Are parasites at the root of your problems?

How "uninvited guests" can ruin your health

Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics...

Parasites!

When I first started practicing functional medicine, I was shocked by the number of parasites I found on stool testing.

For year I tested stool samples in the conventional world, but we only ordered them on patients who had a high probability of a parasitic infection. We also only ordered one or two samples, and as I found, many times you miss the diagnosis if you don't test and re-test.

The fact is that American labs don't get the practice to be good at detecting parasitic infections. Doctors don't know what to look for either. So patients wind up with diagnoses like "irritable bowel syndrome" or "dyspepsia," without resolution of their symptoms, which are often crippling.

People in the functional medicine world are aware of this problem. They're looking for better testing and smarter labs to run. I've even had patients send their stool samples to labs in Africa, where they have far more experience detecting parasites.

A cottage industry has sprung up in the alternative medical world to treat parasitic infections. You'll hear about successes and failures in this world, and everything in between.

This post is about the dirty secrets of parasites, including how to test for them, how to treat them, and also what NOT to do when it comes to parasites.

First, we need to talk about the basics of what parasites are.

The smallest parasites are microscopic, but they're larger than bacteria, fungi, and viruses. The largest parasites are worms - I don't need to tell you more than that.

Parasites are fascinating. They have all kinds of mechanisms to evade your immune system, from mimicking your own cells to suppressing and confusing your immune system.

They are also very, very similar to us in most aspects of their metabolism. This presents a problem, because the more similar an organism's biochemistry is to our own, the harder it is to find therapeutics (drugs, herbs) that will destroy the organism, without also causing severe harm to ourselves. This is the challenge with chemotherapy, and why it makes so many people feel so ill.

In the olden days, doctors used mercury, arsenic, and other toxic substances to kill parasites. More enlightened people used herbs - black walnut hull, mimosa pudica, neem, and many, many more.

The mainstream belief is that parasites are a thing of the past. We look for them in immigrants from places where conditions are rather unsanitary. This is fueled by the fact that most doctors today rarely, if ever, test for parasites, and, even when they do, the lab tech often misses the diagnosis due to outdated practices and (I suspect) pure laziness.

There is one problem with this belief... and it's making Big Pharma big money.

Parasites are common and they are driving a huge proportion of the dysfunction we see in modern society.

Why do I believe this?

Because when you treat patients with anti-parasitics, they often have powerful reactions.

This can't be placebo - I've seen patients who didn't respond to massive doses of vitamins, minerals, and various other therapeutics who were transformed by anti-parasitics, sometimes within hours. These were people who were often skeptical of the entire concept of parasitic infections. I've had patients bring me (or text me photos of) very, very strange "things" that came out of their bodies after parasite cleanses. I've had patients absolutely knocked out by anti-parasitics. Then there are patients who take anti-parasitics and don't notice a thing.

We might also ask, what if the anti-parasitics are doing something else? Anti-parasitics do have a wide range of effects. They may act as anti-virals, anti-bacterials, immune-modulating, or adaptogenic agents. Who knows how they are really working in combinations in different patients? I do not know anyone who treats parasites with single agents - they all use combos of various herbs.

Where does this leave us?

I will happily test patients for parasites with stool testing, but just as often, I will recommend a course of anti-parasitics empirically (meaning without laboratory evidence of infection).

Why would I do this? Am I not data-driven? Am I not interested in objectively demonstrating the presence of disease, rather than mindlessly doling out remedies for infections that may not even exist?

Because anti-parasitics get the job done! And my job is to get the patient better, whether or not I can prove my methods to the whole world.

In the end, I recommend periodic parasite cleanses to all of humanity, WITH SOME IMPORTANT CAVEATS LISTED BELOW. You shouldn’t undertake something like this without guidance and supervision. If you use the right herbs and have a low burden, symptoms of die-off are none to mild. If you don't address parasitic infections, you can find yourself wracked with chronic diseases that do not respond to any amount of anything but anti-parasitics. This is why I find anti-parasitics so important, and why it is one class of therapeutic that I will gladly use in my practice.

There are some caveats to going after parasites that we're going to cover in the rest of this post.

1. If you take anti-parasitics before your body is properly detoxifying, you will ruin your day, your week, or maybe even an entire season of your life. When we kill parasites, the body has to deal with them. It has to clean up the wreckage, so to speak, and this is a very intensive process. This requires an abundance of nutrients and the proper healing energies. If you put the average indoor-dwelling (no sunlight or earthing) person who eats the garbage that passes for food in 2022 (most of what we find in the grocery store) on anti-parasitics, you may well ruin their day, or even their week. They will think that you are trying to poison them!

Before taking anti-parasitics, the patient should 1) be eating a nutrient-dense diet of whole foods, 2) be eliminating normally (urinating multiple times per day, hydrating with more than a few liters of water, and defecating one to three times daily), and 3) be sweating on a regular basis (sauna).

I run labwork to evaluate ALL of these factors in patients before putting them on anti-parasitics. Many patients don't realize that their liver, kidney, or hormone levels are in fact deranged, setting them up for misery and therapeutic failure when they take anti-parasitics.

2. If you take anti-parasitics and are already loaded with toxins, you may make your toxic-burdne WORSE. Why? Parasites store heavy metals and chemicals just like we do. When you kill them, those chemicals are released. If your body isn't detoxifying itself properly (see above), those toxins may just wind up going from the parasites into YOUR cells! You're better off kicking the anti-parasitic can down the road until you've fixed your nutritional status and are detoxifying in a healthy, regular way, than jumping the gun and trading parasites for a worse burden of things like mercury or glyphosate.

Before taking anti-parasitics, the patient should evaluate their total body burden of toxins with certain laboratory tests.

3. If you take anti-parasitics and you have severe infections with bacteria, yeasts, or viruses (which, by the way, are always due to the problems in points one and two), you may not be able to handle the toxic burden created by the die-off, because anti-parasitics are frequently also anti-bacterial or anti-fungal.

Before taking anti-parasitics, I like to make sure that patients aren't dealing with hidden or chronic infections with other infectious agents, so that we don't overwhelm their system with the burden of the parasite die-off.

4. If you take anti-parasitics for too short a duration, you will not get rid of your parasites. Why? Parasites have long life-cycles and they excel at hiding in tissues and evading your immune system. The conventional wisdom is that you can cure parasitic infections in one to three days with drugs like albendazole, ivermectin, or mebendazole. While this certainly can reduce the burden of parasites in many patients, it utterly fails to get durable, significant results in many patients.

Why? Because the parasite burden may drop with one to three days of treatment, but it can just as easily rebound. We also don't know how differently the herbs (most of us in the natural medicine world use herbs rather than drugs for parasites) work relative to the drugs, so it may be a matter of efficacy (as in, the herbs are weaker and you need more of them for longer to get the same results).

Either way, I use anti-parasitics for a minimum of two to three months. I don't trust anything less than that.

5. If you don't treat the family, including the pets, you may not get results. I am no expert on treating pets, so don't ask me how to do this, but when I treat families for parasites, I treat the entire family. Why?

Because if you treat one family member or ignore pets, patients can easily be re-infected by those family members or pets, even if they have no symptoms.

With these caveats in mind, I use the following to treat parasites.

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