Dr. Deb Muth 00:03What if symptoms that have been dismissed for years aren’t all in your head, but signs of an underlying tick-borne illness or complex chronic condition that needs a different kind of care? Today, we’re talking with Ginger Southley DNP, one of the leading voices in Lyme disease, mortgage, and tick-borne illness care. She brings decades of clinical experience and a deeply patient-centered approach to some of the most misunderstood conditions in medicine. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness Now, the show where we uncover the root causes of chronic illness, explore cutting-edge approaches to healing, and empower you with the tools to take charge of your life.I’m Dr. Deb, and today we’re diving into the complex world of Lyme disease, co-infections, more jellins, and the deeper factors that can keep people stuck in chronic illness. If you or someone you love has been struggling with unexplained symptoms, fatigue, brain fog, pain, or a long road to answers, this episode is for you. So, as usual, grab your cup of coffee, tea, or whatever helps you settle in, and let’s get started on today’s journey toward deeper healing.You guys can put one of the ads in here, that’d be great. No. There we go. Because otherwise, yes, we’re going to get chatting, and we’ll forget. I pre-recorded the intro part, so we can just dive in, and I can ask you, like, how you got into this, and then we can start our conversation again. Dr. Ginger Savely 02:01Okay, I can’t remember what I said last time, but that’s alright, I’ll just… Dr. Deb Muth 02:04So, we need to protect them. Well, welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness now. I have a dear lady, Dr. Ginger. She’s being so gracious because we already goofed up our first recording we did on Riverside a few months ago, and she’s been gracious enough to come back and join us again and do it all over again while we’re actually recording. So, Dr. Savely, welcome to the show. Dr. Ginger Savely 02:26Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Dr. Deb Muth 02:30Dr. Ginger, tell us a little bit about how you got involved with tick-borne disease and Morgellons, because you are truly a legend in this world, and I’d love for everybody to hear your story. Dr. Ginger Savely 02:42Well, I just to very briefly go over, I got into the tick-borne diseases because my daughter was so very sick with it, and I started learning everything I could, and the next thing I knew, I was picking it up in my… population, I was doing primary care, family practice, and I was picking it up in that group. And then word got around, and next thing I knew, I’m treating a lot of tick-borne disease, became 50% of my practice, then 70% of my practice. And then, a few years into it, I started having, well, first of all, Dr. Harvey, who was a Lyme doctor in Houston, Texas, he and I were constantly communicating about things and comparing notes, and he emailed me and said, have you seen any patients with you know, blue fibers coming out of them? And I said, I don’t think so, but I’ll start looking for it. So, then I did, and I started asking all my Lyme patients about it, just, have you had any unusual things come out of your skin?And once I asked them, then, lo and behold, a certain subset of them said, well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do have that, but I’ve just learned not to mention it, because people think I’m crazy, so I just never, you know, say a word about it. And so I started picking up a lot of these patients, and you know, of course, since I first came at this by way of tick-borne diseases, Lyme, etc. I figured, okay, these people I know have tick-borne disease, so let’s treat that and see if maybe their immune system recovers to the point where they can handle whatever this is causing the Morgellen’s disease. And so that’s the way I approached it at first, just treating underlying infections, since I had no idea what was causing more dilins. I just noted an association with Lyme disease. And so, I put out a paper about 20 years ago. I published a paper that had to do with Basically, one thing… the main point of the paper was correlatingLyme disease with Morgellins, saying that 97% of my Morgellins patients ended up having Lyme or another tick-borne infection. And, so this is… this is the first publication that basically kind of made that correlation, you know, between the line. And I think it’s been taken out of context a lot, misinterpreted. I never for a minute said that Lyme causes more gelins, not at all, and we… that’s a leap way too far for us at this point. I just noticed an association. So, whatever that may mean, who knows? But, you know, certain illnesses, like, for example, AIDS patients are famous for getting thisCarpacea sarcoma. And it doesn’t mean AIDS causes that sarcoma, because other people get it too. It’s just highly associated