Dr. Neil Nathan is a physician and author, and is a Founding Diplomate of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine, and the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness (ISEAI). He has practiced medicine for over 50 years including 30 years treating patients with chronic complex illnesses, and 20 years treating patients with Lyme disease. He has written several several books about chronic illness, mold toxicity and other environmental illnesses, Lyme and energetic diagnosis. He joins us from Northern California to explore the foundations of mold toxicity, Lyme disease and other infections, and the impact they have on our cells and our nervous system. This episode is part one of a two part interview.
Throughout his career, Dr. Nathan has observed that certain illnesses don’t fit neatly into medical models. While working at a pain management center in the 1980’s, Dr. Nathan and his colleagues saw many patients with what was once called fibrositis, and is now known as Fibromyalgia. Because diseases such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and Fibromyalgia were poorly understood, many of these patients were referred to psychiatrists, and given medications that didn’t work.
With better understanding of the biochemistry of Fibromyalgia and CFS, better treatments were discovered. Over time, though, those treatments became less effective, leading doctors to explore other contributing factors such as Lyme disease. Many patients who weren’t responding to treatments for Lyme disease were also found to have mold toxicity. With the increase in patients presenting with these problems, Dr. Nathan decided to take matters into his own hands and learn all he could about Lyme disease and later, mold toxicity.
