主持人罗伯特·卢夫金（Dr. Robert Lufkin）欢迎听众来到《Health Longevity Secrets》节目。他提到，本期的嘉宾是埃里克·戈登博士（Dr. Eric Gordon），一位专注于复杂慢性病的专家。卢夫金还提到，他的书《Lies I Taught in Medical School》登上了《纽约时报》畅销书榜，并邀请听众访问节目页面下载免费章节。
戈登博士首先解释了“复杂慢性病”（Complex Chronic Illness）的概念。他表示，这一术语大约在20年前开始使用，用来描述那些长期患病的人群，他们的症状通常被误诊为慢性疲劳综合症（Chronic Fatigue Syndrome）、莱姆病（Lyme Disease）或非典型自身免疫性疾病。
戈登博士指出，这些疾病的共同点是慢性炎症（Chronic Inflammation），这是驱动这些病症的根本原因。他强调，慢性炎症不仅是这些疾病的症状，而是其核心驱动力。
戈登博士深入探讨了慢性炎症的根源，提到了细胞危险反应（Cell Danger Response, CDR）框架。这一框架由罗伯特·纳维奥博士（Dr. Robert Naviaux）提出，描述了细胞在受到伤害或感染时的反应过程。CDR分为三个阶段：
戈登博士解释说，当细胞在这些阶段中“卡住”时，就会导致慢性炎症和慢性疾病。例如，细胞可能在重建阶段未能完成修复，或者在通信恢复阶段未能重新与周围细胞建立正常联系。
戈登博士指出，慢性炎症的驱动因素因人而异，主要包括以下几个方面：
他提到，许多人尝试通过补充剂（如抗氧化剂和线粒体支持药物）来改善健康，但这些方法往往效果有限，因为问题并不在于线粒体本身，而在于细胞的功能发生了适应性变化。
戈登博士进一步解释了慢性炎症如何导致慢性病。他提到，慢性炎症会导致细胞膜结构发生变化，从而影响细胞的正常功能。例如，细胞可能对激素和其他信号分子不再敏感，这可以解释为什么许多患者的血液检测结果看似正常，但身体却无法正常运作。
他还提到，慢性炎症会导致激素失衡、代谢紊乱和免疫系统异常，这些问题共同作用，导致了慢性病的发生和发展。
戈登博士批评了传统医学在处理慢性病方面的局限性。他表示，现代医学擅长处理急性病（如感染和创伤），但在慢性病的治疗上却存在明显的盲点。传统医学通常只关注症状的治疗，而忽视了疾病的根本原因。
他提到，传统医学的“食谱式”治疗方法（Cookbook Approach）虽然在某些情况下有效，但在处理复杂的慢性病时往往不够。例如，高血压和抑郁症的治疗通常依赖于几类药物，而忽视了患者的个体差异。
戈登博士强调，治愈慢性病的关键在于完成愈合周期。他指出，愈合周期需要三个步骤：
他提到，许多慢性病患者之所以长期患病，是因为他们的身体未能完成这些步骤。例如，细胞可能在炎症阶段卡住，导致持续的炎症反应。
戈登博士还探讨了压力在慢性病中的作用。他表示，慢性炎症会增加焦虑，而焦虑又会反过来加剧炎症，形成一个恶性循环。他强调，治愈不仅需要身体的修复，还需要让神经系统感受到安全，从而支持愈合过程。
他提到，虽然冥想和放松对某些人有效，但对另一些人可能并不适用。他建议患者根据自己的情况选择适合的减压方法，例如散步、绘画或接触自然。
戈登博士呼吁医学界更加关注个性化医疗（Precision Medicine）。他认为，虽然现代医学在技术上取得了巨大进步，但在处理复杂的慢性病时，仍然需要更多地关注患者的个体差异。
他提到，医生需要了解患者的整体情况，而不仅仅是依赖血液检测结果或药物指南。他强调，治愈慢性病需要综合考虑遗传、环境和生活方式等多种因素。
本期《Health Longevity Secrets》节目中，埃里克·戈登博士深入探讨了复杂慢性病的根本原因及其治疗方法。他强调了慢性炎症在慢性病中的核心作用，并提出了细胞危险反应（CDR）框架，解释了愈合周期的重要性。此外，他还批评了传统医学的局限性，呼吁更加关注个性化医疗和患者的整体健康。
Edit:2025.04.10
00:00
Welcome back to the Health Longevity Secrets show with your host, Dr. Robert Lufkin. His book titled Lies I Taught in Medical School is a New York Times bestseller. See the show notes for a link to download a free chapter. And now please enjoy this week's episode as we look at complex chronic illness with Dr. Eric Gordon.
