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Dr. Diane Mueller believes there needs to be a holistic mind and body approach to heal from Lyme. This belief led her to start My Lyme Doc (formerly known as Medicine with Heart Institute and Training School) an institute that focuses on healing chronically ill patients as well as certifying practitioners in advanced functional medicine testing. As a survivor of mold illness, Lyme disease, and chronic IBS symptoms, she is passionate about helping others restore their health and passion for life.
Dr. Diane Mueller’s most recent project is the publishing of her book, Use Your Mind to Heal Your Mold and Lyme. Her book delves deeper into her approach to Lyme treatment and connects the heart, body, and mind.
Mimi:
I’m excited to learn about everything you have, you have so many things to offer the Lyme community, especially because you have been through Lyme yourself and mold, which is a huge part of this.
So anytime somebody reaches out to me now and says, “Oh, I can’t get better.” I’m like, “Have you looked into mold?” Because I think 9 of 10 times, it’s mold or a parasite, that’s stopping them from getting better from the Lyme, it’s keeping it. So thank you so much for coming on.
Why don’t we just start with the book that’s behind you? You just launched a book and so we can start talking about that.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah, happy to, and thanks for having me, Mimi. So my book is called Use Your Mind to Heal Your Mold and Lyme. It’s a mind-body approach to this problem.
One of the things that I’ve seen clinically that I think is so problematic is when we just are focused on the body and really just focused on the killing of Lyme, and that’s very, very important, I don’t want to diminish, the important, we absolutely want to kill Borrelia. We want to kill all of the co-infections that are associated with it.
The book was really inspired by seeing a chronic problem come in from the clinical perspective where people were just focused on that aspect and were not also focused on the fact that Lyme also messes with our detox systems. It actually screws with our vagal nerve and can affect our digestion, our hormones, our adrenals, our thyroid, all these different organ systems, and glands get really affected by having Lyme disease in these co-infections.
So the book was really inspired by helping people understand that we need to look more holistically at not just killing, but also at repairing all the damage, as well as looking at how the mind plays a role. And I know when I was healing from Lyme, I would wake up, and sometimes the first thing that would happen where I would do these whole-body scans, I’d be like, “What’s wrong with me today? What’s wrong with me today? What’s wrong with me today?”
Mimi:
What hurts?
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah. “How bad is it going to be? Is it going to be a 20 out of 10 or am I going to have a good day? Which is, I can get up and actually go to the bathroom today and do a couple different things.” And so it’s really easy as we know in the Lyme and mold community, to have these thoughts that are really, really real there and true, but at the same time, they create a sympathetic dominance, a fight or flight, an adrenaline type of response in our body.
Once that happens, we’re no longer sending out the signal to heal. And so the book was also inspired by, how can we be doing the things in our mind with this tool that we have of our brain, that are actually starting to change our thoughts, to orient our thoughts, to thoughts that are going to help with that parasympathetic dominance, which is that nervous system component that is really sending that signal to our body to heal and to repair. And so that’s kind of the nuts and bolts of what the book is.
Mimi:
That’s great. I know it’s not a magic bullet and there’s not one thing, but what ultimately was your process to getting better for yourself personally?
Dr. Mueller:
It was really finding all of the different roots. At the height of my illness, I would wake up and sometimes feel like my leg was being sawed off. That’s kind of how I would describe the pain. I had a lot of pain in my hips and low backs and it would move as classic Lyme pain does.
But it was really in a couple of different things. One, it was finding all of the different root causes, which for me was co-infections, it was mold, it was metals, lot of different parasites. I had Entamoeba histolytica, which is a particularly bad parasite as far as the pathology and the symptoms.
So I was really looking very holistically at my whole body for all the different root causes that were playing into Lyme. And it was also getting a hold of my mind, of really having these thoughts of, “I’m dying. I have to move to a deserted island,” or, “I am never going to be well,” or, “I’m never going to do the things I love again,” and really working through the steps of getting control over my mind, so I could be doing the things to send this healing response to my body.
