Episode 9: Living Medicine – Tapping Into the Body’s Innate Ability to Heal
Cindy Kennedy, FNP, chats with Dr. Christopher Fabricius, who discusses the power of the body to heal itself. He discusses how to support the innate processes that allow your body to heal.
Dr. Fabricius is pleased to offer patients a completely different system of medicine that is congruent with nature and in alignment with science. Living Medicine enables patients’ bodies to heal so they can focus on living life — as opposed to drugging symptoms when they are unpleasant. “I’m kind of a purist. If there’s a right way, I’ll do it the right way. I have a Davy Crockett mentality. He said, ‘Be sure you’re right and then go ahead.’”
Transcript of Episode 9: Living Medicine – Tapping Into the Body’s Innate Ability to Heal
Speaker 1: Welcome to Living with Lyme, the podcast where we educate, advocate and collaborate about Lyme disease. Hear from experts as they share reliable information about how to live with Lyme disease. Now here’s your host, nurse practitioner Cindy Kennedy.
Cindy Kennedy: Hi everyone, this is your host, Cindy Kennedy, and I would like to welcome you to Living with Lyme. Today we have a naturopath who actually practices in Utah, his name is Dr. Christopher Fabricius and his practice is Living Medicine. You can find him at livingmedicine.com. Dr. Fabricius and I met kind of by happenstance. I went to a little session in the town over from us because there was a woman who had been struggling with MS symptoms and her family found Dr. Fabricius and he helped her immensely. So he came to our part of the country, which was at that time it was Connecticut and then right over to Hampden, Massachusetts and told us a lot of information. This guy is the real deal and I’d like to introduce Dr. Fabricius. How are you?
Dr. Fabricius: I’m doing very well, it’s a pleasure to be here with you, thank you.
Cindy Kennedy: This is awesome. A lot of people don’t know the holistic route and living medicine, isn’t that a wonderful term? Because you think about all the way back in the ’20s when penicillin came about and it was actually a living fungal species so we go all the way back to what is the real life force and how to create a special balance in our body. Give my listeners an idea of what a naturopath brings to medicine.
Dr. Fabricius: Well, naturopathic medicine in general is an entire system of medicine that, a number of decades ago, was equal in prevalence in the United States to what we call allopathic medicine or conventional medicine. Today, all licensed naturopathic physicians attend four years of medical school and do residency and pass board exams written by conventional medical doctors to be licensed as primary care physicians in the states that they practice within, able to prescribe drugs, deliver babies, do minor surgeries, pretty much treat everything from soup to nuts, infancy to elderly, with conditions as light as stuffy noses to as advanced as various types of autoimmune disorders, chronic infectious disease, and cancers. We are primary care physicians that specialize in natural medicine. Although we have training in conventional medicine, our expertise is really in the application of natural medicine, remedies that actually work in concert with the body to bolster and enhance its own capacity to heal.
Cindy Kennedy: That’s really critical for Lyme disease because people go the route of antibiotics, some people are not able to do that, however, it’s really about balancing and getting your own immune system to actually fight for itself to get rid of or put to sleep this awful infection.
Dr. Fabricius: Yes, there’s such truth in that, and, ironically, it’s something that for as obvious as it seems with regard to common sense, from an intellectual position it seems that it’s widely ignored in the typical approach that’s given to the treatment of patients that have disorders like Lyme’s. The reality is that, regardless of what we’re talking about, and what I’m going to say here really applies to every disorder, and especially so the more compounded and complicated that the disorder is, we always have to remember that it is always and only our bodies, in concert with call it nature, God, [yele 00:04:15], whatever you wish to call it, I’m going to refer to it as the divine to be nonpartisan, but it is always and only our bodies in concert with the divine that can ever and does ever heal us. The reality is is we each have a choice. We can either choose to support our body’s own innate ability to heal and resolve that which is disturbing it or if we do anything else but support those innate systems, we end up, even if inadvertently, working against them.
Many times, people end up going for “treatment” of a specific disease. What we have to remember is is that there is no doctor, no drug, no herb, no vitamin pill, no homeopathic, no surgical scalpel, that ever “heals” us. It is only and always our bodies that ever do and can have the capacity to heal us. We have a choice. We either support those innate processes, or we get in their way.
Cindy Kennedy: Generally, you can think of any type of infection, illness, et cetera, and the bottom line is, supporting the body so that it can heal itself. My question is what would be the different way you would approach Lyme disease or any other co-infection from a tick versus another form of illness?
