Autoimmune Disease: The Infection Connection

In this interview I discuss the connection between infections and autoimmune disease which I call the Infection Connection.
That being said, let's get on with it. Let me introduce our speaker for tonight. Dr. Nikolas Hedberg is a good friend of mine. I've known Nik for, I think somewhere around 10 years now, we both went to one of the same schools in our careers, not at the same time, but we, I guess, met at a, I think, an internal disorder conference in New Orleans, I think was the first time about 10 years ago. I've followed Nik's work and his career and he's done some outstanding work. Nik is a board certified Chiropractic Internist by the American Board of Chiropractic Internists, he received his bachelor training in Exercise Science from the University of Florida, received his Doctor of Chiropractic from the Texas Chiropractic College in Houston. He currently practices in Asheville, North Carolina and focuses on Lyme disease, thyroid disorders and autoimmune disease. He's the author of the book "The Complete Thyroid Health and Diet Guide", which is a comprehensive guide to diagnosing and treating thyroid disorders. He lectures at a lot of integrated medicine conferences, and he's published in a lot of journals. He teaches Functional Medicine concepts through many forms including Functional Medicine Town, Professional Co-op, and with Hawthorn University. His particular interests lately is the role of stealth infections in chronic disease and in that effort to get this message out, he's created a program called "The Infection Connection" and does some online training in these concepts, and he'll tell you more about that as the night goes on. Little known to everyone in the professional world but known to me, Nik is an accomplished opera singer actually, so you'll hear that when you hear him talk, you can hear that come through in his voice. Anyway, Nik thank you for being on. I know you've been on Clinical Rounds before and thanks for coming back and being a guest again.

Nikolas: Thanks for having me on David, it's good to be here.

David: Great. I mean this is a fascinating topic and a topic that's been really been, sort of, obsessing me for the last couple years. As you can see by the content or the topic of our Core III seminar. I've recently written pretty extensive articles on these concepts in Townsend Letter and Naturopathic Doctor News and Review and in other forms. I'm really interested and jazzed about tonight's call and interviewing you because I hope to learn more about this as well because it's literally emerging science day by day. I think it would be a full time job just to keep adequate surveillance of the literature on just what we're going to talk about tonight and stay current with it. Anyway, I know that I kind of started having to really school myself on this stuff out of sheer necessity by virtue of my patient population and how it's changed over the years. I guess we'll talk about that a little bit more but I wanted to really learn a little bit more how you got started in managing patients with chronic infections or stealth infections and how you found your way into really almost sub-specializing in this area of functional and integrated medicine.

Nikolas: Right, it was actually about eight or nine years ago that I was actually listening to you, David talk about the connection between [inaudible 00:08:55] and autoimmune thyroid disease, and ever since then this has really been an interest of mine. I knew it was something that I need to learn a lot about, started seeing more and more patients with Hashimoto's, and chronic fatigue and various autoimmune diseases. You start doing all the things you know in functional medicine, sealing the gut, vitamin D, you know etc. etc., and you can do all that but there's that group of patients, that population that they just don't respond to those things and I found with a lot of those patients when you dig a little bit deeper,