00:22
This week, Dr. Eric Gordon draws back the curtain on chronic complex illness, eliminating the profound yet often overlooked connection between interrupted healing cycles and persistent health problems that conventional medicine really struggles to address. At the heart of conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, and atypical autoimmune disorders lies chronic inflammation, not as a symptom, but as the driving force.
00:51
Dr. Gordon explains that these debilitating conditions manifest when our body fails to complete its natural healing cycle, leaving millions with normal blood tests, but life-altering fatigue, pain, and cognitive dysfunction. The revolutionary, quote, cell danger response framework reveals why your cells get stuck in defensive postures long after threats have passed.
01:18
Your mitochondria aren't broken. They've adaptedly changed their function, which explains why supplements often disappoint chronic illness sufferers.
01:28
This three-phase healing cycle, which is inflammation, rebuilding, and cellular communication restoration, must complete for true recovery. Yet medicine focuses almost exclusively on just the first phase. So what makes Dr. Gordon's perspective particularly valuable?
01:49
His recognition that feeling safe is fundamental to healing. The nervous system must receive signals that it's appropriate to divert resources towards restoration rather than just protection. This explains why stress reduction becomes increasingly crucial the longer someone remains ill. In other words, chronic inflammation itself increases anxiety, creating a destructive feedback loop that further impedes recovery.
02:19
Medicine's blind spot stems from its overwhelming focus on acute care models. We excel at addressing immediate threats like infections or injuries, but pay minimal attention to the complex, individualized healing process that must follow.
02:37
This cookbook approach fails because biochemical individuality means each person's body responds uniquely to identical interventions. Ready to understand why your chronic symptoms persist despite normal tests? Discover how addressing the complete healing cycle might finally unlock the recovery that's eluded you for years.
03:04
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03:34
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04:02
Join the health longevity medical imaging revolution today. And now, please enjoy this week's episode. Hey, Eric, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Robert. It's a pleasure to be here. You're an expert in complex chronic illness. So what exactly is that and what should our audience know about that? Well, it's a term that we started using about 20 years ago.
04:35
to explain the people who had been ill for a while, you know, often, and they often thought they had chronic fatigue or Lyme disease or sometimes MS or atypical. And I say often atypical autoimmune diseases, which to me all…
04:58
All these diseases, the thing they have in common is chronic inflammation underneath them, which is the same for basically all the illnesses that you talk about so well, is the diabetes and heart disease. They're all driven by chronic inflammation. The difference is here is your genes and your environment has created something that now leaves you usually fatigued,
05:25
and in pain, you know, and with brain fog, I guess. So the chronic complex illnesses that we deal with, I think that's kind of the, um,
05:36
the heart of them is they leave people with their lives, um, unable to be lived fully. You know, that, that, that's one of the most important things. So, um, you know, they, um, have fatigue that, and they go to their doctor and their thyroid is normal and they're non-anemic. Um, and, uh,
05:57
Their B12 is normal. Maybe they check that. And after that, they're done. You know, their blood count was normal. Their basic chemistries were normal. And these people are told that they're fine. Now, you know, and if the doctor is compassionate, he realized they're not fine. But too often in the past, they would just be sent to a therapist or the psychiatrist or put on an antidepressant with the idea that, you know,
06:26
You're depressed because those are also symptoms that also can be many of them can be symptoms of depression. So what what we have realized is that it's always inflammation underneath and often infection, not always. That infection usually plays a role, some viral trigger mechanism.
