All roads lead back to the gut, as the functional medicine saying goes, and no one knows that better than Dr. Rachel Fresco, the founder Bio-Botanical Research and the creator of Biocidin, the company’s flagship product. Biocidin is a powerful botanical remedy that is used to treat gut infections and, increasingly, a host of other conditions, including Lyme disease, skin infections, gum infections, and colds and flu. Today, Dr. Fitzgerald talks to Dr. Fresco about Biocidin and the company’s other powerfully effective products, including GI Detox and Olivirex.
In this podcast, you’ll hear:
- Wide-ranging uses for Biocidin
- Research on Biocidin’s power in destroying biofilms
- How Biocidin triggers efflux pump inhibition so antimicrobials can be more effective
- Studies on Biocidin in treating Lyme spirochetes
- Biocidin’s adaptogenic effect on SIgA
- When to use liposomal Biocidin vs. Advanced formula biocidin
- Dosing sensitive patients
- Using Biocidin to clear subclinical infections in the nasal cavity
- Dosing and dose timing for GI Detox
- Dosing and dose timing for Olivirex and Proflora 4R
- Using Oliverex to treat SIBO
- How quercetin, a component of Proflora 4R, to address leaky gut
Practitioners Guide:
Dr. Rachel Fresco, L. Ac. is founder and CEO of Bio-Botanical Research, Inc. Since it’s inception in 1989, Dr. Fresco has utilized her background in naturopathy, Chinese medicine and clinical nutrition to create products that have a significant impact on challenging clinical presentations. Addressing concerns relating to infection, as well as the digestive and immune systems, her products have helped thousands of people worldwide.
Podcast Sponsors
Bio-Botanical Research, Inc. was founded in 1987 in response to the needs of physicians addressing opportunistic infections. The following year, Great Smokies Diagnostic Laboratories (now Genova) was sent a sample of Biocidin® by a physician and had it tested for sensitivity against bacteria and yeast species. They found that Biocidin® was “the most powerful inhibitor of pathogenic organisms” that they had tested, and that it was “equal or more effective than traditional therapies”. They began to refer physicians, and soon many practitioners across the country were reporting outstanding clinical results.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Hi everybody. Welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine, and today is no exception. I’m your host, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald. I’m thrilled to be talking with Dr. Rachel Fresco. Rachel is the founder and president of Bio-Botanical Research, and you know Bio-Botanical. You’re using it in practice because you’re likely prescribing Biocidin all the time. This is the woman who actually came up with that product almost 30 years ago, and she’s going to talk to us about how she did. I’m going to ping her on all sorts of other questions and some of the cool research that she’s been doing over at Bio-Botanical.
Anyway. Dr. Fresco has been working for over 30 years to create botanical formulas that are used as nutritional support by health professionals in challenging clinical presentations. Her focus has been on concerns relating to intestinal dysbiosis and systemic infections. University-based research on her formulas includes study on Lyme disease, biofilm and immune response, as well as informal clinical trials on SIBO, h. pylori, dental infections, and candida. Rachel actually wrote a nice blog for us that you can access on the website. In fact, we’ll link it on our show notes so that you can read specifically about some of the research that they’ve been doing.
Many noted authors, physicians, and laboratories recommend the broad base formulations such as Biocidin, Olivirex, and GI Detox that she’s developed with her team of scientists and formulators. Dr. Fresco, welcome to New Frontiers.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Thank you Dr. Kara. I’m excited to be here today and share the latest research we’ve been doing and answer questions that people may have on the usage of these formulas.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Absolutely. So, you know what, I want to just say something kind of interesting. I use your product a lot, in fact, literally twice today I was talking to colleagues in two different forums. In fact, I was on a webinar with Dr. Tom Sult, the ever brilliant Dr. Tom Sult, who talked about using Biocidin in his Lyme patients and I was talking about treating SIBO on a professional forum, and again mentioned using Biocidin. So, it was just funny, knowing that I was going to talk to you today as I was reflecting on our conversation. I was like, “Wow, already I’ve dialogued on Biocidin twice and it’s not even one o’clock here. It’s just an anchor product in the arsenal of functional medicine clinicians and it has been for an extremely long time. I want to know the story on how you put together this formula that really seems to work. It’s pretty cool.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: So I was in acupuncture school and I was just in my last year at Five Branches University here in Santa Cruz, and I was working for a Chinese herb company, Kan. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Kan’s products.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Of the Chinese herb companies, that’s definitely the best products made, I think. Anyway, so I was working there and my job was to help the acupuncturists and other health professionals that called, to understand the usage of the formulas. I was sort of the consultant. A lot of people were calling from San Francisco with AIDS patients. This was back in 1988 or 1989. There were no AIDS drugs then on the market. These patients were having diarrheal diseases and other opportunistic infections and none of the medicines that were in the traditional Chinese formulary were really hitting it.
