In this episode, Cheryl sits down with Brad Pitzele to unpack a long and complicated health journey that began with early autoimmune symptoms and escalated into psoriatic arthritis, debilitating fatigue, and eventually melanoma linked to immunosuppressive treatment.
Frustrated by a system that offered only escalating medications and limited answers, Brad began an intense period of self-experimentation and research. His turning point came after a Lyme disease diagnosis, one that helped connect years of seemingly unrelated symptoms. This ultimately pushed him deeper into understanding the root causes of chronic illness, especially the role of mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammation.
From there, the conversation shifts into the tools that helped Brad reclaim his health, including exercise with oxygen therapy (EWOT) and red and near-infrared light therapy. He explains how both approaches work at a cellular level to improve oxygen delivery, support mitochondrial function, and reduce inflammation. Thseare are all mechanisms that have implications for conditions like chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis and even cardiovascular health.
This episode is a deep dive into resilience, curiosity, and the power of continuing to search for answers when conventional paths fall short, offering both practical insight and hope for anyone navigating complex or unexplained health challenges.
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
Takeaways
Chronic symptoms do not always have clear answers and standard care often focuses on managing symptoms rather than addressing root causes
Mitochondrial health plays a central role in energy, recovery, and overall resilience and when it is compromised nearly every system in the body is affected
Inflammation and low oxygen levels go hand in hand, creating a cycle that can worsen chronic illness over time
Exercise with oxygen therapy works by increasing oxygen delivery to tissues and may support energy production and reduce inflammation
Red and near infrared light therapy may enhance mitochondrial function by increasing cellular demand for oxygen and boosting energy output
Combining oxygen therapy with red light can create a complementary supply and demand effect at the cellular level
Healing from complex or chronic conditions is rarely quick and consistent cumulative inputs over time matter more than short term fixes
Self advocacy and curiosity are critical when navigating unexplained health issues or when conventional approaches fall short
Small improvements over time can rebuild momentum and hope even before full recovery is achieved
Simple inputs like oxygen, light, and movement can have powerful effects when applied consistently and strategically
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Cheryl McColgan (00:00) Hey everyone, I’m Cheryl McColgan and today I am joined by Brad Pitzley and we are going to talk about some of his health history. He has a really interesting background with some challenging diseases and scenarios that he went through. And you know, like many of the guests on the HealNursery podcast, he just has a health journey that he wants to share with people and kind of what ended up actually helping him. Because so often people go down these roads with
different conditions and they just have a lot of trouble finding out number one what it is, number two if there’s anything that can help them feel better or how to treat it. And so I think Brad’s going to have a lot of really interesting things to share with us today. So Brad, if you could just maybe start by, I don’t know how far in the way back machine you want to go, but kind of just, you know, give us a little bit about your health journey. And as we go along, I’m sure I’ll have some kind of questions to fill in for everyone.
Brad Pitzele (00:50) Yeah, I had weird health things going on since grade school. I was diagnosed with psoriasis, but then I had other weird things that just kind of came and went. We’d go to the doctor, they’d give it a label. It would last for a while. There was no treatment for said label and then it would kind of just disappear and then I’d move on with life and then a year or six months or whatever, something else might pop up. But it really kind of started to come to a head.
Um, probably around 2010 or 11, I started to develop autoimmune arthritis, what was considered psoriatic arthritis, which is, it’s basically like rheumatoid arthritis, but it’s what you get with psoriasis. Um, and they started to test all sorts of different drugs on me. The first sets didn’t work. Then they put me on, um, some immune suppressive drugs. They gave me relief for like maybe six months and they’d start wearing off and they would double the dose and they’re.
I was kind of worse off when it wore off and then it would kind of bring me up a little bit. And then was kind of like I was taking a stair step into, you know, into a worse and worse place. And I was on those drugs for probably about two years. And then I developed melanoma. And that’s one of the side effects of the drugs is it’s got a high risk of cancer and specifically melanoma.
