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Jill Brook: Hello, fellow POTS patients, and lovely people who care about POTS patients. I'm Jill Brook, your hyper adrenergic host, and today we have an update with Brianne Dressen who first spoke to us in episode 206. She is the founder and co-chair of REACT19, a nonprofit providing science-based support for people suffering from COVID-19 vaccine injuries. Brianne has testified before Congressional committees, she has met with top NIH scientists, been interviewed on national news programs, had an award-winning documentary film made about her. She's been the subject of a book. She's collaborated with top experts to get research published.

She has presented at the recent Dysautonomia International conference and probably more that I don't even know about. She has an extraordinary story, some of which we covered previously, but she continues to help bring support for people with life altering [00:01:00] injuries after the COVID vaccine. And so today we're gonna hear some updates on that and hopefully bring some hope to patients in this space, hearing about some of the progress. So, Brianne, thank you so much for being here today.

Brianne Dressen: Oh, thanks for having me back, Jill.

Jill Brook: So I thought maybe we should start by reminding people that you are first and foremost a dysautonomia patient, right? Like you did not have a life plan for this type of a leadership role. You were kind of thrown into it because there was such a need and unfortunately nobody else was stepping up.

Brianne Dressen: Definitely. I, you know, first and foremost, I'm a patient and I deal with, you know, POTS, dysautonomia every single day. It's something that is, you know, a huge curve ball, was not planned at all. Just like everybody else, just came outta left field. And, but it's also opened my eyes to an incredible group of [00:02:00] people like me and, and other patients that are really in need and are being sorely neglected and overlooked in the medical establishment, research, you know, everything. So, yeah. So because of that, we started advocating. And so I, I call myself an accidental advocate because it's not something that was who I was before this. I was just a everyday mom of two young kids, preschool teacher, spent my weekends hiking and skiing, and just, you know, living life in the outdoors and very normal, typical life.

And that all changed very rapidly. But I'm also one of those people that, you know, I, I couldn't look my kids in the face. I couldn't look at myself in the face had I not done everything I could to highlight those things that are broken and that need improvement. And [00:03:00] patient care for complex conditions like POTS and dysautonomia, that's at the top of the list.

Jill Brook: Yeah. Yeah. And I know that, that you have some added challenges because people want to call you an anti-vaxxer or they don't want to hear the story because they worry that it might promote vaccine hesitancy. And so you've had like all these added challenges on top of just the normal, really difficult, complex patient challenges.

And you have risen to the occasion. I just don't know how you do it, but how, how many patients do you represent now at REACT19? And I know REACT19 is getting bigger. I saw that the famous Dr. Been joined you. Can you talk about your organization? Maybe how did it start and what is it now?

Brianne Dressen: Yeah, so we we're a 501c3 registered nonprofit. You know, we're, we're largely a volunteer run organization 'cause we want the financial, you know, donations that come in [00:04:00] to go back to the patients as much as possible. So there's 36,000 people that are registered here in the United States that are all claiming that they have serious adverse events to the COVID vaccines. The vast majority of them are dealing with autonomic dysfunction, and it's, it's very common. It's not unusual. It's very common with, with our membership. The majority of our membership are female, 75 to 80% female. And most are younger, childbearing

age is the the demographic. But we do represent kids that now have POTS and dysautonomia, tethered cord, EDS. I mean, all of these things that are, you know, strong comorbidities. And you know, and we also have, you know, older men, older women. We have partnership with over 20 other organizations globally that are all founded by [00:05:00] people just like me, that are adults that were harmed by the COVID vaccines, trying to advocate for people that are also harmed by the, by the vaccines. And we do understand that long COVID is, is very real. We've never been COVID deniers. I know that when people don't know who we are and they hear that we're talking about vaccine harms, they think that we're COVID deniers and anti maskers and were anti-vaxxers and dah, dah, dah.

And it's like, no, like I got my vaccine in the clinical trial to try to help us all get out of the pandemic, 'cause I understood how serious COVID was and still is. And we still move forward with that reverence and humility, knowing not just that COVID itself is something that we need to take seriously, but also that serious side effects from the vaccines is also something that we need to take seriously.