Mimi:
I found when I was sick, even the basics, I kept saying to myself, because everything seems so overwhelming, when you don’t feel well. The basics of, “Okay, today I’m getting 10 glasses of water. Let’s just start there, because if your body can get more water, then you’re flushing out your system or, “Okay, I need to sleep tonight. What do I need to do?”
So I don’t know if there are any other just simple tricks of, just start at the basics of making sure you’re doing these four things, then it’s easier to kind of put more on top of that.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah, certainly one thing that I think you’re really already kind of leading to is focus on what we can do, so that’s one thing from the mind perspective, if all we can do that day is make sure we get in a hydration, teach the mind to look at that as like, “At least I get to do this.”
I have a client who cannot even get in a car because the vibrations actually irritate his muscular-skeletal system, so it increases the pain. There’s a lot of different things. But he’s one of the happiest people I’ve ever met. And that’s what he has really taught me is every day he wakes up, I’m like, “What can I do today?” So, focused on, “Okay, maybe we get to listen to that podcast we’re looking forward to,” or, “Maybe we get to have a conversation and we’re actually present for five minutes with a family member, where we’re really able to be present for just five minutes.”
So I’d say that’s number one. Another big thing from the body perspective that I find is lymphatic massage. And so if you can get out and get a full lymphatic massage from a lymphatic massage therapist, great. If not, go on YouTube and Google five minute massage, five minute lymphatic massage. The biggest thing with it is you want to make sure that you really start with the neck.The neck is the end point. And if the neck is clogged, nothing else is going to work. I have found that five minutes, twice a day, lymphatic massage is amazing for helping prevent hurts, supporting detox. So that’s an easy, not a lot of time, really easy to integrate. Absolutely, the water, like you mentioned is huge, and-
Mimi:
Do you ever tell people to do bouncing?
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah, absolutely. I love bouncing. I love dry skin brushing. My personal experience is I’ve seen more people have profound responses clinically from the actual self lymphatic massage than the rebounders, but everybody’s different. And I think it’s really good to have a lot of different tools.
Mimi:
That’s true. I know you talk a lot about in your practice, molds, because you also had a personal experience and I am coming to find out, I think that is the evil of all evils, because everyone’s had some kind of water damage in their house, which means you probably have mold and you don’t realize it. You can get mold in your cars just from your air condition. There are so many places that mold is lurking, staying in a hotel room has put me off a couple of times into a downward spiral.
So is there anything that you know from your experience that you can either do to prevent getting mold, without having to go to a doctor and do a whole protocol? Is there anything that you could be taking kind of like on a daily basis to prevent it or just assume you probably have it, let’s just keep it kind of leaving your body?
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah, mold is super, super tricky. One of the biggest problems with mold really is that if we’re living in it, if we’re truly living in a water-damaged building, it’s really hard to get well.
Now what I’ve seen is that once people are well, then we can actually work with their immune systems. We can work with their genetic predisposition to mold. We can work to actually even change their genetic expression and prevent people from say reacting to mold as much.
I know you know this, but just to make sure your listeners know this, that for most people, that mold reactivity is a genetic disorder where you have a genetic anomaly where your body isn’t able to recognize the toxins that mold secretes and when the body doesn’t recognize them, then they build up.
And so it is really difficult if this genetic expression is turned on and you’re living in that moldy environment, to get truly detoxed from it and get your immune system working correctly while you’re living there. So it’s useful, if you can work it into your budget to get something like a HERTSMI me or ERMI test done to see if it’s even in your house, because there are certain times where if it’s in your house, taking a certain supplement is actually probably not going to do much until you remove yourself, and it’s actually going to be a kind of a waste of your money until you’re actually in a safer environment. Now-
Mimi:
So what’s the HERTS, ERMI test?
Dr. Mueller:
So a HERTSMI and an ERMI are a test that are actually involving dust. They collect dust and ERMI is where you’re testing for a lot of different molds. A HERTSMI’s kind of a reduced ERMI, it’s a less expensive test. You’re looking for some of the five more highly pathological type of molds.
Mimi:
Got it. So it’s a test for your house?
Dr. Mueller:
Test for your house, exactly. So you’d run those kind of tests. And then once you know that your house is not toxic, is not water damaged, we’re not water damage to a level that’s problematic. Most houses are going to have some level of mold and there’s levels that are not as severe, that sort of thing.
Then once you’re working, once you know you’re in a relatively safe house, it’s always the order of detox that I find to be most important. So one of the things that a lot of people wind up doing is they focus a lot on liver detoxification, nutrients, milk thistle, glutathione, those types of things, and those are great, or they’ll focus on binders and binders prevents mole toxins once they’ve been released. They prevent them from being reabsorbed into the bloodstream. Those are also great. But one of the things that I find is that a lot of people wind up missing a step.
So when the liver and the gallbladder are involved in the detoxification process, once the liver has broken down toxins, the liver’s supposed to put those toxins into the bile canaliculi, which are basically just tubes that connect the liver to the small intestine, and then eventually we want to essentially poop the toxins out. But what can happen is that placement between the liver and the bile tubes, that transport of the toxins out of the liver, into the bile tubes needs a transport protein in order to move those toxins out.
Oftentimes, that transport protein is blocked, and when it’s blocked, then we actually see those toxins that are broken down, they end up back in systemic circulation. So the way around that is oftentimes starting people on nutrients that are going to basically unblock that protein, make that protein work better so we can get things out. So the Mur works really well for that. And then phosphatidylcholine works really well for that.
Mimi:
Interesting. I never heard that before, so that’s really interesting. You see patients, but you also have a school online that help other practitioners.
Can you talk a little bit about… And are your patients mostly in Colorado or do you do virtual as well?
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah, we do virtually. So we have clients all over the country and even a few overseas at this point. It is a functional-based approach in our practice. And then we have found that a lot of clinicians really don’t know how to treat Lyme and molds and don’t know how to look at functional reference ranges for a variety of diseases. So about five years ago now we created our online school, the Medicine with Heart Institute and at the Medicine with Heart Institute, that’s where people can learn functional medicine, as well as learn how to work with functional medicine in a Lyme and mold community, as well as many other types of people.
So we have acupuncturists, we have medical doctors, we have surgeons, we have specialists, naturopathic doctors. We have nutritionists. So we have a wide variety of types of clinicians that have gone through our online program.
Mimi:
And so typically is it mostly Lyme patients, and do they know they have Lyme when they come to you?
Dr. Mueller:
It’s a variety. So we definitely have quite a few people who’ve had the very, very common story that you and I talked about a moment ago around, “Wow, I’ve already seen a dozen different Lyme literate docs.” And so we do have a good amount of those types of clients that make their way to our office of, what else is out there, and that’s one thing we are really known for is because we’re looking very holistically at how to treat Lyme and mold, we’re often able to find missing blocks to why people don’t heal.
We certainly do get people with chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, migrating pain, headaches, migraines, a lot of the classic Lyme type of symptoms. They have no idea that they have Lyme disease, so we see the spectrum.
Mimi:
Typically, are you treating with IV, so you have to be local, or is it mostly supplements and stuff that you can do online and get shipped to?
Dr. Mueller:
It’s mostly supplements and stuff we can do online. So we do use some pharmaceutical medicine. So sometimes for that, we do, depending upon the licensure that all of my team carries. Sometimes we do have to have people come in person for one in-office visit. But once we have that, we can really treat it from anywhere. And a lot of times we don’t even need to do pharmaceuticals where we have more flexibility to treat a national level.
Mimi:
Oh, that’s great. That’s great. And then you also talked about how the mental and mental component to healing is super important and then you were talking about how you have a course online. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, that’s specific for patients.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah, absolutely. So we have Hack Your Mind course online and Hack Your Mind is really designed to do and help people with this whole component of how to gain that parasympathetic dominance, because the mind, this is a free tool. The brain is our free tool. It’s our neurological system that can send those healing mechanisms. So it is that free tool that we get to utilize if we know how. So it’s really looking at some of the research behind how people create that parasympathetic dominance.
