In this episode, I’m speaking with Dr. J.E. Williams – a specialist in viral immunology – about the link between chronic viral infections and chronic fatigue and the best approach to overcome chronic infections.
In this podcast, Dr. J.E. Williams will cover
- Do I have a chronic infection? (The easiest and cheapest way to determine if you do)
- Why eradicating viruses from your body is counterproductive
- Is there a vaccination against viral infections?
- Williams’ approach to overcoming fatigue
- Why hormesis is essential (And the best types for overcoming chronic viral infections and fatigue)
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The Link Between Chronic Viral Infections And Chronic Fatigue (And How To Overcome Chronic Infections) With Dr. JE Williams – Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey there. Welcome back to the Energy Blueprint Podcast. I’m your host Ari Whitten and today I have with me a former Podcast guest who is now coming on for the second time, who has become a friend of mine who is a wonderful, wonderful human and his name is Dr. J. E. Williams. He is a specialist in viral immunology, and he spent the last 35 years treating tens of thousands of patients. He’s done over 150,000 patient visits, many of them suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. Furthermore, Dr. Williams himself once suffered from chronic fatigue after he was infected with dengue fever. So welcome to the show, Dr. Williams. I know that you have some new insights since we last talked that you’re excited to share and I’m very excited to get into this with you. So, infections are a big area of specialty for you and especially chronic infections. And this link between chronic infections and chronic fatigue syndrome I know is a unique area of interest for you.
So, I guess to start off with, within the realm of sort of chronic fatigue more broadly, somebody has low energy levels and maybe debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, what are some of the tip-offs or main signs or symptoms that would clue somebody into the possibility that there may be a pathogen or viral component to that condition for them?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Sure. You know when, chronic fatigue is a state or condition, right? And it has multiple different aspects to it. So, when a patient comes in, if they’re not pre-diagnosed or pre-worked up well, extensively well, then I start with a standard workup to make sure that their fatigue isn’t coming from undiagnosed thyroid or they have MS which is almost very similar at certain stages with chronic fatigue/ME syndrome. So, and then I look for, because in my area, and I have to be careful that I don’t put everybody into the viral infection box. But then I, because I’ve seen so many of these cases since 1982 and ’83 right from the very first Lake Tahoe incidences when I was practicing in California is when it was associated with Epstein Barr virus and then proven or thought to be proven. Not true and now it has kind of come full circle again.
Then you look for very specific… Before you even get into the blood markers symptoms, do they have swollen glands usually right in here [sides of neck] and, or are they tender? So, if I ask the patient, “Do you have tender, swollen glands on both sides, in the front of, under the chin?” And they say, “No,” I always examine. And then when I touch, I say, “Does that…?” And I feel a little bit of swelling and when I press and say, “Do you feel that?” They go, “Oh yeah, that hurts a little bit.” And I know from myself that there’s two things happen. You know, as you mentioned, I had the dengue fever and chronic and severe, so I was severely sick and severely fatigued. Worse than almost any of the patients I’ve ever seen. And one of those really, really horrible cases and there were all kinds of autoimmunity that tagged along with it.
And, I still get tender swollen glands. I don’t have any today, but I can tell there’s two things that happen that are early signs when I’m having a little reactivation. I feel unexplainably tired, really tired. And normally my energy is super good. I go all over the world in remote areas, high altitudes, 16, 17, sometimes 20,000 feet. And, but I’d be doing almost nothing, my routine. I go, “God, I’m feel so tired,” you know? And, and then I’ll get slightly swollen and slightly tender right under here. That’s a tip off that there’s something going on in myself and my patients. And second is, do they have a subjective fever? Do they have a sense that they’re having a fever? Often chronic fatigue patients will say, “I feel I have a fever.” And when I check their temperature by oral or by now the new digital ones on their forehead or in their ear, then they don’t have a fever, but they feel a little bit hot.
And then I say, “Well, listen, you have a subjective fever. Does it come and go?” “Oh yes. It comes and goes.” I say, “Well, that’s what they sometimes call tidal fever. What you need to do is get a digital thermometer that you can just quickly press on your forehead and check that when you feel hot. Do you actually have a slight fever?” And often we will find when they’re checking that at home every half hour, every hour, I don’t want them to become obsessive about it, but I want them to check that for me. And then, yes, they do, they have like 99, 99.1, 99.3.
Ari Whitten: Whereas their baseline, when they are not feeling that fever, they might feel… They might be more like 98.1 or 98.5 or something.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Exactly right. And there’s a range of normaI, and I talk about that in my book “Viral Immunity” and also “Beating the Flu,” is that there’s a range of normal. So, you know it could be 98.1 or sometimes even 97 and sometimes even lower, and then it, but rarely does it get up to 99. If it’s up in the high 98s is kind of the range of shifted towards the low side and then when you start pushing 99, you’re in, it’s still okay, but you’re starting to have a febrile response. That febrile response is generated by something and we know now what they are. Those are cytokines and chemokines on these immune cells that are going on and so then I start testing. Now people are really, really sick with, like when they have mono which is the acute form of Epstein Barr virus, they have a swollen spleen and swollen liver. So, then I’m checking, you know, their… Always testing their abdomen for, there up under their ribs for their liver, on the right side and their spleen on the left side.
Ari Whitten: Very interesting. Are there any other key signs or symptoms that would clue you into this?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Yeah, there are. Because the… Well, first of all, we’re talking about the viral infection part, so there’s a cellular response. But before that there’s the metabolic response. So that’s the fatigue, change in appetite, of course the energy, sometimes you know, they have the brain fog. And so, all of those are starting to happen, the low-grade inflammation is starting to build up. And then with the chronic fatigue people, they do not have swollen liver. They do not have tenderness under the ribs or swollen spleen, so they don’t have acute, but they also might have peripheral symptoms. They may have changes in their temperature and maybe they have a subjective or low-grade fever in the center or core of their body.
But they have a, they’re cold on their fingers and hands and toes. Another thing that happens, and that is often diagnosed concurrently, or the chronic fatigue is pushed aside, and this vagal autonomic nerve condition called postural orthopedic tachycardia syndrome or POTS is there. So now you see these patients when they stand up, the blood pressure may go down, but with POTS, actually, their heart rate goes up. So, when they… And some of them will say that they can feel their heart is racing. When I check their pulse, I don’t feel it racing. Maybe it feels a little fast, but I don’t feel racing or any irregularity. I listen to their heart, that doesn’t seem to… But then when we move them around a little bit or when we stand them up and I check their, on the little finger clip, you know, for their heart rate. And then that way I can keep checking and checking and checking it. And then it goes up.
Ari Whitten: I understand. Very interesting.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Yeah. So, those are the most common like little tip offs that yeah, you probably have chronic fatigue or, and we should explore that direction in the laboratory now.
Ari Whitten: Okay. And then I want to also mention, in case it’s not clear to any people listening, that fatigue itself or chronic fatigue can potentially be a symptom of an infection or chronic infection, but it’s a nonspecific symptom so it doesn’t tell you specifically that there is a viral infection present or even that it’s necessarily very likely. Because you can have that symptom with or without a viral, with or without any sort of chronic infection. But I just want to be clear that fatigue itself can potentially be a symptom of a chronic infection.