Dr. Fabricius: That’s a great question. The first thing that we have to look at is, for your listeners that are steeped in the conventional approach, is to draw a comparison between what living medicine is versus what the conventional approach is. In the conventional approach, a diagnosis is made of a specific type of infection. Whether we’re talking about Babesia organisms or Bartonella organisms or any of the subclasses and co-infections that every day we learn more and more about through conventional research, the reality is is that the conventional approach seeks to destroy the organism, I would say, almost at any cost using cocktails of antibiotics in different combination over different courses of time and different sequence and what not. What we have to recognize is is that having an infection of any sort, whether we’re talking about Lyme’s or we’re talking about mere strep throat, is not an indication of an antibiotic deficiency. In conventional medicine, the focus is upon identifying the pathogen and then sending in all kinds of basically chemical that is pharmacological therapies to destroy it.
What we have to recognize is is that it is the body of the patient, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, that ever really has the ability to deal with that. What we do is, rather than take a disease treatment approach, we recognize that since it is only and always the body of the patient that ever does the healing, what we need to do is optimize its ability to do that. From the most basic level, the physical level, we have to recognize that, in order for a person to be healthy, it stands to reason that their organ systems have to be healthy, right? There are no organs in the human body that act like islands unto themselves. Every organ is cooperating interdependently with other organs in order to accomplish some very complex ends. What are your lungs without the heart to pump the oxygen through the body? What are your joints without the muscles to move them? We have very simple to very complex organ relationships.
We have to recognize that in order for those order systems to be healthy, the individual organs that comprise them need to be healthy. From an organ point of view, we have to recognize that organs do some pretty unique, very specialized things within the body. Organs need to function within a certain window of efficiency. As long as they’re able to function within that window, the needs that our body relies upon those organs to uniquely fulfill get met. But if anything, and I mean anything, comes along that knocks that organ out of its ordained window of efficiency, and the gap between where that organ actually is operating at and where it ought to be operating at, in that gap, that’s where the symptoms occur.
Rather than seeing that, “Oh, there’s an infection here,” or, “There’s a symptom there,” and throwing drugs at that symptom in the gap, what we do is identify which of those organ systems are disturbed, and then literally give scientifically validated informational and material therapies that literally enable the body to regenerate that organ, such that its ability to function is enhanced and, bit by bit, we return it back to its original level of functionality. As a result of that restoration of health, the disease is eliminated.
Cindy Kennedy: I just have a question. Some of the sickest people I have met, Lyme has its ability to find its way to any organ. For some people, they’re experiencing the arthritic portion of it. Some people are experiencing severe bladder symptoms. Some people, and again, the sickest people I know, the Lyme has found its way to the brain. Neurologically, there is a huge problem there, either with fogginess, with memory issues, with thought processes, with identifying things that might be a problem. I’ll never forget the look on my husband’s face when I actually opened up three drawers in a file cabinet all at the same time, only to have that file cabinet just about fall on top of me. I had no idea when I did that that that is a dangerous thing. When you’re dealing with the brain, how do you go to that first? Because if that’s the primary source of this problem, how do you go to the brain? Or do you not go to the brain first?
Dr. Fabricius: It’s an excellent question. What we have to recognize is is that, like making an award-winning chocolate cake or building a house, syntax, the order in which we apply therapies and the order in which we address a complex set of problems, is the key. The body has a certain hierarchy within which it basically values or prioritizes where it places its energy and resource. If the nervous system is being impacted, that means that there has to have been multiple organ decompensation prior to that in order for the infection to get that far. The conventional approach is to just direct the therapy there.
But really what we need to do in rehabilitating a damaged building or an ill person, is to start at the beginning and start cleaning up the body. The reality is is that it’s been said that we are what we eat, but it’s really what we’re exposed to, what we eat, what we ingest, what we’re exposed to and what we don’t eliminate. The reason why many of these infections are impacting various organ systems in the body is because the primary defenses and primary systems that were supposed to have prevented that from happening have been compromised. What we need to do is really take a wholistic measure of the person and see which organ systems have been hit. Certainly, you’re right. There’s no doubt about it, having your nervous system impacted is huge and, as severe as that can be, if you talk to somebody that’s suffering from having their urinary tract system compromised the suffering can be just as severe just in a different ballpark.
Cindy Kennedy: Oh, absolutely.
Dr. Fabricius: Yeah. We need to treat the entire person and not the disease. What we have to do is step back and take a history to understand in what order these decompensations occurred. To get what, in German biological medicine is referred to as the causal chain. Typically, if we go back far enough in most people’s health, not everybody but most people’s, we can find a point in time at which they were fine and then something happens. It can be a tick bite. It can be something else. What ends up happening is is there are a series of decompensations over time that lead them into the hole where they’re at. What we need to understand is the person in the context and flow of time. What caused what caused what which lead to this decompensating which led to that decompensating that ultimately has the patient where they’re at now?