I had been doing veterinary acupuncture because that’s sort of an interest of mine. I’m a horse trainer, so I was working for a large animal vet and we were doing veterinary acupuncture. He had this herb formula that he was using on these difficult to treat infections in large animals including brucellosis in cows, which I guess is untreatable, and so we had also treated a whole kennel that had leishmania, which is also not treatable. So I knew about this herb formula and because I was an herbalist and interested in the subject, I’m like, “Well, do you think this herb formula can be used for people?” He goes, “Oh yeah, we use it for people all the time.” I said, “Well, can I make this available to other practitioners.” He was like, “Oh yeah, sure.”
So that was the original Biocidin formula and if anybody’s listening who was there back in the old days, it was like this dark purple [inaudible 00:04:46]
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: It tasted horrible, but [inaudible 00:04:56].
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: So one of the doctors in San Francisco, I sent him a sample of that herb formula, and he sent it to Great Smokies Diagnostic Lab.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Now Genova.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Now Genova. So unbeknownst to me, I didn’t know, one day I get a phone call and it’s the owner, the director, Martin Lee, at the time, of Great Smokies and he says, “I don’t know who you are or what this is, but it kills everything.” I’m like, “Well, okay. Is that a good thing?” He’s like, “Well, yeah. We want to put it on our panel.” I didn’t know what it was, you know, the CDSA.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, the Complete Digestive Stool Analysis, so it was the first iteration of the stool test that we all now use in functional medicine.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Right, that was the very beginning of these kinds of tests, right? So, they put it on that panel as a candidate substance and they did 200,000 patient tests over a six year period and it pretty much worked on any yeast or bacteria, in fact was mostly highly sensitive. It seemed to be one of the best candidates.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s extraordinary.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, so because of that, some 30,000 doctors that were using that lab at the time suddenly were seeing that this herb formula could be used, so they were calling me. Pretty much, I had to start a company. I thought I was going to go into private practice. I was waiting for my acupuncture license to come [inaudible 00:06:27]. By the time I actually got my license, I already had so much interest in this formula that I had to pretty much devote my time into working with this. I did do private practice a little bit, like one day a week in the doctor’s office.
That went along for a number of years and then we realized that some of the herbs in the formula were really too harsh, like the sanguinaria, causing nausea. It’s a great herb if you’re working with tumors, but it’s not necessarily the best herb just for GI Dysbiosis. I also wanted to put in some of the essential oil ingredients like the oregano oil and so forth, and I wanted to do a little bit more to support the system, so I played around with the formula and then went back to testing it again to make sure it was still as effective. It was definitely a lot less harsh and by putting it in the glycerin base, now it tasted good so kids could like it. It didn’t hurt the stomach, it was okay if you took it on an empty stomach, so that’s how the new formulation, the advanced we called it, formula started in around the year 2000.
That’s been 18 years that we’ve had that formula. Then from having that formula we thought, “Well why not put it in a throat spray for upper respiratory?” Or later, in the last few, years the idea was, “Why don’t we put it in a liposomal so that we can bypass the digestion and get straight into the bloodstream for things like Lyme.” That’s sort of a needs based, right? You have a problem and you’re just looking for how to solve that problem.
The most recent one that we came up with to use the Biocidin formula in, is the toothpaste. We had heard for years that people were putting the drops of the Biocidin and putting it on their teeth and getting good results and their gums were stopping to bleed. So when a dentist wanted to do a study and we saw the results of that, the before and after slides from the phase contrast microscope were so mind blowing. All the biofilm, all the spirochetes were gone. Just gone. I’m like, “Okay, this is clearly a really good use for this.” So we put the Biocidin in the toothpaste, we call that Dentalcidin, and then we use liposomal form of the Biocidin as a mouth rinse. So I’m going to go ahead and make a Dentalcidin rinse next, taking the liposomal version and just adding some clove and mint and things to make it a little more oral specific.