06:48
Many years ago, so many people who have mono, I mean, the EBV is a big thing now because of long COVID, but so many people when they get mono and especially the ones who got it and were wound up in bed for two, three months and they recover. But then, you know, that's like they're 18 to 20. And then when they're 30 or 40 or after they've had children or after they've been working too many hours, they're
07:17
they start finding that they need to rest on the weekend to catch up.
07:21
And so that's going down that rabbit hole that can lead to what we call chronic complex illness, where your standard blood tests are often normal, but you're still ill. The difference with the autoimmune people is that they have tests that their rheumatologists do that say, oh, you're abnormal. You have this disease, and now they have specific tests.
07:48
medicines that often can interrupt the inflammatory process in the autoimmune diseases, which is very exciting. But at the end of the day, the thing that conventional medicine has to offer people with this whole strain of, you know, illnesses that don't go away, they get better or worse, it's just band-aids.
08:11
Okay. Band-aid medicine. And, and we all have to use it. There's nothing wrong with band-aids. It's really good when you're bleeding to stop the bleeding. The first, first step in anything, you got to stop the bleeding, but you then want the healing. And that's what chronic illness is all about. In fact, I probably should have started it. That would have been the clearest thing to say is that chronic illness is a failure to complete the healing cycle.
08:38
Okay. That's such an important point. And we've been hearing that starting, it's starting to be a theme in this. In other words, that we, we can't just treat the symptoms, which is what a lot of Western medicine does for chronic disease, but we we've got to get to the root cause. It's sort of like, you've, you've got to mop the floor, but unless you fix the roof, you're going to continue mopping the floor all the time. Yeah.
09:04
Going back to what you said about inflammation being fundamental at the root of so many of these diseases, as you mentioned, and all, we've been hearing on this program about the role of
09:17
of insulin resistance and driving inflammation. But I guess what you're saying is there's a subset of people that they may not have significant insulin resistance. Maybe those numbers are normal. And there are these other factors that are often overlooked that drive chronic disease and all chronic illness. And what sort of factors are they? I think you hinted at a couple of them there.
09:45
Well, as I said, it's basically your genetics, how your immune system responds to the environment or the stressor. And let me just bring this back to something more basic, is that what this fellow said
10:04
very smart man who I say. He's my patron saint, this fellow, Dr. Robert Navio. Okay. And the reason he's my…
10:16
I had always been amazed by people coming in to see me with shopping bags full of supplements and still nothing was changing them. These are the people who, you know, I see with this chronic complex illnesses and they're trying really hard and they're taking all the antioxidants in the world and all the mitochondrial support stuff and doesn't do much for a lot of them. You know, occasionally it helps, but lots of times they're not getting much bang for their buck.
10:44
And I read a paper of his back in 2013 or something that laid out why. That really the reason that you're fatigued isn't because your mitochondria are sick. It's because your mitochondria have changed their function as part of their normal functioning.
11:05
Okay. And that's really the thing. It's not like that, you know, there are very few true mitochondrial diseases, a few hundred of them, but they're finally, they're very rare. Okay. Almost everybody who's tired, their mitochondria are just doing what they're doing because of the environment that they're living in because of the metabolites that they're seeing. So, and when I started to understand that, I started to realize why you could give people all the CoQ10 you wanted and
11:32
it didn't do much, okay, because their mitochondria had decided not to listen to it. This whole thing he has labeled the cell danger response. And this is what your body turns on when you get injured or you get an infection, okay? But it has to go through a cycle that he has broken up into three phases called CDR1, 2, and 3,
11:57
which we won't go into the details of, but let's say just basically the CDR1 is that acute inflammation. The CDR2 is when your body's rebuilding tissue and the CDR3 is
12:09
And this is one thing that's very important is the cells have to learn to communicate again with the ones around them. Because, you know, just because you build a new liver cell doesn't mean that that liver cell is responding to its environment. Because one of the things cells do when they get sick is they shut down. They quiet. They just like, you know…
12:34
In the olden days when the castle would be surrounded, they'd burn the crops and retreat into the castle. Well, your cells are doing the same thing. You know, they're trying to that first stage of CDR1, you have a lot of inflammation being created. OK, to and a lot of oxidative stress. And that's on purpose.
