EP. 39: From Chronic Illness to True Healing: Angela Skudin’s Journey with Alternative Medicine
For years, Angela Skudin battled debilitating health issues. Diagnosed with Morgellons disease in 2018, she endured excruciating symptoms and turned to Western medicine for help—only to find treatments that were ineffective, financially devastating, and, in some cases, made her condition worse.
Desperate for relief, Angela explored alternative medicine, trying everything from bee venom therapy to Kambo—but it wasn’t until she discovered psychedelics that she experienced true healing. For the first time, she could sleep, she no longer needed back surgery, and her body began to truly recover.
This personal transformation inspired Angela to pay it forward, founding the Casey Skudin 343 FUND, a nonprofit that provides first responders with access to holistic healing resources. These heroes give so much and often struggle with PTSD and trauma, yet many have nowhere to turn for real healing. Angela is on a mission to change that.
🌀 “You’ve got to feel it to heal it. Sit with it, then let it go.”
Fuel the Conversation! Loving the podcast? If you’d like to send a little cup of coffee my way in gratitude (and to keep me going!), I’d truly appreciate it. Because it’s the little things...
Show Notes
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You ready?
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Okay.
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Good stuff.
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All right.
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Come here.
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Let me just do this. Oh, thank you.
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Just girl stuff, right?
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Cool.
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Okay. Okay.
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Thank you. Good, good, good.
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There we go.
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You have really pretty hair. Oh, thank you. I used to be a hairdresser in my former life.
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Really?
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Yeah. No way.
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Yeah.
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For 16 years.
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I did hair. No way.
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I don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up. And then you just left that when you got sick?
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Yeah, oh no, I started a retail business about ten years ago. Okay, okay, and you started that before 343 mm-hmm, okay, yeah, and then I've kind of abandoned that it's still going But I don't really have much to do with it except I'm doing two more retail builds out build outs right now a coffee shop builds out and then and Another store next to my store. It's gonna be merged together.
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Okay, is that the Codfish Couple?
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Yeah, it's so fun.
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That's so fun.
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If you ever come to Long Beach.
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Yeah, I'll have to make it because I see some of your merchandise and I'm like, oh my God, this is hysterical.
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It's so fun, yeah, I love it. So it's just kind of like my childhood dream fulfilled, but I've got more dreams, so I don't know what I'll. It's nice to continue to evolve. Yeah, so, yeah.
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Well, welcome to the podcast.
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Well, thanks for having me.
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Welcome to Holistic Health. We have Angela Skudin with us today, flying in from New York, so very exciting. We had dinner last night and we had some meetings this morning, just spreading the awareness about psychedelic therapy and healing, especially with first responders. So go ahead and introduce yourself.
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I'm Angela Skudin. I'm the founder and CEO of the Casey Skuden 343 Fund. We are a grant writing organization that provides psychedelic grants to first responders. We also provide contrast therapy, saunas, and cold plunges to firehouses and police departments
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for the interest of detoxification and self-care and wellness.
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How long have you had the organization for?
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The organization began a little bit after my husband's death, which was June 17, 2023, at 3.43 p.m. We started the Casey Skutin 343 Fund about two years, I mean, I'm sorry, about two months after he passed away. So we're just a little over two years now. How many first responders have you helped to date? We have provided grants to over 80 first responders and we've got more on the books that just haven't gone yet. But yeah, we're entering to, you know, about 95 right now. That's how many
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that have been given an actual grant from the 343 Fund.
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Awesome.
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Well, we'll make sure to spread the awareness with the fund because it's fantastic. I'm very amazed at how broad spectrum the holistic approach has been for first responders. And I wanna grow awareness, especially in our area and across the board.
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One thing that drew me to your story, you know, I was driving to work listening to your Ambio podcast with Trevor, and I was driving and I'm like, holy shit, this is amazing, her story, with the whole health and wellness journey that you've been on. Being in practice, I've seen so much autoimmune, so much Lyme, so much unresolved illness in Western medicine, and you educated me on so many things, including the bee venom therapy,
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and then of course the psychedelics. So share with the listeners your story, your health journey to start out.
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Wow, where to begin?
