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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and I am back today with Dr. Sharon Stills to go deep on some things related to fevers and healing in ways you can understand the body on a deeper level to do this better.
She’s an absolute wealth of knowledge. She’s a leading naturopathic medicine doctor, renowned for her holistic and natural approach, and she has over two decades of practicing naturopathic medicine with a focus on root cause solutions to patients of all genders and ages. And she emphasizes the power of natural healing and the importance of understanding and addressing underlying root causes.
She is definitely a wealth of knowledge and like I said in this episode, we talk about fevers and what to know. Why it’s not as simple as just reducing the fever and why this actually can be really problematic over the long term. And from this springboard into a deeper understanding of human health in light of the more European biological medicine perspective, which takes a lot more things into account.
She’s a definite wealth of knowledge. I learned a lot in this episode and I suspect you will as well. So let’s join Dr. Sharon. Dr. Sharon, welcome back. Thank you for being here again.
Sharon: Thank you. Excited still.
Katie: Well, we had a phenomenal first conversation for any of you who missed it all about the importance of the pause in menopause. And we got to go really deep on hormones and a lot of things I did not know about testing and hormone replacement and some really nuanced specifics. So if you missed that episode, I will link to it in the show notes.
It was really, really amazing. And Dr. Sharon, in this episode, I’m hoping we get to touch on several topics. I know you’re a wealth of knowledge on many, many topics, but I feel like some important ones, especially for the parents listening, one being, this might be a new word for some people, but the idea of homotoxicology and the fever response.
It’s seemingly there are a lot of misconceptions of what we do when we encounter a fever, especially in our children. And I would love to deep dive on this and deconstruct some of those myths and leave parents with a more empowering approach. So to jump into this topic, can you explain to us what that word means for one and what’s wrong with the conventional approaches that are sometimes used for fever?
Sharon: So homotoxicology is the work of Dr. Hans Heinrich Reckowig. And so this is work out of Germany. And if you talk to me long enough, you’ll start to hear like everything I do in my clinic. Oh, yeah, I learned that in Germany, I learned that in Switzerland. Because I took it upon myself when I was a naturopathic medical student to realize that what was happening over in Europe with European biological medicine was so far advanced from what we were doing here in the States and so profound. And the doctors that I saw that were getting the greatest results had studied in Europe.
And so I have been to Europe countless times. I have worked with clinics over there. And this is just one of the tools that I have learned from my studies over there and brought back to the states. And so means homotoxicology means homo: human, toxic: toxins, ology: study. So it’s the study of toxins and how they affect humans. And we have two different types of toxins. So we have exogenous, which means outside of us. And those we’re all familiar with, from heavy metals to mycotoxins, to food colorings, to pesticides, to EMFs. All of these are toxins that are coming at us.
But then we also have endogenous toxins. These are waste products, a buildup of CO2, even imbalances in our hormones, enhanced cytokine, which are inflammatory molecule production. So we have both toxins that we create inside ourselves from improper physiology and then we have toxins that are coming at us. And so when I first started practicing 23 years ago, maybe I was naive, but I used to ask patients, let’s see if you’re toxic. Let’s see if there’s toxicity approaching you.
Now it’s sadly, it’s of course you’re toxic. Let’s just see how toxic you are and let’s see if you’re eliminating those toxins and how we can give you a plan to avoid toxins and detox, because it’s something that we all need to be doing actively. So homotoxicology is a six phase sequence of what happens in our body. And so the first sequence is excretion. And so what is excretion? It’s diarrhea, it’s saliva, it’s mucus, it’s phlegm, it’s throwing up, it’s tears. This is our body’s natural mechanism to say… like my granddaughter just the other day was puking her brains out. Poor little thing. She’s five. And I just said to my daughter in law, you know, this is a good thing.
This is her body’s wisdom. Her body obviously came into contact with something it didn’t like and she’s doing what she should be doing. Her body’s innate wisdom is throwing it up. So let’s just let her be. Let’s support her. Same if you have diarrhea. But what do we do? We are a society of like, we don’t want to be uncomfortable. We don’t want to be bothered. We don’t have time for this. And so we shut things down. We take anti-cough medicine, anti-diarrhea. We take something to dry up the mucus. We say, don’t cry: big girls and big boys don’t cry. Suck it up.