Dr. J.E. Williams: That’s correct. So, fatigue generally comes from, again, these metabolic cellular changes that happen and the energy is pulled to fight the infection and it leaves you tired. So, our ancestors or when my dog or wild animals are sick or feeling sick, they lay down, they feel tired and they curl up. And I used to do the same when I had my fatigue and my medical friends would say, you know, “Where were you?” You know, and I said, “Well, I was healing myself.” And they said, “Well, how do you do that?” I said, “Well, when I feel all these things coming on,” I said, “I close all the blinds in my bedroom, and I lay on the floor for three days.”
Ari Whitten: Yeah, you know, you just reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. But when I was a little kid and I used to catch a cold or something. I used to have the thought, “Oh exercise, like physical exercise is healthy. Therefore, if I’m getting sick, I should go do a bunch of exercise because exercise is healthy and therefore will help me recover from this faster.” So, I’d be, you know, I’d catch a cold and then I would go for a run. And I literally have memories of like going for, you know, these super intense running workouts while I’m sick and I just, I didn’t understand what you just explained very well at that time. And so I just made myself so much worse by not listening to that, you know, that evolutionary response that we are all programmed with, which is we are designed to be fatigued when we have an infection so that we rest, which is an intelligent response to help us to heal and to help our body devote resources to fighting that infection
Dr. J.E. Williams: And to be quiet, you know, to rest quietly. And now here’s something else. That what you’re talking about is actually for healthy, normal healthy people. If they have a minor infection coming on, they go for a run or work out and they say, “Yeah, I got really sweaty. And, and then I, you know, the next morning I was better.” So, one of the things that happens is our white cells, the leukocytes hang out in our body and they cluster to the tops of the blood vessels like bats in a cave almost, waiting. And if there’s, inside the blood, if there’s infectious particles and microorganisms are moving along there, whoo, they drop down on them. And when you go for a run or jog or, then you can shake them off and sometimes you do get better, but sometimes you get worse.
The other thing is that febrile, the febrile response happens, so you get a high fever, you sweat. And the old nature cure doctors and traditional Chinese medicine has a list of not just one way, they have eight ways to treat acute, minor and moderately severe infections. And one of those is diaphoresis. So, my nature cure mentors, like Bernard Jensen, they would wrap their patients up in a wet sheet, a cold wet sheet. My mother was a registered nurse, an army officer from the depression and World War II era. And she told me, she said, “Yeah, we used to do that in the hospital. The medical doctors would write an order, you know, the cold sheet treatment.” You know, and then your body would respond to the cold sheet and would heat up and would sweat.
Ari Whitten: Interesting.
Dr. J.E. Williams: And sometimes they would get such a high fever that the sheet would dry, so, you know. But, now chronic fatigue people, you can’t do that. It will make them much worse.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, we’ve kind of given a general overview of this landscape of chronic infections and viral infections in the context of chronic fatigue syndrome. What are specifically the most common viral infections that would occur in somebody with chronic fatigue syndrome?
Dr. J.E. Williams: When we test them, there are many. And that’s where it starts to get interesting. Little by little, the laboratory science has gotten better in the last five years or so. It’s gotten a lot better. So, you almost always see Epstein Barr virus with the chronic fatigue. Now you also see, this is important, is that you also see that in MS. So, in an early stage MS patient and an early stage chronic fatigue patient are very, the symptoms are very similar. And the researchers now debate on how that diverges. They may actually start from the Epstein Barr virus and then diverge. Now you’ll also see clusters of viruses in the worst type of chronic fatigue patients. They often will have herpes simplex one and two. They often will have herpes zoster that causes shingles if they’re older, but sometimes even younger with immune suppression.
Dr. J.E. Williams: They almost always, the most difficult to treat and the ones with the most symptoms also have HHP 6, human herpes virus six, which some researchers believe is actually the cause of chronic fatigue. They cluster along with other viruses. Sometime the virus that causes cat scratch fever, sometimes that with cytomegalovirus that often parallels along with hepatitis C or HIV. So, you have to rule out those big, big problem viruses. And then you start to narrow it down to typically a pattern of multiple viruses that have high viral titer, very high viral titers on their…
Ari Whitten: And actually, can we digress on that point for a minute? I know that we covered this in depth in the first Podcast. But just in case people haven’t listened to that Podcast or they want a little refresher, can you kind of explain the difference between somebody who has in the past been infected with a certain virus? I’ll give an example, like I’ve been infected with Epstein Barr virus. And when I was in my mid-twenties, I got mononucleosis and then I actually had debilitating fatigue, chronic fatigue for about six months after that. So, what’s the difference between someone like me and most people? If they didn’t get mono, I’m under the impression that they usually had an Epstein Barr virus infection when they were a kid and when they get it at an early age, then it usually manifests in cold like symptoms, more standard cold rather than mononucleosis. Please correct me if I’m stating anything incorrect. And then, you know, so what’s the difference between someone like me or someone like that who’s been infected with the Epstein Barr virus versus someone who seems to have chronic symptoms associated with a chronic viral infection? And you suspect that it’s the Epstein Barr virus sort of reactivating or staying active instead of getting shut down, like it appears to be in me.
Dr. J.E. Williams: There’s, well, first of all, I want to say that Epstein Barr virus is very well studied and there’s more attention on it now. The reason is because 95 percent of everybody, every human being on the planet has Epstein Barr. There’s different variations of that virus and we commonly understand it as having mono. It’s passed by saliva, therefore called the kissing disease. But that can happen by, you know, rubbing your mouth or cleaning your mouth when you’re eating and touching a counter and somebody else touching that. Or your mom, you know, using her saliva to clean your face when you’re out and she doesn’t have a napkin or something like that. So, it’s very easy to catch. And when you first get infected you can have no symptoms. Most people don’t, but some people have severe mono, end up in the hospital or have a persistent fatigue for months like you had afterwards.
And then there are two basic immunoglobulins which are immune function activities that are produced by specific immune cells. And those are the messenger or communication molecules. And those that are tagged to acute infections are IgM and those that are tagged to chronic infections are IgG. So, when we test for mono, we test for Epstein Barr IgM and that will be positive. When we see chronic fatigue, I also check for IgM, but it’s always negative. So, there’s no acute infection and these markers are not present. But the IgG markers are present. And In chronic fatigue patients there are essentially three commonly used laboratory types of markers, IgG types of markers, and they will have two or all three of those positive. And then the labs put a number to that and then they, so they’ll say that the Epstein Barr antibody nuclear antigen, for example is one of those, is elevated or positive. And depending on the labs, the way the lab measures these, the numbers are different from lab to lab, but they’re basically the same model. And you’ll see that with chronic fatigue patients that their immunoglobulin M, the acute phase would be negative, although sometimes if it’s reactivated it will be positive.
And then their early antigen, their nuclear antigen, are either always positive. But more importantly is how high that number is. So, on LabCorp, for example, on the, it’s called the Epstein Barr antibody VCA IgG, their positive range is above one, 1.0. And patients like yourself who are now healthy but who had mono, their EBV antibody VCA, IgG would, might be around eight, 8.0 or 6.0 or 5.0. But chronic fatigue patients may have 265.0. So that means they have an excessive amount of memory cells that are flagged and still there.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, I have a different sort of a facet of the same basic question. So that’s what would differentiate somebody with, you know, somebody who had an acute infection versus somebody who has a chronic infection. You can see this show up in certain biomarkers in their bloodstream and you can measure this on certain lab tests. But another facet of this question is why does this infection become chronic in some individuals but not others? Why does it get shut down in someone like me, for example, and many other people and doesn’t become chronic versus in some people it seems to just stay chronic for years and years and years?
Dr. J.E. Williams: We don’t know. However, some of them, we know a lot, but we don’t know some things. And, but this is important as well is that Epstein Barr causes lots of types of cancer. So, in Africa it causes these lymphomas, these big nodules you see often in pictures, you know, and called Burkitt lymphoma. And other cancers as well. So clinically if I see Epstein Barr, then we have to take a look to see if they’re having cancer, usually immune cell types of cancer. And Epstein Barr… There’re two main types of lymphocytes, the T cells which are made in the thymus, which is right here behind the breastbone, about the size of your thumb. And that’s why the T for thymus, or thymic derived lymphocytes, a type of white cells. And B cells. B cells are derived from the bone marrow, B for bone. And you see changes in…
And then as you start to look deeper on the lab, you’ll see changes, immunological changes in these types of cells. And Epstein Barr has an affinity for B cells. And the B cells will become more activated. So, you might see a greater number than normal of total B cells. Over time you’ll see less. Now you start to see a deficiency of B cells as well as T cells. And there are many different types of those, and they have differentiations based on this called cluster differentiation on numbers, there are so many of them. So, it’s CD56, CD57, CD27 and so forth. So, when we look at those, then we start to now rule out potential blood cancers or other cancers and we start ruling all these things out and narrowing it down into, “It looks like you have Epstein Barr plus cluster of other viruses.” By the way, all, almost all of them in the herpes viral family.
The conventional types of treatment
Ari Whitten: Got you. So, to kind of recap everything we’ve talked about so far, very quickly. Basically, chronic infections, chronic viral infections can potentially and are very likely playing a role in many cases of chronic fatigue syndrome. And there are ways of measuring and directly assessing whether these viruses are chronically active and are present in certain individuals. So, transitioning to sort of the practical treatment side, are there any useful antiviral drugs or vaccines or anything like that that has come out of the conventional medical model? And I certainly want to talk about, you know, natural treatments for this. But let’s first kind of talk about the conventional approach to some of these chronic viral infections. Is there anything useful in that realm?
Dr. J.E. Williams: No, there is not. But they’ve tried everything. And, however, vaccines are really important because so many, such a large percentage, almost 100 percent of humans are infected with that, right? With Epstein Barr virus. So, if there was a vaccine that would manage that, manage the infection better and prevent these types of cancers associated with it and prevent chronic fatigue, that could be a useful vaccine. But we also don’t know what that is doing to our genome. We don’t know if that’s an evolutionary necessary virus and some people get sick, but some, it has something else to do with our system. So, tampering with vaccines could be, you know, the devils playing the devil’s advocate. But there isn’t any useful vaccine anyway. The second is that there is no specific antiviral drug. We only have a cluster handful of antiviral drugs because viruses are so small and so hard to treat compared to bacteria that…
And the way I approach it and the way our group, medical group approaches it is if there’s another virus like shingles or herpes simplex virus one or two that are active that are symptomatic, then there are good antivirals for those. And they’re all in the same family. The original one was called Acyclovir, but they’re all in that same, newer generations of that. And so, we give that antiviral drug often, some patients don’t want to take drugs, to lower down that particular group of Epstein Barr viruses so it’s not overlapping as much. And you noticed that people do stabilize out. They seem to do a little bit better, but they’re not a lot better and they’re not cured. So really no vaccine and the drugs don’t help Epstein Barr, but they can be used kind of from the side angle with the other herpes viruses.
There is one drug that has potential. It’s in the same family and is called Valganciclovir but it’s super expensive. It’s like hundreds of dollars a pill and insurance companies won’t pay for it unless it’s… They’re not going to pay for a chronic fatigue patient. They are going to pay for patients who are having immunosuppressed with, from organ transplant and they’ll pay for them because it’s lifesaving, but they won’t pay… And we’ve been looking at, in some patients we explore the options of getting that drug cheaper from India or places like that. We haven’t found a really good reliable source yet, but it shouldn’t be that expensive.
Natural treatment approaches to chronic viral infections
Ari Whitten: Yeah, definitely. So, with that said, with kind of, before we get into the natural treatment side of things, just examining the fact that the conventional treatments as far as drugs and vaccines have limited to no effectiveness and are extremely unlikely to cure any chronic viral infection. Let me just ask very directly, have you seen people be cured and have you seen complete resolutions of chronic viral infections through some of the natural methods that we’re going to talk about?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Well, the answer is yes, but you asked a broad category of viral infections. But if we narrow it down to the chronic fatigue and the Epstein Barr, the answer is very few. Yeah.
Ari Whitten: Very few people that you’ve seen complete resolutions from.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Right. Well, look at my case for example. So, I, you know, I would do research in the tropics and I’m, and I am around very sick, poor, very poor people and you know, they improve. They still have leprosy. Most people can’t believe that, but they do, and they have leper colonies in these remote areas of the Amazon. And it’s unbelievable what’s still happening, like biblical diseases still exist. And dengue fever is not even from the Americas. It’s from southeast Asia. But because of world travel and trade and ships moving around, it ended up in Brazil and moved into the Amazon and now it’s all the way up to Florida. A few of my friends and patients have had dengue fever from cruises to the Bahamas, you know, walking around at night on Miami Beach. And now there’s Zika which came from Africa and many others.
But so, they, in my case, I went from, oh, this was in the ’90s. So, my medical colleagues were hopeless. The first thing I thought, I thought I had malaria. They thought I had malaria and when we tested every which way, multiple times, I think I checked seven times including looking under a microscope and all kinds of other tests that diagnose malaria quite readily. I didn’t have malaria. They didn’t know what to do with me here in San Diego. And so, I had the best infectious disease available and I had the best rheumatology available and I had the best natural therapies available and nobody could do anything. And I was in terrible shape and far worse than 90 plus percent of my patients. And, it came on insidiously. So of course, yeah, I was sick, I expect to get sick when I’m doing field work or researching. Not every time, but most of the time I did. And I then I got, I was fine, I was better, I felt normal. It was six weeks and to 12 weeks after I’d come back, and I thought I had a flu or cold. And then I thought I had multiple recurring colds or flu. I thought I was overworking and then, then it just went ballistic. High fever. I lost my color vision for five days. I was very sick. And it wasn’t until we got on the phone with doctors in Peru and they said, “Oh, you, that is some form of, they said atypical dengue.” But now we know that there are multiple different types of dengue. So, after I exhausted all the possibilities and my joints were swollen, huge, like this and I could barely walk. And I said, “You know, screw this, you know.” And I said, “You know, what am I, what should I do?” And so, I did everything that I knew, everything. Chinese herbs, I was boiling on the stove. I was taking homeopathy, things I didn’t even believe in some. And, but I did everything maximum. And somehow it helped. You know, but I don’t know if it was the products that helped. I could never narrow it down to it was this natural medicine that turned the corner. Or was it my own body’s healing, my willingness, the ability of my immune system to respond to my, mind the idea that the brain rules biology.