So, yeah, so we have been working for the last several years to bring [00:06:00] fiscal you know, support for people. So we've provided $1.25 million in medical expense grants for people that are suffering. And anyone that's dealing with a complex condition can relate to the substantial financial burden that happens with with this type of condition.

And there's a lot of us that have sunk our life savings into anything and everything across the globe. Just trying to get some kind of measure of our lives back. And we've been able to put together a small program for people to be able to apply to get a little bit of reimbursement for the medical expenses.

The grants are between six and $10,000, and so anyone that believes that they, or if they have it in their medical record that they suffered a COVID vaccine adverse event, they can apply for reimbursed medical expenses that they've already paid for, or if they wanna go try [00:07:00] something that's pretty expensive, that there's no way that they're gonna be able to afford it, like, you know, a, a set of HBOT treatments or trying to get your doctor to approve IVIg, but you have to go to a specialist that is out of your price range. We can provide, medical grants that can help with that. And so of course just being able to increase people's options and being able to get treatments has made a substantial difference for people.

So that's, financially that's what we do. And that's kind of turned into the cornerstone of what our organization does. We also have a, a provider network, which has over 600 providers on it nationwide. And these are just doctors that have committed to not gaslight the patients. And you know, it doesn't mean that they have the cure, but I think just being able to get, you know, patients with providers that are willing to work with them, listen to them, understand what's going on, collaborate, [00:08:00] right, and 'cause this is much more of a partnership between patients and providers instead of just showing up in an office and expecting the provider to like fix us.

I don't know anyone that that happens to. Like, we go in with our research and we go, hey, have you seen this? Have you heard about this? You know, or the doctor will be like, hey, I, I found out about this from another patient. Do you wanna try it? Those are the types of doctors that really are on the cutting edge.

These are not the doctors that are sitting up in these, you know, well-established institutions behind all of these committees and boards and everything else. This is kind of, it's a little bit of guerilla warfare for all of us, right? And the patients are gonna be the ones that figure this stuff out way faster than anyone else, right?

And, and that's why it's good for us to collaborate with our providers that are, that are flexible in that way, but also with each other as well. So, but in the medical provider network, we also started a medical [00:09:00] board. And the medical board has an advisory role, right? So we have Dr. Mobeen Syed. He's obviously famous on YouTube.

If anyone hasn't looked up his videos, highly suggest it. They're very informative and he does it in a way that keeps you engaged and, and makes you want to learn more. So he's, he's come on board to direct the entire rest of our board, which has neurologists, we have immunologists, we have a radiologist on there, and of course a couple pediatric providers and, and a couple of others.

So, anyway, so they've come together to address and try to come up with the emerging research on long COVID as well as COVID vaccine injury because there's so many parallels there between the two, but there is a little bit of a difference. So he's working on several webinars on behalf of REACT19 for educating our patient group.

And, [00:10:00] and then we also have our support, like our emotional support groups. So we have, you know, support groups on Facebook, just like most other, you know, patient groups do. And we just launched this smaller, more focused emotional support system, which is like little groups of like 10 people, 10 to 12, and they get together on these Teams or Zooms every week and they just get to connect with each other.

And a lot of us are stuck in our homes, you know, for a long time, if not full time. And it's really challenging for us to just be able to get out and see other human faces and to be able to connect. But the reality is, is connecting human to human is such a vital piece to our healing, you know, and so we've done these little support groups for about a year and a half.

I was in the very first pilot and [00:11:00] I loved it. I still am very close with everybody that I went through that pilot with, and yeah, so I have my little support group on my own too because of this program. So that's a few of the, the things, at least specific to the organization that we've got going on.

Jill Brook: Wow, that's amazing. And now your name is also on at least one research article that I've seen and maybe more. And so I don't know if that is a REACT19 thing or a Brianne Dressen thing, but you have been helping with research to help kind of figure out what's going on. Do you wanna talk about that?

Brianne Dressen: Research is another big pillar of what we do. So through advocating, through REACT19 and also as a patient I've connected with Yale and Akiko Iwasaki and Harlan Krumholz at Yale. They have a study, it's called the LISTEN Study, and they brought in and studied long COVID patients as well as a subset of vaccine [00:12:00] injury patients, COVID vaccine injury patients.