The dentist who did that study also did DNA analysis of cavitations of root canals where he went into the root canal, debrided it, cleaned it out, pulled a [inaudible 00:09:12], and came back with 35 different pathogens including amoebas and HPV. Can you imagine all that’s up in your root canal?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s extraordinary. Yeah.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: That’s so bad. So he ozenates the area before he closes it up and rinses with the liposomal Biocidin and then has the patient rinse for two months, twice a day, and then come back, open up the area again, go back into the [inaudible 00:09:34] bone and take a sample. We went from 35 pathogens, down to four not so bad ones or sort of normal ones for the mouth, in eight weeks. The next thing I want to do is a University, real trial on this because I feel like this could change the way that periodontal practitioners are working. If they had something like this that could cut through the biofilms and get to these pathogens and prevent people having to get all this painful root planting and you know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: So I try to just solve problems as they arise for clinicians. With the Biocidin being a strong anti-microbial, you definitely want to support other systems. Coming up with good probiotics and things that will help support the immune system and support the adrenals while people are detoxing, but I think one of the most important things that we came up with in the last 10 years was the GI Detox.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well listen before you jump on to that…
Dr. Rachel Fresco: That one is so helpful.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I know it is. Your product design is very creative. The back story is just really cool and inspiring, but before we move on to talking about some of the other offerings that you guys have, just tell me, just talk to me a little bit about some of the additional research you’ve done. You’ve been looking at bio-film, you’ve been looking at Lyme specifically, and then you’ve been doing some clinical stuff. You want to just comment on some of the other ways that you’re using Biocidin?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, in 2013, I met Claudia Marques and she’s sort of the foremost Biofilm researcher, internationally. She was at the University of Binghamton in New York and we got to talking and she was willing to have the University help sponsor research on using the botanicals against biofilms particularly because cystic fibrosis is something that that University is working with and there’s a lot of biofilm issues there. So we sent her the Biocidin formula and she tested it on single pathogen biofilms and multi-pathogen biofilms of both bacteria and yeast. She did things like pseudomonas, and e.coli, klebsiella, candida, and the results were really remarkable. The death curve is so immediate, within 10 minutes, you’d see pretty much all of the biofilms being wiped out. She even could use a fluorescein stain on the biofilms and then video it and you could watch the biofilm being broken up.
I started doing more research on the individual herbs in the formula, and thanks to the internet and PubMed, right, that’s so easy now compared to 30 years ago. Sure enough, so many of the herbs that are in Biocidin have been researched for their ability to inhibit biofilms, either by stopping quorum sensing, or by stopping the adhesion of the biofilms, or by stopping their replication and spreading. One of the most interesting things that came out of those studies was this efflux pump inhibition. When you have a pathogen it will sense an antibiotic or an antimicrobial and it will turn on its efflux pump and just sort of kick it out and that’s why you get drug resistance. What’s interesting about plant medicines is, there’s a whole bunch of categories of plants that do this, they actually inhibit that efflux pump so that now your concentration of your anti-microbial substance, whatever it is, is going to be higher and you’re going to get a better effectiveness. That was really interesting to find out.
After that biofilm study, then we started doing the Lyme research and one of the things that’s important in Lyme is also biofilm. That University, [inaudible 00:13:41], in Finland, did the same kind of biofilm study in addition to looking at the spirochetes and round bodies and so forth and the exact same result, the exact same death curve. That made me feel good because two different universities now have backed up that the botanicals in the Biocidin are doing a good job on biofilms. Then the Lyme study was also interesting because not only were the herbs effective against the spirochetes and these persister round body forms, but they also seemed to have a synergistic effect with certain antibiotics like Ceftriaxone, you could use an eighth of the amount to get the same kill rate. That’s probably because of the efflux pump issue and also the fact that the liposomal Biocidin showed a very high level of intracellular penetration.
There’s a lot going on there. That’s why I think botanical medicine is so interesting because you can go at things from so many different angles at the same time without causing toxicity and without causing a backlash. I think that’s why herbalists, through thousands of years, have always combined things together typically. Right? They don’t look for a single bullet ingredient. In Chinese medicine, you have your minister herbs that support the imperial king herb and then you’ve got other herbs that take things to the channel. I think that’s a smart way to look at how you’re using herb medicine.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: …supporting systems and you have to know that uva ursi is a really good antibacterial herb for bladder infections because it’s a diuretic and it goes to the bladder channel, but you can’t expect that uva ursi is going to necessarily treat a gut infection. You have to know how you’re applying these herbs and where they’re going and then by making synergistic combinations that can do more than one thing, that’s why you’ve got such a broad base of coverage with the Biocidin. You can address a sore throat with it or you can address a vaginal infection.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s great. Thank you for that really nice synopsis. I just wanted to let folks know that we’ve got the Bio-botanical white papers on all the products that we’re going to talk about and we will have those on our show notes page. The Biocidin white paper is a lengthy discussion of all of the botanicals and the evidence behind them and their various mechanisms. You’ll see the research on these compounds is impressive. I think, you guys are starting to kind of put together the body of research on their synergistic interactions as you do these various in vitro studies, but you’re also doing some pretty cool in vivo, some clinical trials. Just talk to me a little bit about those, SIBO, you mentioned the dental infections, but you’re doing something with SIBO, h. pylori, you’re looking at candida.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Right. The SIBO study we did, was kind of interesting. Dr. Danielle Lewis had just graduated from Naturopathic School at Southwest and her primary interest was research too, so she kind of headed this up for us. What we were looking at is, what would happen if we give Biocidin to patients who have tested positive for SIBO, but we’re not going to change their diet, we’re not going to give them any of the other support formulas, we’re just going to see what this one intervention does. In that study, we got a 50% reduction in the breath test, but a 70% to 100% reduction in symptoms, just with that one intervention without changing the diet or other treatment. Then when you add in the other formulas like the Olivirex, which is better for the Methane producers for example, and then you add GI Detox to mop up the toxins and hold them out and help the patients to feel better faster, we got a really, really, really nice program there that seems to be super helpful in SIBO.