So, what I was talking about was that we’ve tried so many things, right? And what really works, I think we have an idea that probably putting together a lot of things is the way to go. And I’m not averse to using, as I mentioned, some antiviral drugs with some patients and other things. But right now, I use a systems approach, so I’m working on multiple things at the same time. I look at the thyroid function, I look at their vagus nerve, I bring everything that’s out of balance back towards normal. And it does not, none of them in my experience, cure chronic fatigue.
Ari Whitten: It doesn’t cure chronic fatigue.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Doesn’t cure, but it helps a little bit keep them functional. And then, again, I use the systems approach for treatment because I’ll start with immune support, inflammation management, and then natural antiviral therapy. That’s the three aspects that I’ll use on them.
Ari Whitten: Okay, so it sounds like in the context of people who specifically have chronic fatigue syndrome where there may be a dominant causal component from a chronic viral infection, it sounds like it’s going to be really hard to completely cure the chronic fatigue syndrome. And mostly what you’re looking at is strategies to sort of decrease the activity of the virus or bolster the immune system so that you minimize the virus and minimize the viral related symptoms and increase overall functionality, but you’re not going to completely eradicate the virus and eradicate the chronic fatigue syndrome.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Right, exactly. You can’t completely eradicate the virus because the virus has become linked into the mitochondria and linked into the genome.
Why eradicating viruses from your body is counter productive
Ari Whitten: Okay. So, what do you make of claims…? I am aware of some practitioners out there who are claiming that they can completely eradicate various kinds of chronic viral infections. And, I mean, I will say very clearly that I’m aware of several practitioners who are using methods that I would consider completely pseudoscientific who are making these claims. So, I’m inclined to just brush those claims off completely. But do you think it’s possible? Should that even be the goal? Should we be trying to completely eradicate the virus in these people? Or should it just be, you know, sort of trying to mitigate symptoms and decrease the overall activity of the virus and increase energy levels as much as possible while just accepting the fact that you’re probably going to have some viral related symptoms for the rest of your life?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Well, again, there’s nobody, there’s no way that biologically speaking that you can sterilize the body of viruses. That just doesn’t make any evolutionary sense whatsoever and you wouldn’t want to do that. Right? So, and second is anybody who makes claims, I need to see proof. If they have done it, then what’s their proof that they actually have done it? I need to review that. I’m always open to that and I’ve always put out that challenge all the time. Not a single person in my entire career has ever come back with proof, whether it’s hepatitis C or Epstein Barr, that they’ve eradicated the virus.
Ari Whitten: Wow. I want to go back to something you just said a second ago because I think it would be an interesting… It’s a bit of a digression, but I think it’s an interesting one. You said it wouldn’t even be a desirable thing to completely sterilize our bodies of viruses. Just out of curiosity of why that is, why is it not a desirable goal to want to eradicate and sterilize our body of all viruses?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Because viruses are, predate mammals and they were here billions of years and we’re not. And that they interlink, as you know, the current research with the DNA inside the mitochondria, which is, originally was a form of bacteria, the way we understand it, that now produces energy within the cells of living organism like mammals, including humans. So, without that code that the virus carries, we couldn’t exist. Now that’s different from bacteria. Even though we can harbor plenty of bacteria, but we really shouldn’t have high populations of bacteria. I’ve started to do DNA testing in blood. We can do that now. We can test a thousand or every known bacteria and every known virus, DNA and RNA, in a blood sample. And the lab I use is called Periomix. They’re new. They’re out of the Washington DC area. And when you’re, we are seeing DNA of bacteria in the blood.
The old way of thinking, you know, medical way of thinking is that there’s no, your blood should be essentially clean and sterile. But we do see DNA or signatures of bacteria. And one of my patients who has Parkinson’s disease had a lot, hundreds of bacteria and bunches of viruses, way beyond the norm. So, these are things that we’re just beginning to understand, you know. What does that mean? What’s a reasonable balance or level? Just like a rain forest has to have not just monkeys. That’s a zoo. That has to have all kinds of other things that go on the monkeys that they pick from the trees then the drops of water carry, and everything has to be there. But it has to be in balance.
Ari Whitten: Right. And so just to summarize that, so we, there is a benefit and a natural balance that should be present of various viruses that stay latent in our system for basically our entire life. But our bodies ideally should have some kind of balance where the viruses stay relatively inactive and we stay relatively symptom free, but those viruses are still there, and the goal is never to completely sterilize and eradicate them.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Right, exactly. Because the symptoms are, the symptoms that you have from, whether it’s a cold or flu or chronic fatigue people have been… That includes the fatigue, the low-grade fever, those that I mentioned already, the joint pains, the myalgia type of discomfort of the burning symptoms. All of those things that they have, and even some of the brain fog associated, are linked to inflammation. And that is a cellular type of inflammation driven by these cytokines and chemokines, which we can measure. And there’s also a consistent profile, when we look at that, with chronic fatigue patients have these markers in them so they’re responding to the viruses. So, it’s a combination of multiple things that responding together correctly rather than incorrectly and then reestablishing the balance. You may have to suppress the viral activity because it’s too much and you may have to manage the inflammation because it’s overly active for a virus that may not be doing anything, and you may have to enhance the immune status.
So, the idea that you can just knock the virus out completely… For example, even human herpes simplex one and two that Acyclovir is very useful for, doesn’t wipe out the virus. It just suppresses the viral replication. So, you have less viruses in your blood and in yourselves and you have then less immune response against them and you don’t have breakouts and you don’t feel sick or feverish when you have, before the breakouts. And then, after a while, maybe you don’t even need the Acyclovir or the Valtrex or the newer forms because your system has recovered that balance. But it doesn’t kill. The antivirus is unlike an antibiotic, they don’t kill or destroy the organism. They reduce replication.
