Why Some People Stay Sick: Immune Imbalance, Chronic Infections & the Missing Piece in Healing

Why does one person recover quickly from an illness while another spends years battling fatigue, food sensitivities, anxiety, recurrent infections, autoimmune symptoms, or mysterious health challenges that never seem to fully resolve?

In this season-opening episode of HEY YOU'RE GONNA BE OK, Elizabeth Mae introduces the foundational concept that drives nearly every client success story you'll hear this season: immune system balance.

Through the lens of functional immunology, Elizabeth breaks down complex concepts like TH1 and TH2 immune function into everyday language, helping listeners understand why some people become trapped in cycles of chronic illness, inflammation, histamine reactions, recurring infections, mold sensitivity, Lyme disease, POTS, MCAS, gut dysfunction, and autoimmune symptoms.

You'll learn why symptoms are often not random, how triggering events like mono, COVID, mold exposure, pregnancy, antibiotics, tick bites, or major stressors can shift immune function, and why simply chasing symptoms rarely creates lasting wellness.

Elizabeth also shares the framework Hey Hey Mae uses to help clients recover and stay well by looking at the whole picture - including infections, hormones, gut health, thyroid function, blood sugar regulation, mold and toxin exposure, nutrient status, detoxification pathways, nervous system health, and more.

Whether you're dealing with chronic sinus infections, recurrent strep, shingles, food sensitivities, anxiety, eczema, POTS, MCAS, IBS, fatigue, or simply feel like your body has never been the same since a major health event, this episode will give you a new way to understand what may be happening beneath the surface.

In This Episode:

• What functional immunology actually teaches us about immune function

• TH1 vs TH2 immune balance explained simply

• Why some people develop chronic illness after infections - and others don't, including tick bites and Lyme Disease

• Common immune triggering events and "Never Well Since..." stories

• Lyme disease, mold, EBV, Bartonella, Babesia, chronic infections, and immune dysfunction

• The connection between allergies, food sensitivities, histamine issues, and chronic inflammation

• Why we look beyond symptoms to understand the whole body

• The foundations that support long-term recovery and resilience

A Favorite Takeaway:

"Your body is not attacking you at random. Symptoms are often the immune system's attempt to adapt, protect, and survive. The question is not just 'what symptom do you have?' - it's 'why does the immune system feel unsafe in the first place?'"

This episode serves as the foundation for the entire season and is one you'll likely want to revisit as you hear the client stories, practitioner interviews, and deeper dives still to come.

Please note that transcripts may contain minor errors or inaccuracies. We hope you enjoy reading them and find them helpful.

Hey, you're going to be okay. I'm Elizabeth Mae and my functional health practice. Hey, hey Mae helps people heal when they've exhausted traditional options when no one can figure out your health challenges. My team helps you resolve symptoms and restores your health. You're listening to my podcast. Where will your stories of healing chronic illness from a root cause immune centered approach?

Welcome back to another season of hey, you're going to be okay. I am so excited to walk you guys through our season opener this time, because for a third season, we're going to bring to you tons of episodes of Client stories, healing from all sorts of different things that you may be able to see yourself or your kids in.

But today we're really going to talk about why some people say sick. You already know that a big part of our approach and success for so many clients that hey, hey, Mae is addressing things with a functional immunology approach understanding immune balance, understanding chronic infections, and really looking at them through the functional immunology lens. I want you guys to walk away from today's episode, understanding the basics of a system that has been made out to be very confusing and perplexing, especially since we all experience that big collective infection situation.

If you agree that shut down our world. So we're going to talk through what if your symptoms aren't random, what's going on in the body? And I hope you leave this episode really feeling equipped about how you can care for your family and a lot more peace around some maybe endemic issues that we're seeing, like Lyme. There's an uptick in ticks this year.

There has been an uptick in viral issues in the last several years. So I want you to kind of understand that immune dysfunction is truly at the root of nearly every client that we support. That also means that the immune system is truly the key to their recovery. So let's jump into it. Your immune system is a beautiful system.

It is wonderful. And it does things that we like and things that we don't like. So one of the things we don't like is chronic inflammation. A lot of us are familiar with that and may even identify and say, well, my body carries a lot of inflammation. Chronically. Your immune system is doing that. A great example of a wonderfully functioning immune system is if I get a cut here on my hand, the body should swell up a little bit around that cut, it gets a little red and puffy, right?

And eventually a scab will form. Sometimes there's some bleeding, a little pus, infection, whatever, and then the scab forms. As soon as that happens, the redness and swelling go away. The redness and swelling were product of the immune system. The immune system comes in to inflame, to allow immune cells to get to the site of an injury or a wound, and then they'd inflame as that injury, wound, infection, etc. is resolved.

So another thing you're you're does is to create the boundaries for your body, which is really cool because your immune system decides what is me, what are Elizabeth cells and what are outside pathogen cells? What are food cells? What are things coming into my body? And then what are my cells? And it toxins are included in that. So your immune system helps the body to identify which things are coming in my cells, which things are toxins.

And then how to identify and purge those. Your immune system also handles all sorts of mystery illnesses, right? As our children grow, especially until age six seven, eight, there mean system is learning appropriate tolerance. So it's identifying pathogens and things that are not of their body, marking them, creating antibodies and addressing them. And from time to time, as we grow in our adulthood, we will still have little mystery illnesses here and there that may start, they may fully expand, and your immune system is really in charge of deciding if that is a short illness, if that's a long illness that gets greatly expanded, and if it's an illness that you're exposed to and you don't actually end up getting. So some people are also therefore going to recover a lot more quickly, in others will spiral into chronic symptoms. And your immune system is really the gatekeeper on all of those processes. So this season, we're going to be diving into a lot of real client stories where you will see different functions of a person's immune system that are kind of a signature way of being.

And then we're also going to talk about different educational episodes. We're going to walk through some more homeopathy. We're going to talk about how do we use it with chronic infections, how do we use it for more clinical application versus acute support? We're going to talk a lot about Pots and mash resolution. This is something we see great success within our clients.

It is difficult because it's typically a very unwell, very sensitive body. But we're going to talk how those things are connected to our immune health. We're also going to give you the same old practical hope that we get to see every day in our practice. I want you to know that people like you, and like your children, have faced exactly what you are facing and do get better.

They're able to obtain an appropriate foundation for their health. After they walk through this process. You're not just stuck. It's not always going to be this way, but this season is really a framework for understanding why bodies do get stuck so you can get unstuck. And it's also about understanding the why beneath chronic symptoms. Because chronic symptoms are truly often an expression of an immune system either functioning well, not functioning.

