About the Episode

Identify the different factors that play into complex health conditions and start feeling better!

Join board-certified Naturopathic Doctor, Dr. Nafysa Parpia, as she deep dives into complex and chronic illnesses to help you better understand how they work and how to treat them.

Listen now and untangle the possible factors affecting your health!

What We Discuss

When we talk about “complex cases,” we’re referring to the “mysterious” cases where there are many different causes contributing to their illness and inflammation in the body. These are the diagnoses that just don’t make sense to the medical establishment. Sometimes these hard-to-diagnose cases get the label of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, long-haul covid, autoimmune conditions, chronic Lyme or tick-borne diseases, and any post-infectious illness.

In these complex cases, there are no true treatments. There are quick palliative treatments for relief, but no personalized medical treatment or investigation available to address the causes. Because these conditions are so underlying, complex, or little understood, they often take a lot of time and multiple doctors to arrive at, and they can end up with catch-all “wastebasket” diagnoses that don’t mean much.

Individual Systems & Toxins

People with complex cases can have many different causes, which are often different for each patient. In fact, even though everyone’s genes are expressed in different ways, the end result can be quite similar, making things even harder to diagnose. Different people will have different sensitivities, so for some these triggers can be toxins from the environment, or something else such as mold or heavy metals.

Patients might have an allergy to mold in the environment, the toxins from mold, or they might have a high load of mycotoxins inside their bodies, all of which can all contribute to complex cases.

Heavy metals are another source of disease. Many of Dr. Parpia’s patients eat a lot of fish, and some of them have high mercury. She also sees the lead in many of her patients, specifically her female patients in the starting phase of menopause. It’s not normal to have lead in the system, so the body ends up storing it someplace like the bones and urine. But when people have bone loss, such as women going through menopause, that stored lead goes back into the system and can cause further complications.

Removing ourselves from exposure to toxins and mold allows us to assist the body in flushing out what’s already inside us without continuing to add more for it to process.

Treatment for Complex Cases

There’s always going to be another exposure and more stress, so preparing your body so it knows what to do when it gets an exposure, or bitten by another tick, can help ease symptom flares in these complex cases. Detox and immune modulation can be some of your best friends for this.

Dr. Parpia treats chronic infections in similar phases, by first modulating the immune system and bolstering the detox pathways to prepare the body to be able to handle the detox process. Inflammation is the important first-step in the healing response, but patients with complex conditions have had such assaults on their systems for so long, inflammation that should originally be temporary has become chronic. If we don’t honor the order of treatment and tackle the small stuff before moving on to the bigger stuff, it makes untangling the inflammation within the system much harder.

Peptides Therapies

When Dr. Parpia talks about immune modulation, she’s talking about peptide therapy. Peptides bring down inflammation in the gut and throughout the rest of the body, optimizing the healing process for all the different pieces of the condition.

Because peptides help stabilize the immune system, they also work as great bandaids while doctors can go in and treat the root causes. Treatment for complex cases needs to be well-rounded because it’s not caused by a single factor such as just mold or just metals or just Lyme. A well-rounded treatment approach is a dance that’s different for each patient.

Learn how the factors at play in your own health and start healing with this episode!

Guest Bio

Dr. Nafysa Parpia is a board-certified Naturopathic Doctor at Gordon Medical in San Rafael, CA and has spent the last decade treating patients with complex chronic illnesses. Her current focus has expanded to include Long Haul COVID and ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome).