I actually had MS as well. So I did not have that medical training .when i had this, i was actually at law school. So I had my first time optic neuritis signs when I was 23, But I went to to to an eye doctor because that’s all I knew at the time. Right. And he said, Oh, it looks like maybe you probably did something with your, you know, your lens, you know? So, and, in some sense it is actually saved me personally, because I did not hear all the, the grim possibilities until it came back many years later, but by then I was already, a naturopathic doctor. And so I kind of, already had this, can be dealt with,!!!!!and anyway, but your story I want to get into yours here, but it’s interesting. So you had a dad who is a neurologist. So at that point, what was the suggestion? How did you know that that’s not the route you’re gonna go?

Elizabeth Yarnell (05:21):

I did go that route for the first couple of years because my father was so insistent that I get on some sort of pharmaceutical regimen because that was his world. And he sent me to all kinds of MS Specialists. I flew across the country to see like the guy he felt was like really up on all the latest trials and research. And I did try these therapies and I experienced some pretty horrendous side effects. I had hives all over my body for three years. Like a good day was 30 hives and a bad day was 300 hives. And on top of that, by the end, when I finally stopped using this, every time I injected myself with this medication, I would literally have a convulsion, have a seizure And I was just like, you know, my body is telling me it does not want this. If I am starting to seize up before the needles even withdrawn from my shot site, like this is just, and that doesn’t even begin to touch on my whole needle phobia issue that I had to every single day deal with when I was injecting myself with these drugs. And then well, I’ll just add this while I was doing the drug therapies. I was still having ms. Exacerbations and experiencing new symptoms. So I felt like they weren’t even working. Right.

Dr Manon (06:52):

I’m just curious. because often when we have to, you know, try something else, it’s very hard and sometimes family can be a difficult force to contend with, you know if you’re taught one thing and you’re in the latest and the greatest and the most recent studies and the biggest specialist of the single parts, it’s very hard to shift out of that going……Hmm………………….. Maybe the system doesn’t work………………. Maybe it’s not big enough to understand how the, the whole body works.

Elizabeth Yarnell (07:37):

Well, I feel that Western medicine is looking in the wrong places. They’re looking for answers….They have become so myopic where they just can focus on such a small piece of anything. So here’s a great example. I broke my foot last weekend and I called up the orthopedic surgeon ……I’m like, I need to go see an orthopedist. Well, last year I broke my arm and they’re like, Oh, well, who do you want to see? And I’m like, well, I want to see the same doctor that I saw when I broke my arm last year. And they said, well, he only sees arms. You have to go to some guy who only sees foot’s feet.

Elizabeth Yarnell (08:19):

I’m like, are you kidding?

Dr Manon (08:23):

Wow. Yeah, that’s funny. I had not heard that yes, a specialist for every single body part, but literally not even for a phenomena, right!

Elizabeth Yarnell (08:37):

Literally you become a specialist in bones, but only in bones and one small area of the body.

Dr Manon (08:46):

Once you see how myopic my view is it’s easier to understand how you can go deep, but you can’t go wide And it really comes back to……….I mean, for me…….. It was the, the role of the general practitioner, who technically sees everything. And you know, at least in Canada, we refer out to specialists if acquired, And, if the GPS ability to see the whole. doesn’t work then you have a chance to see, ………..huh? Maybe there’s something, you know, all these conditions might be related or they all come down to inflammation but if you’re not trained, even as a GP to see that, then you know, you’re part of the whole system. Right. You know, it’s very interesting.

Elizabeth Yarnell (10:00):

I had another good example to share. My uncle passed from scleroderma. A number of years ago, scleroderma of course is another autoimmune disease. And by the time he had been eight years into his battle and he was nearing the end of his life. And he was in the hospital for the last time. And we went there, he had like a baggie full of prescriptions. He had so many prescriptions. He didn’t even know which prescriptions he was on, but he was taking like 30 pills, three times a day, one from the heart guy, one from the GI guy, one from the scleroderma guy, nobody’s talking to anybody else nobody’s dealing with him as a whole body. They’re just dealing with that one specific aspect of him.

Dr Manon (10:51):

it’s really sad. And then you have to add the psychiatrist, because at that point, people are usually feeling like terrible. And then they say, now we’re going to tie in the mind. And it seems in a very strange order, at least, you know from my background, it doesn’t make any sense to do that. You start with the whole and then you might need to go down certain paths because there is knowledge to be had that looking at the overall maybe can be helpful, right?

Elizabeth Yarnell (11:28):

Nobody’s looking to the root of their problem. They’re just looking at the symptoms. Oh, you have diarrhea. I’m going to send you to the GI specialist. He’s going to say you have IBS and he’s going to give you imotrin or something like that. Imotin, I should say or something, but he’s not gonna look at all the meds your on and say, you know what, maybe this medication is upsetting your stomach, he,s just going to prescribe you another one to try to mask it.

Dr Manon (11:55):

Or even looking at, you know, maybe it’s the imbalance in your nervous system. Maybe the autonomic nervous system is not working and your vagal nerves, not working and feeding back properly or whatever gut issues that are causing it. You know, an inflammatory reaction I mean, there’s so many things that if you look holistically, make so much more sense, you know, too,

Elizabeth Yarnell (12:21):

The scleroderma doctor, who’s like this world famous specialist in scleroderma. And my uncle says to him, you know, what do you think about diet? And the guy says, I like my scleroderma patients to have some meat on their bones, which my uncle interpreted to mean he should eat half a dozen chocolate donuts every day, a quart of chocolate ice cream every night, hot chocolate every day ……I mean that just basically allowed my uncle to run loose with his worst instincts and feel like it was sanctioned by his doctor.

Dr Manon (12:55):

it’s true. It’s not just that there’s, you know, in most medical colleges, nothing to do with nutrition or 11 hours, you know, but it’s also the the impact of what is seen as accepted because of the lack of, of knowledge. So that’s that’s another good point. So let’s go back to you and your dad. So what happened?

Elizabeth Yarnell (13:28):

So, my father is still upset that I am not taking any disease modifying drugs. He does not believe in what I do, even though he’s seen the efficacy and he seen me, I’m here 21 years past diagnosis and I ski I dance. I can walk and run all of you. If you met me on the street, you would not know I had ms. Even though the MRI will show you that there are 17 spots of plaque on my brain. So it’s not like I don’t have ms. I do have ms. But I have learned, I look in a different place because my, as yourself said, my training as a naturopath is if there’s inflammation, what is causing it and how do we get to the root of that? And how do we figure that out so that we don’t have to put that bandaid on later and try to suppress those effects from that inflammation without even addressing why the inflammation is there in the first place.

Dr Manon (14:27):

And so, you decided to go your own route, the evidence of your transformation, and that’s where you realize it’s not science it’s. And I don’t mean this with any sense of against any religion, but it’s, it is a religious belief almost that that is like, this is the thing that works and evidence, which is what, you know, science is technically based on. Part of it is seeing what you see, right. To see the changes and take that into account. And I have found that some sometimes not, not with everyone, thankfully, but it is really difficult to move out of your own paradigm belief system that it’s so deeply ingrained.

Elizabeth Yarnell (15:21):

But beyond that, it’s not only just in the medical profession, because it’s, what’s taught in medical schools that you can’t believe anything you weren’t taught in medical school and nothing that hasn’t had a phase three placebo controlled gold standard trial. And really the more I learned about the human body, there are so many things that just don’t work with the phase three placebo control trial with tons of people and everybody getting the same dosage, the same therapies. And in fact, in what I do, which is customized anti-inflammatory diets there there’s no universal rules that would apply to everyone. Anyway, in fact, I’ve even tested a set of twins and found that their test results were radically different from each other. So, you know, if I could say the right diet for all ms. Patients is this, then I could write a book and get super rich, but that’s just not how the human……….