And there's been three papers that have been released now. The first one was just like a general overview of post vaccination syndrome and what they were seeing, what the data was that they were collecting. It's POTS and dysautonomia and you know, all of these other horrible things that need to be recognized.

And then the second paper was the most controversial. And that paper had to do with what they found in some of the blood samples that they processed. So they, in some of the people that they collected blood from, they found lingering spike protein. These are people that had to prove that they had never had COVID before 'cause they really wanted to see, okay, what specifically is the vaccine doing? Right? And so the immunology research department at Yale is one of the best in the world. And so their immunophenotyping they did is, [00:13:00] you know, it needs to be replicated. All research needs to be questioned. It needs to be replicated. It needs to be expanded for us to better understand it. But the initial findings are a little, you know, concerning. And then the, the third paper that we just released, it was last week, and it has to do with comparing the data sets from the long COVID group as far as symptoms reported, as well as the post vaccine group.

And there is a, according to the research, there is a symptom signature between the two. There's a significant overlap of the, you know, 60 plus symptoms, right? But there are a few symptoms that are more likely to be reported in the long COVID group versus the post vaccination group. The post vaccine syndrome group are more likely to report with neuropathy, burning, tingling, numbness, you know, which is not something anybody wants.

Long COVID, of course, adversely [00:14:00] is going to be more likely to report brain fog, smell and taste issues, issues with the lungs. Which, that all makes a lot of sense to me too. So, yeah, so research has been really important for us and we've been trying to encourage other researchers to step into this, start researching it.

We've awarded two research grants that we're waiting for papers to come out on those.

Jill Brook: Oh, wonderful. Is it hard to find researchers who want to study something so controversial?

Brianne Dressen: Very much so. And even the tops at Yale can't get their, their really good quality research published. There's just a lot of taboo there. You can't, and I don't say this lightly, but you cannot touch the topic of vaccine injury in an environment like this, in a research environment or, you know, in government worlds without having some kind of repercussion come back to you. Nobody touches this topic and [00:15:00] walks away unscathed.

It's really unfortunate because I think it's the only condition where it's that severe an affront. POTS is very controversial as well. Over the years it's, it's, it's starting to become more and more accepted. But Lyme, you know, is a similar condition that people really have a hard time with accepting that that could be a real thing.

Right. And Lyme communities have been fighting for recognition for 40 years. So we've got a really long road ahead of us, I think. I don't think any of that culturally is shifting quick enough to be able to get proper recognition soon enough. But I do think that that's probably the single most important thing that we as a society can be doing to just bring the emotionally charged temperature down on the topic so we can have a rational conversation about this.

Kind of like if you had a peanut allergy and you say, oh, [00:16:00] well I can't have peanuts 'cause you know, it, it did me dirty once. Nobody gets all emotional and tells you to be careful about talking about your peanut allergy, you know? So I do think that we as humans can do better.

Jill Brook: Yeah. And I think that in the past did REACT19 have some efforts in lobbying Washington to help bring about some awareness and to also maybe look at the government compensation program that already was in place to help people who, who had physicians who vouched that they had had a vaccine injury.

And can I ask for an update on what happened with that?

Brianne Dressen: We've, we've tried to maintain a steady presence in Washington since the beginning. It's really strange going from being a preschool teacher, not ruffling any feathers [00:17:00] ever, to the second you show up there's people that are like on alert just because of your presence. So, but it's the compensation program for COVID vaccines specifically is a major failure.

So, for example, if you get hit by a car or if you have that reaction, you know, to a peanut you have a right to make a claim in court, right? You have a right to say if you find evidence of an issue that was known that would cause you harm, you have a right to sue. It's, it's actually a constitutional right that we all have as American citizens.

There's a law called the PREP Act that was passed in 2005. And it was designed to help emergency personnel move faster during an emergency and not be bound by the typical, like massive [00:18:00] regulations that slow everything down in government. In there, there was a, a clause put in that if there is new drugs put in like a vaccine during an emergency and they're implemented and people need to get it, that those manufacturers are absolved from all liability.