We do all of these things instead of just letting our body excrete. And when we excrete, we create health. We create an immune system that says, I matter, I’m important, my job here is important and you’re letting me do it. Now, if we shut down the excretion, maybe we make it go away, but we don’t really make it go away. We just drive it deeper. We think we’re making it go away.
And so the next step after excretion is inflammation. Andinflammation is activating our immune system, our defense system, and it’s fever. And fever is the body’s natural way of saying, there’s some toxins here and I need to burn them off, they don’t belong here. And what do we do?
We take Tylenol. We take an anti-fever because we don’t want anyone to not feel good or it’s uncomfortable. Or if we’re the parent, I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to be sick. I mean, I’ve heard myself say that, right? I mean, I was a single mother raising two kids, put myself through medical school. I did not have time to be sick.So there’s no judgment here, I totally hear you.
But we have to really think about what we’re doing because sometimes a quick fix in the moment leads to a lot of problems down the road. And so if we don’t let our body burn up on its own, we take away the natural response of having fever. And think about it. You know, you as the parent or as your children, no matter how old they are, do they spike a fever? Do you spike a fever? When was the last time you spiked a fever? Patients come to me and, you know, I give them the magic wand question, what would you like to have happen working with me?
And if they tell me they haven’t been sick in a long time or they haven’t had a fever, or they don’t know how to sweat because that’s another important way we excrete. I put that to the top of my list and I’m like, you probably think it’s crazy, but your naturopathic doctor is telling you part of our plan is you have to get sick because it’s really important. We have to excrete, we have to inflame. And we hear a lot about inflammation, and chronic inflammation is not a good thing, but inflammation at the right time is crucial to help. So if we don’t allow fever and we shut it down, then what happens? These toxins that we’re not allowing our body to excrete or to burn off, they get deposited. And where do they get deposited? They get deposited in the extracellular space. So this is… we talk a lot about the cell, but the cells are swimming in soup, let’s say.
So the cells are the meatballs and the extracellular space is the soup. Sorry for any of you vegetarians out there. And so this soup is the extracellular space, and this soup is our internal terrain, our milieu, it’s called Pischinger’s space. It’s the matrix. It is the connective tissue. It is where we communicate with the external.
It’s where we communicate to the internal in the cell, where we communicate to the mitochondria. And this is where truly health begins and ends. If we don’t have a clear extracellular space, our fascia is not free flowing, our lymph is not free flowing, which is what’s excreting toxins. Our pH goes out of balance. We get demineralized. And now we’re starting to clog it up with toxins.
Should I keep going, or do you have any questions?
Katie: Keep going if there’s more. I’m taking lots of notes.
Sharon: Okay. So, we have excretion, we have inflammation, we have deposition. So, because we haven’t allowed ourselves to excrete, because we’ve shut down the fever, now we’re taking these toxins and we’re depositing them, and we’re causing chaos. We’re gunking up our system. We’re still outside the cell.
If we now go further, we go into the next stage, which is called impregnation. Now the toxins are migrating and affecting the cells and the enzymatic activities of the cells are now being affected. And from there, the cells go to the next stage, which is degeneration. And that means the cells are really getting intoxicated.
The cells are getting destroyed. We’re not having good function. Our mitochondria are not working. And lastly, we go to de-differentiation. And now the cell is becoming un-dedifferentiated. And what does that mean? That means neoplasm. That means cancer. And so the number one thing I hear my patients who are dealing with cancer say to me, it’s like clockwork every time it’s about 20, 30 minutes into our initial intake. They go, you know, Dr. Stills, I just got to stop you. I don’t understand why I ended up with cancer because I never get sick. And then I show them this. And I don’t mean to be like this big doomsday fear because it’s not, you know, this is not 100 percent going to happen, right? But this is a possibility and possibilities that by simply shutting down our ability to excrete or inflame, we’re setting the terrain, we’re setting the stage for possible really serious disease down the road.
Katie: Wow. Yeah, that I feel like is such a deeper understanding of fever than most people think. And I get it like the idea to just isolate a symptom is its own thing, versus understanding how connected it is. And I also always love to reframe symptoms as messengers. And in this case, you just explained all the beautiful messages it’s giving and the positive benefits of a fever.
I think that alone is such an important point is to realize like, this is of course your body being on your side, it’s doing this for a reason. And probably even just that knowledge helps parents and even for ourselves to make different choices around what we do around a fever. And as you were talking about the detox pathways, I thought back to when I was kind of in the thick of thyroid stuff and had a lot more going on in my body.
