This is article 2 in a three part series...
Mistake #2: Pounding Your Body with Intervention.
There are interventions that clinicians usually recommend for chronic disease and its related infections. They may be appropriate. But they may also be a total disaster if you are chronically ill. You are aware of this if you have been in the chronic disease community for any length of time at all.
Prolonged or multiple oral antibiotic administration can be one of the interventions that is suggested when a mainstream physician approaches chronic illness. If your methylation processes were functioning, your body would use its own immune system to combat the infection. Unless your own immune system is working, prolonged, high dose, multiple oral antibiotics may not work well and you can destroy the lining of your gastrointestinal tract with this approach. Then you will not be able to absorb the nutrition in your food. Then how is your immune system supposed to function? It won’t. And you may go from bad to worse, and lose hope of anything ever getting you well.
You have to be healthy to tolerate oral pharmaceutical antibiotics. Even herbal antibiotics can be a challenge for you. You have to have good GI function and a range of good GI organisms present in your gut to tolerate antibiotic therapy.
If the flora in your gastrointestinal tract is already compromised, and you start pounding your body with oral antibiotics, you wipe out the bacteria that is supposed to be there, and instead promote the growth of opportunistic organisms like clostridia and candida yeast. These organisms are the cause of many symptoms in themselves. And once an organism like clostridia or yeast establishes itself in your GI tract, it can take years of maintaining the correct GI environment to get rid of it.
Other problematic interventions include intravenous injections. How problematic these are depends upon the state of your health and what the IV contains. There are substances that may be very helpful, but if you have the wrong genetics for them, they can put you on a roller coaster of symptoms. These IVs include in particular Vitamin C, glutathione, and Vitamin B6.
Vitamin C is a very helpful antioxidant. Injected intravenously, it is also very antiviral. Intravenous administration of Vitamin C can kill the virus that is in your system very efficiently. But the viruses in your body harbor toxic metals, and when you kill them precipitously with an intravenous solution, those toxins dump into your system.
Unless your methylation pathway is working efficiently enough to make glutathione, you may not be able to detox these metals effectively and they will cause symptoms. This has nothing to do with a Herxheimer reaction or doing anything positive about any illness you may have.
IV Glutathione is often given with or following Vitamin C. This may help mop up the immediate toxic spill, but you need to be making your own glutathione to continue the cleanup as you shed virus. So, you need a functioning methylation pathway to get the benefit from these IV’s.
Glutathione has sulfur in it. If you have one of the genetic mutations that cause biochemical pathways to be unbalanced by the injection of a sulfur molecule into your bloodstream, then IV glutathione may really make you sick. You get symptoms of sulfur toxicity and never get much benefit from the glutathione at all.
Beyond that, it is nearly impossible to get a nutritional IV without Vitamin B6. Vitamin B6 is a perennial favorite among doctors who use nutritional IVs. But B6 upregulates the CBS enzyme, an enzyme that functions in the first step of the sulfur detoxification pathway. B6 increases the activity of the CBS enzyme, which may unbalance this pathway and make it function less effectively. The CBS enzyme is also vulnerable to upregulation by genetic factors and other biochemical issues, some as simple as blood sugar fluctuations.
If you are chronically ill, it is best to keep the B6 in your system to just what you need, as opposed to high dosing. Likewise, it is better that your immune system develops competence from balanced, daily administration of the substances it needs. This supports both immune competence and sustainable detox. If your methyl group formation is optimized, your immune system will activate and many functions in your body will perform better. If you balance your transsulfuration pathway, your body makes its own glutathione. This glutathione is already inside the cell, exactly where it needs to be to function.
Especially if you are chronically ill, resist the temptation to overwhelm your body with anything. Just supply it with what is necessary for it to function optimally on a daily basis. And use biochemical testing to make sure you are going in the right direction. Then you find yourself on the slow but sure path to wellness.
I have a free, downloadable ebook on my website www.NancyMullanMD.com that explains methyl groups and methylation. Click here to download your free ebook.
If you want expert help personalized to your unique body chemistry, you can consider getting an Exploratory Conversation with me. This is a 30-minute conversation in which I will listen to your health issues, review your test results (if any), and make recommendations about what I think you should do. You can tell me all of the things you have tried and I will give you my input about what you can consider next.
The fee for this service is $129. It is easy to set a time for this conversation, and it can save you weeks or months of doing the wrong thing, lurching around in the dark with a clinician who doesn’t know anything about the genetics or molecular biology of MTHFR. You may be dealing with conditions in your body that are confusing and difficult to understand. I can help you cut through all of that and give you clarifying input that moves you in the right direction.
I look forward to being able to help,
Dr. Mullan
What people like you are saying about Dr. Mullan’s work:
I shudder at the thought of what my family would be like without Dr. Mullan. Thankfully, with her help, we have stopped my husband's chronic 30 year battle with kidney stones. He is no longer forming them and is stone free. My thyroid is now working normally, my body temperature is almost normal and my hair has grown back. My oldest daughter's Autism is in the process of being reversed and her hair pulling has stopped. The greatest blessing from our good health is the birth of my second daughter Ava, now one-year-old. At 50 years old I carried her to term. One of my doctors commented to me saying “ you are carrying this baby like a 22-year-old.” Yes, I am because of Dr. Mullan and working on my methylation pathway. One by one she is knocking off symptoms and bringing us back to health. The future is bright! Thank you, Dr. Mullan, for the work you do.
JVW
Wow. I feel great. Thank you for your help. It's amazing really. Like a light turned on. Curious to see what the next tests show. To ride this peak indefinitely is my goal. Ha. I have energy again. Yay!
Really grateful,
DG
I am so relieved. My daughter is doing SO WELL since we started with you! We have been to so many doctors and tried so many things.Now I can start working on my own program with you....
GV
So excellent! I literally learn something every single time and I get clarification on things that have been lingering in my mind… VB
You are giving people a huge gift by empowering them… It’s about helping the patient become their own healer by taking them to a higher level of consciousness… AL
Thank you so much, Dr. Mullan. Thank you so, so much for everything you do. MS
Wow! I have to tell you, this was such an uplifting session. It’s so nice to hear good news, especially about a child. Anxiety, OCD and a host of other mental/psychiatric symptoms have been a huge hurdle for me. So to hear this story of all those awful symptoms totally going away is such a bright light for me!!!! TR
Fantastic, caring, smart, savvy doc. I worked with Dr. Mullan for a couple of years to help MTHFR mutations and their associating expressions! To say the least! She's brilliant. At that time she had weekly calls for her patients - free - where we could ask questions and she would reply. What doctors do this? She does. She's also an animal lover and is right on about the way she practices medicine. I highly recommend her. In good health!
MG
"Dr. Nancy Mullan is a beautiful person. She is an expert in her field and has helped our family so much. I am very grateful to her. She came highly recommended and I know why. I would recommend her and her website for information re: healing from a genetic point of view. Thank you, Dr. Mullan, for everything.”
GD
"Dr.Mullan has helped me with issues that I have struggled with for years. She is knowledgable and practical. I would recommend her to others.”
BC