12:54
to try to kill the bug. The second stage is you kill the bug and then you've got to, you know, rebuild the tissue. But the third stage, that cell has to begin to respond to the environment again because that first stage, its membrane becomes more, less permeable.
13:12
The membrane structure changes and it doesn't, the ion channels and the hormone receptors just aren't working as well. Okay. And that's why a lot of people after these illnesses will have prolonged hormonal issues where their blood tests might look like they have enough hormones, but their body isn't acting like it.
13:35
So that's because some of these cells haven't finished the healing cycle, this healing cycle and completed and returned to normal. So inflammation happens when you get stuck, when enough of your tissues get stuck in any one of those cycles.
14:00
Okay. That's, that's the trick. And you don't need your whole body, you know, it's, you know, in it at the same time, because we'd probably die if all of our cells were in one, in one of these cycles all at the same time, but parts of us ourselves are. So when you talk about, um, diabetes, you know, like the insulin resistance that we, that we see, um, we're also seeing in the fat cells inflammation and that's driving the insulin resistance, but it's also, um,
14:31
creating a lot of inflammatory cells. And when the inflammatory cells are going, they're releasing lots of pro-oxidant things that just keep stressing the system. So it's a round and round cycle of inflammation.
14:51
That I think is really the critical thing here. And the trick is, how do you lower the inflammation? Well, you have to let the body know that it's safe to heal. Okay, because this is the other…
15:05
component of healing that I know you have spoken about many times and it's so important is the body has to feel safe. We have to do all these chemical stuff and yes, we need all these interventions that are biochemical or either herbal or medical, but we have to also let the brain know, the nervous system know that it's safe to heal. And that's where a lot of the other modalities come in.
15:34
Now, when it's safe to heal, is that related to stress? Is it a matter of…
15:41
avoiding stress and relaxing safety. What is it? Is it the mental feeling of safety or is it something on a mitochondrial or cellular layer or a little? As we said, as above, so below you need that. You need all of it. I mean, again, I don't want to, there are plenty of people who will stay stressed and anxious and get better.
16:03
So we don't want to make absolutes about this. You know, we don't have to be perfect. That is the beauty of the body. You know, I always tell people I was a mechanic for a short time when I was young. And then you had to do it right. The beauty of medicine is we just got to get close. Okay. Because the body is a self-healing organism. But it's until there's at least enough time
16:30
of the message that it's all safe when you have chronic illness, this becomes more important. Okay. Cause this is, this is what's so interesting is when you have an acute disease, you get, uh, you know, uh, acute pneumonia, you break an arm, you know, um, the, if you, um,
16:50
can, you know, like I said, especially with a broken arm, you know, if you get the x-ray and they cast it and then they take the x-ray a few weeks later, they tell you, oh, yes, it's healing. And you relax around that injury. You know, you're not really, I mean, because you have the sense that it's healing. And so all this is happening in the background, you know. But if you have an injury that like six months later, it's still interfering with your life.
17:17
you're it's easy to get too much attention to worry about that area and that that worry and that stress um begins to build over time depending how much of your life is is is interfered with and what we find that people with chronic inflammation um over time their anxiety goes up
17:41
So even if they're anxious, even if they're calm to begin with, they get a little anxious. If you're by nature more anxious, you can get very anxious because you're wondering what's going to happen with your life if you're in this state. So what's interesting is that
17:58
chronic inflammation makes everything worse. So you don't have to be perfect to heal. I just want to emphasize that. I'm not talking, you don't have to meditate the rest of your life to get well. If you meditate a little bit, it helps.
