BAL “Quick Bites” Series
“I’ve always said that the FDA has been captured by the pharmaceutical industry. They don’t have our best interests at heart. You shouldn’t be funded by the people you’re supposed to be regulating.”
– Steven Phillips, MD
Ticktective host, Dana Parish, talks with her longtime collaborator and co-author of Chronic, Dr. Steven Phillips, a Yale-trained internal medicine doctor who specializes in treating patients with complex, chronic illnesses, often driven by underlying infections like Lyme, Bartonella, Babesia, and now, COVID. In this podcast episode, Phillips discusses the importance of getting to the root cause of mystery autoimmune illnesses, rather than just suppressing symptoms. He states that many chronic infections can drive autoimmune conditions, including Lyme disease, and that Lyme tests are often inaccurate, with a sensitivity of around 50%. Phillips discusses how he recommends treating suspected tick bites to prevent the development of chronic Lyme disease and his use of a multi-antibiotic approach and pulsed antibiotic therapy to target persistent infections. He also discusses his experiences treating COVID-19, using a multi-modal approach including doxycycline, Paxlovid, Metformin, and other drugs and supplements, and the reactivation of infections like Bartonella in Long COVID patients. They also discuss how the chemical and pharmaceutical industries’ interests do not necessarily align with patients trying to get well. The interview highlights Dr. Phillips’s expertise in treating complex chronic infections and his holistic, evidence-based approach to patient care.
Topics include:
- Identifying the true causes of mystery autoimmune illnesses
- The current medical paradigm of symptom suppression
- Oversimplification of infections and their cumulative effect on health
- Understanding asymptomatic infections and their impact on autoimmune conditions
- How asymptomatic infections are more common than symptomatic infections
- Infections acquired by lice, fleas, biting flies, spiders, ants, ticks, and mosquitoes
- Efficiency of the different vectors and the ‘time to transmit’ of infections
- Treatment approaches for tick bites and Lyme disease
- Doxycycline use in Lyme and Babesiosis and instances of failure
- Treatment of Lyme rashes
- Use of doxycycline, Zithromax, ceftriaxone, and tetracycline in treatment plans
- Establishing the superiority of certain classes of drugs and their efficacy
- How spirochetes become resistant to/evade treatment
- Issues with the current standard of care for Lyme and other bacterial infections
- Controversies in Lyme transmission including congenital and sexual transmission
- Maternal-fetal transmission, breastfeeding, and Lyme in pregnant women
- Why pharmaceutical companies are keeping people sick
- …and many more topics too numerous to list!
Dr. Phillips takes a comprehensive, integrative approach to chronic health issues caused by tick-borne diseases, focused on identifying and addressing the root causes of disease rather than just treating symptoms. Click here to watch or listen to this Ticktective conversation on YouTube.
Steven E. Phillips, MD, is a Yale-trained expert on zoonotic infections and coauthor of the book CHRONIC. He specializes in treating medicine’s most complex cases, which include Lyme & other vector-borne diseases and Long COVID. Additionally, he has served as an expert for the states of CT, NY, RI, and VT, providing testimony during their respective public hearings, which resulted in changes to existing healthcare laws. Dr. Phillips has been a longstanding public face of the Lyme pandemic. He is currently spearheading a drug development effort to bring the public a durable, effective treatment for some of these infections, which will hopefully change how we treat a range of rheumatologic and neurologic illnesses. Dr. Phillips also sits on Bay Area Lyme Foundation’s scientific advisory board. This blog is part of our BAL Quick Bites series. If you require a copy of this article in a bigger typeface and/or double-spaced layout, contact us here. Bay Area Lyme Foundation provides reliable, fact-based information about Lyme and tick-borne diseases so that prevention and the importance of early treatment are common knowledge. For more information about Bay Area Lyme, including our research and prevention programs, go to www.bayarealyme.org.