So let's talk about big old giant words. Functional immunology. What is functional immunology? The immune system is not separate from the rest of your body okay. So it is a system that is here patrolling. It is looking for cells that are mind cells, that are food cells that are pathogens. And functional immunology is just really looking at the function of all those different cells, of all those different symptoms.

So functional immunology and thinking through how the body works and in systems based methodology is quite a bit different than a symptom based sort of medicine. Some functional health care will also say, hey, we're functional health, but they're really just swapping pharmaceutical Band-Aids for supplemental Band-Aids. In this approach, where we care for our clients by looking at everything through a functional immunology, multiple organ systems based approach, we are applying quite a bit of strategy to changing the body's function.

So a new foundation of wellness is achieved for the unwell person. And they say study in that health that they have gained. So when we talk about the immune system and people who get sick and recover versus people who get sick and don't seem to bounce back, we got to go back to what that immune system is doing.

The immune system is a gatekeeper and your immune system is your body's boundaries, right? Your immune system also interacts with other systems. It interacts with hormones. They're signaling. They're by Mindy's actually a hormone. But it's very supportive of your immune system. The immune system interacts with gut health. That's where pathogens come in. Right? Like we eat. Unfortunately parasites, bacteria, viruses on our food all the time and our wonderfully functioning digestive systems eat those up so we don't get sick.

But our gut health is also greatly populated by lots of good bacteria, some bad bacteria, different species. And so those are all things that are part of immune function. And there's also some local immune cells in your in your digestive tract. Your nervous system interacts with your immune system. It is sending all the signaling. Your nervous system is what nerves and your brain.

So your brain notices a pathogen coming in. It activates immune system. The nerves are also handling a lot of communication in with the immune system. So lots of interaction toxins interact with your immune system. If you have a body that's being exposed to a high amount of toxicity, that's going to limit immune cell function, it can limit bone marrow health to where you're not even forming adequate levels of immune cells.

So there's interaction there between toxicity in the immune system. Sleep greatly informs the immune system, partially because when we sleep, that's primarily when we detox. So if we're not sleeping well, we're going to have toxicity build buildup. But sleep also is a time for immune cells to continue growing and functioning. And sleep can be a really big limiting factor for the immune system, just not to have enough mitochondrial power to function as a wonderfully policing immune system should.

Blood sugar is a huge one. Blood sugar can really increase inflammation or drive it if we're having blood sugar difficulties, and likewise if we have appropriate blood sugar management, that's going to take a lot of stress off of our immune system and gives your body more resiliency to inflame and flame. Stress is a huge one. That one's kind of easy I think we're all familiar with.

Like we get run down and then we get sick. Of course, there's going to be an interaction between stress and the immune system. Nutrient status is also very important when it comes to your immune system. You know, MT4 and other genetic conditions are big hot button topics in pediatrics, and for good reason, because they help us to know how some bodies use their B vitamins, how some bodies detoxify certain substances, and when there are inadequate levels of B vitamins, particularly B12, B6, folate, the immune system can struggle as well.

That nutrient status really informs its wellness. So all these things work together. And then of course, our environment, your immune system, keeps out environmental triggers as well. So your immune system is big player when it comes to seasonal allergies. It is seeing that pollen come in your nose attacking it, cleaning it up. It is seeing seasonal allergies come in, but it's also seeing food allergies come in, seeing food sensitivities come in.

And the biggest, most famous of all environmental issues is mold. Your immune system absolutely polices mold. It absolutely responds to mold. And it can be greatly limited in immune function when mold and mycotoxins are present. Going back to that toxin load, the immune system will down, regulate and struggle to really perform optimally when it is flooded with those immune cells or with those mold cells and mold spores and mycotoxins.

So in care, we don't look at one isolated symptom. And through the lens of functional immunology, we don't either. We look at the terrain the immune system is trying to find to function inside of. And then we look at how did the immune cells work in general. So I think we need to walk through that a little bit.

Your immune system has different jobs in different parts. It actually functions in a certain way that we have a pretty good understanding of. And it has a really simple framework. So I would like to compare the two main arms of the immune system to a teeter totter. You have T.H. one and 32. Let's walk out with both of those are Th1 and T.H. two are going to be on opposite sides of the teeter totter.

And the teeter totter really should maintain relative balance. Sometimes we're going to have a little more inflammation and CH2 will get a little more active. Sometimes we're going to have infection coming in, one will be more active, but we should always have a good resolution. Back to balance after any immune trigger or struggle or issue. So one this is fight mode.

This is your immune system showing up, killing pathogens, patrolling for stuff that does not belong. Think about viruses. So things like Covid when not in your body Th1 cells get very active and go handle those. The flu is the same way. Herpes virus cells. Oster is a rando but really important virus for us to talk about because it is the virus that creates chickenpox when you're a child.

So that comes in, you get the full presentation of that herpes virus is survivors, and you end up with chickenpox. The thin side of the immune system kills back. That viral production. A replication works with one to to to make appropriate antibodies. So the body remembers. Oh this is what herpes virus cell is. Austria. Looks like we've dealt with this before.

We don't have to let this turn into chickenpox next time. And so we get that good little play between Th1 and T.H. two. And at the end of the illness, chickenpox are gone, the child as well. And they remain well for many, many, many years. Later on in life. Sometimes we see someone suffering with singles, that is, that herpes, varicella zoster virus coming out of dormancy and sneaking past T.H. one and creating a full blown illness in the body.

So you can see how Th1 is there to combat and fight, but then also without appropriate regulation of that little teeter totter, doing both sides work over time, infections can come back out and sneak past that one side. So Th1 also handles bacteria. So infections like strep cluster difficile or seed, if we're familiar often with in older people or people with GI struggles, Th1 really handles those bacterial infections to staff or MRSA.

Impetigo is a common kiddo infection that comes from staff and strep bacteria, predominantly Mycoplasma pneumonia is something that has been made more popular. Known about. We've experienced it quite a bit more after Covid, and it creates a pneumonia type presentation, often in children, but not limited to children. Your one side is also going to handle intracellular infections. So infections going inside of cells, which just like viruses are part of that too.

It's going to handle lime, lime and bug borne infection for the most part tend to be bacteria or spiral keep bacteria. Epstein-Barr is a huge one. So mono when your kiddo gets that in high school, one is trying to fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. Once the infection is into dormancy, the child is feeling better. We know that one is done its job, two is created some antibodies and we're back to nice balance and we can move forward.

Not being unwell but still carrying viral memory. Chronic pathogens are something that one should be dealing with all the time. You're never going to have just one strep exposure in your life, right? Sometimes we get sick from a strep exposure and other times we have it and then we don't have it again for many, many years. That's really what should happen.

But sometimes Th1 function isn't strong or isn't showing up enough for a strap infection. And we'll see recurrent infection. So that covers Th1 fight mode. The other side of that teeter totter of the immune system, the two main arms is T.h two. This is our allergy and inflammation mode okay. So I want you thinking about things like seasonal allergies.

That's going to be when Th2 is showing up in a big way. It's inflaming. It's creating a lot of dilation of our blood vessels to get immune cells in where we're breathing in. A lot of that infectious is not infectious I'm sorry. Allergic material, the pollen, the, you know, junk in the spring, mostly pollen flying around the air, a lot of fungal stuff in the fall for a lot of people, when they have seasonal allergies in the fall, those sort of things are coming in through is going to ramp up and inflame, and we're going to see a big uptick in that inflammation side.

The other piece that we see with two activity is your standard run of the mill inflammation. So someone who deals with joint pain or they deal with just like inflammatory pain from time to time. That's going to be TH's responsibility as well. On the allergic side of things, something like F PiS is actually mediated by the two side of the immune system.

And understanding functional immunology is how we get our kids into resolving the F PiS before they grow out of it. At six, seven, eight years old, we're able to reach full resolution of f PiS often because we understand this immune balance. So other things that antibody Th2 side does moderate speed sensitivities and moderates food allergies to full anaphylactic EpiPen histamine production.

So my MCAS tendency clients their antibody sites often overwhelmed. And then the Th2 side also handles extracellular parasites. So things like lice Irpin worms this side of the immune system is going to be moderating and handling. And we can see poor regulation of those things or recurrence in those things when Th2 is struggling. So you got these two arms right 20 Th2.

These are your main pieces. And when one sired over fires we say that's the immune system becoming imbalanced. And often the other side will weaken in response. Because I do have a relationship with one another and sometimes one system isn't responsive. A lot of our clients do have a thin side. There's just not responding at all, and there can be other systems interacting with this.

I've seen people with rheumatology, rheumatology disorders. I've seen people with bone marrow issues because of infections. And so they're not making adequate levels of white blood cells, red blood cells, healthy cells, those sorts of things. And then we can see Th1 drop because those really are driven by a lot of healthy immune cells. So there's all relationship here.

But the key things are when the immune system is imbalanced, our symptoms are going to begin stacking up the symptoms of those infections that the immune system is not able to adequately clear, and the symptoms of the Th2 side that is not adequately resolving or ending inflammation. After an inflammatory episode, those things are going to start stacking up.

And children often this can look like when never appropriately developing. Two we'll see kids who just like their bodies, really don't sort through much of anything they're exposed to. They're exposed to anything, they get sick and there's not really great resilience there. There's just cyclical sickness and the same stuff. So immune imbalance can really affect us all differently.

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Today some people are going to look constantly sick. Others may look constantly inflamed. They can actually be both. And remember inflammation. I think we kind of got sold a bad deal on that. Like we think that inflammations, like just being puffy or it's just pain in my joints.

But truly inflammation can be pain in my digestive tract. It can be IBS, it can be an overactive digestive tract, it can be pain, it can be back pain, it can be knee pain. It can be pain that stays around way too long past an original injury. It can be all these things, and even the person who is never sick can be someone who struggles with this imbalanced immune system because their ones don't.

Showing up. Their THC is not showing up either, but they'll have some chronic symptoms that they're carrying. You see this most unfortunately in men because there's not a sensitivity. There's often a lot of power through it. I always feel this way. These are symptoms I got from my family, like a lot of excusing it, but truly it's more the immune system is imbalance and they happen to be decently well and resilient people.

But that never sick or never fully mounting a fever. Those are all signs that the immune system is imbalanced. You know, the other thing I think about the mean system are all of our families who do everything wonderfully. They eat well, they eat to balance their blood sugar. They're eating organic, they're non-GMO. They're not eating trash. They're sugar so limited.

There's so much sunshine and grounding and outside play. These people are doing wonderful things for their bodies. But in the environment of an imbalanced immune system, as soon as you remove those great habits, they don't feel well. So my history is even learning how to use and special diets to control or support more mean resilience. So for me, I had Hashimoto's and I dealt with that quite intensively for a few years.

I had Epstein bar viral issue acutely, and a special diet. Being on the autoimmune protocol diet really helped to get things in to a manageable way for me about ten years ago. But what would happen is if I ever came off of that diet at all, my body would really rebel. I really would struggle a lot. And so even those great habits, when you pull them out and then you see symptoms, we know that there's an immune component and we have work that we can resolve.

So that person does not have to say on a special diet forever. So many of our clients are simultaneously like under functioning against infections and then overreacting, harmless things like food, pollen, stress, just like really quickly inflaming. There is another part of the immune system called Th17. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. But that's really like the big guns that come in when Th2 can't inflame enough and resolve things.

Th1 isn't killing to 17. Is that Ahmed immune system? That's like a bonfire. It's going to come in and be really over reactive. It's going to really drive tissue destruction in its in its reactivity. It doesn't just come in and inflame a little bit. It comes in in flames big time. It can damage tissue. And it's actually what's responsible for starting autoimmune process, where the immune system has now turned on the body.

It's no longer only patrolling outside substances, pathogens, foods. It's coming in really attacking the body cells as well. And when Th17 is turned on, it can be very difficult to get it turned all the way off. But when we understand the Th1 and two balance how 17 is propelled forward or calm down, then we are able to really have a roadmap for fully resolving a lot of autoimmune disease, getting it into dormancy and resolving progression, resolving tissue damage, which listen when it comes to something like Pans and Pandas where the autoimmunity is destructing brain tissue, I will shout it from the rooftops that we can use functional immunology to save bodily tissue, to stop the autoimmune progression, because when that starts and a little kiddo and their brain is being distracted by their own immune system and age four and five, we don't we don't quite know yet because Pans Pandas isn't super old. What's it going to look like when they're 50? When they're 70? When they get a shingles vaccine at 60 and they have the shingles, what is it going to look like?

So it's really important for us to understand one and two, but also 17 and knowing that autoimmunity does not have to have the last word in the body, because functional immunology gives us a map for how to improve whatever is progressing that autoimmunity so that we can hopefully shut off that tissue destruction. So with this balance, it's so important.

And a lot of times clients will ask, okay, I can tell them imbalanced. I'm seeing that I'm not killing Epstein-Barr, that I live chronically with. I can see that I'm over inflaming. I've got a lot of inflammation. I got a lot of food sensitivities. I feel a lot of pain in my body. But like, what do I do about it?