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Yeah. In 2018, I became really just ill with what were perceived as autoimmune conditions. Initially, it just seemed like I was just having back problems and hip issues just from just being athletic my whole life
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and working out and maybe just not giving my body the proper rest. So I thought that I was looking into having a couple of surgeries. I was in nerve pain and just really severe back pain. And I went to the doctor just doing what everybody else does,
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you know, what's wrong with me? And they said, Oh, you have a labral tear in your hip initially, and we should operate on that or wait. And I thought, I'm a person that likes to wait. So I waited. And then my body just started disintegrating. I ended up with two fully bulge-trained discs, a piriformis nerve impingement, left side scoliosis, spinal stenosis, degenerative disc disease. On top of that, just simultaneously, it seemed that I had this Lyme infection that was either
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present and then came out of, you know, reactivated in my system, or, you know, I was bitten by a tick at the same time. Yeah. Who knows? But no one knew what was wrong and I started getting gum degeneration and just different things that were kind of pointing towards like fibromyalgia type symptoms and just went on a long road of every time I would go
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into a doctor's office I was genuinely looking to go to the specialist and I was leaving today with a diagnosis and that just kept not happening over and over again. And just the surgeries were what were offered, and the surgeries were going to really change my life physically. I wasn't going to have the physical capabilities if I had this hip surgery and this back surgery that I would have had if I was able to rehabilitate my body in some natural way, or even if I
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found a Western medicine route. The only route at the time were the surgeries. And it just, I saved those off and I continued looking for answers. I just have so many more complications in my body that that were just unrelated to the back and the hip. And I thought, well I'm having neurological symptoms, I'm having inflammation, I'm having pelvic pain. I had these sores that were all over my body and they just wouldn't heal. And no one could really figure out what
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was going on. And I just started researching and researching and reading and I came across just some literature and some books that people had written regarding mold toxicity and Lyme disease. And I found out that I initially didn't think I had Lyme disease or anything because I had taken, you know, the Western blot and, you know, the ELISA prior to that, and they were just, they always came up negative. And at that time I didn't know anything about testing. I didn't know that, yeah, it's
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super common for Lyme disease to go undetected on those testing methods. And in fact, like those testing methods weren't even developed for Lyme disease. They were initially developed for AIDS or HIV, rather. And then there was just so many components to why you would test negative that I didn't know about lab testing.
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So it kind of appeared to be a kind of a Russian roulette whenever I was taking the test and that maybe something was being missed. So I found other tests. For me, I used the iGenX test. I flew to California to see a Lyme specialist there,
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and was clinically diagnosed with Moore-Jones disease, and a couple of other tick-borne co-infections that you could just tell from a clinical diagnosis. I'm unsure which ones of the gamut that I had were able to be clinically diagnosed other than the Moore-Jones at the time.
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And then I tested for the Lyme and it came back positive along with the co-infections, the BCA, Bartonella, and relapsing fever Borrelia. So from that journey, I came up with three co-infections that I had, the Lyme disease and the Morgellons disease. So I immediately thought at that point, hallelujah, you know, they found out what's wrong with me? Great, what prescriptions are you giving me?
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And in 30 days, I should be good to go. And I remember saying to the doctor, great, so you're gonna write me these prescriptions and then these sores on my legs and stuff, like they'll be gone by summertime, right? This was December of 2018 and she said, no.
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And I thought, what do you mean? Like you diagnosed me, you're gonna give me some pills and what do you mean? Like we got 30 days and she said you'll need to be on antibiotics and antiparasitics for five to nine years to have a possibility of clearing this and I thought I don't have that kind of time.
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You were young when this all started.
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Yeah I was at the time, I'm so bad at I'm 38 years old, 37, 38, so that was kind of a like when I heard that, that was just a huge balloon deflator where I just thought, oh my God, this isn't going to be easy at all. And it wasn't easy at all. I did the antibiotic protocol.
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I ended up in the anti-parasitic protocol and I ended up getting a PICC line placed in my arm, receiving IV antibiotics for four or five months and then daily. And then that pretty much destroyed my gut, my microbiome, and just really caused a lot of gastro symptoms and just really struggled with that, building that back up. It got to the point, I was on different protocols.