Dr. Mueller:
And so the course is basically designed, it’s step by step where there’s lectures, there’s review of some of the research studies in layman’s terms. And then there’s exercises every day that are very, very easy, that only take a few minutes, 5 to 10 minutes every day, that you can put into place to allow your nervous system to reorient to the healing type of response and sending those signals that say repair and heal, and normally we charge 297 for this course, but we’re actually giving this to your audience for free. So I assume you would put that somewhere [crosstalk 00:17:59].
Mimi:
Yes. I’ll put it in the notes. That’s great.
Dr. Mueller:
Perfect.
Mimi:
Yeah. And the blog and also in an email, so that’s great. Thank you.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure. I hope it helps everybody.
Mimi:
I think it will help. It’s an interesting topic because when you think about Lyme, how many times, I’m sure this has happened to you, it’s happened to me. I can’t, probably countless times, where I’ve gone into the doctor’s office and they tell me I’m making it up. It’s all in my head. So there’s a fine line of having doctors telling you it’s all in your head and then also having it be like, “Okay, it’s not in your head. It exists, but yet it’s in your head,” where you have to change what you’re thinking.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah. I am so glad you brought it up because I think it’s one of the most important topics when we are talking about the mind to talk about this. It’s actually something that I do talk about in the first section of this course, for this exact reason.
How many of us have been told, like, “You’re depressed,” or, “You just have anxiety, and other than that, you’re a hypochondriac.” And so I think it’s really important to delineate, that’s not what we’re saying. What’s going on is very, very, very real. And your nervous system naturally tends to go for most people, have a stress type of response because going through Lyme is stressful and we’re were just rewiring the nervous system that got patterned because of everything that is real that you’re experiencing. We’re just wanting to rewire the nervous system in a different way that’s saying, “Hey, now we want you to heal.”
Mimi:
It’s just acknowledging that PTSD, or it’s one neurologist I worked with when I was getting ketamine treatment. She was like, “It was just a matter of just resetting the bar, and kind of acknowledging it and kind of reworking it.” I don’t think we talk about the whole limbic system enough and how it’s kind of driving everything and you’re in this fight or flight pattern and you got to just calm your body down because everything just overreacts.
Mimi:
Is there anything we haven’t discussed that you think is important and pivotal to healing and helping people, especially people who are at home and they feel hopeless? They’re by themselves. Not many people believe them. They’re kind of running low on cash and they feel helpless.
I have a lot of people that reach out to me that are that way and I get it because I’ve been in that position. Fortunately, I had a husband that believed me and I had a husband that supported me, but still, it was just it’s lonely and it’s painful.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah, there are a couple of things. One of the biggest things that I would encourage everybody to do is take any lab work you have been fortunate enough to get done seriously, meaning there are these crazy connection points that people don’t always realize, if you have high cholesterol and that cholesterol mixes with toxins in the blood, we get something called oxidized LDL. LDL is that bad cholesterol. And if you get oxidized LDL, what actually will happen, what can happen, is you can get blood-brain barrier disease where that oxidized LDL will actually cause your blood-brain barrier to become permeable, meaning you will get toxins from Lyme, from co-infections from mold, more easily into your brain. So that’s where we get the depersonalization and the brain fog and all these different types of symptoms.
Dr. Mueller:
And so a basic test, for example, your basic lipid panel that a lot of people can get under insurance. And sometimes it’s like, “Oh, my cholesterol’s a little high.” And we don’t always think that, that could be contributing, but there’s a lot of different mechanisms like this. And I cover stuff like this in the book too, around there is these things that we don’t necessarily think are part of the problem, that when you actually understand how the body fits together, they really are. And sometimes they can be a missing link. So any lab work that you have that you’re like, “I’m not going to look at that later because that’s not Lyme,” I would encourage you to look and really take that to heart around the connectedness of all of it.
