SPONAUGLE WELLNESS - Key Persons
Alexa Sponaugle, our teenage daughter, contracted Lyme disease when she was 13 years old. Alexa was a horse lover and spent most of her evenings working with horses. Ironically, a recent study in New Jersey tested 90 horses dispersed throughout the state and found 80 of the 90 had Lyme disease, something to think about. After two years of LLMD Lyme treatment, Alexa almost died from a mega-dose antibiotic therapy consisting of six different antibiotics every day.
Alexa's personality changed dramatically, our once cheerful Alexa developed an obsessive "worry" type of anxiety followed by intermittent panic attacks. Alexa developed social anxiety, yet before treatment, she was a social butterfly. She fell into a depression she described as a "black hole." Her chronic fatigue worsened every month and she could no longer participate in family sports, this was particularly unsettling because Alexa was arguably the best athlete in our family.
Click on the link below to read Alexa's full story of healing from Lyme, and how treating Alexa brought Dr. Sponaugle to where he is today with treating complex illness.
Before the Lyme and mold symptoms took over her life, Tasha was an avid hiker, world traveler and active member of the Durango, Colorado community. She worked as an intensive-care unit and emergency room nurse and took to the mountains and desert of Colorado whenever she could.
Being forced to quit her nursing job due to brain fog and the inability to care for patients, she began to feel she had no purpose and felt into a dark world of depression and suicidal ideology. Learn more about Tasha's journey to healing from severe depression and anxiety to healing from mold and coinfections she did not know she even had.
Job Titles:
- the Anesthesiology Chairman
The Anesthesiology Chairman, Dr. Jerome Modell, and his professors, invented a ventilator therapy, called PEEP, which revolutionized the treatment for drowning. They had also invented CPAP (PEEP without an endotracheal tube) and, later, IMV (Intermittent Mandatory Ventilation). Treatment modalities invented by Anesthesiologists at the University of Florida have been utilized in Intensive Care Units throughout the world.
Job Titles:
- Certified Physician
- Integrative Medical Doctor
Dr. Joshua Helman is a Harvard-trained board-certified physician licensed in fourteen states. He embraces an integrative approach to health, wellness, medicine, and life. He has two degrees in biochemistry (undergraduate from Harvard and master's from University of Cambridge [UK]). His medical degree is from Harvard Medical School and MIT. He is passionate about applying his biochemical knowledge to real-world challenges. He is board-certified in emergency medicine and lifestyle medicine. Dr. Helman has served as an attending physician throughout his career and ultimately as the Medical Director for Hippocrates Health Institute in Palm Beach, Florida.
Dr. Helman developed a passion for integrative medicine. He believes in treating the patient as a whole and not as his or her individual symptoms, which lead him to join the integrative medicine team at Sponaugle Wellness Institute.
His clinical and research focus is on these areas:
Regenerative medicine
Wellness
Environmental medicine
Mold toxicity
Lyme disease
Dr. Helman has always had a keen interest in fitness and living a healthy lifestyle. He naturally became self-educated regarding the medicinal benefits of nutritional wellness and the longevity benefits of exercise and various herbal medications inspiring him to begin studying functional medicine and regenerative medicine with a desire to provide more holistic care for his patients.
As an integrative MD, Dr. Helman has found he gets better patient results when he combines his expertise in critical care medicine with ongoing learning and training in the principles of naturopathic medicine and the new frontier of regenerative medicine.
Upon joining the medical staff at Sponaugle Wellness Institute, Dr. Helman quickly revealed his passion for healing complex patients, many of which, have failed to regain their health after seeing an average of 30 physicians.
Working at Sponaugle Wellness Institute, Dr. Helman treats many chronic Lyme and neurological Lyme patients who are referred to our clinic for more intensive care than can be provided in a typical physician's office setting. He has been a part of the clinic's team for five years. After multiple physicians, it is clear Dr. Helman is the right fit for Sponaugle Wellness Institute.
Our IV therapy room is staffed with experienced nurses and provides an inpatient level of care for complex patients who typically suffer from multiple organ dysfunction as do hospitalize intensive care patients. For this reason, Dr. Helman has found his multi-faceted training invaluable for providing the quality care our patients require.
Job Titles:
- Wellness Spa Director, LMT
Job Titles:
- Physician
- Our Founder
- Our Medical Director
Our Medical Director, Rick Sponaugle, MD is an integrative physician who attempts to prioritize treatment through quality forensic medicine. Performing an analysis of 400 numerical bio-markers in his initial consultation, Dr. Sponaugle's goal is to diagnose and treat the underlying cause of your multiple symptoms.
Our Founder, Marvin "Rick" Sponaugle is an Integrative Physician who attempts a more precise diagnosis through quality forensic medicine. The analysis and correlation of approximately 500 numerical biomarkers enable Dr. Sponaugle to better determine the true causation of sickness and to better prioritize individual treatment. Believing in functional medicine, Dr. Sponaugle approaches healing on an intracellular level using biochemistry and detoxification protocols to optimize mitochondrial function.
Dr. Rick Sponaugle, MD is an integrative physician who attempts a more precise diagnosis through quality forensic medicine. He performs an analysis and correlation of approximately 400 numerical biomarkers. This extensive evaluation enables Dr. Sponaugle to diagnose the underlying cause of his patient's illness.
Our Medical Director, Rick Sponaugle M.D., is an integrative medicine physician who has treated 10,000+ patients from around the world suffering from the most complex brain and neurological disorders. Dr. Sponaugle has performed sophisticated brain research correlating over 10,000 Brain Chemistry analyses with neurotoxin levels and their associated changes in SPECT and PET brain imaging. Many of these patients suffered from undiagnosed Lyme disease, Bartonellosis, Mold Toxicity, and environmental toxicity.
With an emphasis on environmental medicine and tick-borne infections, Dr. Sponaugle specializes in treating brain and neurological disorders that are derived from severe neurotoxicity.
Mary Lindsey was a healthy and extremely active teenager who danced 20 hours a week before she succumbed to a combination of neurological Lyme disease, Bartonella infection, and mold toxicity. As these infections progressed, she became wheelchair-bound and developed severe neurological symptoms, including seizures, slurred speech, and total body pain.
Job Titles:
- Certified Nursing Assistant
Job Titles:
- Executive Administrative Assistant
Violet Somers - Granddaughter of Suzanne Somers - Thanked Dr. Sponaugle With This Framed Photo of Her Celebrating Her Recovery at the Beach!
VS: I was around thirteen; I only remember that it was an age where I didn't feel like I could eat anything I wanted anymore and look the same way every day. I couldn't depend on my body feeling right and I couldn't depend on my stomach not being bloated. I was also starving … I would be so hungry. As soon as I stopped eating, I would be starving again. It would happen after every meal. It was an insane feeling. I didn't seem to be in control of myself; I could never get enough. For me it felt like the world was ending. I felt like I wanted my life to be over. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I was filled with the feeling that everyone was going to hate me and that the worst thing in the world was going to happen. It's a horrible and awful way to feel. I felt completely out of control.