We have a patient who really struggled for five years with this mysterious illness. She’s a highly educated professional, holds an advanced degree, and was in her business, had started her family, and all of a sudden started to get ill. And she went to see lots of doctors...very expensive...down to The Mayo Clinic! Very common... when something gets mysterious that we go down to the Mayo Clinic. That's why about a third of our people (patients) have been to The Mayo Clinic. And still couldn’t quite grab the answers...umm...

And five years into this program, her husband came up to her and said... “I’m out. I'm done. No one knows what you have. I don’t know if you’re making it up! I don't know. I can’t function like this. I’m sorry, but I’m leaving."

She did what she had to do. She just moved forward. Umm....You know she’s got two kids, so you've got to deal with that. And now her husband is going…"I can’t do it." So, she lost her family (kind of...at least that's not how she expected it to go!). She’s seeing her career slip away because she’s missing work. She’s going to her car to take two naps a day, just to get through a workday. And then when she gets home, she can’t really be the mom she wants to be. So this is a person, like I said, extremely well accomplished and educated before this all happened. And her story just kind of broke my heart, because I’m going…."Okay, what happened?”

And she found a Lyme Functional Medicine person in the cities, three years ago, who diagnosed her with Lyme, and then started some stuff for her.

And I just met her, and we started talking and..

I said “Well, how long have you been working on this?”

She said “three years.”

I said "Well... how are you doing? ..That’s kind of a long time."

She says “Is it a long time?”

I said “ Well, we tell people 12-18 months you really should be quite good.”

She says, “Well it’s been three years!”

I said “Well, are you better?!”

She replied “I’m worse than when I started.”

I said “Well, maybe you need a second opinion. Thats a long time. May be you need a second opinion."

I took a look at her protocol… She was taking 46 pills every day!

Which is somewhat common, you know, you’re on 12-15 different vitamins. A lot of times when you are sick they start to pile up.

So it was 46 pills…and I looked at this and I said “Of your protocol…44 of 46 pills are just trying to help you keep it together. Two pills [vitamins]a day are really, in my opinion, trying to move you forward from point A to point B."

And I said that I thought this is really a disproportionate amount of what you are doing. I tell people, we really want 80% of what you’re doing to be moving you forward. And we want 20% to be helping you get by, so you don’t have to suffer. I used to say “100% of the root cause!”

That’s a mistake an early doctor makes; 100% of the root cause means you people are miserable while you’re going for the root cause, 80% means you’re making progress and the 20% helps people smooth it out.

She started working with us about 6 months ago, and I’ve got to tell you, the last three months have been some of the best three-months she’s had in ten years! And that’s some pretty quick results although, she’s had some things going for her…but the last few appointments were these kinds of “boring appointments” I’m talking about.

I asked “How ya’ doin?”

She said “Doing Good.”

I asked “What are you doing?”

She said "I’m doing all this stuff with my family…trips with my girls. I haven’t had to take a nap in a month, I just work the day.”

I asked “And then what do you do?”

She said “Well then I go home and I’m mom to my girls.”

And

I go…"Well..good!”

[She asks] “Well do you want to change anything?”

I say “Uhhh, not really!!” If it’s going that good, my general rule is let’s be patient, when it’s going good!

The better it’s going, the more patient I am, the worse it’s going, the more I want to fiddle and change and alter…. She’s the patient that, I’m thrilled for her ability to engage in her career because she has career aspirations and her ability to engage as a mom, because it’s been 10 years of her going “I can’t do the things in life…I can’t live the life I want to live because I don’t have the health to do it. So we’re getting good results with it and I’m excited for her to get all the way through!

There are some other people too who have similar stories; those are the [patient] stories that tend to get me when... “I have career goals, I have family goals, I have these things, and they are just not happening because I have this illness. Can you please help me re-gain even the option of being able to work in my life."

And that’s really what we want to help people do, is re-gain their life, re-gain the health to at least engage in their life!