So that was kind of a, a jumping off point for me. I, during that period, I also started to develop weird other symptoms. Like I started to get stiffness in the back of my legs. had tremendous brain fog and energy issues. had pain in my feet and I would take this back to the rheumatologist and I’d be like, this is, is this part of the, this disease? assume. he was like, no, that’s not part of the disease. And I was kind of shocked and like, well, it feels like part of the disease. It’s kind of, you know, it’s just.
Cheryl McColgan (02:38) All right.
Brad Pitzele (02:41) another symptom of whatever’s going on with me. But he didn’t really acknowledge that. And then when I got cancer, I went back to him and I was like, Hey, you know, I’m really afraid I’m like, if I keep taking these drugs, more risk of cancer. I don’t take these drugs. I, you know, I die, cripple crumpled up in a ball in the corner, so to speak. And he was kind of like, no, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Yeah. I think we’re just going to try another drug in the, the, the same category.
And that was like, just started having alarm bells in my head. Just started shouting at me. was like, either path feels like it’s very bad. And I was a, I had a young children at the time. I was a relatively new father and that was even more scary. I was kind of the single income in the household. And I just started like, I’m like, what happens if these things happen to me to not just me, but my family. and that’s kind of when I started jumping off and like doing my own research and trying to figure out what I call a third path for
because neither of those really made sense to me.
Cheryl McColgan (03:40) those both sound like
not very good options. I’m just kind of curious when you were going back to the doctor with these things, kind of two questions here actually. One, and I think I already know the answer, but one, were drugs the only answer that this doctor was able to give to you? And secondly, I think having the cancer being a known side effect of the drug is really interesting. you ever talk about what the mechanism there is or anything to know about that just for people with curiosity?
Brad Pitzele (04:07) Yeah, so yeah, mostly it was drugs. He did also offer me injections of steroids into some of my joints. He was very skilled at it, because he said it was gonna be very painful. It wasn’t that painful, but steroids turn off your immune system. And it’s the same thing with some of the drugs I was on. One of them was a…
I won’t call brand name, but it was a TNF inhibitor. TNF stands for tumor necrosis factor. And it’s basically in a component of our immune system. And so there was some research done and they found that if they turned off that component of your immune system, hey, the pain and symptoms go away. Unfortunately, as the name alludes to, it kills tumors. when you turn it, we all have cancer in our
Cheryl McColgan (04:49) Yeah
Brad Pitzele (04:52) body. Like right now as we speak, everyone has it. It’s just our immune system is able to kill it off and so it never really gains a foothold. But once you start tipping the balance of the scales, obviously, you know, it can run amok. And that’s what happened in my case.
Cheryl McColgan (05:08) Yeah, very interesting. also it just brings up so many other questions that I’ll have to go down a rabbit hole after we’re done with our conversation. But so you had these things, you didn’t have good relief, you were still having symptoms, then you got cancer. And I assume obviously you had to get treated for that at that point. Was that really the turning point for you to just be like, I’ve got to find some other way to manage this? How did how did things go from there?
Brad Pitzele (05:30) Yeah, it was, and I’m not gonna tell you it was a fast turn for me. It took me several years. But I mean, from there, I just started reading anything I could. I read books, I was out on the internet, I was in chat groups talking to other people who had similar symptoms, Facebook groups, Googling on PubMed, looking at research, so many rabbit holes I ran down.
I was joking, I’m recovering engineer. ⁓ I got my undergraduate in mechanical engineering, so I’m very analytical by my nature, I suppose. Research didn’t scare me, and I just was reading anything I could. I wasn’t gonna…
Cheryl McColgan (05:55) You
Brad Pitzele (06:07) You know, wait for them to find something in the research and then try to translate it 20 years later. Like that does me no good. and I tried everything. I did a lot of self experimentation, everything from complete changes of diet, supplements, so many, mean, different modalities, all sorts of weird stuff. Sometimes my family looked at me pretty good side, I when they saw some of the stuff I was doing. but you know, when you’re, when you’re really desperate and.
things are getting worse and worse. And particularly when you also feel this responsibility and obligation to your family, you just, it’s not even just about you. You’re like, what do I do? I like, I’m gonna disappoint all these people and life is not gonna be good for them. I just told myself, I’m not allowed. know, like this is absolutely not allowed. This is not gonna happen, but it kept happening for a few more years. And then,
I ended up at a doctor’s office and he tried all sorts of things. Nothing was working. He was an MD, but he was non-insurance, so was integrative. And he was trying all sorts of alternate modalities on me. Even the things he was sure were gonna do anything, nothing was doing anything. He’s doing testing on me, nothing was popping. And then he suggested I do a Lyme disease test.