The other clinical trial that we did was more of a double blind placebo control trial at the University of Louisiana. That trial was one the effects on the SIgA. We were looking at immune suppressed athletes. These guys would exert so much, these professional football players or Olympic people, and they would be very susceptible to respiratory infections because their SIgA tested to be very suppressed. We would test them before and then after exercise, give them either the Biocidin or the placebo, at 30 minutes and 60 minutes after exertion, and they saw a 66% increase in the SIgA.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s amazing.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, so…
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Was it salivary SIgA, I’m assuming?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, salivary SIgA, so that was interesting. They were using the throat spray version of Biocidin, which is 40% less concentrated than the regular liquid drops, because it’s got alcohol to get it through the sprayer. Even in the 40% dilution, three sprays of throat spray had a significant effect on the Salivary SIgA. When I was talking to our researcher in the Netherlands, Dr. [Erin 00:19:18] Haas, he’s tested over 1,000 patients using Biocidin and what he saw with SIgA in the gut, was that patients that had an overactive SIgA seemed to come into balance and if it was too low, it came up. So, it almost seems like it has an adaptogenic or moderating effect for the SIgA. I would like to do more research on the gut aspect of that, but what we’ve seen so far is very interesting.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So, so interesting. Alright, so let me just back up and talk about dosing and the forms. You talked about using liposomal specifically in Lyme and then the non-liposomal, the “advanced formula,” you’re using it more gut specific.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Right.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I want to know two things. One how you’re dosing Biocidin in general, and I know that we can start very, very low and then we just titrate up based on whatever’s going on and based on the patient tolerance. Talk about dosing and then I want you to just walk through your SIBO protocol. Then we’ll move on to talking about some of the other products.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Okay, great. We have this usage guide that practitioners can get that will go over this so you don’t have to try to remember it, but basically you just start with a very low amount because you don’t know if the person’s going to have a big die-off reaction. You start with maybe one drop or, if somebody’s really strong, you could take a couple of drops and you gradually increase, like you said, per the patient’s tolerance. For some people, they have no problem, they could go up to the full dose in three days and somebody else it could be three weeks or more. I think you just have to have the patient check to see how they’re feeling.
If they get too much die off, then use the GI Detox to help mop up those toxins, take less Biocidin, drink more fluids, and so forth. You don’t want to blow people out of the water with this. Particularly Lyme patients, particularly people who’ve been really, really ill for 20 years. Those people you have to be careful and go slow. Some people, we even will put one drop of Biocidin in a big glass of water and have them take one sip of the water, the really, really sensitive people.
There’s a big range of what can be used there, but then in an acute situation, let’s say I started getting an acute UTI, I would take 30 drops or more a day, or the liposomal, I might take two pumps, three or four times a day, along with two capsules of Olivirex every few hours that day, if I started to get an acute infection. You know how everybody’s had that flu that’s been going around. Here at the office a lot of people were out sick and I was exposed a lot. A couple of times I started to get a fever and I started to feel super tired and that’s what I did, I just took a massive quantity of Biocidin and Olivirex, went to bed, took the other support things like extra D and Zinc and was fine. I never came down with the full blown flu this year, so that was good.
So you can use them acutely, but in sensitive patients that have long-term problems, it’s a slow steady process that might take three months or six months or more for somebody who’s been sick for 20 years.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, so folks, we will absolutely have the link to the usage guide on the show notes page. When are you using the advanced formula versus liposomal? Just give me the lowdown on the different…
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Okay, so the theory is that the liposomal formula, because it’s going to go directly into the bloodstream from the oral cavity, might be more useful in situations where you’ve got an infection outside the gut. If you had a lung infection or a sinus infection or a bladder infection or prostatitis or anything like that, or somebody with a skin infection, right? It might be better to use the liposomal. You can use it topically as well.
I did an experiment because we really haven’t done a formalized study to know, “Will the liposomal work as well in the gut, too?” So I came back from Peru and I had picked up some kind of parasite. I had all the symptoms and I’m like, “Okay, here we go.” So I decided to take a high dose of liposomal Biocidin and the GI Detox for five days and see what would happen. All my symptoms were gone and I got a stool analysis and it was clear. I think that the liposomal one is getting into the gut, however, we just don’t have enough numbers of lab tests that I can look at from a patient going, “This patient only used the liposomal and look, their GI klebsiella is all gone.”