18:13
But again, only for some people, because there are some people who when they meditate, they get more anxious. For those people, they're better off maybe doing Tai Chi or painting or using their hands. Anybody, you know, walking in nature, all these things help.
18:28
give us calming signals. And they're important. The sicker you are, the longer you are, the more hard you have to work. If you've only been mildly ill, you can go back to being as neurotic as you want to be and probably get along. You know, I compare this to like, you know, having a
18:50
Basically a curve in the spine or your head's forward. There are lots of people whose heads are forward all the time. And you see them at meetings. They're 80 years old and they're like this and they've been that way for 40 and they're fine. Okay. But I see lots of people who are like that when they're 30 and they're a mess. And
19:08
And this head forward position is stressing their vagal system. Okay. And the tight muscles are not letting their brain drain. And so they have constant head pressure. Now, look, one guy's been doing this for 80 years. The other person's been doing this for only 10. But what's the difference?
19:30
the person, one of them is chronically inflamed at a bigger level. So they have less room for not being perfect beings. When you get, the sicker you get or the longer you stay ill, often you're
19:50
the more you have to pay attention to being healthy. It's just like the patients, many of the people who I know who watch many of the things that you produce are people who want to stay healthy. And they realize in order to really stay robust through their lives and increase the odds that they're going to be really healthy when they're in their 70s and 80s, they have to work a little harder at it. If they're just going to sit on the couch and watch television,
20:19
They might live to 80, but they're going to have trouble getting out of the chair. Okay. So they have to make a choice how much they're going to do. And when you're really ill, you unfortunately have to usually have to work a bit harder to get well, you know, it's, I wish it wasn't that way, but that, that, that seems to be how it works. You know, you have to do the things that would keep you healthy. You have to go, you have to find the things that would have kept you healthy and
20:47
and do them, but it's hard to do because you don't have the energy. And that's a big issue. Now, if this chronic condition is at the foundation of chronic inflammation, is at the foundation of so many of these chronic illnesses, why is this such a blind spot for our traditional healthcare system? What
21:14
Why aren't they on top of this? Well, because they had a model that worked. It's the model of acute disease. Okay. Acute disease, you get something happens to you, you get an infection. And if we can kill that infection, your body then heals. Remember, your body still has to do the healing. You know, as we saw, you know, in cancer patients, if they have no white blood cells, it doesn't matter how many antibiotics he gave them.
21:43
the outcome usually wasn't good, okay? And it's the same thing. But that was the model of medicine is acute care. And it's based on warfare, really. I mean, medicine has made this biggest leaps and bounds in the last hundred years because we keep killing each other and we work really hard at fixing the soldiers. It's amazing, you know, you can like get run over by a car now and be mangled and they can put you back together. I mean, it's really one of the amazing things we can do.
22:13
The problem is that medicine hasn't paid attention to this black box of healing.
22:20
you know, what happens between when we make the intervention and what your body has to do for itself. Okay. So we're really good at removing the stressor, the external, the arrow, if you will, we can pull that out of you, but then you have to heal. We can sew the wound up, but all the, it still has to heal. Okay. And that healing is when that healing is misguided or
22:45
When that healing gets stuck in one of those phases of Dr. Navio's three stages of the cell danger response, that's healing. That CDR describes the healing cycle. If you get stuck in that healing cycle, you then have chronic disease. Medicine has paid little attention to this because we are focused on
23:12
Fortunately, you know, we have become hyper focused on, can I find a drug or a single intervention that is going to change somebody? Okay. And that's where all the research money has gone is, and we, because we think like engineers, right?
23:30
And engineers do amazing things. But when it comes to biological systems, they don't always get us where we need to go because they're looking for direct connections that A causes B. And in the body, A causes 100 things and 100 things feedback on A. It's a…
23:57
We learn details in medicine. One of the things I like love about medicine is I learn one little fact and then I take that fact and I try to use it to help somebody, you know, but the reality is that.