And so what that has done is that has caused every single person that's been harmed by the COVID vaccine, which if you look in the VAERS system, there's been as many people that have reported COVID vaccine injuries, just as many people that have reported just from the COVID vaccine, as there have been in all of the vaccines that have been implemented in the United States combined. It's still outpacing the entire history of the vaccine injury program in the United States, just this one vaccine. That's the vaccine, ironically, that has full manufacturer protection. So that means [00:19:00] that the people that are harmed are completely on their own with burning, tingling, you know, POTS, MCAS, all of the things. And it's, it's pretty tragic to see, which is why we started the care fund.

That was the whole premise of, of starting the medical grant program, was to kind of help fill that, that need a little bit. The federal government tried to facilitate making a program to kind of fill in that hole, right. They were like, well, that's, that's unconstitutional. We're taking people's right to sue away.

We need to have an alternative remedy that's reasonable. So they made this program, it's called the CICP. The CICP to date has paid, or it has agreed to pay 39 people. 39 people that have been harmed by the COVID vaccine. The average payout is $4,000. You have a one year deadline to [00:20:00] file from the date that your symptoms start.

You have no right to an attorney. You have no right to an appeal. And you have no access to who is adjudicating your case, why they're reviewing it the way they are. Nothing. So there's vaccine skeptics and vaccine advocates agree on this wholeheartedly that the CICP is a failure and it needs to be reformed.

So we've been pushing every single year to try to push for reform. All of those have failed, obviously. The division between the two parties is what I believe is to blame. There is no way that something like this will be passed bipartisan. And so that's the problem. But we're still pushing as hard as we can to try to get some kind of comprehensive reform.

Right now, what we're doing strategically, 'cause this is all strategy, right, we, we understand that there's how things should be, and this should have been fixed [00:21:00] several years ago. This should have been recognized several years ago and these people should have been helped, right? That's not the world we live in.

The issue obviously is the appearance of or the PR nightmare that is vaccine injury for them, right? And so it doesn't have anything to do with the patients. So we are currently waiting to see what like HHS is deciding to do about this problem 'cause Congress is not gonna do anything that's gonna be in contrary to what HHS wants to do on this.

We do know that there are some, a lot of meetings going on, conversations going on, and HHS is reviewing what options are going to be the best for this issue, as well as the VICP, the other vaccine injury program. And so we're just waiting. As soon as they decide what they think is gonna be the best option, then that will give us the green light to be able to, you know, adjust on our end [00:22:00] what we need to push through legislatively.

And so, yeah, that's kind of the problem, 'cause we can push for laws to be passed, but unless we have elected representatives on board, it's not gonna go anywhere.

Jill Brook: And like, just as an example, I think I saw you post online that for, for your case, you got your symptoms and dysautonomia I think very soon after a shot, in a context of a clinical trial, your doctors were on board, you saw experts at the National Institutes of Health who agreed. You had documentation of everything. You actually did make the one year deadline because I guess you did, you know a lot of people won't have made that. But you were still denied, right?

Brianne Dressen: I was. I was denied. So even with my massive amount of evidence, it still was not strong enough to prove [00:23:00] this insanely impossible causal link standard of proof that they've required for that program. So, yep, I'm one of the many that's been rejected out of that program. So they have over 10,000 people that are currently sitting in the queue.

They've been sitting there for going on four years now. Only 39 have been awarded.

Jill Brook: And I think I've heard you mention some numbers in the past about how much money they've spent on their own administrivia versus giving to patients.

Brianne Dressen: Yeah. This is government inefficiency at its worst. 25 million. They have a 25 million a year budget to run all the administration for the program so they can pay out maybe 20 a year.

Jill Brook: 20 million a year?

Brianne Dressen: 20 people.

Jill Brook: 20 people, and each of those people has gotten a [00:24:00] maximum of $10,000 or something.

Brianne Dressen: Yeah. So there's, there's been one death benefit that's had that has been awarded for $360,000 for myocarditis. There's been another benefit that's been $1.2 million. But we've been talking to the family. They don't have the million. It's not coming to them. They're really frustrated about it.