I just think either of them are going to work well. They both test well on biofilms, they both test well for all the pathogens. I’d say the liposomal costs more for the patient. We know that the liquid is doing well on its own for a gut infection, so why do they need to spend more money, but if you think they may have systemic issues too, then maybe the liposomal is fine for everything.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I have to say that I use…
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah. What were you saying?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Go ahead, finish that.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: No I was going to say, how are you using it?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, that’s what I was going … I use advanced formula all the time. I really haven’t used liposomal, although I am, just based on our conversation. Interestingly, when I was on a webinar this morning with Tom Sult, he and his Lyme patients, he’s using liposomal specifically, probably because of the backstory you’re giving. I use advanced formula all the time. I do tend to think about Biocidin for gut specific stuff, although it’s clear to me that the botanicals, being a naturopathic physician by training and having some background in botanical medicine, it’s obvious that we can use these systemically, but I just tend to think about it more gut centric.
The cool thing is, I use it in kids all the time. Because we can drop dose it, you just can go very low and slow and do it safely with really pretty much anybody. In fact, are you actually suggesting that it’s okay to use during pregnancy and breastfeeding?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: No. Breastfeeding yes, pregnancy no. If you look at some of the herbs in the formula like Goldenseal, those are contraindicated in pregnancy in the medical text. If I was pregnant, would I use this instead of antibiotics, maybe for myself, but you can’t recommend that for a patient because you’ve got literature saying that, that’s contraindicated.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Absolutely.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: You have a liability issue there, so I would say no we don’t recommend it at all during pregnancy. We do say it’s fine during breastfeeding. We’ve even given the liquid Biocidin to just born babies that were born with thrush, and it’s worked beautifully. You can just take one drop and swipe it around their mouth or put it on the nipple before they breastfeed. Women who’ve had breast infections like that on the nipple, it’s worked for. It’s kind of like the Windex in My Greek Wedding. If you have an infection someplace, I’ve had people tell me that they’ve had MRSA on the skin and that they were told that they had to go on a PICC line of antibiotics and the woman who told me this was the head of the SCD Lifestyle. Do you know those people?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: She’s like, “I have been working for years on my gut and the last thing I want to do is go on a PICC line of antibiotics right now.” I’m like, “Well, try this and if it doesn’t work in three days then consider what your options are going to be.” So she took the liposomal orally for systemic application and she put it on topically on the lesions and it was gone.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s really neat.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: We’ve seen that test, too, in the nasal swabs where people come back with MRSA or MARCoNs. You can take the Biocidin, either the liquid or the liposomal, you can put it in a saline solution, and just spray it right up the nose. We have a kit for the practitioners, it’s not on our price list, but you have to ask for it. We have a kit where you get the little buffered saline packets and a little nasal spray bottle and then the directions. You just have the patient spray two or three times a day and it’s been amazing.
One ENT doctor, I was lecturing in Ft. Lauderdale a few years ago and this ENT doctor stood up and he raised his hand, I didn’t know him, and he goes, “You don’t know me because I get your products through on of the distributors like Emerson, but I just want to tell you that I’ve been doing this nasal application of the Biocidin in my practice and I’ve cut down on these surgeries by 30% to 50%.”
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Isn’t that incredible?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Just by treating the biofilm because those biofilms get up in the sinus cavities and they’re just hard to treat. So using the botanicals is a really good way to go for cleaning up these things. These people also who have chronic mold issues, a lot of times these people have subclinical infections of the sinus cavity so it’s a good place to think about cleaning.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Absolutely. Nice pearl. We can get the intranasal kits if we ask for them. I didn’t know that, so I’m…
Dr. Rachel Fresco: You can also just go to the drug store and buy any saline nasal spray that you could unscrew the top. You could also use the colloidal silver nasal spray or the xylitol nasal spray. Any of those that you can unscrew the top and you just put 10 or 12 drops of the liquid Biocidin in there, shake it up, and you’re good to go.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, alright. Terrific. That’s a nice pearl. Let’s talk about your other products. You’ve mentioned GI Detox. Give us the lowdown on what it is, how you’re using it, why you developed it. Give me the background.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: One of the things that was challenging for patients was die off when you’re using Biocidin, especially if you have your gut ridden with pathogens. So I wanted to use something to mop up the toxins but I didn’t want to use bentonite clay because it’s congesting. I found this clay called pyrophyllite, it’s from an underground source near Crater Lake, Oregon and the pyrophyllite clay has a very interesting structure. It’s 10 times more absorptive than zeolite. It’s got 60% silica content, so in and of itself it heals the gut. The most impressive thing about it was that the University of Arizona had tested it and it kills gram negative bacteria and their endotoxins and that’s the very LPS thing that causes the systemic inflammation that we’re going after.
