very, it's a catch all for a lot of different Things, right?
• 32:26
  Nikki Schultek: It's a description of a form of dementia.
• 32:29
  Nikki Schultek: So the dementia is the umbrella underneath it.
• 32:31
  Nikki Schultek: Alzheimer's is the most common form.
• 32:33
  Nikki Schultek: But then there are others that can people have heard of, like frontotemporal dementia, vascular dementia.
• 32:38
  Nikki Schultek: Then there are Parkinson's disease that has some overlap, like in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's.
• 32:43
  Nikki Schultek: You may also find some of the Parkinson's disease bad guy pathology, alpha synuclein, which may also be a response to infections, by the way.
• 32:53
  Nikki Schultek: And then you have other brain diseases that have similarities.
• 32:57
  Nikki Schultek: And we study those too.
• 32:58
  Nikki Schultek: So we look at, we're studying pants Pandas, which are the pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with infections.
• 33:07
  Nikki Schultek: Pandas refers to specifically strep infection, whereas pans refers to kind of like dementia is the umbrella.
• 33:15
  Nikki Schultek: Pans refers to that.
• 33:17
  Nikki Schultek: This can be from long Covid, it can be Lyme, it can be mycoplasma, chlamydia, cytomegalovirus.
• 33:23
  Nikki Schultek: A whole lot of other things can trigger these symptoms in kids.
• 33:28
  Nikki Schultek: But we also are looking at als, we're studying epilepsy.
• 33:32
  Nikki Schultek: So our team is looking at infection associated brain diseases and studying them in a holistic and integrated fashion, sharing specimens among different labs, studying the same cases, the same people that we lost to one disease, being looked at using multiple different sophisticated technologies.
• 33:55
  Nikki Schultek: And we're looking for a few things.
• 33:56
  Nikki Schultek: Things we're looking for infections and we're doing so in using very specific approaches, also unbiased approaches that look for everything that's there using technologies like something called sequencing that will map out DNA, which is the genetic material from pathogens or germs.
• 34:21
  Nikki Schultek: And then we also are looking at the immune response spots.
• 34:24
  Nikki Schultek: We are also in women because many of these diseases target women disproportionately.
• 34:29
  Nikki Schultek: Two thirds of Alzheimer's and 2/3 of multiple sclerosis.
• 34:32
  Nikki Schultek: 2 Infection associated brain diseases that target women.
• 34:36
  Nikki Schultek: We are looking at what happens in the context of hormonal shifts, what happens to the immune system, what happens to pathogen load to the pathobiome, which the word pathobiome, just to step back for a second is really key.
• 34:49
  Nikki Schultek: We chose that very intentionally, even though we knew people might not know what it means yet.
• 34:54
  Nikki Schultek: Because, okay, the microbiome is a word a lot of people have heard of, right?
• 34:57
  Nikki Schultek: And when I hear that word, I think like kumbaya.
• 35:00
  Nikki Schultek: Like it's all the gut bacteria are happy.
• 35:03
  Nikki Schultek: I have a healthy microbiome.
• 35:04
  Nikki Schultek: The word microbiome, I feel like, has like a positive connotation for me.
• 35:08
  Nikki Schultek: I don't know if that's true for you, too.
• 35:11
  Nikki Schultek: And pathobiome has the word pathological woven into it, meaning troublesome.
• 35:17
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yes.
• 35:17
  Nikki Schultek: And it doesn't just refer to the germs.
• 35:20
  Nikki Schultek: So, yes, I can.
• 35:21
  Nikki Schultek: I call it, you know, organized crime.
• 35:24
  Nikki Schultek: You get to a certain point where the immune system is malfunctioning, either due to an infection or due to some other element of aging.
• 35:33
  Nikki Schultek: Hormonal shifts, exposure to mycotoxins, you name it.
• 35:37
  Nikki Schultek: Any of the insults that.
• 35:39
  Nikki Schultek: Can we call that the exposome.
• 35:41
  Nikki Schultek: The things that you're exposed to in your life, chemicals at work, you name it.
• 35:45
  Nikki Schultek: Something brings you down.
• 35:46
  Nikki Schultek: And now all of a sudden, you have disproportionate numbers of bad guys in the community.
• 35:51
  Nikki Schultek: You have like a mafia or a mob type situation.