Dr Manon (16:19):

So can you share a little bit the steps you take, the diagnostic steps and what you’re considering for anyone who is listening to this show and also the doctors who are listening to this show. because, you know, I do think in the end everyone that goes into the healing arts wants to help. And I definitely hold that as the highest level of commitment and then, you know, training and life. It definitely has a way of challenging all of that, but what are the steps you go through?

Elizabeth Yarnell (17:03):

I have a three pronged approach. First I take a very detailed health history of my patients to see what are their symptoms of inflammation? Is there inflammation at the root of their symptoms and the root of their problems? And usually there is, I would say mostly. And then I take, I have a four, really three main prongs of my approach the first or the centerpiece is a customized or personalized, scientifically based anti-inflammatory diet or dietary therapy. And the therapy I use is called leap L E A P. And I use the MRT test, the mediator release test, which is a very sophisticated state-of-the-art food sensitivity test that is only offered by one lab in North America. And that’s out of Florida and that’s a single blood draw. So I give my patients a collection kit, they get a local phlebotomist to them.

Elizabeth Yarnell (18:01):

They get a prepaid FedEx mailer that gets dropped in the mail and ends up at the lab in Florida the next morning. And they run your blood against 170 different items. I think there’s like 150 foods and 20 or so chemicals and additives that are in our food supply. And when the test results come back, I spend two hours with my patient. We extensively review the test results. We cross correlate botanical food families with anything that turned up highly reactive. And then together we identified the least inflammatory foods for them to eat. So instead of saying, you know, go home and avoid A B and C that turned up high on the test. And then the patient is like, but that’s all I eat. What should I be eating? I don’t even know how to substitute that. Instead we find X, Y, and Z, the foods that are the least inflammatory on the test. And those are the foods that we construct their customized diet around.

Dr Manon (18:56):

And have you found that typically, because that reaction is something I’ve certainly seen. But patients will say, well, that’s all, that’s what I eat. It’s like, because that’s what you eat. That’s where your body has created inflammation again. So it’s because of the leaky gut or whatever. What is your understanding of why that happens?

Elizabeth Yarnell (19:22):

I think that’s sometimes that happens. And certainly if you are doing an antibody test and you’re looking for antibody creation, then those antibodies will have to have been exposed to that food in the past. But mediators like histamine or sidechains and other mediators in the body don’t have to have a previous experience with that food. In fact, when I tested my six year old son, he tested super, super, highly reactive to coffee. Well, he had never had coffee, so it’s not, it doesn’t really correlate that much on the foods necessarily that you’ve always eaten or that you’ve never eaten. It can kind of, I don’t know which foods white, the white blood cells, the T cells decide which foods are threatened, which foods are not. But sometimes you’re like, but I eat pistachios all the time. How can this be causing these symptoms?

Elizabeth Yarnell (20:23):

Well, partly that’s whats causing those symptoms that you can’t tell because you’re eating it all the time. So you’re having this low level, or maybe even medium or higher level inflammation all the time. You can’t tell yourself what’s causing that inflammation on top of that. I like to tell my patients if your walking around. So if you come to me, you’re already hurting, right. You’re walking around 80% inflamed, pretty much all the time and you eat something and it bumps you up to 90% inflamed. You might not even notice, but if we get you down to 10% inflamed and all of a sudden you eat something and you’re bumped up to 90% inflamed, you absolutely notice, and you can make that correlation very easily then.

Dr Manon (21:05):

So you’re looking at at this test, which is a combination of chemicals and foods those are the things that are tested.

Dr Manon (21:19):

And then what’s the three prong approach.?