By using the Biocidin to break the biofilms and kill off the pathogens and then coming back with this GI Detox to mop up those endotoxins before they get reabsorbed in the hepatic portal, then patients are feeling so much better, so much faster. Because the pyrophyllite is water soluble, it doesn’t clump up, it doesn’t cause as much congestion for people as other clays and then we added a little bit of the activated charcoal in there, too.
It’s a super simple formula. You could use it if you get food poisoning, you could use it if you just ate something or drank something that just didn’t agree with you, you could use it for mycotoxin mop up, and I’m sure it’s helping with metals because it’s picking up anything. The thing to remember about products like that is that they pick up everything, so you want to take them on an empty stomach, away from other supplements, away from other medications.
We kind of have a routine with the Biocidin. If you take the Biocidin and the Olivirex and the Biotonic, you can take all of those together a half and hour before meals. Then in between meals, on an empty stomach, you can use the GI Detox and then the Proflora 4R, the new probiotic, you can take that anytime, but I find it convenient to do that at bedtime. If you’re going to take other, regular, lactobacillus type probiotics, you can take it with that one at bedtime. Then you’ve got it sequenced out throughout the day where it’s pretty convenient for the patient.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Talk to me about how you dose the GI Detox.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: I like to start people with one capsule, twice a day between meals, and then maybe go up to two capsules. That seems good. The other times I’ll use it like if I get to a hotel that’s moldy and I’ll start feeling bad because I’m mold sensitive, I’ll just take two immediately to help stop the mycotoxin issue. I think that it’s a pretty safe formula. I’ve used it on my animals, it’s just the clay and charcoal. I’ve taken it out of the capsule and used it as a poultice.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: It’s just clay and charcoal, you know? It’s really safe. You could probably even take more than two capsules, but I haven’t found that I’ve needed to except in the case where I had food poisoning. Then I’m taking two capsules every few hours.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay great. Let’s talk about the Olivirex. Just give me a little background on what that is and how you’re using it.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: It kind of was something I developed for myself. I had some viral issues from who knows where we get these things. I know that people in my age group were all exposed to a simian cytomegalovirus that was in the Polio vaccine. That simian cytomegalovirus exposure was over a 10 year period of anybody that got vaccinated during those 1960s to early 1970s. My lab shows some kind of chronic viral issue, so I’m looking at, “Okay, what’s antiviral? Olive leaf’s antiviral, let’s find some of that.” I started using different companies’ products, and I was just a little bit disappointed. When I started doing research into the ingredients, I found out there’s a lot of variability in the potency of the olive leaf.
The pharmaceutical company that we get a lot of the things for Biocidin from, they have one that is 22% to 24% oleuropein from Spain and it’s organic. When I got a sample of that, I immediately noticed how much stronger it was. I thought, “This is good. Maybe we’ll put this together with some support herbs for the drainage pathways for the liver and kidneys and a little bit of support for the immune system and that will be a nice balance to go with the Biocidin when you’re focusing on viral complaints.” The Biocidin is also antiviral. It definitely has an antiviral effect, but putting the two together seems to really work well.
Then it was through the SIBO research that we found out that the Olivirex seemed to have a bigger affinity for the methane producing bacteria, so that’s why it’s in our SIBO protocol. I’d say, “When do you use the Olivirex?” Anytime you either have a really severe infection that you just want to throw the kitchen sink of antimicrobials at it, because it’s antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, just like Biocidin. You’re doubling up on your support using those two together in any kind of severe difficult infection. I’m talking about where we’re had people with c difficile and they’ve already failed four courses of Ansamycin. So, we’re going to throw the kitchen sink at them on these antimicrobials and we’re going to give a high dose of it.