Ari Whitten: So if this is the case, and it is that, you know, these viruses are there and they’re meant to be latent in our bodies and there’s a natural balance that our body should have, how much effort and energy do you think should be put into trying to attack the virus through specific targeted compounds or interventions that are designed to inhibit the replication of the virus versus how much attention and energy should be put into bolstering the terrain, the overall health of the organism, in this case, the human and immune function overall, you know, systemic health of all of the different organs through a very comprehensive, you know, systems based approach to bolster the entire organism?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Right. That’s the approach I take. I use a systems approach. And as a clinician I personalize that to where the patient is, their age, their level of infection. And, as I said, will use Valtrex, often a much higher dose than normal to suppress one of the viruses and then use natural therapies, intravenous vitamin C, high dose, multiple different ways to try to bring things back to some type of normalcy for them.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. One of the things that I want to highlight that I’ve heard you mentioned a few times now is this multi-pronged systems-based approach. I know of a few people who have chronic, in this case, Epstein Barr virus, who I’ve seen try sort of one, very targeted intervention after another. So, you know, they try monolaurin and then they try, you know, this herb and then they try medicinal mushrooms and they try, you know, this other thing or they try Rife therapy or, you know, whatever specific thing. I think another recent one was, maybe it was called BHT, it was some particular chemical that they had read from somebody based on Revici’s theories that was supposed to combat virus. And so, they were experimenting with high doses of this particular chemical. Just intuitively, I always felt like it was dangerous to be playing around with very specific sort of single pronged strategies to combat the virus because, you know, just intuitively, I’m curious if you agree, but I felt like the virus probably will adapt and survive that one particular thing and maybe even become resistant to it. And then potentially you’re now dealing with a worst problem. And so you, it just always made more sense to me to attack it sort of in a very comprehensive system based way with the idea in mind that you bolster the terrain and the body’s immune function in such a way to establish better balance rather than just using very targeted, specific single pronged intervention to go after the virus.
Dr. J.E. Williams: That’s correct. Now let me make a couple of comments here. Is that, one, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve seen a lot of chronic fatigue and chronic viral patients, a lot. I have two books on viruses, and I have lots of writing on it and I’ve followed the research every single day and I have done for decades. So, if you, my book “Viral Immunity,” is like 15 or 20 years old. It has everything in there. Monolaurin you mentioned, we’ve already used monolaurin. It was used in the ’80s for HIV. Why, is there a new monolaurin, is there a super monolaurin out or is it the same monolaurin that didn’t work, so we didn’t use it and it has been forgotten. And now it’s pulled out and dusted off and supposedly it’s going to work. No.
Ari Whitten: Interesting. So with that in mind, with having said that, you know, kind of a systems based approach to establish a better homeostatic balance between the host, the terrain and the, in this case, the virus is the goal and that, you know, we’re inclined towards a natural approach to this since the conventional approach of, you know, drugs and vaccines has relatively limited usefulness. What are some of the most effective natural antiviral agents in your experience?
Dr. J.E. Williams: I’m going to answer that, but I want to make one more comment that really important, is that you’ve mentioned about the terrain. Well, there’s another aspect and you’re very familiar with this, it’s about the environment. So if the virus, the first response to the viral infection, chronic viral infection is metabolic, then the environment that include diet, temperature, exercise, and maybe even things like the Rife machine, coming from the outside electromagnetic fields, the Bemer mat, multiple different things like that could have an influence or should have an influence on it, on that terrain. The Ondamed machine. Now we’ve used all of those. I’ve seen those in practice in our clinics for decades. And I have not seen a single case that I think is remarkable that I could say, “Here’s a case study of one remarkable case that’s been miraculously fixed by any of those.”
But I believe that they have value and they have use and that we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, that we should continue to work on everything that we can. Now, with that said, what I do is I start with the… After I work with a patient for their individual needs, like correcting low thyroid, correcting anemia, bringing up their vitamin D levels, managing their zinc level, for example, that’s necessary for thymic function. After all of those things, then I start to work with immune support. And we’re supporting the either T cells or B cells and then I work managing inflammation and I’ve identified where we’re targeting and then I add the antivirals that we can and they… So, for immune support I like to use a Thymex extract and peptides, thymic peptides, and I like to use beta glucan in high dosages, other mushroom extracts.
I like to use adaptogens, like ginseng, white ginseng not red ginseng that has anti-inflammatory effects, and cordyceps and bupleurum for anti-inflammatory effects and Medicare, which is a South African natural anti-inflammatory derived from a plant. And then the Guna company from Italy has homeopathics that are, that focus on the cytokines. Very modern, very contemporary, university scientists developed, is really, really brilliant. But again, hard to get it to work unless you put everything together. So, I’m making a dinner, right? If you’ve made a dinner for your kids and you just put out one thing, they wouldn’t be very happy about that. Not cooked well, too. And then AHCC is a mushroom extract is useful. Olive leaf is useful. I like asatis, ban lan gen, the Chinese herb it’s a, and we have that also in injectables and as well as extracts. And I like to use, of course working on the metabolism, high doses of Q10 of PQQ and, and these type of, NAD and MitoQ products and so forth.
And so I work with everything like that. I’ve given up really overly focusing on the viral part of it because I have done it, a lot of it, you know. And that includes high dose vitamin C, ozone. Now we have a treatment in our office called five pass, which is a very strong ozone therapy combined with blood irradiation therapy and it goes through the, it goes to a special device. So, you’ve got both of those at very high therapeutic levels.
Ari Whitten: Is that UV blood irradiation?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Pardon me?
Ari Whitten: Is that UV, ultraviolet blood irradiation?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Yeah, it’s ultraviolet, right. But different bands, multiple bands.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Dr. J.E. Williams: So, and hydrogen peroxide, colloidal silver, glutathione to help for the antioxidant aspect of it and all of those by oral, by as well as intravenous. And we do it every day, every single day.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, I’m curious, you listed off a bunch of things there. I’m curious, do you just take all of those things and then throw them at a patient all at once.
Dr. J.E. Williams: No.
Ari Whitten: Or do you rotate through them in a systematic way where you use this group and then another group and then you know {inaudible] for different lengths of time?
Dr. J.E. Williams: That’s correct. Again, analyzing the case, validating the previous diagnosis or re-diagnosing, making sure that they don’t have MS versus chronic fatigue, things like that. Making sure that they’re not misdiagnosed, making sure they don’t have some other serious virus that’s attacking their central nervous system. So, the diagnostic parts are very, very important. And then individualizing that therapy, correcting the things that we can correct. If they have hypothyroidism, improving their thyroid function with thyroid hormone. So, if they’re menopausal age woman at 55 and her progesterone is low or pregnenolone is low, you know, supplementing those. And then I look at, “Now what are we going to target, what are we going to focus on?”
Is it the, is the virus the primary aspect? Now here’s, this is important. You can also measure, as I mentioned, we can measure the DNA now in the blood. That doesn’t mean that’s necessarily a live virus going on, but the DNA is captured somehow. But we can measure what’s called the viral load for Epstein Barr, for example, so with various varied very accurate laboratory technology. And almost never do you see in chronic fatigue patients active circulating Epstein Barr virus. So then, again, how do you get that drug into the, across the membrane of the cell where the viruses are. So, but so then I make a decision on which of these therapies and how we’re going to treat and then again how we’re going to, as you said, rotate them with that. And then what’s their follow up and evaluation? I’m checking the patients say if they’re in the IV infusion center, I’m checking them once or twice a day and then maybe every two weeks just sitting down with me and then maybe every month to three months we’re checking laboratory findings on them.