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Lyme people know the different protocols and whatnot. I ended up going on Desulfram protocol, which is, it's off-label use for Lyme disease. And it's just things that just have to be really monitored closely with blood work and everything. And it got to the point,
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not that I wanted to stop the Western medicine treatment, it just got to the point where they were unaffordable. One of my prescriptions was, I believe, $5,000 a month, and that was just one of them, and we just didn't have the money to come up with that. So in all, it was $5,000 a week for my IV treatment, and then one prescription was $5,000 a month, and then I was just taxing my relaxing my poor family with my health situation and
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We're having to borrow money, you know get money from family and Talk about they're talking about Taking you know the substantial portion of my husband's pension out to pay for treatments And I kind of ran out of Western medicine options and affordability The next step for my treatment was going to be to go to do this treatment in Germany where they, this is actually pretty common, but it was $80,000 and they were going to give me a fever, put me in a coma, give
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me a fever, and then hopefully that was going to kill everything. But it wasn't guaranteed or shown to kill a few of the co-infections that I had. So it was kind of like I could potentially die, it's going to cost $80,000 and it's not even going to get rid of everything. How do they put in a fever? You know what? I'm not sure. That's interesting. I didn't get um, yeah I mean, I remember looking into it at the time, but like now I'll have to go back and look at it Yeah, but they do it for cancer, I believe too
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yeah, it's in Germany at least the place that I was going to go to was and was. And so then I had found on social media actually, I laugh because people say, how did you heal from all these things? I say social media. It's true. Where do you get your info?
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Google or social media? Obviously, WebMD. Right.
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So I found this girl and on tik-tok and she was doing bee venom therapy and I thought that's crazy bee venom therapy is actually you take a live bee and You and you have it sting you and multiple times Over your body and I saw this is nuts, you know So I've wired her doing this if she's doing it for Lyme disease for a year before I had the guts to try. So that kind of went in conjunction with running out of the money and having this, am I
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going to go to Germany and potentially kill myself or am I going to sting myself with some bees? Right. So I went with the bees. Good choice. Yeah and I started with this traditional bee venom therapy protocol. I say traditional B-Venom therapy protocol. I don't know, some lady named Ellie who was kind of like the forefront of B-Venom therapy, she came up with this protocol. She's not a doctor or anything, but she came up with this and it's helped a lot of people. It helped me certainly, but there was just a huge detox
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component that came with it and I kind of was doing this bee venom, then doing all this detox right after I did the venom and then my system was really not getting to take full advantage of the venom. So I started doing no detox, just the bee venom and the protocol was stinging myself with 19 to 26 bees
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every four days and then waiting it out for my immune system. The B-Venom kills everything and in the targeted area it just wipes it all out and then your immune system will build back everything fresh and new. So I did that for 15 months and along with another plant-based remedy called Combo and that pretty much got my body back from the majority of Lyme disease and the tick-borne co-infections were resolved with those modalities and inter-psychedelic.
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Psychedelic. Yeah.
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So yeah, I did the B venom first, did the combo, and then we moved forward to, to I found psychedelic therapy from that primarily ibogaine or iboga. From the combo?
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That was the next evolution. Yeah.
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That was like bee venom combo, iboga.
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Why not?
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And I'd never heard of it.
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It wasn't at this point in my life. I'm covered in sores. I'm dendritic and not looking to go party. You know, I'm like, I'm gonna die, I need something. So I found this iboga and it was through the combo, actually, a practitioner, and I ended up doing just a really irresponsible thing that
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could have killed me and I had no idea. I had someone come and serve me iboga in my living room and with no, you know, cardiac check or anything, no EKG, no monitor, no, you know, line in my arm just in case, you know, all the things that we know are so important to do today before entering one of these journeys. I Just ate a bunch of root bark, which is what iboga is, you know for those a powder How did they give it to you? So they do it in capsule form?
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Yeah, just a bunch of capsules. So for people that are listening that don't know iboga is Yeah, it's a it's a root bark that comes from a place called Gubon in Africa and It appears to do miraculous things for people's healing not even on appearances, but scientifically sure so It's toted as you know the most powerful psychedelic on the planet primarily due to its brain regeneration capabilities and
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Yeah, I thought with that ate a lot of that swallowed a lot of those pills, vomited a lot that night, didn't really see anything. I was expecting to have this huge psychedelic experience and I didn't really see anything and I was quite frustrated after that journey, just kind of vomited all night long and thought, what am I doing? I had the day after is traditionally referred to as gray day and I beat myself up on that day just being like
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what's going on now this is a really bad idea just all that negative self-talk came flooding in and it wasn't till later that night when I went to go to sleep and I actually went to sleep that I realized this did something I say that because I was having to drug myself for years to be able to go to sleep, whether it be Ambien, Lunesta, alcohol, Xanax, whatever. I needed something to sleep. The common offenders, right.
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Time of the day. Yeah, whatever. And you probably weren't getting a good sleep with those anyway, right?