I remember I didn’t sweat very much, which at the time I thought was a good thing and I didn’t spike fevers very much. And what seemingly has shifted for me now, one, thanks to exercise and sauna, but I sweat very easily, especially living in Florida and I do spike fevers, but typically they’re short lived.
If I don’t mess with them, it’s usually like under 24 hours, high fever and then it’s gone and I feel better quickly. So it makes sense that we could be like prolonging the discomfort if we can interrupt our body’s natural responses. And I can only imagine that some parents listening might be saying, yeah, but what about when fevers get dangerous?
What about febrile seizures? What about, what about? And I also know being a mom, it can be really scary when a small child spikes a big fever. So what do parents need to know about in those particular cases? Like, is there ever a time and a place to try to reduce a fever or are there alternative approaches that are more supportive of the process you just explained of what’s going on biologically?
Sharon: Great question. And what are you spiking fevers and sweating? I love it. So yeah, so obviously I’m a doctor, but I’m probably not your doctor listening. So you do need to have a good relationship with the pediatrician. You know, when kids in my practice are sick, it’s like, parents get my cell number because it is scary. And again, it goes back to reframing because we think 102 is a scary high fever. We think 103 is a scary high fever, and it’s not. You know, if we’re getting into the 105, the 106, then yes, there are things you don’t want to let a fever run. Febrile seizures can be scary, of course, but there are things you can be doing with hydrotherapy, with herbs, with homeopathic remedies.
Homeopathic remedies are a blessing for fevers, especially in children who don’t have so many layers of emotional and physical toxins and can really respond to a remedy, whether it be belladonna or their constitutional remedy or aconite or phermphas. There’s lots of different remedies that can be used at different times in a fever. I work with a set of remedies from Europe that are isopathic remedies that help to modulate the terrain. They’re isopathic homeopathic remedies that help modulate the terrain so that the fever can be handled and the body can work through what it needs to work through. Using cloths and damp and washcloths and foot baths and baths and all the things are important.
So I think what’s most important because. In the moment, the parent brain goes off and you’re just in fear, and you just want to help your baby not feel sick. So you have to speak to your pediatrician, you have to create that relationship. This needs to be a conversation before the fever arises. How do you handle fevers, doctor?
How do we partner? What is your plan for, you know, are you a Tylenol at the first sign of 100? And so that you have a plan, so when it happens, you’re ready. And although your sympathetic system is going to want to go into action and be afraid that you can have some parasympathetic tone there and you can remember, okay, fever is okay. This is safe. I know what to watch for. I’m going to start implementing these things. And honestly, people always ask me, more so when my kids were younger, you know, Dr. Stills, what do you do when your kids get sick? Cause they want to know the magic herb I’m using and the magic vitamin. And honestly, the first thing I do, and it speaks to what you just said.
The first thing I do is I lie them down and I watch them for the first 24 to 48 hours and I make sure they’re hydrated. Maybe give some electrolytes, make sure they’re getting as much water in as they can tolerate, and I just watch them, and I let them do their thing. And when I get sick, the first thing I do is I go lie down, and I say, okay, where am I out of alignment? Where am I not honoring my sacred no? What am I doing? Because obviously my body’s saying you got to lie down. You got to take a look at what’s going on in your life. And so and remembering that kids need to get sick. It’s the way their immune system comes on board. It’s like, you know, the immune system is in training.
And I actually use remedies, again from Europe from Germany that help train the immune system for children. It’s like a 1 to 2 year program where they’re taking a capsule 1 to 2 times a week of different bacterias that are A-pathogenic. So it means when you take them in, they don’t cause pathology. They don’t cause an active infection, but your immune system sees them as something that they need to, it needs to deal with. And so it will help your child to grow granulocytes to have neutrophil activity. These are breakdown products of your different parts of your white blood cells. And so it trains the immune system. And sometimes I have to do this with adults because they have not excreted and not inflamed. And so we just, again, have to have a different viewpoint about it and not be so fearful and realize, oh my gosh, this is my child doing what the body is meant to do. This is a win for the immune system.
Katie: Yeah, it seems like even just that mindset shift helps it to be a positive reframe and helps it to not be as scary and stressful as thinking like something is wrong and I need to fix this symptom. And understanding like the body naturally heats up when we are dealing with something internal like you explained. I’m curious, do you think, or is this connected to why we see studies showing benefits from sauna use, for instance, in adults?
Is it also partially because we’re kind of conditioning that heat response?