Why did it happen to me? Why didn't happen to my neighbor really important? Never. Well, since this means you've never been well since X, Y, z, a vaccine, a sickness, a surgery, a car accident. Since your parents died, since you're divorced. This is what we call a triggering event. So triggering events can cause the immune systems Th1 and two balance to be completely knocked off of its balance.

Okay, so most chronically ill people can typically identify for me a turning point. And that's a big flag for me where I know immune system work is going to turn this around so that they get a new foundation of health. Drinking events are very important because some of them are even good. Pregnancy is actually a triggering event. When we become pregnant, it's a two dominant state.

So Th1 actually gets down regulated because we don't want immune cells killing the embryo implantation. We don't want them going in and saying, oh wow, this is not part of Elizabeth. Of course, every single human being that has come to be has parts of not the mother's body inside. Right? The semen comes in. That is an outsider, and your body is going to want to deal with that, especially if it is unhealthy.

So semen quality, a whole nother discussion for another day. But the immune system can go and into pregnancy and implantation. It can end an unhealthy pregnancy at any point when we see resulting in miscarriage. Not all, but some. It can interfere with a pregnancy through in a topic pregnancy. There's inflammatory processes going on there. So without getting into it, really what should happen when you're pregnant is through, takes over Th1 comes down and then we're done being pregnant.

The mean system should go back into balance. So for some women this means going into pregnancy. They never really felt great. They had immune issues, they felt awesome when they're pregnant and then after they had baby, sometimes they go back to feeling not as great and sometimes they're autoimmune or persistent immune issues actually resolve. We have a client, she's one and a house of six that we've seen.

Now all other five people have major immune issues. She gained health every single time she had a baby, because her immune system actually recovered better balance afterwards. So it can go both ways. But let's talk about when it doesn't. What are other common triggers? Stressors are huge. So death, divorce, job loss, anything that you don't have skills to cope with at the time and create stress for you can be a huge immune trigger.

Think too about things like moving. Well when that happens, like you literally get exhausted. There's so much more work going on in your day to day. There's the emotional work. There's all the added labor or shopping for a house and packing. Moving. Those things limit immune function to just by their very nature of kind of draining us. So stressors can be stressors, but they can also be things to just take a lot more from us.

Stress or grief is a huge one. So I like to talk about death as a huge piece that always triggers that, or can often trigger that. Herpes virus. Is Oster out of dormancy? Right? That was the chickenpox virus. How many older people do you know have had shingles? But it's been after an episode of a sickness. So many after they've lost a friend, after someone they've been caretaking for passes.

And then very quickly thereafter, they're struggling with shingles. That's a big stressor, mold exposure, huge stressor to the immune system. It's not only toxic, but it's really limiting to immune cell production. COVID's another one. A lot of other viruses that seem bar mono. Those are big immune triggers. So sometimes I'll see in my teenage early college clients, which that's not a great time, right?

We're not always taking good care of ourselves at that point in time, but you will see them struggle with mono and then quickly thereafter they're starting to deal with bronchitis, or they're starting to deal with eczema. They're starting to deal with other bacterial driven issues in the body, because that mono acted as an immune trigger for them to lessen the support of Th1, really killing those things.

And now we're seeing it manifest as skin problems or even anxiety. Those sort of things can be there to tick bites or big immune trigger bug bites can be the spider bites, right? Because any of those vectors can transmit infection at the time that they're biting. Antibiotics can be a big trigger, especially IV antibiotics. And then certain families of antibiotics can interact with certain genetics.

I think about my earlier daylilies crew. They have certain genetics that are going to interact with certain medications that impact collagen, and that can be a trigger as well. Surgery is a big trigger for lots of reasons, but we're also often exposed to resistant strains of bacteria that are found in in hotels, not in hotels, in hospitals. Same for labor and delivery.

We have the baby in a hospital. We can pick up things there. We have a baby in a moldy home and have a picturesque home birth. We can also limit our immune system there. So lots of things to think about and not things to be afraid of. Okay, these are all things in our world that should be present, that we should be able to move through with healthy immune balance and deal with vaccine reactions are another thing I want to talk about briefly.

There's a few components, and I probably need to do a whole episode about how these interact with our immune systems to the best of our understanding, but the high points are there are lots of components to our vaccines. A lot of vaccines will have bovine serum or albumin in them. Albumin comes from egg. And so if we inject those things into a body, particularly one where immune systems already imbalanced or it's already overactive, overactivity can be you're sick, your kid has eczema going on, your kid has a rash, impetigo, anything like that going on?

When we inject at the time of illness, we are triggering an already active immune system, and it can take that trigger and decide to now become overactive in its response to some of those ingredients in the immunization, as opposed to creating good, healthy immune response to the immunization. Right. So I can vaccinate you with something that has bovine or calcium in, and now you're really struggling with dairy response.

Or I can see kids a lot of times with a vaccine that contains albumin, then they start reacting to eggs. So those sorts of things are really important to think about. There's also interaction documented in many studies between certain vaccines. So MMR is a great one great example that it can limit in many people their immune resilience or that one response to claustrophobia full claustrophobia family.

So not just cluster difficile or CDF all clustered and streptococcal bacteria of Candida. So these are three things. Three pathogens that are very closely tied in to autism and ADHD presentations. Whether they're causative. It's not perfectly clear yet. I would say there's plenty of research there to see and understand them as pathogens that very consistently cause progress to autism, symptom load, ADHD type presentation, so blah blah, blah, blah blah.

There are very many things that can trigger an immune system into imbalance. Now, sometimes an immune system never fully recalibrated after that trigger. Which did happen is you deal with the stressor. Maybe you get a little sick. One kind of goes offline. But after we get through the stressor, balance should come back. Somebody don't recalibrate. Some body's stay stuck in survival mode.

This is really common with Lyme infections in particular because they will go and burrow in the system. And the immune system knows something is here. We just can't quite find it. And that creates this over immune response. You have a lot of theta activity. We have a lot of histamine production ongoing over time. And that immune system is just not really recovered.

Since that triggering event of the bug bite, the immune system can then begin reacting inappropriately. So a lot of times we'll see food allergies or sensitivities and kids after immunization, or we'll see f pies on set. A lot of times we'll see eczema pop up after we've introduced solids into the diet at six months. So there are lots of different things.

But the immune system after a trigger will be compelled to react it appropriately. Symptoms basically just start piling up. So that's when we start to see the symptoms of like the chronic lingering infection. All this stuff about to tell you these are all symptoms that come from individual infections. So when I do a clarity call with someone, I can pretty much hear the likelihood of which chronic infections are at play.