Because once we understand in what order the organ systems decompensated in, we then understand what order we need to reverse engineer that and begin working with those systems to work that person out of the hole. That’s a very, very important concept. It’s actually paying attention to the generational aspect of the decompensation, and that’s one of the keys to actually helping people to actually get better, to get healthier. Because I know many people who’ve come to me over the years who’ve seen the finest so-called experts in the field of infectious disease and they’ve been given well-indicated antimicrobial therapies, boatloads of them, over years, and they’ve only gotten sicker and sicker and have had more and more organ systems become compromised because those antibiotics are, yes, they’re attacking the Lyme’s disease, but at the same time they’re also causing all kinds of corollary damage. In addition, they’re not doing anything therapeutically to rehabilitate the compromised systems that allow for the infection to settle in and further itself. And that is [crosstalk 00:14:49].
Cindy Kennedy: It’s like a war. It’s crazy because it’s like a war. You go down one path and then there’s collateral damage, and once you have that collateral damage, trying to repair that … It seems like we’re always playing a catch up. It’s like a Catch-22 or a snowball effect. Is that what you see?
Dr. Fabricius: Well, yes, and I think the reason for that is is because people get caught up in the war, only thinking about shooting the enemy. They don’t realize that in order to win the war, we have to have logistics in place. Our soldiers need to be fed. We need to have sanitation. We need to cleanse the camps and keep them sanitary so that our ability to have command and control isn’t compromised as a result of sewage building up and garbage building up. We need to have maintenance of our equipment and supplies and we need to have good communication lines. If our communication lines are compromised in the body, if the body loses its ability to inter-coordinate its complex organs’ functions, how can it win the war?
I think all of the focus has really been on putting a bullet in the enemy as it were, and what we have to recognize is is that to strategically win a war we need to go further than just tactics. By all means, certain types of antimicrobial therapy can be useful. I’m not arguing that point. However, by itself I truly believe that that approach of simply using an antimicrobial approach is sort of damned to failure. The reason for that is is that it is blatantly ignoring the fact that in order for you, for example, to be healthy and fight a Lyme’s infection, what if you had pneumonia? What if your lungs aren’t working properly? What if your liver’s compromised? What if you have a major hormonal imbalance?
We have to remember that our bodies always have a limited pool of energy and resources to appropriate. Oftentimes, if you deal with some of these more central peripheral issues that may not directly be related to “Lyme’s disease”, let’s say a person has always had terrible PMS, their liver’s compromised. We have to remember that the liver’s job is to detoxify our body. The liver’s job is to balance all of our body’s hormones. The liver’s job is to make 85 to 90-plus percent of our body’s immunoglobulins, which are the cells that actually make antibodies.
Even though this is not involved in, “Oh, where’s the infection?” And, “What is the organism?” And, “What sensitivities to antimicrobials does that organism have and therefore we’re going to give this boatload antibiotics to deal with that?” We have to step back and take the bigger picture, that since it is only and always the body that does the healing, we need to direct therapies to enable the body to deal with other absolutely essential systems such that it will then be able to have optimized functioning in those systems, free up its limited pool of energy to allow for more of that to be directed at eliminating this microbial issue.
We have to always remember that the presence of a microbe of any sort doesn’t guarantee infection with that microbe. You know, Cindy, you and I right now, and every production assistant in this studio, have strep in their throat right now. It’s a medical fact. Strep is an ubiquitous organism. It’s on our desks, it’s on the pens we’re holding, it’s in our hair, it’s everywhere, including in our tonsils. Why don’t we have strep throat? Well, everybody that lives on the eastern seaboard, from the Swanson, Louisiana, right on up into Maine, has been bit by hundreds of ticks in their lifetime and the reality is, most of them we aren’t even aware that we were bit.
The tick bites us, it injects us with saliva that has an anticoagulant so that it can actually draw into itself and drink our blood without it coagulating, and in that saliva are hundreds upon hundreds of organisms. We don’t just get inoculated when a tick bites us with Borrelia Burgdorferi or Bartonella or Babesia organisms and all of the different subfamilies one at a time. We get injected with all of that stuff. Then depending upon the life cycle of the organism, it’ll set up shop in different combinations or sequences in the patient. What’s interesting is, is that it depends on the terrain that that seed is planted into.
Cindy Kennedy: Right.
Dr. Fabricius: Many people who’ve been bitten, like myself I would go camping at least once to two times a months literally 12 months out of the year for my entire childhood, probably 12, 13 thirteen, in the woods, wrestling around. I’ve pulled, gosh, gob loads of ticks off my body-
Cindy Kennedy: Oh, that’s [crosstalk 00:19:47].
Dr. Fabricius: I’ve been infected just like everybody has. Why is it then that I don’t have strep, I don’t have Lyme’s, whereas another person might?
Cindy Kennedy: Right.
Dr. Fabricius: It’s because their cellular terrain’s compromised and we need to pay attention to that as well.