I remember thinking, I’m like, doctor, I don’t have Lyme disease. I’m like, I’ve never been bitten by one of these ticks. I’ve never had that bullseye rash thing. I’m thinking to myself, I don’t have that. But I was kind of like, you know what? And it was expensive test at the time. It was like 500 bucks. Insurance didn’t pay. But I was like, you know what? I’m gonna pay the 500 bucks. I’m gonna do the test so he can see it’s negative and we can get him off this Lyme thing. We can get to the real deal because it’s not Lyme.
And sure enough, it came back that I had Lyme disease and one of its co-infections called Bartonella, which is the infection that causes cat scratch disease as well. And I was so shocked. went back to him. was like, doc, what’s the chances this is a false positive? I don’t think I have it. And he was like, Brad, it’s a urine PCR, which means you have the DNA of those bacteria in your urine. What do you think is the chances it’s, it’s false positive? I’m like, got it.
Cheryl McColgan (08:12) Not.
Brad Pitzele (08:14) And that’s when it finally started to hit. ⁓
Cheryl McColgan (08:16) Well, just for people that aren’t familiar, I think everybody’s kind of heard of Lyme disease at some point, maybe Bartonella, but what did that kind of mean to you at the time? Like I’m sure once you got that diagnosis, you wanted to learn more about it. Were you thinking that that explained some of the things that you had up to this point or how did that mesh into the whole symptom profile?
Brad Pitzele (08:36) Life disease is incredibly challenging.
for a variety of reasons. One, it’s very difficult to get under control. There’s a lot of folks in America and across the world, quite frankly, suffering with it right now. The other reason it’s tough is there’s not a lot of doctors willing to treat it. There’s this whole stigma about it. What makes it particularly difficult is there’s this question on if it actually exists in some doctor’s head. It’s like the weirdest thing in the world.
We know there’s this infectious agent, we know it infects humans, and yet when a human comes to the doctor and says, I’ve been infected by it, they’re like, are you sure? And so you kind of get, I think the term I hear often is medical gas lit. And on top of that, doctors, for legal reasons, often don’t want to touch it. So my doctor didn’t want to touch it. And he was like, look, you have to go to a Lyme specialist three hours away.
I recommend him as best I can. And it was a long waiting list to get into this doctor’s office. And while I was waiting, just…
I was relentless, you I just couldn’t sit here and let myself deal with all this. It was a three month wait. And so I just started reading voraciously on Lyme disease to your point. was reading all sorts of research. I was reading books on it, a lot of books on the, like the science and what was happening to your body mechanically. And it was actually pretty eye opening because when I started to read all these symptoms, I was like, I started to piece together all these pieces, the puzzle that happened to me in my childhood, ⁓ things that happened
Cheryl McColgan (10:12) Mm.
Brad Pitzele (10:13) more recently, things that the rheumatologist couldn’t explain, but now we’re clear as day what was going on. And so the jigsaw puzzle started to fall into place for me. So it was kind of an epiphany from that perspective, yeah.
Cheryl McColgan (10:29) Yeah, that’s got to be the waiting had to be one of the hardest things, I’m sure. then once you finally got to him, did he because he was specialized in Lyme specifically, did he have any solutions for you? Or then was it somewhere that you still had to go to go down the road?
Brad Pitzele (10:42) No.
You know, the disappointing thing is, I ended up, the whole family was diagnosed with Lyme disease, not just me, my children and so forth. So we all carted in