And if their immune system is driving, their body is just like symptom dysfunction. So things like chronic fatigue anxiety. Did you know can be driven solely by pathogen, not just you worrying about what's going to happen next in life. Food reactions. That's a big symptom load. Food reactions can even map out to be certain groups of things. Epstein-Barr has a strong correlation with egg reactivity.

It also helps that a viral load of epsilon bar replicate. So they're a little nuances to things that help us to understand what's that. People a lot of times will feel very sensitive to sugar that can only eat a little bit, or if they eat a little bit, they feel really weird or like a lot of times that is progression of a bacterial infection sometimes.

Candido insomnia is a huge one. Insomnia is related to immune issues. We look at it and think, no, I just can't sleep. Well, yeah, you can't sleep because your body is packing around a lime infection that dysregulated your circadian rhythm and your melatonin production. Or you can't sleep because your body is using melatonin to detoxify your brain, and you're not getting to use it to cue your sleep in the evening so everything you can see has an interaction.

Your systems, your organ systems are not siloed. They are not individual parts that don't interact. They absolutely interact and affect each other. Recurrent infection big sign that symptoms are piling up. You keep getting bronchitis over and over again. You always get a sinus infection this time of year. You're always getting impetigo. When we go back to school and the kids all touch each other.

No, we should not be getting those things recurrently unless the immune system is dysfunctional. Digestive symptoms are huge. People who come and they say, I've had. I've done everything. It's not gone away. The issue is actually not the bacteria. It's not the bacteria that are overgrown in the intestines. It's the immune system, not policing those bacteria, allowing the good ones to grab the Batmans to die.

Pots and huge mast cells can remain very active, especially after mold when strep populations are high in the body with Lyme and other bug borne populations are high in the body. And so you'll present as someone who has pots and MCAS. And it's a big giant mystery. But truly, the whole crux, especially of mast cells, are immune cells.

That means you have an immune problem. Autoimmune symptoms are another big one or autoimmune diagnoses. And I would even say the client who's had autoimmune diagnoses in the past and resolve them, or they've come and gone or we see like little signs of lupus, but never a full diagnoses. Or we see we've been to the rheumatologist, but they couldn't figure out what was going on, or you didn't have an it, A and A, you didn't fully meet the diagnostic criteria, but you had autoimmune type symptom load that's hanging out and showing up for you.

These are all signs that the immune system is at the root of whatever's going on in the body. Symptom wise, we have to resolve it at the immune level. So I want to move into kind of like a hot button issue this summer, as there's so much talking about how many more ticks there are. There's a lot more concern about Lyme

And I would say in the years that we've addressed this and supported this for our clients, it's absolutely grown. And just from a basic like bugs reproduce, our winters aren't as cold, so there's not as much freeze. And we're also seeing that texture becoming more resilient even to winter. So there's just more opportunity. The bug is only part of the story, and I want us to walk through quickly.

Like, why can one person get bitten and they're okay, but then someone else gets bitten and they go down really hard, really quick and become very ill. So not every tick carries Lyme and co-infections. Number one, that's really important. Some ticks are going to carry some infections like toxoplasmosis, Bartonella and plasma Rickettsia. Rocky Mountain spotted fever talk I think you said the plasma it's actually a parasite, but a Borrelia the lime bacteria, they can carry one.

They can carry none. They can carry six like they can carry multiple things. And then what happens after the tick bites depends on if the tick injects into your body those infections. So the tick generally carries infection in its hind gut. It attaches to your body, it starts to suck your blood, and it's going to mix your blood with the materials of its hind gut.

And at some point it vomits back into your body, therefore your bloodstream, because it's attached to a vein. And now we have an infection coming into the body. You and I can both be met by the same tick attached for the same amount of time. It absolutely regurgitate to our bloodstream. And you get Lyme and I do not what happened healthy th1 arm of the immune system should appear when a tick bite occurs.

Consume the pathogens with those Th1 side cells. Neutralize it, prevent an infection intrusion. Okay. This can absolutely happen. So sometimes people will say I sent that tick off for testing and it had five infections and I don't know what to do. And I kind of feel fine. I never had a rash of any kind, bull's eye or otherwise, because the bullseye rash is not necessary for a lime diagnosis.

But I don't understand. Well, this also can happen with appropriate antibody response for someone who's had lime before, and the body has created appropriate antibody memory when they're bitten. Again, what should happen is those antibodies to come out and say, oh my gosh, we already know this is Lyme. We're going to address it. No big deal. Let's move this from Lyme into strep okay.

We've probably all had most of us had at one point or another or we've had an ear infection which is often strep bacteria causing that. Many of us know how children or we're around children, or we go to the grocery store where children go, strep has become more antibiotic resistant and it is around us all the time. So when my kid breathes in my face and I don't get strep, what happened?

My killer side was active. It came out and killed those strep cells that came right into my face, handled it. Same thing that happens when one kid in the house has in battle and not everybody else gets it. Mom and dad don't get it, but maybe the siblings do. What happened? The one side of the healthy people's immune system showed up, handled that bacteria, and it didn't turn into an illness.

That's what we want. So we know that some people are going to get bit biotech who's carrying lime and co-infections and they will become sick. Their killer side was not showing up and doing what it needed to do. Their antibody side may not have already been familiar with those infections. To the people who do resolve, those people have a healthier terrain, healthier immune system.

So that's really what we want to move towards. It's really all about immune resilience. It's about the body's total toxin burden. Because if I am full of toxicity, because I'm living in mold, my mean system is going to struggle big time to mount an appropriate response when I get bitten by that tick. Stress load is huge. People will get bit in a time and they're already stressed out, or they're already exhausted, or they become super stressed out about the tick exposure.

And that can take the immune system. Nutrient status is huge if we don't have adequate nutrients to run appropriate immune cells, if we're struggling with anemia, if we struggle with bone marrow marrow quality, low ferritin, those sorts of things that can affect our immune resilience, because where are a lot of our immune cells make in your bud marrow super important.

So if we don't have adequate iron levels, we don't have adequate B levels. We're not going to have healthy blood bloods coming from that bone marrow. So nutrients is really important. Gut health is huge. If we have unhealthy gut health, we can also even have infections make a home in our gut so people can have strep in the throat.

You can have strep in the gut. Some kids have both. So when they get sick before you know that it's a full blown strep throat infection, they throw up and that's your little signal up. Johnny threw up one time. Guest Roberts deals strep. Again. That's pretty typical because your gut health is really connected. Your gut is also mucosal layer.