Or, like we were talking about…
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What is that? Just tell me what that dosing is for c. diff.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: For c. diff, this particular patient, she had failed the four courses of Vanco, she was 26 years old, she had severe diarrhea, her mother was afraid she was going to die. She happened to be, her mother was the sister of a doctor who orders from us, so the doctor called us and was like, “Hey, what have you done with c. diff?” So we said, “Let’s try this. Let’s put her on 30 drops a day of the Biocidin and two capsules of Olivirex three times a day and two capsules of GI Detox twice a day and the Probiotic, let’s just put her on,” what we call the comprehensive cleansing program, “Let’s just put her on that program and let’s see what happens after four to six weeks.” Within three weeks the diarrhea stopped and at six weeks she went back and got tested and the test was negative for the c. diff. She sent me the results, before and after labs, and then we tested her at six months and at one year because we wanted to see was this going to hold, the result, because the spores in c. diff, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: You can get relapses. So, yep it worked. We can’t make any claims and say this is always going to work on every case of c. diff, but Kurt Woeller who does a lot of work with Great Plains Labs, he has a lot of children who have c. diff in his practice, so he sent me some before and after labs showing a similar thing where a child had failed, in this case it was a different antibiotic and then he put them on this regime at a children’s does, and indeed, within eight weeks, the marker, the HPHPA marker, was down to normal. So, I’d say these things are … At least you can’t hurt anybody with them, right? You can hope they’re going to work, you’re doing something that’s non-toxic and hopefully you’re going to see the result there in the labs. I’d say mostly we do. Do you do a lot of the before and after testing in your clinic?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah absolutely. Particularly with breath tests we’ll see a favorable outcome. I lean more heavily on clinical, so I do before and after testing, but I don’t do it as religiously as I’m paying attention to how people are actually feeling.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Some people can’t afford it too. The patients don’t want to spend the money on another test, they’d rather just buy three months of Biocidin, you know?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: If they have a choice, they’re just going to want to go for treatment.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I do tend to follow up with breath tests. Actually I do retest stool, but I don’t do it as quickly as I’m doing breath test follow ups. Yes, without question I’ve seen good laboratory outcome, but I think far and away, what I would say is, just clinically people respond, hence it being this workhorse formula in my practice. Listen, I just wanted to circle back to a comment you made about safety. Have you ever seen elevated liver function tests?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Never. In fact, we had AIDS patients who were on these for years at high doses and never saw an elevation in their liver. Other patients too, a lot of the autistic children, they’ll do a course of Biocidin, but then they’ll stay on a maintenance, sometimes forever because these kids are just so susceptible to GI issues, maybe it’s because of the mercury, I’m not sure why their immune systems are very compromised, but there’s never been. You’ve got liver support things in there. You’ve got Milk Thistle, you know? So there shouldn’t. It should be helping those systems to function better.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I just wanted to clarify, when you talk about 30 drops a day, you’re talking about 10 drops three times a day or…
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Right.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: That’s what I would do. I’ve gone up higher than that. I got bit by a tick one time and I woke up and this tick is embedded in my arm and I was just panicked. I took the tick out and drove it up to IGeneX to get tested, but it was going to take three weeks to get the results back on that tick. Santa Cruz County is like Russian Roulette, 50% of the ticks are infected. It’s no joke if you get bit by a tick. I was taking way more than that of Biocidin and Olivirex and I made a poultice out of it, with the GI Detox on the bite, and I guess I’m in fairly good shape. I can tolerate four pumps of liposomal Biocidin at a time, three times a day and that’s fine for me. It might knock somebody else under the table. I don’t hesitate to go up higher if I think it’s necessary. I did get one parent who said that their four year old, with the strep, the PANDAS, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Rachel Fresco: This kid was so violent, he had bitten the mom, the child was sent home from kindergarten not allowed to come back because of violent behavior. The mother tried giving the regular dose of Biocidin and it helped a little bit. She goes, “If this helped a little bit, maybe it will work better.” She was giving the kid like a dropperful several times a day.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Guess what? The behavior stopped. She wrote a letter to us and she said she would rather sell her body than ever be out of Biocidin. I assured her that would never be necessary, that we would support her. It was good to know that in that one case of that kid, they had to take a really high dose. I think in the short term you can do that and there’s no problem with safety.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Isn’t that interesting. That’s about 60 drops I would imagine, in a dropperful, right?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: No, no it’s like 15.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh it’s 15 in a full dropperful?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Oh, oh.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: If you just squeeze it and let it go up, it goes up about a third of the way up the dropper.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And that’s 15 drops?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah that’s 15 drops. So there you go.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Alright, let’s talk about this pretty cool probiotic, the Proflora 4R. Talk to me about the ingredients, the design, why you came up with it, it’s kind of creative.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah. We used to have a product called Proflora. It was a supernatant, it was a liquid formula, and it worked beautifully. I really liked that formula, but the company that was manufacturing it for us, couldn’t provide us with a level of testing that would make it pass the current GMP standards. It was a small mom-and-pop operation, they just couldn’t do it. So we had to discontinue that. I kept looking like, “I don’t want to have another ‘me too’ probiotic because you can get those anywhere. There’s lots of good ones on the market, why do we need to have one?” Then when I started looking at the spore forming strains and the immune modulation of those and that they produce natural antibacterial substances themselves, the bacteriocins, I was like, “Oh these spores are very interesting.”
I was talking to Tom at MegaSpore, Tom Bayne is the owner, about my interest in these and he said they could license us some of their strains. We looked at what else would your dream probiotic do and we’re like, “Well, it would be great if it could close tight junctions.” There’s research that indicates that 100 milligrams of Quercetin will help stop leaky gut as well as stopping the histamine response that causes a lot of problems for people with SIBO and so forth. A lot of people complain that they need more motility and strata for the good flora, so we thought how about Marshmallow Root, soothing to gut lining, providing some of that fiber as well as Aloe Vera extract, another one that’s going to heal and soothe the gut lining and help with motility.