Cindy Kennedy: I see. I’m talking to you, I’m in Massachusetts, you’re in Utah, and people are going to want to know how do they find a naturopath? The other things is that I have read that you offer your services over the phone. Is that a common thing? Do you find that you can be as good of a provider over the phone as you are in person?
Dr. Fabricius: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. Thanks to the advent of technology, we can do some pretty impressive things. Certainly if a person needs a … Distanced, I mean. Certainly if a person needs a physical exam, you need a hands-on approach. But just as if … Let’s say you and I were neighbors, and you were a patient of mine here in Utah. If I want to draw your blood, although I’m licensed to and I’ve done plenty in my lifetime, I send you down the road to Quest and get your blood drawn. If I need you to have a gynecological exam, although I’ve certainly done my share of those, I would rather send you down the road to a gynecologist. Have them do it because that’s their expertise, they write up the report and give that to me. I could shoot X-rays, too, or any of these things I’d rather refer out to somebody even locally.
Well, whether you’re seeing somebody that is just down the block from me or I’m writing a script and you’re getting a gynecological exam or blood work or radiological examination in your neck of the woods, when I get the report and we talk, it doesn’t much matter if you’re holding a copy and I am, whether you’re three feet apart from me sitting in a comfortable chair or if we’re chatting on the phone looking at the same data, what matters is what we do with that data.
Cindy Kennedy: That’s great. That’s so good to know because people in different parts of the country don’t have access to that type of care. Before we end here, and I know that you have so much to offer, my people out there, all my [Lymeys 00:22:08], the Lyme community, so I’m sure that you and I are going to have to do this again because there is so much more to talk about. I do have a couple of quick questions for you. You ready?
Dr. Fabricius: I am. I’d be honored [crosstalk 00:22:21].
Cindy Kennedy: What ticks you off? You ready? What ticks you off?
Dr. Fabricius: That’s a good question. What ticks me off is that all conventional physicians, trained in first world nations, learn that it is the body that does the healing. It’s never the doctor, it’s never a drug or a therapy. We can give drugs or therapies that certainly assist the body in accomplishing its ability to heal. You break a bone, you go into the doc, he sets it for you, puts on a cast, he prepares it so that your body is then in an optimized place from which to heal. But, ironically, it seems that everything that’s taught and drummed into the heads of most doctors in medical school, when they get out into practice it seems to, just like a cartoon, shoot out their ear and be forever then ignored.
Cindy Kennedy: Wow.
Dr. Fabricius: It’s always and always our patients’ bodies, my body, your body, Cindy, that ever accomplishes healing. For that complex system to ever accomplish healing, your body, my body, every one of our patients’ bodies, we have to give support to the entire body and make sure everything is tuned [crosstalk 00:23:36].
Cindy Kennedy: I understand. It’s the bottom line. It really is the bottom line.
Dr. Fabricius: [crosstalk 00:23:39] That’s it, it’s the entire key. It really is. [crosstalk 00:23:46] doctors ignore that.
Cindy Kennedy: One other quick question for you. Because life is never smooth, sometimes you get a lemon, or maybe multiple lemons. What in your life has been your lemonade?
Dr. Fabricius: Gosh, I think everything comes down to perspective, and really coming from a place of wisdom and humility to accept the fact that sometimes some very unjust, completely wrong, even horrible things can happen to some very, very good people. What we need to do is face that. We need to make sure that we pay attention to just how bad it is. There’s nothing wrong … If something hurts like hell, it hurts like hell. We should declare that because that’s the truth. We should always be honest and truthful with ourselves, our physiology, our biology, our social relationships, et cetera. [crosstalk 00:24:51]
Cindy Kennedy: This is great. No, honestly …
Dr. Fabricius: We have to accept the fact that when those things hit us it’s then what are we going to do about it. That’s what it comes down to. That being the case, how shall we proceed?
Cindy Kennedy: Yes.
Dr. Fabricius: Then at that point we have a choice. Either focus on solution or not. When I had been injured, I lost my ability to walk for a long period of time, and I had been savagely hazed when I was a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy to the point where my kidneys were in failure and I was told that, “I’m sorry, son, you’d never be able to fly a plane, and you’ll be lucky if you even fly a desk because it’s probable that you’re going to need to be on dialysis.” Well, that was awful. It really sucked, and I was really miserable about it for a long time. But then, each of us, when we’re ill, has to come to a point when we’re hit with a challenge like that, whether it’s a divorce, a betrayal, a business reversal or an illness, where we have to say, “Okay, this sucks. But now what am I going to do about it?” And how can I leverage what I do for my best well-being and go from there, and I think that’s really great lemonade from it.
Cindy Kennedy: That sounds so good. I really, I can’t thank you enough. You’ve given us so much insight and so much information and I hope people will look you up and get help from you. I’d like to thank you again and I’ll be in touch soon.
Everyone, this was Dr. Christopher Fabricius from Utah. Until we meet again, take good care. Bye all.