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No. Yeah. I was on Adderall by day and Xanax by night. And that is, my body. Sure, sure. With all of that, my body just not resting, not resting, and it's like the straw that
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breaks the camel's back. Yeah.
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And then, boom.
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And then, domino effect.
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Yeah. Yeah. So, for me, the domino effect led to a misdiagnosis of fibromyalgia, where I was put on Cymbalta. Lovely. And actually developed Tourette's from it, which was super grateful
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because it got me off of that early without having to.
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Wow.
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You know, I didn't know the ramifications of being on these medicines, you know, for these autoimmune conditions or these conditions.
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Right, and you're not informed, typically.
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Not informed. They don't tell you that. They're like, take this, you're gonna be better. Right, right, right. So, you know, and people that are in this, you will take anything, you know.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just let me feel better. And so that was a blessing in disguise that I actually got one of those negative side effects because it got me off of that. Also, you know, I said to the doctor, I don't have fibromyalgia. The diagnosis requirement is nine points of pain and I have a thousand. And she said, oh, you're right. And then I thought, I'm on my own
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No one's coming for me. No. Yeah, not getting answers, right? so that led to all the alternative stuff and yeah after my iboga journey the first one I was able to sleep and That had never happened before and I noticed it and it's been five years No, not quite five years coming up and it will have I have slept every night since that journey sound. I don't have a racing mind anymore. I don't need to think of plan A, B, C.
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I can just chill, and I've never been able to do that in my life, and it was a direct result of that root bark that night, regardless of seeing one psychedelic vision. I didn't see anything, but the healing that was provided to me has been just vital to my existence here today. And that wasn't even your intention of doing it,
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which is interesting. But the medicine, what I love about it, is the medicine knew you needed to sleep to heal, and that was step one. Yeah, that's it. That's crazy.
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That's how it works.
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It's like, you really don't know what you need when you're in a flare situation like that, you know, there's so much you need. But the medicine seems to intelligently know what you need and provide that to you. So I was provided that on my first night
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sitting with Iboga, and then provided a big education on the responsibility of sitting with psychedelics going forward and the danger of living room psychedelics. How did you figure that out? Like oh this isn't safe. I figured out that that wasn't safe because the ibogaine movement came shortly thereafter. Yeah and I started researching into it and realizing oh my gosh I especially when in the condition that my body was
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in oh sure yeah I was like fragile how do I had a heart condition at the time that you know you shouldn't you got to really get tested if you have a heart condition with iboga you know and I had all these other systemic things going on but again I wasn't going through a treatment facility right I wasn't going through a responsible psychedelic provider. I was going through some dude from California
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that had a hook in Africa, you know? But that just speaks to people's just ability and just want to heal. No one wants to be miserable. So I'm sure when you're seeing patients and you see just the frustration
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of not being able to figure out what's going on in your body. And then the want is you as a practitioner to give them answers, you know? Exactly. And usually, like you said, they've been everybody else.
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They've had all the imaging, misdiagnosis or lack of, and then last resort, functional doc or someone voodoo-ish, right? Yeah
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Yeah, I always tell everybody they say now What should my I'm diagnosed with Lyme disease like what's my first step being I was like a functional medicine doctor. Yes And That's the only person that's going to be able to help you pave a way in the current Society that we live in with Lyme disease that or some shaman from Africa
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Functional medicine doctors easier to find yeah, at least in the face. Yeah, and you I mean you got a great care team right now
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I mean you do acupuncture you do chiropractic you do yoga. Yeah, I mean
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Yeah
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So I learned a lot from my experience. It's kind of one of those things you when you're put in that position to live in daily nerve pain for months and being suicidal suicidal ideations constantly because you know you're a burden on your family, you're a burden on yourself and no doctor can tell you how to get out of this. So having all that on me it was just yeah there was no option for me other than to figure a way out of this. So once I learned all the
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ways to get out, I implemented them into my life so that I can make a promise to myself I'm never going to get into the situation again. They say a lot of times once you know you can't unknow. Right. I know now. So yeah the psychedelic, taking the psychedelic is probably the easiest part of the journey and then the self-care and after that comes after that is definitely the most difficult part. And that's forever.
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Exactly, which in general, we're not equipped with those tools as a society.
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No.
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Which is sad.