Everybody else is $4,000 or less. So, yeah, so there's been experts that have talked about this program before and they say you have a right to file and you have a right to lose. That's what you get.

Jill Brook: Well, and so that's where it's all the more amazing that REACT19 has given out, did you say one and a quarter million to patients?

Brianne Dressen: Yep. Yep. And it's, it's still going. So if there's people in need out there, apply. We'd, we'd love to help. And then of course, obviously if there's people that want to donate specifically to that fund and have 100% of their money [00:25:00] go into the hands of someone for medical expenses. They can apply and have it go directly into that account.

So we've tried to make this as transparent for people as possible to understand, you know, that we mean business when we mean when we say that we're putting the patient first.

Jill Brook: And if somebody is interested in doing that, do they go to react19.org or where should they go?

Brianne Dressen: Yep. Go to react19.org. You can find the application under financial resources that's under For Patients. And of course if you wanna donate, you just do react19.org/donate.

Jill Brook: So. What's kind of amazing is like, I don't know how you do it, but when you talk about some of these things, like you skip over a lot of the injustices that have happened to you personally and to others. And and so I'm always impressed by that. And so, I know that I think there's a [00:26:00] book out about you and a documentary about you and other, others like you, and how you created REACT19.

And that goes a little bit more into it, I think. And I think your documentary like won a big award. Do you wanna talk about those?

Brianne Dressen: Yeah. The documentary is, it's, it's weird to put yourself out on display like that, but it was also very, very important for us to do, to help people understand what actually has gone on, what has happened to the patients, what happened in the clinical trials, what happened when we were all flown out to the NIH and studied there, what happened to the data from both of those incredible studies? You know, what did the government do after we told them all of this? You know? We had support groups that were taken down for photos of a rash. You know, it was pretty brutal and it was definitely politically motivated and has spurred lawsuits. So I'm part of a lawsuit. It's called Dressen v. [00:27:00] Flaherty, and we're going after the Biden administration specifically 'cause it happened under his administration. And they demanded that social media companies censor real stories of vaccine injury because it could cause, because it could cause vaccine hesitancy, which in reality, if you recognize vaccine injury and you help those people, then you're gonna bring vaccine hesitancy down. But if you're gonna tell them that they can't talk, especially in the United States where we all know that we have constitutional rights to open our mouths, then you've got a problem.

So that's why we're going after them. That was the first lawsuit I've ever filed in my life was against the president of the United States, which was super weird, but...

Jill Brook: Yeah, that's wild.

Brianne Dressen: So we go into several of those different aspects in the [00:28:00] documentary. It won two different awards at the Santa Monica Film Festival.

It premiered in Hollywood, California, which I was shocked that of all the places in the country that that's where we were able to premier it. But it was sold out. We did another premier in Texas. And yeah, but if, if people don't want to take the time to read a book, but the book is awesome.

I love the book. I believe that the book is way better than the movie. No offense to the movie guys, but but it's just like anything else, right? Where people are like, oh, the book's so much better. The book is an easy read. It's like 250 pages. We tried to keep it short. So people will make it through it without getting bogged down in too many details.

But it's something that every single complex chronic illness person can connect to and relate to. There's so many themes in there that just are carried throughout the book that makes sense. Strains with family, [00:29:00] relationships, friendships, the politics that always come in and mess all the stuff up, right? And then, you know, the, the angels that are kind of always hanging out in the wings that always tend to help with these, these types of movements when they pop up, you know. So the book's awesome. The book you can find on Amazon, if you look up my name, Brianne Dressen. It's called Worth a Shot, and it's written by award-winning writer Caroline Pover, who also just like me, volunteered, went and got injured from her shot.

So yeah, so that's why it's such a cool story. And then the documentary, it's called Follow the Silenced. You can find it on our YouTube channel and it's less than 90 minutes long. So if you feel like just sitting back and, you know, having some popcorn or some, you know, [00:30:00] low histamine snack, for me, that's like rice right now, then, then that's online and you can watch that for free.

Jill Brook: Wow. So do you feel like people like you are starting to be heard a little more and listened to more?