Elizabeth Yarnell (21:22):

So, that’s the centerpiece. The second piece is to recognize that when there’s chronic inflammation in the body, it does visible damage to the digestive tract. And as you know, 80% or more of our immunity is based in our digestive tract and complete digestion is really the foundation of all health. So in order to see what’s going on in the digestive tract, I use a 24 hour urine collection and that gets sent off to a lab in North Carolina, they do their analysis. I turn that over to the food enzyme Institute in Wisconsin that was founded by Dr Loomis. He discovered food enzymes in the 1970s. They come back with a report in clear English that says things like having trouble, digesting carbohydrates, or proteins or sugars are maybe too acidic or too alkaline, or maybe electrolytes are out of balance.

Elizabeth Yarnell (22:13):

There’s all kinds of things we can see through the urine. We also look for heavy metals that we can’t see through the blood. So when we have both of these tests performed in the same time period, it gives me a very holistic picture of that person, even though we’re not in the same room together. Right. Okay. And then the third one, and then the third part of my approach really has to do with, with the fact that I really believe even I would say more and more every day, that hidden parasitic infection is at the root of so much of chronic inflammation and parasites. Let me tell you if there’s something that gets me thrown off listservs and open forums that involve medical professionals, it’s mentioning the word parasites, but parasites, I believe are much more common than we have been led to believe. And they are in so many places in so many of us parasite testing is notorious for false negatives.

Elizabeth Yarnell (23:15):

So I don’t even look, I don’t even suggest people look and get validation. I put everyone in my practice on an herbal parasite protocol for the first month and we just level the playing field because if there are parasites there, then there’s only so much better you can ever get, you can follow your diets. So strictly you can do all these supplements. You can do all these things, but if there’s parasites there and you don’t address them directly, they’re never going to go away. That’s their job is to find a host and reproduce and populate and live happily ever after.

Dr Manon (23:51):

Yeah, that’s it, that’s the one from having talked to many naturopathsit’s very hard to to prove it by testing you, you can do five, six, seven tests at different times. Maybe one time it will show up. And think of the cost of that. That’s ridiculous, you know,

Elizabeth Yarnell (24:14):

Exactly. And maybe not because some parasites live in the bowels. And so our typical parasite test is about, is a stool sample or multiple. But if you have a parasite that lives in the liver, like a liver food or in the heart or in the bloodstream or in the brain, that’s not going to show up in a stool test. And then there are parasites that are sub microscopic and some that are so anaerobic that they literally disintegrate when they’re exposed to air. So there’s all kinds of, of reasons why parasite testing is, unreliable.

Dr Manon (24:49):

So what do you use as single herbal product that you see as useful?

Elizabeth Yarnell (24:59):

I use a combination of four different herbs that are staggered in terms of dosage over the course of the month. So you kind of start very slowly. So a lot of people feel unnecessarily nervous about herbs because of what we’ve been told. And so it allows them to start off literally with like one drop and then they kind of crescendo and then it goes back down the other side, one of the herbs addresses full, fully grown adult parasites, another addresses the larvae, another justice, the eggs, and the fourth is specifically in pharma side for worms.

Dr Manon (25:42):

And how many times have you seen a mental, emotional correlation to the onset of well, any chronic disease, but especifically MS?.

Elizabeth Yarnell (25:56):

So what I see is a huge correlation between bowel dysfunction and auto immune diseases. And often that’s the beginning of a person’s health journey. And that has never seems to be something that the ms. Doctors ask, how are your bowels, when did this start? Oh, you mean kind of your bowels have been bad since you took that trip down to Mexico four years ago, you know, and they really haven’t been the same since nobody is drawing those draw those lines between the dots together. But I really see a huge correlation between, I would say most autoimmune cases and significant bowel dysfunction, probably from parasitic infection at the root, at the that’s probably how it started and then it culminates from there.

Dr Manon (26:46):

Right. And in your experience with people……..you’ve had quite a bit of experience….. Have you, have you seen any correlation where it’s a triggering event? Not necessarily going to Mexico and picking up a worm, but a triggering event that cascades the entire downfall in which then because of the auto immune system, then basically the gut becomes permeable or you become more susceptible to a parasite. Like have you ever seen it start? Like, it’s a chicken and egg question I’m asking you, what have you, in the people with MS specifically, have you, have you seen that correlation or not particularly, or what’s your experience with that?