• 35:55
  Nikki Schultek: And we even know that certain of these bad pathogens collaborate with each other, just like my team collaborates.
• 36:01
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yeah.
• 36:01
  Nikki Schultek: And we don't want that.
• 36:03
  Nikki Schultek: So the pathobiome takes into account not only the community, but the terrain, and it refers to also the health of the immune system.
• 36:13
  Nikki Schultek: So our team feels, you know, and we're not the only thing that we should be looking at, like, the stuff that we're interested in.
• 36:21
  Nikki Schultek: I mean, this is what we are studying.
• 36:24
  Nikki Schultek: The role of infection and the immune response to infection in the diseases that target the brain, that are neurodegenerative, neuropsychiatric, and otherwise.
• 36:33
  Nikki Schultek: But we also think that other ideas should be welcome at the table, because let's take Alzheimer's, for example.
• 36:40
  Nikki Schultek: Billions and billions of dollars have gone into developing therapeutics, and we still don't have something that is truly effective, affordable, safe, accessible to most patients.
• 36:51
  Nikki Schultek: So we just essentially feel that we know enough already that infections have been strongly linked with a variety of neurodegenerative diseases.
• 37:03
  Nikki Schultek: And the linkage between Ms. And Epstein Barr virus is so powerful.
• 37:09
  Nikki Schultek: But it's.
• 37:10
  Nikki Schultek: You know, now when you read the literature on it, the word causation is used.
• 37:15
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yes.
• 37:16
  Nikki Schultek: You know, people used to say, oh, it's an association.
• 37:19
  Nikki Schultek: Right.
• 37:19
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: It's.
• 37:20
  Nikki Schultek: It means it's in the ballpark.
• 37:21
  Nikki Schultek: It may not be causing it.
• 37:23
  Nikki Schultek: But now the.
• 37:24
  Nikki Schultek: The research is just so compelling that Epstein Barr gets involved.
• 37:29
  Nikki Schultek: You know, this huge military database study revealed that essentially, if you did not get Epstein Barr, you didn't get Ms. And that's wild.
• 37:37
  Nikki Schultek: It's crazy.
• 37:38
  Nikki Schultek: You know, we have to start using common sense, right?
• 37:40
  Nikki Schultek: Where, you know, like a lot of what you probably do every day with your patients, which is you look at the person, you listen to their story.
• 37:48
  Nikki Schultek: You're leveraging quite a bit of common sense and experience right on top of data that you get from lab tests.
• 37:55
  Nikki Schultek: And we feel that we should be doing this as a scientific community also.
• 38:00
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Wow, this is such a great.
• 38:02
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: It's just so exciting to me because here you are bringing people together and this multi collaborative group.
• 38:08
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Would you call it architectural collaboration?
• 38:10
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: You had some really cool words in.
• 38:11
  Nikki Schultek: There, but it's collaboration architecture.
• 38:15
  Nikki Schultek: I couldn't think of a way to describe what I do, you know, and I was hoping that it could become a thing, you know, that other people that are adept at, you know, reading broadly and enjoy tangential learning and science and then can also socialize with a lot of different people and build bridges, you know, and form alliances that people could do this.
• 38:37
  Nikki Schultek: And there are other people that like myself, you know, patients with lived experience that leverage business skills or other acumen that they have and get involved.
• 38:48
  Nikki Schultek: So thank you for saying that.
• 38:49
  Nikki Schultek: I mean, and it's.
• 38:50
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Yeah, it's so exciting because it's what's needed for even clinicians.
• 38:54
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: We need to start really collaborating because there's so much that we're seeing and as we share stories and share what's working and talk to.
• 39:01
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So to me, it's just super exciting because on this level, you're bringing the information down, trickling down to us in the clinic, you know, seeing the patients and giving validation to some of the things.
• 39:11
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Because truly the average research, back in my medical school days, you know, say something was started to be seen as a pattern.
• 39:18
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: It'd take 20 or 30 years for that to get into clinical practice.
• 39:21
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: We can't wait that long.
• 39:23
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So you're really accelerating the pace with your work.
• 39:26
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: If people want to find out more about you, the lab, the work, the.
• 39:30
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: All the different things, what is the best place where they could come and maybe even donate money to the cause?
• 39:36
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I mean, by all means, I would love to see that happen.