Sharon: Yeah, I mean, sauna is just a beautiful tool. I think if I had to take like one tool to the desert island with me, that’d be my castor oil packs and my sauna, probably. But sauna definitely helps to heat us up. It’s helping to detox. It’s improving our cardiovascular response. It’s training our immune system. And so I think of In Europe, where we’re not, you know, it’s illegal in the States, but I think of hypothermia. And what we do to patients who have a cancer diagnosis, where we are heating up. And at one of the clinics I work with in Switzerland, they do extreme hyperthermia, where they’re heating the body to like 107, 108. And not to do at home, but that’s actually going after and killing the tumor directly. When our body is getting to 103, 104, we’re not actually killing a tumor. We are just stimulating our immune system. And so I think saunas are a great… I can think of many fond memories of sitting in the sauna in my old practice with my kids and singing rock and roll songs and sweating it out when they weren’t feeling good.
And so yes, and if you don’t have a sauna, can use just good old naturopathic hydrotherapy. And so you can take a hot bath, you can drink some ginger or some yarrow, achillea tea, these are diaphoretics. And you can soak, and then when you get out, you can bundle up and then go to bed and sweat it out.
You can also do wet socks, which is a lovely naturopathic medicine treatment where you soak the little feeties, you get them hot, you pat them dry, you put wet, cold wool socks wrung out over them, covered with dry socks. Again, the sweatshirt, bundle up and go to bed. And it sounds like, why are you putting wet socks on my feet, that sounds like I’m gonna get sick?
But it stimulates the vis, the natural healing powers of the body, and you will wake up with dried socks and you will wake up with everything drained from your throat and your sinuses. And it’s a great treatment and kids kids do really, really well with it.
Katie: I’ve gotten to try that one a couple times with my kids, and I’m amazed. I’m always amazed at how much it works and how quickly. And that’s when parents can feel like we’re actually helping them, they feel better, and we’re not just attacking the fever and not understanding the rest of the response.
And I would love to learn more about the European biological medicine and how that is similar or different from functional medicine. And especially anything you feel like to highlight that people can learn in a mindset shift or in practicality here that we aren’t doing that they seem to have like figured out in a different way. Or just anything practical and useful that you feel like we might miss in the U.S. that they’ve kind of figured out over there.
Sharon: So I think European biological medicine to me just looks at the human body interconnected in all the levels. So we’re looking at informational planes, whether that be through history taking or looking at the tongue or reading the pulse or looking at the iris. But we’re also looking at psychoemotional and constitutional and we’re looking at seasonal. And functional medicine, and I’m not dissing functional medicine because it’s a piece, it’s a slice of the pie of how I practice. I think there’s value in running a stool test and looking at the microbiome or doing a toxicity testing, but I think it’s still too along those allopathic lines.
Like, let’s do a stool test. Oh, you’re low in akkermansia. Let’s give you akkermansia rather than looking broader. Why are you low in akkermansia? What is going on in your terrain? Why is there an imbalance in your microbiome? And I think if we miss that psychoemotional, if we miss the timeline of our traumas and our emotions, we miss a huge piece because it’s integrally related. I just had a patient the other day who was so stressed out. We were dealing with so many issues with her. She left her relationship and I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months. She left her relationship with, it wasn’t that she didn’t love him, she lives in another country. It was causing a lot of stress. She was out of balance. She couldn’t get into a rhythm.
She was always on an airplane. She left her relationship and like half the things we were dealing with, just took care, they just work themselves out. And so we have to… we, are so conditioned that our medicine is going to come in a pill bottle.
Our answer is in a pill bottle. And when patients come see me, they’re like, I don’t want the pharmaceutical pill bottle, I want the natural pill bottle. And that’s definitely a shift in the right direction. But not all medicine comes in a pill bottle. And honestly, the most potent medicines don’t come in a pill bottle. And so we really have to broaden from, Oh, you have high glyphosate and we need to detox that. And you need to eat organic and take some glycine, which is important to the broader picture and what’s going on emotionally, because our emotions are affecting. And if we don’t regulate our nervous system… so a foundation of European biological medicine is our nervous system. We’re constantly doing heart rate variability. I have like four different heart rate variability machines I’m putting in my new clinic because they’re all so fascinating.