We found a Quercetin that’s grown in Brazil and it’s sustainably grown without pesticides and it’s patented form called QU995 and the research on this patented form of Quercetin shows 170 times the bioavailability as your standard Quercetin, which by the way a lot of comes from China and places that I prefer to not buy ingredients that are not really tested. In fact, even the Chinese herbs we have in the Biotonic, we get three inches of documentation on testing for those and they’re all organically grown. So this Quercetin seemed like a really big winner and we experimented putting this formula together and it works so beautifully. So, you only have to take one a day, I take one at night, and it’s really, really helping, I think, not have a negative reaction to probiotics that some people would get with bloating and gas and so forth.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You’re taking it at night, why?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: It’s just convenient. You could take this with the Biocidin because the Biocidin doesn’t kill it, so we actually did a test where we took these spores and we put them in the Biocidin and they were still viable when grown out. So Biocidin doesn’t kill the spores, I think nothing kills the spores. That’s the good thing about the spores, right? You don’t have to refrigerate them, antibiotics don’t kill them, so you could take it any time, but I just found it convenient to take it at night because, if you’re using Olivirex, the Olive Leaf might be a little harder on the Commensal bacteria than the Biocidin is. I found it nice to just have your gut at night be able to do its thing in building up the beneficials. If you’re taking a lactobacillus type, you could take it at the same time. It will help those to work better and implant and everything. That’s just my little routine and it’s easier.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So I’m assuming, since you can take it pretty much anytime and with the Biocidin, one could take it with food, without food?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yes, it really doesn’t seem to matter.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: If they’re on antibiotics and using this as adjunct supportive therapy, they could take it concurrently, or do you space it…
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yep.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, cool.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: That’s the beauty of that one. It’s very easy to use, it seems very effective, there’s a ton of research on the spores, and then with this patented Quercetin, I mean even if you just have a cold or flu, having that kind of strong Quercetin in your system could really help you not feel so lousy, right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Rachel Fresco: With the histamine response to the virus. I think it’s a good everyday supplement for anyone. I like this Proflora a lot.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I just want to let folks again know that we’ll put the white paper up on the site and you can read the various mechanisms of action with the spore formers and see her citations. It’s actually a really nice juicy white paper. Okay, Dr. Fresco, we’re heading home here at the end of our time. If some of the practitioners who are listening are going to be new to your product line, where do they get started? What do you want to tell them?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: We have a lot of resources for practitioners in the way of education. Angela, who’s the director of education here, Angela Chilcott, she does individualized trainings with the doctors. You schedule with her to set one up and you can pick a good time and do a half and hour to an hour training. We also have recordings of the training available that we can send and we have an educational website that our European connection there in the Netherlands, Dr. Haas, has and we are able to put more clinical information on that site because in the Netherlands they don’t have the restrictions that you have in the United States in terms of medical research on botanicals.
We have that website that we can direct people to and that on that website, he also has all of our past webinars that you can watch live anytime. So Dr. Jill Carnahan is on there, Dr. Lynch, there’s a lot of people who’ve done webinars with us that have great information. So we have that as well. You just basically send us an email at info@biocidin.com, say that you’re new to our products and you want to get started and from there we’ll send you all the links and information you need.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Perfect. So we will absolutely have as much content as we possibly can on our show notes and we’ll link over to you guys and then clinicians can go directly to Biocidin and speak to the tech staff there and get access to the website. I don’t think I can put the Netherlands website link up on the show.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: No, that’s something that we give out to doctors that we have vetted that they are licensed practitioners. Not something I want to say because I don’t know if there’s non-practitioners who listen to this podcast, but we really rely on the health professionals to help people with these formulas. [inaudible 00:48:21] We have a referral list of people who do Skype appointments and online appointments to assist you. We do not recommend that you ever buy these things on Amazon. Our doctors have signed something that says that they will not put them on Amazon. Unscrupulous individuals sometimes do, or counter fitters will put product on Amazon or expired product as we have found, on Amazon. So it’s not worth it when you’re playing with your health. You want to get the product directly from the practitioner or from one of the reputable distributors like Natural Partners, or Emerson, or Fullscript, that get the products from us directly. You definitely want to pay attention to that. Then [inaudible 00:49:04].
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I just want to say, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you today. You’re a fount of information on the science behind it and the mechanisms and it’s just been really juicy and I appreciate that you’ve been headlong into research globally on what these are doing in vitro and in vivo and so, just thank you so much for joining me today on New Frontiers.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure. I hope next year we’ll do it again.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes, absolutely. We shall. I look forward to seeing what new products you guys come up with and also some of the new research that you start publishing.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Definitely, definitely. Have a great rest of the day.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Thank you.