Dr. Williams’ take on Ozone therapy
Ari Whitten: Interesting. I have a specific question, a bit of maybe a digression of sorts. Ozone therapies, you mentioned that you use that. I talked to an MD friend of mine who specializes also in chronic fatigue syndrome and also has a unique interest in infections. And, a few years ago I remember talking to him and he was just raving about ozone and how it’s amazing, you know. I remember the first time I ever talked to him on the phone, he said, “Oh, you know, right now I’m hooked up to an IV ozone, you know, and I’ve got, you know, ozone coming into my bloodstream.” And he’s like, yeah, “It’s amazing and I’m going to send you research on it.” And I looked at the research on it and there’s definitely some intriguing research for sure. But the last time I talked to him, maybe three months ago, he actually told me that he’s not using ozone in his practice anymore because he said that the responses were too unpredictable. That, you know, sometimes people got better and sometimes people got way worse and that it was just hard to predict how anybody was going to respond to it. So, he just kind of gave up the whole thing. I’m curious if you’ve found any of that or what your experience has been with ozone.
Dr. J.E. Williams: No, that, I agree. Things that are new, that have the potential to treat something that you don’t have any other way to treat, it makes you really excited for a while. And then if you’re a real practitioner and, you know, you’re evaluating your cases and you use it on yourself like a lot of us do, then you, the honeymoon period wears off. And ozone is one of those where I don’t, we have this, the state-of-the-art ozone therapy and that’s illegal in the United States. There’s better in other places. They do your entire blood and that’s how I was originally trained. My mentor was William Hitt, PhD/MD when he was in Mexico. And he had a device that was, must have been five-foot-long and you know, this big and essentially, he could almost do entire transfusion, you know, through the machine that was a German device. And they still do those in Indonesia and Malaysia, but contemporary, they’re not using ancient machines. These are all very, very new. So, we’re just taking a little bit of blood out and then putting a little bit of ozone in. As soon as the ozone hits the blood, it turns to oxygen.
Ari Whitten: Right.
Dr. J.E. Williams: So, the ozone, the effect has to be quickly, but it’s only in a little bag of blood. That blood then goes back in. What does that really do? Now the equipment that we use is even higher dose of ozone and the bag is much bigger and it’s also irradiating as it goes through. So, but still, it’s a drop in the bucket type of approach. Now, I’ve been around ozone a long time and the top ozone therapists in the world are in Italy, Spain, Chile and Cuba. And as you know, I know Cuba very well and have been many times and I’ve lectured there and visit on a regular basis, my medical colleagues. So, two years ago I went back, just focused on the ozone and I went to the Ozone Institute in Havana. And they, and these are the doctors who do the training in Spain and in Chile, for everybody else. And, at one time the ozone was, there was no holds barred on, you know, on it. They can do the international standard from Russia or from anywhere. And they, and so this was something that they thought that would be cheap and they designed their own devices cheaply and they put in every hospital in Cuba, ozone therapy. So, they did tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of patients.
So now the only two things that they do ozone for that works kind of okay is disk injections in the lumbar spine. I interviewed many patients that had the procedure. Some of them, approximately half, it didn’t work. For those that it did work, some worked really well. And for others they had to have a series, they had to go back and get more. So, it didn’t work that great, but better than surgery perhaps. And the other was rectal ozone.
Ari Whitten: What, I mean just to digress further, but I mean, it just kind of is, what is even the mechanism behind injecting ozone into a damaged or bulging disc with the idea that that’s going to eliminate pain? The only thing I could possibly think of is that because ozone is a free radical, it may be causing some slight degree of tissue damage which stimulates a healing response.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Yeah, it does that and it also has anti-inflammatory effects and it may have, going back to what I inferred a few moments ago and what you and I talked about a fair amount when I was in San Diego last year, is hormesis. So, it may have a hormetic effect. A small amount of tissue damage done by the right thing at the right place and the right time makes a big change and then it reduces inflammation and starts to help enzymatically repair some of the swelling and the deterioration of the disk.
Ari Whitten: Right? And there is actually some research on ozone in the context of hormesis. I remember looking this up at one time and I wondered to what extent that IV ozone, rather than working through some, you know, just sort of sterilizing viruses, is actually working through just creating a hormetic response and maybe boosting glutathione and…
Dr. J.E. Williams: It has, it’s an oxidative therapy, ozone. And in Russia that’s how it’s used, as an oxidative therapy. However, it’s the same, if you take a test tube of virus, viral material or bacteria and you put ozone into it, it immediately kills them. So, on contact it kills them.
Ari Whitten: Right, but at the same time the ozone molecule is turning into oxygen very, very fast.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Immediately. Immediately.
Ari Whitten: So, it doesn’t have time, it’s not going through your whole body and all of yourselves as ozone and sort of sterilizing….
Dr. J.E. Williams: It does not go through your whole body.
Ari Whitten: Right.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Right. So as soon as you inject that ozone, pure ozone into the bag of blood that you’ve taken out of the patient, that’s venous blood and it’s like a dark, a purplish color. And when we put that ozone in, if it’s the right amount and the machine is working right and calibrated right, it turns it pink, it becomes oxygenated blood and then you put that blood back in. And the idea is that if you do it enough times you little by little, it’s like taking a glass of water out of a dirty stream and getting a clean glass of water and putting it back in and, you know, maybe in 100 years you’ll clean up the stream again. The salmon will swim up river maybe. But, that’s why I said that little bag at a time doesn’t have any direct effect. Also, Ari, there’s no viruses, live viruses in the blood. So, those are not killing any live viruses.
Ari Whitten: The viruses are inside the cells.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Inside the cell. So, the only way that that ozone works is we have to do more of it, and we don’t have the type of machines like they have in Southeast Asia or in Germany or in Russia to do the entire bloodstream like a transfusion.
Ari Whitten: So, this idea that I’ve, based on what you just said, this idea that I’ve heard from some practitioners that… I’ve seen some that seem to be under the impression that the ozone is actively killing the viruses throughout the body. This cannot possibly be true based on how we know it’s acting.
Dr. J.E. Williams: If there’s no virus there, how can it kill what’s not there?