Brianne Dressen: I think so. I think politically things have changed quite a bit. For a lot of people, it's been upsetting to see what's going on. I totally recognize that. I understand that. That level of oppression and hate was waged on us for the previous four years, to the degree that there were people that literally lost their lives, took their lives, just like, just like it is right now.

So I understand and I empathize with the insane political climate that we're all existing in right now. Specifically and strategically looking at this for vaccine injury help, obviously [00:31:00] politically, it's, it's at an advantage right now. As much as people are terrified of this topic, the reality is you cannot leave people abandoned when their life and their body has been impacted by a severe health condition due to any drug.

There should be no sacred cow. No matter what it is, there should be no sacred cow that we are all willing to sacrifice our children, our own health and livelihoods for something that we're totally not even connected to, right? We need to take care of those people. It, it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter.

It shouldn't matter if there's five people, or if in the CICP where there's 10,000 people that are waiting for compensation, or in the VAERS system where you have 1.2 million people that are waiting for recognition, right. It's a serious issue and [00:32:00] the solution really is pretty simple. There's just a lot of powerful entities that are making it way too complicated to fix.

Jill Brook: Wow. I mean, I find myself wondering how you find the energy, especially like in dysautonomia, we're supposed to be trying to reduce our sympathetic tone, right? Stress bad.

Brianne Dressen: Yeah. Yeah. So I have tried to throttle back how many times I have to account like the triggering and horrific parts of my experience. And that's why I really like the book and the documentary because then if people are like, well, what actually happened to you, you look fine. I'm like, go watch the documentary.

And you can see, you can see just how mild this was, right. And then I don't have to have my own, you know, like, and I call it like the emotional, spiritual, physical connection. I don't have to have that disconnected [00:33:00] and attacked all the time anymore. It's extremely challenging. You know this. Advocating for yourself, advocating for others when it comes to a taboo topic as an invisible illness.

And it's something that I have to focus on every single day to help center my own emotional center. And I make sure to try to protect myself from those energies, and you can find 'em anywhere, right? They're online. There's people that will fight with you online. People talk about, oh, I have POTS, and there's people that will be like, that's a bogus disease, or, you know, just trolls, right? So I limit my exposure to online. I don't read comments. If there's people out there that you know, have a different opinion than me, I understand acutely, I'm like, well, they didn't go to the NIH and they didn't [00:34:00] see firsthand what the NIH knows about this issue.

They haven't been involved in Washington. They have not been involved in the censorship. They, you know, and so then I just, I'm like, well, they don't understand. And it's not me as one person that's gonna be able to change their mind. I don't think anyone has ever had their mind changed by reading random fighting comments on the internet, to be honest.

And so for other chronic illness people like me, that's like my biggest like advice is get into groups that are supportive for you online. The rest, absolutely, they're not worth it. Step away, turn them off. Leave the groups. You know, it's your own peace and your own healing energy needs to be the number one priority for you at all times.

At all times. And that comes from protecting it and protecting yourself and allowing yourself and giving yourself permission to actually protect yourself. Because [00:35:00] we all think, oh, well, all these people are online, it's not a big deal. And it's like, no, our bodies and our minds are innately connected and our bodies are struggling, and our bodies need all of the support we can give them, and a lot of that support comes from our mind and our nervous system.

Jill Brook: Yeah. Wow. I mean, that's that's amazing that you can do both and fight as hard as you fight and also find ways to try to rise above it and to protect yourself.

Brianne Dressen: It's the only way.

[background conversation]

It's my mom. She's the best. Everyone should have a support system like I have.

Jill Brook: Oh.

Brianne Dressen: She's helping with my kids today.

Jill Brook: You know, I was just discussing with my husband about how basically an amazing mom is like the key tool in surviving dysautonomia.

Brianne Dressen: Amen. [00:36:00] It's, yeah, I don't, you know, yeah. I don't know what I would do without her. She's so sweet and she's, she's getting old, but she's still, she's not functioning at my level yet. We'll get to where we're equals probably pretty quick, but she's pretty amazing. So...

Jill Brook: Wow.