So anywhere that's not your slime USA, your ENT, your mouth, your gut all the way out through the other end. Those are mucosal areas and they are full of bacteria good, bad and otherwise, that help to consume our food and break it down. Like those portions are really important for fortifying our immune system. Genetics and detox pathways are huge, too.

If I am someone who has GSG issues, I don't make adequate glutathione, which is my body's master antioxidant. Say I get bit by a tick, I start having mast cell activation, I've got a lot of inflammation going on, and I just don't have adequate levels of glutathione, nor can I make it or use it. My body's going to really struggle to resolve that inflammation without a great diet.

High antioxidants in my food already a lot of rest at the time, so there's lots of factors that can play when we have an immune threat come in. Whether it's a kid breeding strep in my face or it is, a tick biting me. Total inflammatory loads huge too, especially with Lyme and co-infections. If we're already someone that leans towards an over inflamed state, your immune cells are are basically too active.

Th2 is already way too busy. There's too many of those inflammatory guys running around when someone's bit by a tick. And we're dealing with an acute client. One of the biggest, most important things that we can do is to reduce inflammation. Because inflammation can get a hand really, really quickly. That's what happens when someone has an anaphylactic response.

They have a very, very quick over inflammatory side of the immune system that can turn into anaphylaxis, lack of breathing, all those sort of things. Right. If you're already carrying a high inflammatory load, tick bite comes in. Your mean system is going to get very inflammatory very quickly, because that's just the nature of how that works. And it can go overboard really quickly.

So the more we can handle that total inflammatory load, the better our immune resilience is going to be, the better one's going to be able to show up and hang out. So it's really about all the factors that support the immune system, which is important. We'll talk kind of about how do you care for someone with this functional immunology approach?

Elizabeth, if all of these other systems often matter too? Well, we'll get to that. So big takeaways from this part. And the tick fears are just not all ticks carry infections. So let's just stop there. Not every single one that bites is going to have something. And not all exposures create disease. So you can be bit I can be bit.

Our ticks can do the same thing, carry the same stuff. And your body's status when you had the bite. And mine are going to inform whether or not we get sick. But a dysregulated immune system is much more vulnerable to persistent infection, to chronic inflammation, inappropriate immune signaling. And what I love about understanding functional immunology is it really takes away this whole fear based medicine approach, right?

Like when somebody gets bit by a taken I say this is a person who formerly contracted Lyme and Alpha gal and got very sick, very quick. And I was also already a very healthy lady working in this space. Every person who weighed in doctors, E.R. doctors, clinicians weighed in on my case. It was very fear based. They didn't know what to do.

They didn't know why my body was inflaming. They didn't know why I had a onset of MCAS, why I had onset of Pots, why I was super heat intolerant. I'm talking it was 65 degrees outside and I was overheating. No one had any idea. It was all very scary to everyone. Once we understand the immune system function and we understand how the terrain of the body works, what these immune cells are doing, where they come from, how they get closed out or resolved.

We don't have to function in this very scared place anymore. And I think that's one of the beautiful gifts that Covid gave us, because it really pushed immunology research forward more. It moved smart voices in that area forward. So let's talk about patterns that we see that are immune patterns. Because I know you're wondering okay, I'm hearing you, Elizabeth.

On the balance thing. I'm hearing you on auto immunity and Th17. And I'm feeling like maybe I have some patterns. So recurrent infection clients, a lot of times we're going to see chronic sinus infection bronchitis. We'll see recurrent strep. Sometimes we receive recurrent mycoplasma or we'll see recurrent RSV things that are commonly in our world that are just around, we're all being exposed to.

We often will see UTIs that are recurrent bladder infections, whether it's a full UTI or you're just getting the symptoms of it. You can see ear infections over and over and over and over again, despite the tubes, with the tubes without the tubes, varsity pneumonia, shingles popping up over and over, or just 1 or 2 times, they really should not come back out.

We should not experience shingles. If we've had chickenpox before. Our immune system should retain dormancy over that. And we can even see prostate issues. And that's another place where there are some hollow spaces. And when we see those hollow spaces, the lungs, ear, nose and throat area, our gut, digestive tract, intestines, even that prostate, when they're not maintained by Th1 and balance, when that part of the immune system can't get a handle on infections and symptoms there.

That's when Th17 steps in and says, I got this. I'm gonna handle these inflammatory issues in these lungs. And that's when we see more difficult things like asthma or a lot of breathing restriction come in. We see the anaphylaxis. We see full body rationing issues from these hollow spaces not being able to manage themselves. So it's really important to understand that in our immune dysregulation, clients are seeing everything from allergies, whether seasonally or foods and food allergies.

Asthma is a huge one because that is just the inflammatory cascade jumping way off a cliff and creating that mass inflammation in the lungs. If you've been wanting to transform your health but don't know where to start. I've got you. My full color cookbook is much more than recipes. It's a 300 page crash course in healing through food.

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We see a lot of Hispanic reactions, whether that skin stuff or heart palpitations, racing heart brain fog and dizziness. We can even see tics and tremors and vision changes. We'll see sometimes tunnel vision with someone when they're dealing with an acute histamine Potts type reaction. We absolutely see Pots and MCAS as well. So remember MCAS stands for mast cell activation syndrome.

And mast cells are immune cells. And so we're going to see symptoms there that are totally stemming from the immune system. We also will see. So that is a condition where a child usually under the age of eight is having a delayed, often anaphylactic response to certain foods. And that again is immune system mediated. We can also see with immune issues nervous system symptoms.

So some of our clients based on their pathogen load are going to map out to kind of hit one one area or the other. A lot of our pans pandas kids, we see the full litany of more nervous system symptoms. So anxiety, panic, rage, irritability, your mom, irritability and rage is not always just to you. It can be pathogen load in your immune system, playing together, OCD and impulsivity.

We see that ton with strep, brain fog and dizziness. Those sort of things can come to and sensory issues. So those would be a client who's got a lot more nervous system system symptoms that are stemming from immune system symptoms. And then we have our clients who have gut symptoms. These are my favorite because they come and they're like, I just have this gut issue.

I just need a protocol for how to kill my gut bacteria. I need a better one for my Sibo. No sympathy. These people are going to have bloating, constipation, diarrhea, reflux for years. They're on a map resolved, but that doesn't work. Or if they go off it for a minute, then they really struggle and they can have IBS, IBD, they can have Candida patterns.

They're just recurrent fungal issues in the body, whether that is candida in the gut, vaginal yeast infections or ongoing athlete's foot nail fungus. All of these things are manifestations in the gut of issues in the immune system. And this is why we don't just address or support one system when we work through care with somebody. Your body systems are absolutely not siloed, and everybody system talks to every other body system.