• 39:39
  Nikki Schultek: Yeah.
• 39:39
  Nikki Schultek: So we have.
• 39:40
  Nikki Schultek: So my research center at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and Medical School is called the Pathobiome Research center, and it's www.pcom.edu backsplash pbrc.
• 39:56
  Nikki Schultek: So, like, patho that in the links,.
• 39:58
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Guys, if you're driving or whatever, worry I'll include that.
• 40:01
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: But yeah, so.
• 40:02
  Nikki Schultek: So the university center, you know, at PCOM is my collaboration hub and it is a nonprofit, so donations can be made.
• 40:11
  Nikki Schultek: There's like a giving page for pcom.
• 40:13
  Nikki Schultek: Inquiries can be sent directly to me and then I can send people, you know, along to a place where they could donate.
• 40:20
  Nikki Schultek: We also have a website for the consortium, so that's alzpi.org so it's Alz like Alzheimer's, P like Pathobiome.
• 40:29
  Nikki Schultek: I like initiative.org and there's a whole collection of education podcasts, symposia, publications from our team.
• 40:37
  Nikki Schultek: And really that website is definitely geared toward clinicians and researchers and life sciences professionals.
• 40:44
  Nikki Schultek: But I do get a ton of emails from patients all the time because I've shared my story so widely and I'm always happy to provide resources.
• 40:52
  Nikki Schultek: I'm not a practicing clinician, I'm not a doctor, but I do frequently recommend that people that suspect they have infection associated chronic illness find a doctor like you, Dr. Jill.
• 41:03
  Nikki Schultek: You know that I often offer people the Ilads International Lyme associated Diseases Society or for pediatric cases, the maps, you know, which both have provider searches.
• 41:16
  Nikki Schultek: And then of course there are, you know, the Dr. Bredesen and Dean Ornish, Dr. Pearl Mutter.
• 41:24
  Nikki Schultek: I feel like I always mispronounce that and I'm so badly.
• 41:27
  Nikki Schultek: It's a tongue twister for me.
• 41:28
  Nikki Schultek: But I'm so grateful.
• 41:30
  Nikki Schultek: Thank you so much for hosting this and for having conversations, you know, that are really getting people thinking.
• 41:39
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: You are so welcome, Nikki and thank you for taking your difficult journey but also taking it and transforming and really this ability for you to be a connector and bring all these people together is really extraordinary.
• 41:50
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Like I, I am just amazed and again, like I said, you are doing something that we in the clinic, it can't do.
• 41:56
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So keep up the great work.
• 41:57
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I am so happy to support you.
• 41:59
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: I hope you guys listening out there have enjoyed this and will also go to those websites.
• 42:03
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: If you're a doc, go to the research, do some reading, educate yourself.
• 42:07
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And Nikki, good luck with the rest of the journey because I think this work is super impactful and super important.
• 42:13
  Nikki Schultek: Thank you, Dr. Jill.
• 42:14
  Nikki Schultek: I appreciate it.
• 42:15
  Nikki Schultek: Thanks for all you do.
• 42:17
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Hey guys, as you can tell, I get super excited when we talk to another type of provider.
• 42:22
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: This, in this case Nikki takes her personal story and it has started the consortium for all of this great research and work that helps pave the way for new discoveries and ability for us as clinicians to actually change the way we practice medicine.
• 42:37
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: So I hope you will go out if you're a clinician, read her research, the website she gave there will be in the links below.
• 42:43
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: If you are a patient, I hope you'll educate yourself and ask the right questions to your doctor and make sure you find someone to really help you.
• 42:50
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And hopefully you'll find Every week on Resiliency Radio, we are bringing you great, incredible interviews with these kinds of people that are doing the work out there on the field.
• 43:00
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Not looking for glory, but just really changing the way we view medicine and giving us that foundation of research in order to take things to the next level.
• 43:10
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did.
• 43:13
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: If you do, please leave a comment.
• 43:14
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Share with someone who you might think would be interested.
• 43:17
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Or if it's your doctor, why don't you share this episode with your doctor so that we can educate the providers out there to start to be looking for these complex chronic infections, especially in the realm of neurodegenerative diseases.
• 43:29
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: Anyway, guys, I'll see you again next week for a new episode of Resiliency Radio.
• 43:33
  Dr. Jill Carnahan: And until then, be well.