Brianne Dressen: But yeah, she's able to fill in those many, many, many gaps with my kids that just, I can't, I can't just jump up and get in the car and go pick them up when they need, or make sure they get to their activities or, you know, there's all the things that yeah, that she loves to help with, so, and they love her for it too.

Jill Brook: Oh, that's great.

Brianne Dressen: Anyway, sorry. So what was your other question?

Jill Brook: Oh, I was just wondering what, what brings you hope in this space? Is there any particular, is it the research? Is it the fact that the documentaries are actually like winning awards? Or like when, when you think [00:37:00] about the good news or the is, are there treatments that are helping people? Like where do you see reason for optimism?

Brianne Dressen: There, there is reason to be optimistic and there is hope in this. Research is a big one. Obviously, the research that's cutting edge is not necessarily happening under the term vaccine injury. There's incredible things happening with, you know, ME/CFS research and, and Lyme as well. You know, long COVID research and POTS and dysautonomia research, we just went to and presented at Lauren Styles Dysautonomia International medical conference and listened in on all the research that's going on there. And it's a lot, there are incredible researchers out there that are very passionate about this issue, right. And it's, the more answers that come, the more we'll be able to look at some of these other therapies that need to happen.

The other hope I think is really [00:38:00] understanding and recognizing our own sovereignty and power. I know that it's so hard, especially being new to this, you feel like you've lost all control over your life, right? Like no control, but there are some things that we can do emotionally, and I've done a lot of work on this, self work on this, that we can, you know, bring our own method of healing to our own bodies.

We can still respect and honor our bodies. We don't have to hate our bodies or be frustrated with our bodies to no end because they're not cooperating on any given day. But we can, we can still find some, some places within ourself to foster that healing environment. I had no idea how impactful that would be for my health, and until I finally was like, okay, fine, whatever, I'll [00:39:00] start, you know, manifesting every day and I'll start doing positive meditation every day, and I'll go put my feet in the grass and disconnect every day. And then as soon as I started doing that, everything changed. And then in that same process, I found a couple of other therapies that helped me, so I added, I'm on like 15 things just like everybody else.

But I added hydroxychloroquine and I went back on IVIg. And that combination, for whatever reason, with my etiology, which I strongly, strongly suspect is autoimmune in nature because the, the IVIg is like helping a ton. It really just took this out of control spiral and brought it down into some little pieces that became more and more manageable, right? So it's like, oh, okay, I can take a shower. All right, cool. I can sit upright for a couple of hours. Awesome. You know, and then just [00:40:00] celebrating those little wins instead of being like, I can only sit upright for two hours. It's, I can sit up for two hours, this is great. You know, and remembering those wins, celebrating those wins. So important.

And we don't need to rely on anyone else. We don't need to depend on anyone else for those types of wins. Those wins are 100% in our court. They're in our control. We can, we can do those exercises on the daily, right? And so that's kind of where I'm at right now is just trying to focus inward on that 'cause I've spent years like hammering the outside, like the external factors, right? And now I'm finally where I'm going inward and focusing on the inward, and it's been pretty transformative.

Jill Brook: Wow, that's so good to [00:41:00] hear. Especially because you have these, these pressures that must mess with your psyche.

Brianne Dressen: For sure.

Jill Brook: That's amazing. Is there anything else you wanna tell people? Any final words or we'll put the links in the show notes, but there's the book, there's the documentary, there's react19.org, we could put links to the research papers.

Brianne Dressen: Yeah, the research would be awesome so people can review it and, and Dr. Been will be releasing a lecture very soon on the latest Yale paper so people can understand it a little bit better and what it means, limitations and, and all that, so...

Jill Brook: Oh, great. Well, Brianne, thank you so much for all the work you're doing and for shouldering all of this and, I mean, you're just doing so much under such difficult circumstances. We really appreciate you being here. I know everybody else [00:42:00] is wishing you just all the best for, for your personal health, and just thank you for being here.

Brianne Dressen: Yeah. Well thanks for having me. It's always good to catch up with you.

Jill Brook: Okay, listeners, that's all for today, but we'll be back again next week. Until then, thank you for listening, remember you're not alone, and please join us again soon.