The effect of hormesis on treating chronic infections
Ari Whitten: Right. Got It. So, shifting back, you know, I’m glad we touched on hormesis a little bit. Kind of with this systems biology picture in mind that we need to sort of do what we can to bolster the immune system to try to limit viral replication to try to bolster immune health, hormonal health, you know, all of these aspects of things. Are there any other, you know, environmental or lifestyle factors that you’re aware of that have a place in this approach to creating homeostasis?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Sure. I believe strongly that qigong, gentle yoga, gentle exercise helps. But most of those chronic fatigue people don’t have the desire to exercise, to do anything when they’re severe. But they, I encouraged them to do, at least to sitting in a chair and do deep breathing exercises. So, I think that there’s places where you start to, you begin the process of regaining control over your own physiology. And I, so I encourage that. Diet is important because it’s also a metabolically related condition. Right? And so healthier diet, plant-based diet. I don’t think there’s, I haven’t found a specific diet that works for chronic fatigue, whether… We’ve done them, I’ve tried them on myself or we’ve, I’ve seen them all so… But generally, a healthier diet certainly. And sleep is important. Hyperbaric oxygen in some cases, highly oxygenating the cells. It doesn’t kill any viruses, but it does sometimes improve brain function.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. What about either cryotherapy or saunas? Have you experimented with that and found any success there?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Absolutely. And what I’ve found is that it doesn’t help much. Theoretically it should have this hormetic effect. But again, these chronic fatigue patients, the virus may have triggered their problem, but now they have another problem that’s not an acute viral infection. Right? So, they, so as you said, when you exercise, you get worse, you know. And so often you’ll see the patients when they do the cryo chamber, you know, they get worse because their system is already imbalanced towards the weak side and that makes them weaker. Or it has no affect. The same thing with a sauna. Now detoxifying the system, I think is an important therapy. So mild saunas or short infrared saunas can be helpful for these people. There are some theories that are based on the extracellular matrix. I work with that as well. So, inject medications just under the skin through, over their body. Saunas help that lymphatic drainage. They help thin the extracellular matrix.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Fascinating. I think, you know, in the context of somebody who is, has chronic fatigue syndrome, my experience, given that I’ve developed some unique protocols with certain types of hormetic stress and hormetic stressors and the dose becomes really critical to get right. Especially with some of the more physically rigorous things like for exercise being the best example of this. I would say cryotherapy is another example. But if you overdo the dose on those things and, you know, you haven’t been really, really cautious with getting the dose right in these people with severe chronic fatigue syndrome, it absolutely becomes counterproductive. But I have, I do have a number of, quite a large number of case reports now from people who have used some of these hormetic stress protocols, sauna, and some of the breathing protocols that I recommend with really incredible effects as long as you start very small, very slowly give rest days in between and then slowly build up in baby steps over time. So, I definitely think that it can be a useful part of this overall systems-based approach to things. But in the context of people with these chronic viral infections specifically, I couldn’t say that I’ve tested that very rigorously.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Right, that’s true. And I, as I just mentioned, I support that and encourage that on patients. But my focus is so detailed and so much laboratory work and that my focus ends up on that and not on these other lifestyle areas. Then we give them information on what to do and some of the patients, of course, the patients that we have are almost debilitated when they come in. They couldn’t even, they can’t even drive themselves to the sauna or even if they install an infrared sauna in their home, they can’t get from their chair to the sauna.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. I have one, a couple more questions for you, but just real quick. I know you read my recent book on red and near infrared light therapy. I’m curious if you’ve been experimenting with red and near infrared light at all.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Well that was a really great book. That was, you did an amazing job. You just covered everything on that red light. And everything was so up to date and the publisher put it together well, and you made it accessible in the form that it’s in. So, it was really great and that was one of the best, I mean that should be a model for a lot of the other material that goes out that is reaching the public on medical and health knowledge. That was really, really a landmark achievement. And I…
Ari Whitten: Thank you so much. Well I asked you that question. If I hadn’t asked you that question, maybe all those kind words, wouldn’t have come up.
Dr. J.E. Williams: No, I really liked that, honestly. And I don’t know a lot about red light therapy. I know some. And patients, will talk about it. We use lasers and we have, I have used it over many years, decades. But now people can do it on their own. They can buy these things and do it on themselves, which you brought that up to them. They don’t have to go to their doctor’s office or chiropractor to have it done to them. They can buy good quality products that are therapeutically useful and do it at home.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Dr. J.E. Williams: And so, with your book I’ve really re-looked at that therapy and have started to mention it to patients and have referred your book to them and we don’t even do red laser any longer in our office. We would like to, but it takes time to hold the light or have the patients hold the light and do the settings and everything and they’re available now. So, we just have people buy their own equipment. We’ll give them a prescription for that sometimes there, they get some insurance coverage.
Ari Whitten: Great. Yeah. I’m curious, you mentioned, one of the things you mentioned in this, I’m not sure if it was before we started recording when we were talking or during this interview, but you mentioned thymic involution. The thymic gland, you know, sort of shrinking and…
Dr. J.E. Williams: It gets smaller, yeah.
Ari Whitten: I don’t know if you caught it, I think I briefly mentioned this sort of in passing in the book because there’s only a very limited amount of research on it, But there’s actually some research suggesting that red and near infrared light therapy can actually prevent or maybe reverse that thymic involution, maybe just bring it to a halt so that it doesn’t happen. And there’s other research where they’ve shined it directly on the thymus gland and actually shown that they can stimulate a greater production of T cells and bolster immune function through that as well.
Dr. J.E. Williams: I’ll take a, I’ll relook at that. I have heard of that therapy, but I’d like to, maybe you can set up a supercharged red-light system for us where we can do a study on thymic…
Ari Whitten: I would love to do that and actually I have something in the works, it’s a little too early to announce it, but I am working on something. But I have one last question for you. So, you know, coming back to this thing, I mean, that we talked about earlier, kind of this homeostatic balance between the human, the organism and the viruses. And that we are meant to have these viruses and we are meant to establish some balance where they are present and we are not, ideally not experiencing debilitating symptoms. But in some people this balance gets thrown off and the virus is more chronically active than it should be and there are some symptoms present. Given that you said that a complete resolution of completely curing this is unlikely for the vast majority of people, what, I just want to sort of see if we can quantify what kinds of improvements you think are possible.
And there’s a scale, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. It Is called the Bell Amsterdam scale
Dr. J.E. Williams: Sure.
Ari Whitten: And, you know, sort of, for people that are unfamiliar with it, they basically rank this from zero to 100. And at zero is, it says the patient has severe symptoms on a continuous basis, is bedridden constantly and is unable to care for him or herself. And then 100 is a patient has no symptoms at rest, no symptoms with exercise, normal overall activity, is able to work full time without difficulty. And then there’s gradations in between at 10, 20, 30, all the way up to 100. So just to mention one more at 50, just so you guys can see this, kind of have a clearer picture of the spectrum, 50 is patient has moderate symptoms at rest and moderate to severe symptoms with exercise or activity. And overall activity level is 70 percent of expected.