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Yeah, I think we were speaking earlier, like the tools that we have and then we don't realize that we're just operating with 10% of ourselves, working with our ego mind, and then there's this whole subconscious mind that needs caring for. And we're not taught about that in school and we're not taught about that as adults unless we seek it out. So I started a mindfulness practice from it.
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I'm not going to say it's something that I enjoy. It's not even something... I don't even really like yoga, you know, but doing yoga, I didn't have to get any surgeries. My back completely repaired itself and I have more flexibility and more ability today than I've ever had in my life and I'm the oldest I've ever been so yeah, it's just kind of like you know sometimes you don't want to eat your veggies, but they're good for you it's the same thing with like the self-care protocols and
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and The yoga the mindfulness the meditation the sauna care the breath work all that stuff So those are all tools that I learned along the way During my healing journey and my psychedelic integration journey and their tools that I implement into my my life now as I don't do all those things every single day, but my mindfulness practice is pretty steady. You know every day
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Yeah, well like you said it's practice. You'd have to put the effort in yeah, yeah We're talking about meditation earlier today. I said the first time I went to meditate. I remember being so angry. What is this meditation? And I got this book that says how to meditate. And I went and sat in my sauna and I'm just covered in sores from head to toe with this Lyme disease and so swollen and sitting in this infrared sauna just trying to sweat it out. I get this book and I open it up and I start reading it. I don't even know what it said but it's not how to meditate. And then I just remember just practicing more and more just sitting in stillness right using my breath to sit in stillness
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it just Meditation is a practice and your body Remembers when you practice and now if I can I could sit down and meditate with you in five seconds without even accessing that little book So yeah, the books up here, right? Right. It's innate. Yeah. Well, I guess the books in here, right, right Nothing's up here the books in here in here. Yeah. Yeah, it's uncomfortable
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I've and this is hopefully like something I am looking forward to gaining out of my trip in January is It's uncomfortable to sit in your own thoughts Because especially as women I feel like okay, I got a B C D and E to do I'm doing this in my mind I'm doing this in my mind. I'm not present in the moment, you know
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0:27:15
And that's just it's it's hard as women to we're always and in men also I have to give this to men We work at the population of first responders. They're always thinking about others Sure, you know, but women and being in mothers like you're always thinking about yeah others Yeah, it's so rare to think about to put yourself first, right? Which is one of those mindfulness practices that we try to practice. It's like you're a number one. If you're not number one and you're not good, no one that you're caring for can be good. So that in itself, our society has kind of labeled that as narcissism, where it's actually just deep self
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love and self care. So to even just have the awareness that you need to foster more for yourself is a huge foot in the door in the healing practice. You're yourself going on a journey soon too. And it's actually the main journey that we write grants for in our organization for first responders. I've been through that journey two times. I'm and Tijuana, Mexico for Ibogaine and 5-MeO DMT. And yeah, that five days in Mexico really seems to open a portal for people's healing
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0:28:33
and for their body healing. And as you mentioned, that journey's backed by a scientific study, the Stanford study. So I think as more of these conversations happen, as we're in the psychedelic renaissance right now, and as more housewives and doctors are going down to Tijuana, Mexico for Ibogaine journeys, we'll see a lot more healing results.
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0:29:11
It gives me so much hope for humanity that there's something out there that can do all of these things for when we get this out to the generalized population. Well, it's ancient medicine.
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0:29:25
Ancient.
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0:29:26
You know, it makes sense. Yeah. Nobody over in... They don't have Western doctors in Peru. It's interesting that the life expectancies of these places are so much greater than the life expectancy in America. So something is definitely amiss.
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0:29:44
And I think we're on the road to success with it. And I think that just having conversations like this are so important and the more we can normalize it and get the facts out, the more people will be able to heal and have access.
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0:30:02
Absolutely.
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0:30:03
Yeah.
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0:30:03
Well, great. Anything else you want to share with our listeners?
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0:30:06
If you want to support or come through a grant with the Casey Skutin 343 Fund, please. Any and all donations are welcome and loved. We are a grant organization and we rely on donations to exist. If you know anybody, a first responder that needs help, please visit the caseyskutin343fund.org and we would love to help you out or get a donation from you.
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0:30:29
Any of the above!
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0:30:31
Any of the above!
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0:30:33
I would love to, I don't know, like when I get back, I don't know, like have a race to raise money for you guys. I would love to, I don't know, like when I get back, I don't know, like have a race to raise money for you guys.
3
0:30:40
Oh my god, that would be awesome!
Transcribed with Cockatoo