Dr. Mueller:
So that’s one thing for sure, and absolutely looking at, I think when you’re talking about the loneliness that comes with it, one of the things too, that I cover in the book is this idea of social media support groups. So it really encouraged you if you’re experiencing the need for support, to look for support groups, but look for support groups that aren’t just talking about the struggle, because we can get locked into these support groups where it’s always just life is over and it always just, I’m never going to get better. And it’s story, after story, after story that’s negative.
Dr. Mueller:
Well, that’s going to fuel your mind with all of that negative energy. And so it’s good to be talking about our challenges, but I would encourage you to find support groups and communities that are sharing their struggles but are also looking for that silver lining, that one nugget every day to lift themselves up because that’s really going to help the mind orient to that healing type of response. So really kind of being careful about the type of support and the community that you’re finding that they’re supportive, but they’re also encouraging and uplifting and are going to fill you, not just with the scary stuff, but with the hope.
Mimi:
Yeah. No, it’s true. That and just like the quick little tidbits like that you’re talking about like, “Hey, try this app,” or “Take this course,” or stuff like that. Now the one thing I would love your opinion on and it only, maybe six months ago, came to my attention and I was like, “Why did no one ever talk about this?” But I kept seeing a pattern about minerals and putting minerals in your water.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah. There are a couple of different things. One is when it comes to saying metal detoxification, so toxic metals. Zinc is really, really important. We actually cannot detoxify heavy metals or toxic metals without the use of zinc, so that’s one big thing. We also see that we do have a change frequently in certain things like chloride and sodium when we have mold for example. And so we can actually see that people become very electrolyte deficient with that. And then of course we have magnesium that is used for all of our stress hormones and stress responses in our body, also helpful for maintaining healthy blood sugar.
Dr. Mueller:
So there’s a lot of different utility in minerals. It’s very, very common for example, for magnesium to be deficient in Lyme and mold because of this is a stressor, and we burn through more magnesium when we’re stressed. So there’s certainly a lot of different links between minerals and toxic metals, as well as in really setting the body up for appropriate healing response, so, that’s one of the reasons there. And if you’re filtering your water and you’re do something like reverse osmosis, which is great, you’re actually, demineralizing your water.
Mimi:
Because I find that the days where I’m dragging and I need energy. I take a couple of ionized minerals, put it in my water, chug a glass of water. Then I take some chlorella and I put it in. And then all of a sudden I feel like a new person having those two big glasses of chlorella and minerals.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah. Yeah. And chlorella is such a great binder for metals as well as for mold toxins, Lyme, there are so many different types of toxins that chlorella can bind. It’s a pretty broad spectrum binder.
Mimi:
And then the chlorophyll, also is the green stuff that I put. But this has been amazing. Is there anything else that we have not covered that you think would be important?
Dr. Mueller:
I think this is the bulk of it. If you guys are looking for help, please do reach out to my clinic or if you’re looking for training, please take advantage of that Hack Your Mind course. I would love, love, love for you guys to be integrating that in, it’s free. It’s easy to use. It doesn’t cost any money as far as there’s no supplements, it’s just the power of your mind. So I would just hope to leave everybody with hope because I do, I thought my legs were being sawed off. I thought I was going to have to move to a desert island and I actually have more energy in my forties than I did in my twenties. So it’s really come a long way and I see this over and over and over again that this does not have to be a life sentence.
Mimi:
Well, thank you so much. And thank you for all you do. And I can’t wait to read your book as well.
Dr. Mueller:
Yeah. Thank you, Mimi, it’s been a pleasure. I appreciate you having me here.
Mimi:
Thank you. Each week I will bring you different voices from the wellness community so that they can share how they help their clients heal. You will come away with tips and strategies to help you get your life back. Thank you so much for coming on and I am so happy you are here. Subscribe now and tune in next week, if you want to learn how I detox and you want to check out my Detox for Lyme Checklist, go to lyme360.com/detoxchecklist. You can also join our community at Lyme 360 Warriors on Facebook and let’s heal together. Thank you.