Speaker 2 (27:37):

Certainly I see that people have traumatic experiences. Do they always lead to ms and I’ve heard a lot of, theories that, Oh, you must’ve had a terrible childhood experience that would have led to your ms. Myself. I don’t have any memory of any experience that could have led that way. I have had many parasites though, starting when I was seven. So sometimes I feel like when you have parasites and when you’re experiencing bowel dysfunction and chronic inflammation all over your body, you are less able to cope with these things. So they become maybe worse than they might need to be in your own mind and in your own life because they take on a life of their own because you are not physically strong enough really to handle it and to deal with it and process those emotions because your body is not in a good state, but that hasn’t been the focus of my research. That’s, I’m not necessarily probing for those kinds of experiences with my patients. I do follow the research of I’m going to blank on his name, but he wrote the inflamed brain. He’s a neuropsychiatrist out of England. You know, that book.

Dr Manon (29:01):

Yes, I do. I’m blanking too.

Elizabeth Yarnell (29:04):

Yes. And so he’s super interesting because he’s a neurologist and a psychiatrist and he is the first one I’ve seen the first in the medical community to notice the correlation between inflammation and mental health. And I give a lot of lectures on that correlation between inflammation and mental health. And I think there’s a huge connection.

Dr Manon (29:28):

Well, I can definitely see it from that perspective, the impact it has for sure. I guess in my practice, which is not a specialized practice, i,ve seen different chronic diseases. But I have and maybe it’s just been my instinct to ask you, or because of my own experience, you know, to see if there’s a stressor that puts your body into a more susceptible state?And so that’s been an interest of mine. So again, it’s just another focus and that doesn’t mean that there always is! But I have, definitely witnessed that many times and sometimes in the work I do it’s looking at that, that then turns things around.

Elizabeth Yarnell (30:43):

absolutely. And, you know, and I think the deeper understanding of how unbelievably well we are put together and what impacts us we’re still at the beginning of that, you know, it’s as if now looking, because ………all we did before was looking at disease management and when you look at healing and health, we’re in an infancy in a sense, I mean, we’ve had traditional, you know medical arts that have been around for a long time, but the more we’re able to understand the more questions we have at least that’s how I I’m witnessing, the universe at this stage.. So you still have the placks?

Elizabeth Yarnell (31:43):

They’re still there. You can, I can get an MRI and they are still there with MS. Sometimes they come and go, but mostly once they’re there, they usually stay.

New Speaker (31:54):

And I think that’s at least also I can correlate that to my experience with people, the end product is not what causes, there’s no direct causality to the way you’re experiencing your body. You know, often we say, aha, we’ve got this. Therefore I can’t move my body. therefore, I’m going to be in a wheelchair. Therefore, you know, it’s almost like the image that proves the fact, but you can have that. And as you say, dance, move, whatever. It’s not it doesn’t mean the end.

Elizabeth Yarnell (32:40):

In my practice, I combine a lot of science with the holistic kind of art of natural philosophy. And I can’t deny that the, you can image my brain and you can see what you see there it is there. It’s not, not there. So with MS I don’t know, it always depends on where the damage in the inside, the nervous system has been done as to what kinds of manifestations you might have in terms of abilities. So because I know those plaques are there. It doesn’t mean that I know like one pack is probably towards my optic nerve because optic neuritis is one of my symptoms. But when I think about it, I have optic neuritis. I don’t manifest it myself. Does that make sense? So what in my practice, what I see is that when we trigger that information with some external factor, and I really base this off of Dr . Alessio Fasano’s three-part theory of auto-immunity, which says that there is a genetic predisposition toward being hypersensitive, which I think could be, and, or parasites. The second factory says is an environmental trigger, just like a gluten is for celiac patients. And the third factory says this leaky gut. And so all of which, and like you got, we know, is, is indicative of chronic inflammation and always, always a company’s inflammation. So it’s really all about inflammation. And what I look at is will, can we identify those triggers? And if we can identify the trigger for you, that causes inflammation in your body, and we take it out of your life, then you won’t get that inflammation. And if you don’t have the inflammation, then you won’t have symptoms. And if you don’t have symptoms, are you really sick?

