Most practitioners meet parasites the same way. As something they went looking for, found, and addressed. The patient improved for a while, and then stopped improving.
In the fourth episode of The Healing Terrain, Dr. Drew Kidder sat down with CellCore co-founder Dr. Todd Watts for a conversation that spends less time on parasites than the title suggests. What it spends time on is order. Not whether to address organisms, but what has to be working in the body before you do.
The Question Underneath the Question
Dr. Watts came to this through his own health. It started at twenty-eight with Epstein Barr. At forty he was diagnosed with Lyme. Somewhere in the years of cycling between feeling well and crashing again, a doctor suggested he look at parasites.
Almost nobody was talking about it. There was very little to read. So he read what existed, and then he started looking at his own patients differently.
What he found reframed the problem. He had a practice full of chronic Lyme patients whose panels came back loaded with coinfections and viruses, and the obvious conclusion was that these were people with a lot of infections. He landed somewhere else.
"It's not an infection problem. It's immune dysregulation."
That distinction is the hinge of the episode. When immune signaling is balanced, exposure is an ordinary event the body handles.* When it is not, exposure becomes a burden the body carries. The organisms are the same either way. The terrain is not.
Why Exposure Is More Common Than Most People Think
There is a persistent belief, among patients and practitioners alike, that parasites are something you pick up abroad. Contaminated water. Unfamiliar food. Somewhere else.
Dr. Watts takes that apart without a single statistic.
"Our food comes globally. It's not just locally anymore."
The food supply is not local, so exposure is not either. And that is before the ordinary parts of a life. Animals carry them, which means cattle, goats, sheep, and horses do, which means the food chain does. Pork, beef, fish, sushi.
"You walk barefoot. There's parasites in the soil. You get bit by a mosquito, you get bit by a spider, you get bit by a tick, or a flea."
Rivers, lakes, ponds, oceans. Anywhere water meets a body there is a route.
He is careful not to overstate the domestic picture, and the concession is what makes the point land. "We deny the fact that we have parasites in the US because we have clean water. We do. We just have less exposure than [other] countries."
None of this is alarming on its own, and that is the point. Exposure is ordinary. What varies is what the body does with it.
The Part Most Protocols Skip
Here is the idea that changes how a protocol gets built, and it runs against instinct.
Organisms in the body take on burden from the tissue they occupy. Which sounds almost useful, until you consider what happens when they are cleared out of a body with nowhere to put what gets released.
"That's why when you do a parasite cleanse, it's really important to detox and open up drainage pathways at the same time. So if you just clear parasites, it could in some ways make you more toxic, because they're not absorbing that anymore."
That is the argument for sequence, stated plainly. Removing organisms is not the finish line. It is a release of stored burden into a body that has to be able to move it. If drainage is sluggish, the patient does not feel better. They feel worse, and they blame the protocol.
Why the Organisms Are Hard to Reach
There is a second reason this work stalls, and it has nothing to do with drainage.
Organisms build biofilm. Dr. Watts describes it as a protective layer, one that shelters a range of organisms and one the immune system eventually stops recognizing as foreign.
"They build a biofilm that the body doesn't even recognize, at some point, that they're even there anymore. So then they cohabitate with no one knowing they're there."
"It makes a really beautiful environment for them to thrive."
That explains a pattern most practitioners have seen. A patient who has been through repeated rounds targeting organisms directly, returning each time with the same picture. If the protective layer is never addressed, the target was never fully exposed.
The Order of Operations
Put together, the episode lands on a sequence rather than a product list.
Energy first. Mitochondrial function is what gives organs and glands the capacity to do the work at all. As Dr. Kidder puts it in the episode, "our organs don't fail overall without failure of energy first."
Drainage next. The pathways have to be open before anything is asked to move through them.
Binders throughout, so what gets released has somewhere to go rather than circulating.*
Then the organisms.
Dr. Watts is direct that this came out of clinical practice rather than theory. He and Dr. Jay Davidson were working with an unusually sensitive patient population, and the standard functional medicine instinct to address gut health first was not producing good results.
"What do we need to do? We need to open up drainage and support energy first. Once we started doing that, people were able to go through the parasite protocol so much easier."
The parasites, in other words, were never the difficult part. The sequence was. Or as Dr. Watts puts it when the conversation circles back to where it started, "it goes back to the fact that a healthy microbiome is a healthy you."
The Mistake Practitioners Actually Make
He is candid about who struggles with this, and it is not patients.
"There's people that are just impatient, especially practitioners. I'm gonna go straight to the parasite products and I'm fine. And then, my gosh, that was not fun."
The pattern he describes is a practitioner who skips the foundational phase, has a rough experience, and then goes back to the beginning and runs it in order anyway. The sequence exists to make the process tolerable. Skipping it does not save time. It costs a phase.
Not Only for the Sickest Patients
Foundational work often gets filed under complex cases only, and Dr. Watts pushes back on that directly.
"It's not just for the sick. You want to optimize optimal health. Everybody could use it."
The framework was built by working with the most sensitive patients, which is exactly why it tends to be tolerable for everyone else.
What He tells Practitioners to Do
Dr. Kidder closed by asking for clinical pearls. The answer was shorter than the question.
"Just don't overlook it. Just because it doesn't come up on testing, it's not on a physical test that you're doing. So what? Just address it."
Listen to the Full Episode
Why Parasite Protocols Have to Start With Drainage is available on Dr. Talks, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