Patient is unable to perform strenuous duties but can perform light duty or desk work four to five hours per day but requires rest periods. So that’s the spectrum. So I’m just curious, Dr. Williams, do you think somebody can go from, you know, really severe fatigue, almost bedridden most of the time to maybe getting up to a 50 or a 60 where they’re largely functional throughout the day but maybe can’t do really strenuous things and maybe they need to rest every so often during the day? Or maybe from a 50 to an 80 or something like that?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Absolutely. Let us re-clarify, this is, that the virus, viral part of it is really challenging because that may be the cause that tips the balance and, but there are no longer viruses moving around. They are in the tissue somewhere, they are in the central nervous system somewhere. They are in the B cells somewhere. And so, you’re not going to get rid of the viruses and then get better. So, however, that doesn’t mean the patient can’t improve their condition, lower their symptoms and get a lot better. So, and I have patients that do that all the time. But they may not get, like myself, I may not be 100 percent like I used to be, but I’m 95 percent. But it took years to get there. And I would say my colleagues would say, “How are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I’m 70 percent better.” And then I was 75, then 85 and I said, “Wow.” You know? Then I got up to 90. Then maybe 10 years ago I said, “I’m 91, I’m 91 percent.” Now I’d say I’m 95, at my best I’m 96 or 98 percent, but I have these relapses, you know. But they’re not as severe as before. And, so, yes, I believe that that’s the goal and yes, I’ve done it with patients and some remarkably so. But that doesn’t mean that we wiped the virus out. We just, that means that we put Humpty Dumpty back together again more or less.
Ari Whitten: And propped him back on the wall.
Dr. J.E. Williams: We don’t prop him back up on the wall because some of those patients will fall off again. Now they will fall on the other side of the wall because of their own behavior or because they got some other infection that we’re all prone to. So no, we don’t put Humpty Dumpty back up on the wall.
Ari Whitten: You let him climb back up on the wall on his own in due time when he’s ready.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Right. Or maybe we take him to the movies or something like that.
Ari Whitten: Awesome. Well, Dr. Williams, I really enjoyed this Podcast. I really enjoyed this conversation. It’s such a pleasure to talk to you as always and you’re just, you’re an amazing source of wisdom on this topic and I always learn a lot every time we talk. So, thank you again for coming on the Podcast. And if somebody wants to work with you or follow your work, where should they reach you?
Dr. J.E. Williams: They can take a look at my personal website. It’s drjewilliams.com and, or they can go to, call our clinic at 941-955-6220.
Ari Whitten: Excellent. Oh, one more thing before I forget. I know, you know, before we started recording you mentioned this new blood panel that you’re working on. Can you talk a bit about what you’re doing with that and kind of how you’re working with some of these lab tests and putting together a panel that’s going to be really useful for people?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Yeah. The other area that I’ve worked on for 30 years is aging. And there’s an overlap with chronic fatigue because they, people, their biological age is lower. But also, just because now I live in Florida and I have a lot more older patients including in their eighties and nineties that who want to be active. And I also wrote a book on managing the factors of aging called “Prolonging Health” just about 20 some years ago as well, and ahead of its time. And I focused on how we can assess aging, where are you now and how can we prevent the diseases associated with aging. And we know a lot about that. We know a lot about inflammation, we know a lot about cardiovascular disease prevention. But it hasn’t been put together in an organized fashion. And there’s new markers about aging and there’s new research.
So, I got very excited recently about this and I put together 20 plus markers, research based, with good, very good evidence and my own experience. And we’ll be releasing that in the next month or so directly to the public. And here’s the other exciting thing about it, is that as blood tests have become a lot cheaper, a lot cheaper, the technology is faster, there’s more robotic and they’re highly competitive. And I’ve been doing this a long time and they give me really, really good prices, unbelievable prices. And it’s even getting better. Soon it’s going be like a dollar. Already some of the tests are $1.50.
Ari Whitten: Wow.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Yeah. Insurance is still getting billed 30, 40, 50 or 150 dollars. But, if I buy direct from the lab, [inaudible] price is $1.50 or $1.75 or $5.60 or $10 or things like that.
You know, when we first started testing vitamin D when I found that it was an issue in the early eighties when I was teaching clinical nutrition in San Diego at the University of Humanistic Studies, the test cost over $300. It was 320 some dollars for Vitamin D, 25 hydroxy. It now costs twenty some dollars. So, the second part of that is that most states, there’s only three states, New York, Delaware and Maryland, I believe maybe New Jersey, too, that don’t allow a consumer to obtain blood test. But all the rest of the states have passed laws that you can go directly. You don’t, your insurance won’t cover it, your health insurance, unless it’s done through your doctor. But if you want to check your cholesterol or your blood count or anything else, if you know what to order, you can order direct and there are services that are online to do that. And I work with many of them. So, people who want to manage their healthy aging or anti-aging plan, if they want to measure their own testosterone level and so forth.
If they want to look at some of these new markers of inflammation of metabolism that I’ve been working on, then there’ll be able to go directly and I’ll provide the information for them on how to, you know, basically interpret it so that they can… They can’t be their own doctor, but they can certainly look at these profiles of numbers and see where they are in terms of disease prevention, in terms of estimate how long and how well they might live.
Ari Whitten: Excellent.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Really exciting, exciting stuff. And it’s available. It’s nothing esoteric. And it is going to be cheap.
Ari Whitten: You’re breaking down which specific tests and which specific markers to get tested for?
Dr. J.E. Williams: Absolutely.
Ari Whitten: And then providing a sort of a simple way to analyze and interpret the results.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Absolutely. They’ll have a map where they can just put in their results and see where they are.
I did a similar thing with my Complete Blood Test Blueprint Program which is available online from Renegade Health. And we did a second edition of that. And they see the optimal ideal range, the normal laboratory range and see where you fit, and people can take the test that they had from their doctor or order their own again with some of these companies I work with and plug them in. But this one is more specific. This is about how well you’ll age and how long you might live.
Ari Whitten: Excellent. And people can get that on your site. I know it’s not available currently when we’re recording this. We’re recording this on, at the end of December. But I’ll probably release this in a few weeks, maybe a month or so, maybe towards the end of January, beginning of February. Do you think it will be available by then?
Dr. J.E. Williams: That’s the goal. I mean, that’s our target.
Ari Whitten: Okay, and then when it’s available, it’ll be available on your site drjewilliams.com.
Dr. J.E. Williams: That’s correct. That’s correct.
Ari Whitten: Okay, great. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much Dr. Williams. Such a pleasure as always, and I’m sure we’re just scratching the surface of your knowledge. Maybe I’ll have to have you on for a part three.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Okay. The best for 2019 to you and keep me up about this thymus and the red light, please.
Ari Whitten: I will. Yeah. Such a pleasure. Okay. Enjoy the rest of your 2018 and hope to talk to you again sometime soon.
Dr. J.E. Williams: Thank you. Bye.
Ari Whitten: Bye.
The Link Between Chronic Viral Infections And Chronic Fatigue (And How To Overcome Chronic Infections) With Dr. JE Williams – Show Notes
How to determine if your fatigue could be triggered by a chronic viral infection (1:15)’
The most common viral infections that occur in people with chronic fatigue (15:07)
Why some get fatigue from a chronic viral infection, and others don’t (23:27)
The conventional types of treatment (26:36)
Natural treatment approaches to chronic viral infections (30:50)
Why eradicating viruses from your body is counterproductive (38:40)
The best approach to treating chronic viral infections (47:39)
Dr. Williams’ take on Ozone therapy (59:40)
The effect of hormesis on treating chronic infections (1:09:17)
Links
If you want to work with Dr. Williams, go check out his website or call his clinic at 941-955-6220.