You're not just a lime case, you're not just a hormone case or just a gut health case, because the immune system and all of these other things interact, and other things like blood sugar balance, drive, immune system, detox defects and genetics push the immune system, limit it. Food can absolutely push the immune system. If you continue eating foods that you're currently sensitive or allergic to, you're going to have a limited immune system, more inflammation, which can create more brain inflammation, more dysbiosis, everything kind of just circle when you start understanding what's going on.

But addressing that immune system is driving all the circles. That is where we get to a real new foundation and health. So other things to think about as far as system clues that your immune system is actually at the crunch or at the driver's seat of the problems that are thyroid function when we've got any kind of thyroid automated graves, Hashimoto's, whether it is ongoing or you had some antibodies, we know the immune system is playing mold, and toxins absolutely limit the immune system, and they are going to create a cascade of symptoms.

Hormone issues can be there because of spillover from other symptoms. If you have a lot of bad bacteria in the body, those bacteria eat and peep and poop and they die and they let off toxicity. And that can impact hormones, because if the body has to clear those quite a bit, it can back up on clearing things like excess estrogen.

And you just look like a estrogen heavy person. But really your body would clear the estrogen. Well, if we didn't have an uptick in history from the immune system and pathogen load in the body, vascular and O2 delivery is huge. Sometimes pathogens will limit oxygen delivery in the system. The body can down regulate iron production if you have a parasite issue because parasites, some of them love to eat iron.

So you can really see how these things are not they're not strictly the immune system. Like if you've got low iron, we don't look at that and say your anemia is because of your immune system. It almost be kind of dumb. Your anemia is because you don't have enough iron. But how do we get here? We got here because your body has a lot of parasites, and it is decided to not store iron, because the iron feeds the parasites and makes more of a problem.

So we need to get to the immune system and ask it, why are you not kicking these parasites out? And then we can resolve the iron issue in time. Infections are huge gut microbiome. We talked about that and the nutrient depletion siege. Because your immune system runs on nutrients so do all the other systems. Chronic infections need nutrients of their own.

Viruses can't live on their own. They've got to get inside your cells and live off your mitochondria, pathogens going in and out of cells. They're also going to eat at minerals. Some minerals. Supply and balance can also be a big part of this too. But your immune system lives in your whole body, which is great. It can go anywhere and deal with an injury or an infection.

But your body systems are also in close quarters, and so inflammation in one area can mean inflammation in another. When clients have issues in their intestine, say, I'm seeing a female client with IBS or Sibo issues, I can guarantee you we have hormone issues because her female organs, the uterus, nobody's back up to those intestines. And inflammation doesn't just stay in a perfect little tight pocket inside of her GI track.

It can move right on over to neighboring organs so you can start to see how everything's related. Hopefully you're not overwhelmed if you are, we're happy to take the wheel from here. But healing isn't really just one magic answer, which is great and stinks. I always say that to clients who are like, I've been working on this forever.

I've done a protocol for this and for that and for this. I'm just not better and I don't want to try another thing. Well, I get that. I absolutely get that. And that's really how I even came into this space on my own many, many years ago. But healing isn't usually one magic answer. Recovery involves all parts, right?

It it involves calming that inflammation. We got to get a calm so that your immune cells can complete inflammatory cycles. We've got to improve your immune resilience. We got to wake up to one against whatever it is that your immune system is allowing to live in your body. We have to address those infections. Sometimes we need to kill them with antimicrobials all of the time.

We have to wake up your Th1 arm of your main system to naturally create immune resilience and know from here forward that your body is going to kill up to marvelous. It's going to do that appropriately, right? We have to get that Th1 side woken up. We always have to support to port detoxification. This one is huge. You want to do a little caveat and talk about what her reaction is.

Her reaction is just when your body tries to clear an infection too quickly, there's too much die off and it can't do that. It was coined in Lyme World because Lyme, when it dies off, does create a lot of what I said earlier, like the poop and peat basically from the pathogen, which is really toxic. When you have die off really quickly, then the body experiences the symptoms of that toxin upload.

It can happen with fungal stuff too. A lot of times people say, well, I'm really sensitive. I don't know if I can do this. One time I use this supplement. I had a big reaction to it. It's a bad supplement. No, there's got to be more strategy there. Typically, we're having a hard time because we haven't supported detoxification and drainage well enough, and pathogen load has started to be killed off or the immune system is starting to pick up, killing it off.

And then we kind of have a bottleneck. So that's huge and has to be a part of addressing chronic infections, or you're going to feel like junk. And anybody who feels like junk during a protocol is not going to get through it. We're not going to get to the other side. So that part's very, very important. Nourishing the body is huge.

A lot of times we need a lot more nutrients when we're doing immune work. Sometimes we need more vitamin D, we need more vitamin C one other minerals, that part's really important. And it has to be done strategically, because even too much of a nutrient is not a good thing. Too much vitamin D greatly burdens the liver. I need your liver working and handling detoxification of the trash that we're pushing out is super important.

We can't be burdening it by over pushing that vitamin D, so rebuilding tolerance is really the name of the game when it comes to the immune system. The goal is not perfection. It's that your body is naturally adapting, that your body goes back to that good right design of an active Th1 side killing things, an active Th2, remembering antibodies and flaming when you need it to.

I really want your body to inflame when you've got to cut. Have a fever when you get sick to kill that bacteria and then go back to normal. So that's really our goal. And and in that process, the basics are really powerful because sometimes people will say, okay, fine, fix my immune system. That'll handle it. Right? Well, it'll handle it for a little while.

But if you're not going to sleep, you're not going to eat protein. You're not going to have minerals repeated in your body. You're not going to move. You're going to let your blood sugar get all dysregulated. You're just welcoming back in more triggering events. And we're going to be right back where we started. So the foundations are really powerful.

But I would say immune work takes away some of their essentialism. Back to those clients who are on special diets to maintain their health. They get to move away from a special diet once their immune system has been resolved. It's something to eat well. They still need to manage their stress, handle their toxic burden, pay attention to their gut health is something gets awry, but typically they move into a new season of like a really solid, healthy foundation.

They're not dealing with chronic issues again. And and even advanced therapies like, once clients get better, they're often like, I've literally never felt this good in my life. I can exercise, I have such good resilience. I'm not sick all the time. I've got energy I want to optimize now. Well, those therapies that are part of optimization work so well when the body has this good foundations in place in the immune system is balanced.