with the tooth, so… We might be talking about a disease that’s highly associated with tick-borne infections, or maybe it’s caused by a co-infection that we don’t even know about. Or maybe it’s something entirely different, and the tick-borne diseases were just suppressing the immune system to the point where The person succumbed to whatever this was whenever they got into contact with it.And so, I began, you know, just experimenting and trying different cocktails of things to see what would work. And as I began to treat, I realized that The more jealous patients did notget better with a Lyme protocol. They got better when I used a Bartonella protocol, a specific group of antibiotics that’s used to treat the Bartonella infection. Now, again, I’m not saying for a minute Bartonella causes more gelin, but I’m just saying that when I use the treatment for Bartonella, that’s when I get the best results on my mortgageellin’s patients. And I also have noticed that my Morgellen’s patients tend to have other symptoms that are typical Bartonella symptoms, like a lot of the neuropsychiatric symptoms, neuropsychiatric, sorry, and the, the streaks that they’ll get on them, the red tracks. Spontaneous scratches, all that. So those we do see on our Bartonella patients that don’t have more gelin.So, I started… it was… my early patients were, I would always say, you’re the lab rats, because we’re just experimenting with everything, and they were more than willing. I mean, these people were so desperate, they were so miserable, and so… upset by the way they’ve been treated by the medical establishment, that they were, every one of them, at a point of saying. I don’t care what you give me. it… if it… even if it kills me, I’d rather be dead than have to deal with this, you know? Dr. Deb Muth 08:07Try something, right? Dr. Ginger Savely 08:08That’s pretty drastic, I know, but that’s where they were. They were at a point where, I don’t care, I’ll take any risk just to do this. However, I’ve always been using FDA-approved medications, and, you know, it’s just… naturally, I’m treating, sort of in my own, kind of invented way, because there’s no textbooks you can go to for this, there’s no algorithms, there’s no treatment protocols for this, because more than half of the medical world doesn’t even believe it exists. So, we… you know, I looked very carefully at all these patients in my office with magnified, lighted magnification, and I was seeing amazing things. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes the hair on the back of my neck would stand out when I would see these things, because You know, bright blue fibers are not supposed to be coming out of the human body. And I would even pull at them with the tweezers, and, you know, they would not come out, so it wasn’t like a matter of they were just stuck on there, you know, from fabrics or something, as dermatologists often claim is the case. Dr. Deb Muth 09:24I had a patient once with Morgellons, and she got a magnification glass that she could attach to her phone, and she, like, took pictures of what was coming out of her skin and video recorded it and sent it to me, and oh my gosh, it’s crazy. crazy how these things come out. And if you don’t see it under a microscope like that, it’s really hard to understand what’s going on. Dr. Ginger Savely 09:48Exactly. And, you know, what we’ve always said is dermatologists usually carry about a 12X scope in their pocket, but you need really more like 60X to see this stuff, because very rarely can you see it with the naked eye. I mean, sometimes you can, but you do need that lighted magnification in order to see it. I do have some patients come to me, they have all the symptoms more jealous, but they say, I don’t think I have fibers, and I said, well. but you… have you really looked with magnification? They said, well, no, I just thought I’d see them, and I… so then it turns out they actually do have them, but… Yeah. So I… I’ve been fascinated mostly then in treating these patients by how… diverse each patient is, because I can develop a protocol that’s working fantastically on this patient, and try it on the next patient. It doesn’t work at all. Dr. Deb Muth 10:49So… Dr. Ginger Savely 10:50So, it’s just back to the drawing board, every single patient. And of course, there’s a huge variance in degree of severity of this illness. I have everyone… everywhere from people who are totally functional, going to work, and just have this annoying thing going on, all the way to people who are just completely marred and disfigured and can’t even get out of bed. So, you know, of course, there’s quite a difference there, and naturally, it’s a lot more difficult to treat the more severe cases. And often with the more severe cases. Our best hope is reducing symptoms significantly to where they’re tolerable. But in the very severe cases, I don’t think I’ve ev