Dr Manon (34:44):

Well, exactly. And I think coming back to, to the plaque, the reason I raised it is because people will say, well, there’s the proof of it, which means that I’m doomed. And, and I’m looking at the, the nocebo effect of this, because if you take like disc degeneration, which is something, I look at it, you can look at it at a spine. And then if we were to ask 200 people, you know, show me your x-rays, there would be plenty of people where you could see disk_de_ generation, but there is actually no symptoms that come with it. So you’re an example of, yes, it could be in scenarios, et cetera, but that’s not typically what people are told when they, they see the proof of the scarring or the the plaque, it, it reinforces to them everything that the diagnosis and the prognosis that comes with it. Right. And I think what you did is yeah, sure. It’s there. And were able to live your life fully.

Elizabeth Yarnell (36:07):

. Well, I didn’t accept that, that there was nothing that I could do about this. And I’m like, there’s got to be something!!! Somebody is not figuring this out and it needs to be figured out. So if we can figure out what is causing this inflammation and make it stop, then, then that’s as good as a cure. Right. I never call it a cure because that would get me in trouble with the medical authorities, but it’s as good as a cure because I live symptom free. And so it’s like, I don’t have that mess except for when I eat the wrong things. Like for me, it might be lettuce, lettuce, lettuce will give me ms. Symptoms.

Dr Manon (36:49):

what do you think about legumes? Is that because if you, although it’s McDougall diet, I think there is a lot have you found that to be true?

Elizabeth Yarnell (37:24):

Legumes are not universally a problem, or even significantly statistically correlated to be with any certain issues. I am not a big fan of kind of fad diets that vilify a whole food group or a whole type of foods. I think it’s absolutely unique for each person. And that’s what I find when I do the MRT test.

Dr Manon (37:50):

Well,I love the idea of the uniqueness to it because I think, you know, it’s the combination of the holistic view and the unique care because even though we all need the holistic view, we also all need unique therapies that work for our unique way and connection to manifestation.

Elizabeth Yarnell (38:13):

Right, right. Whenever anybody asks me to give kind of universal recommendations, my most comfortable universal recommendations are really things to avoid. I think you should avoid artificial colours and flavours. I think you should avoid synthetic sugars, substitutes. I think you should avoid things that are made from chemicals and mostly processed foods, you know? So that, that list is much easier for me to share.

Dr Manon (38:40):

Definitely. So do you have any last comments you’d like to share before we sign off?

Elizabeth Yarnell (38:48):

So I really believe that all of health comes down to inflammation and no matter what your diagnosis is or what your symptoms are, if inflammation is at the root of those problems, then we can work on reducing that inflammation and we are going to eliminating those symptoms. And that’s really the whole thing my practice is all about.

Dr Manon (39:10):

Well, thank you very much for sharing your point of view and all your information. And do you have I think you’ve left a link or something that people could contact you.

Elizabeth Yarnell (39:24):

Absolutely. You can. You can always find me@mywebsiteatelizabethyarnell.com or you can go directly and book a complimentary 45 minute naturopathic health assessment with me. Another gift. This is a free kickstart to reducing your inflammation. It’s a seven day course. You’ll get an email every day for seven days with different tips on how you can start improving your health by removing inflammatory triggers each day.

Dr Manon (40:10):

. Perfect.well, thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (40:18):

Well, thank you manon It was such a pleasure to join you and chat today.

 

 

 

 

Thank you for joining us. For more information, go to DrManonBolliger.com.