But we’re constantly checking the nervous system. How is the sympathetic nervous system responding in relationship to the parasympathetic nervous system? And every, and I don’t say every lightly, but every chronic illness has an overactive sympathetic nervous system and an underactive parasympathetic nervous system. And we need to up regulate the parasympathetic nervous system. We cannot heal if we’re stuck in sympathetic. So in European biological medicine, we’re looking at regulation.
We’re looking at the energetics. We’re looking at bioresonance. We’re looking at the effect of color and sound and chanting and toning and meditation on the body. It’s so funny because everyone is always like, what’s your specialty? And I’ve struggled for so long. I’m like, how can I have a specialty because that goes against everything that naturopathic medicine, European biological medicine represents. Because the knee bone is connected to the hip bone and so it doesn’t matter to me. Do I have time to tell you a real quick story? My very, not my very first patient, my seventh patient, I was brand new, green, like my background, out of naturopathic medical school. Was going to be a pediatrician and into my clinic walked a gentleman who was 68 years old. And he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and told to go get his affairs in order. And he happened to be driving by, I had a billboard on the street that said naturopathic solutions, a center for balanced healing.
So he came in and he said, do you have the solution for me? And I was like, hmmm. I like, I had never even seen a patient dealing with cancer. My whole medical school career I was really focused on pediatrics. And so here’s this live man and his wife and I said, I’m going to be honest, they were my seventh patient. I said, I’m going to be honest.
I’ve never worked with anyone dealing with cancer, but I understand how the body works. I understand homotoxicology. I understand drainage, the need for excretion. I understand the emotional component. And I’m willing to do what I can, I’ll apply that to you, but I make you no guarantees, not that you should ever make guarantees. Anyway, so long story short, he and his cancer ended up going away. He ended up walking his daughter down the aisle, he ended up living another 10 years, he died from a cardio, he had a heart valve issue, it was non related to the cancer, it was something he was born with.
And it taught me a lot. And that’s the message I’d like to leave people with is that the diagnosis is not that important. The human being and all the pieces that make us a human being are what are important and figuring out where the glitches are. Is it on an energetic level? Is it on an emotional level? Is it a biochemical level? Is it below the biochemistry, the bio photons, the energetic information that the cells speak to each other, which is really what informs the biochemistry and the physiology. And so I don’t niche. I niche in people. I niche in people who need some help or who just want to stay healthy and live to 120 or 130 because I truly believe we are designed to do that.
And so European biological medicine goes so far beyond than just looking at the function of the body. It takes into account the mouth. You know when I first started practicing, no one really talked about biological dentistry. And I know biological dentistry has made its way to the states and it’s a lot better known, but it’s still, I think, in a lot of doctors mind is a side course. And to me, it’s one of the first things I do with a patient.
What’s going on with your mouth? If you have metals, they need to be removed properly. If you have root canals, we look in the computerized regulation thermography scan that I do that is looking at regulation of the body through the nervous system. We get a cone beam scan. About 70 to 80 percent of what blocks the field lies in our mouth, whether it’s in cavitations, root canals, periodontal disease, mercury in the mouth, galvanic currency, and so we have to really pay attention to the mouth. That’s another like foundation of European biological medicine.
Katie: Wow, I just learned so much and I have a feeling there’s still much more that I can learn from you and for everyone listening as well. Where can people find you online to keep learning from you, and or if someone wants to work with you, what are the options on that?
Sharon: So my website is drstills. com, although our new clinic, lastingwellnesscenter. com, will be up and running soon, but you can always find me through drstills. com. Our clinic will be in Scottsdale and you can work with me there. You can, I teach classes, I host summits, I do my best to educate. I feel very passionate about teaching and helping people to empower themselves, even if they don’t end up becoming a patient.
There’s so much they can learn so that they can advocate for themselves with their own physicians. But I’ll definitely, in fall of 2025 our new clinic is opening. I feel like I’m giving birth to like sextuplets. It is definitely a birth of more than one child. And so I will be in that clinic hanging out with my son, my eldest son, who also is a physician. So he’ll be practicing side by side with me there, which is super exciting. And, yeah. So Dr. Sharon Stills on social media.
Katie: Well, and I will put those links in the show notes and hopefully we get to have more future conversations because you are an absolute wealth of knowledge. But for today’s episode, thank you so much for your time and for everything that you’ve shared. I know I have learned a lot and I would guess our listeners have as well. So thank you for being here.
Sharon: Oh my God, thank you for having me and thank you for all that you do for the parents out there. It is such an important work that you’re doing.
Katie: Thank you. And thank you as always for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
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