So really important. And I think my big takeaway for you guys today is if you've heard nothing else, not listened or understood, any of my other nerd talk here is just when you work with someone, you have got to work with someone who can connect the dots. You want to look for someone who is a good listener, who can really see patterns, who can push past diagnoses and labels and look for how did we get there?

How are systems and symptoms working together, and what do they mean? You've got to have somebody who can interpret symptoms alongside labs. Lyme, for example, is a clinical diagnosis. That means that we don't you can't make that diagnosis based on labs alone or symptoms alone. Both parts have to come together. Lyme testing is difficult, and I will talk about that some other time, but you can easily have depending to on when you are bitten.

If you test for Lyme this week and you were just bitten two days ago, you're not going to have any result on that test. You're not going to. So we have to make decisions on how do we address and support your body. Your physician is going to make a diagnosis based on testing and symptoms. So someone who understands both of those things.

Another huge part with the immune system is we can't have a practitioner who who dismisses fluctuating symptoms. For me, when I'm looking for a lime, if you've had symptoms that are multi-system and they move around the body over time, I know my ears perk up and I start to listen. Are there other Lyme signs? Because that's a classic sign of lime that the symptoms move around from system to symptom, system to system, and they change over time.

So that's really big. And then just understanding that system I think we're done with these words. Understand that systems are connected. So if you are having hormone issues but you're also having IBS and someone goes into just address your hormone issues, that's not going to work. They will be back next month, next week because your digestive track is creating trash.

It has inflammation going on. It's not absorbing nutrients that you need like that's going to impact your hormones. So got to understand kind of the body's priorities, how the systems work together and then how the immune system moderates the whole deal. The right practitioner is going to help you understand why your body is responding the way it is.

Okay, I love my doctors. So thankful for them. I am so thankful I can go to the E.R. if I get a car accident. That's not the place for us to go and seek understanding of our body. That's not really the place for us to go and seek understanding and resolution. Education around why our body has been stuck when we're dealing with chronic autoimmunity.

I would even say that rheumatology is not the place for you to go and learn what's up with your autoimmunity, because their job is to diagnose and treat disease, to give you something to make you feel better, to improve your condition. The goal is not necessarily resolution in those spaces. Okay. So the right practitioner is going to help you understand why your body is responding the way it is and the tools to get you out of there.

Your symptoms are absolutely communication. So if we see symptoms of mold, I want you guys to go back and listen to those mold episodes and old podcast seasons. That's your body communicating and saying, hey, we're showing you this pattern because we're exposed to mold. Your symptoms are communication pots, and it's love. Clients who come in with that because you know what Pots and Marcus are their immune response to other pathogens.

If someone's got let's see Reynolds. They've got sinus congestion, allergies, sneezing. They get headaches, they get dizzy. They've got a lot of anxiety. They'll get some diary and constipation. They're going to have rashes and hives and eczema. Heat intolerance. This sounds like a whole crazy group of symptoms, right? It also sounds like mass. You know what else is sounds like a whole symptom load of Lyme.

So it's really important that we move past diagnoses and we start to look for the patterns that we can look at symptoms and say, okay, yeah, Susie has all these symptoms of mixed. This is her group. Well guess what. This group of mixed symptoms look exactly like a lime symptoms. So let's think and look there. Same with pots.

Someone who's dealing with Pot symptoms that are more of the allergic allergies, exercise intolerance, a lot of that fatigue or fatigue after meals, dizziness, washing or sensation in their ears, ringing in the ears, even blood sugar. Regulation issues or dysregulation. Bloating, constipation, vomiting, abdominal pain. Guess what? Those are all pot symptoms. Those are also all symptoms of someone who's dealing with the chronic strep and bacterial infection.

So it's really important that we move past diagnoses. And you have someone who can see symptoms as communication. Everything communicates. Fertility is communication. That's your body saying, hey, we're not safe enough. We don't have the resources to support a pregnancy, sometimes miscarriage or the inability to obtain a pregnancy. Your immune system is involved there, often ectopic pregnancy. Your immune system is involved in the body is trying to tell is something things like Lyme very clearly an immune issue resolving it.

The immune system has to be resolved. We can't just throw antibiotics and herbals that are in expected to go away, because the immune system is the reason it's dysfunction is why limes allowed to stay. So if we're using antibiotics and herbals to kill it, that's all we're doing is we're killing immune. Training has to happen for that person to obtain a new foundation of health.

Chronic infection stories about those for days, people who deal with eczema over and over and over again, that's typically a bacterial fungal pathogen issue. It can also be a viral issue. We can see severe X-Men rushing from Epstein-Barr virus and other herpes viruses. Think about how HSV two creates HSV one creates cold sores. That is a skin issue, right?

You get a cold sore that is like a blister. But guess what? It's from a herpes virus. So it's really important that we can kind of see how the immune system can can be a derivative skin set. It can be at the root of chronic infections like impetigo or molluskan. That is an immune issue. And and and then secondarily our nervous system can heal.

Because think about if there's viruses running all around your body, your nervous system and your immune system are seeing those sending cells there to deal with it. But that can really be your own internal nervous system trigger, right? There's a lot of activity going on. And anytime we have nervous system, she's just a lot of stimulation. So we start thinking creatively about function and we start using the lens of functional immunology.

We can learn that your body is not attacking you at random. Your symptoms are often your immune system's attempt to adapt, to protect, to survive. And the question isn't just like, what symptoms do you have? It's why does this immune system feel unsafe in the first place? What's here dysregulated this immune system? The immune system is in the core of so many chronic illnesses, chronic symptoms.

And this season we're going to unfold for you lots of different client stories of overcoming that immune dysfunction, gaining a healthy body, gaining immune resilience, spending way less time sick, more time healthy, getting a new foundation so clients can then optimize instead of struggling ongoing. We're going to walk through really cool things resolving like f fries, like anaphylactic allergies, stuff that's really scary and can resolve and greatly improve.

When we think about how the immune system works and work at it from that angle. So excited to spend time with you this season. Come back! We'll be popping out episodes all summer long. Lots for you guys to enjoy and learn from. Thanks for listening. I hope you're leaving. Encouraged, curious, and hopeful. If you learned something, I'd love for you to share this episode with a friend.

Hey, we are all healing together! You can learn more about my practice, our team, and what it's like to work with us at Hey Hey Mae. I teach lots on Instagram and answer questions there. Each Monday my Instagram handle is at hey Hey Elizabeth Mae. You can watch these podcast episodes and more on our YouTube channel. Hey hey Mae, learn about and enjoy our homeopathic line and take our homeopathic short course at heyHey homeopathic.Com happy healing.