24:09
it's like when people take supplements or take these days, everybody's probiotics, you know, we have this probiotic that does that one thing, but it's interacting with a system that's going to do a thousand or a million things. And we just hope that we get the piece that we want out of that. And the other million things that it does kind of,
24:29
it doesn't make enough ripples in the pond to really disturb us, you know, but we don't understand at all how this body works. You know, I mean, look at immunology every week, they're coming up with new, new subclasses of, you know, of cells of T cells, B cells, macrophages. I mean, it's endless. And
24:52
And that's and so but we like to simplify things. So we think simply and we like simple problems. And chronic illness is not a simple problem. And it requires your body to do the healing. And here's the biggest problem. OK, it's a problem of the individual. When when you shoot people with bullets, we all act kind of the same.
25:16
Okay. And the repairing that process, you can do that on, you know, a thousand soldiers and it's going to work probably 990 times, maybe even a thousand out of a thousand. Okay. You're going to get pretty decent results. Now, when that person has to complete the healing. Okay. So you're going to get the, you know, the blood to stop the, you're going to, you know, save the organ, the body, the guy's going to walk out of the hospital. Fine. But then talk to them a year later.
25:46
Out of that thousand people, probably several hundred of them still aren't feeling quite right
25:53
And even with something as simple as a bullet wound, you'll find that they feel differently. You know, they have some of them, it's going to be a little sore. Some of them, the skin is going to be a little abnormal. Some of them are going to have a reduced range of motion, you know, all with the same injury because it depends on how their body has reacted to that. Now, that's a simple thing, a bullet wound.
26:16
relatively. But when you have a more complex interaction, like an infection or toxins, or even a better example, because some of us have no problems dealing with a tremendous amount of toxins. Our liver, we just have the pathways to get rid of a lot of stuff. And other people
26:37
Don't do well at all with them. So it's their biochemical individuality that comes into play. And so you have all these variables. Medicine has gotten less good at dealing with variables because it's cookbook. You go to your, you know, you go to your doctor and they have, they have like, you know,
26:57
six to nine medicines and out of those six to nine really probably only four really different medicines and six different variations on the same drug for a problem high blood pressure you know they've got you know they're they're you know four or five categories with like you know six to ten medicines in each one and they'll pick one and you know you god forbid you have pain you know they
27:20
Again, they have a few classes and you just like work through them. Antidepressants is the same thing, but it's all cookbook. And there's very little thinking about your body involved. And the idea of precision medicine is kind of cool, but it's,
27:39
still not going to answer the whole thing because detail, detail, very large group of things to do. So we need precision medicine. I'm all in favor of that. I think the more details we have, the better it is. But people have to understand there's a gestalt of the human, and that's where the doctor is important. And the doctor used to be so important because the doctors actually knew people
28:07
And that's kind of losing it because the flavor of who you are as a human being has a can have a lot to do with what you need to find health, not just to have the absence of something that's making you sick.
28:26
Not just to make your numbers look better, because that's what medicine is today, is treat the numbers and not that human being in front of you. I'm sorry, we sort of rambled off your subject. No, no, that's very good. Well, this has been a great conversation. How can people find you, maybe your website and social media, find out about your practice as well? Maybe you could tell them.
28:47
Okay, we're just at gordonmedicals.com. I think we probably are on Facebook and Instagram, but I don't pay much attention to social media, I must admit. But that's where we can be found. And, you know, this is the kind of medicine we do. We look at, you know, people talk about root causes, and it's multiple things. You know, I wish there was one root cause when people have had
29:10
become chronically ill. It's multiple. But luckily, you don't have to fix everything because the body will heal itself. Great. Well, thank you so much, Eric, for spending the time with us today. And thanks for all the great work you're doing in this space. Thank you. A pleasure. Pleasure, Robert. And thank you for your work.
29:33
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Edit:2025.04.10
