Dr. Evan Hirsch

Listen

Listen to this podcast or watch the video. CLICK HERE

Transcript

DOWNLOAD PDF

Wendy Meyers: Hello everyone, my name is Wendy Myers of MyersDetox.com. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Live to 110 podcast. On this podcast, we talk about everything related to detoxification. I’m an expert on heavy metals detoxification, and I love to educate people about the importance of detox to help with every imaginable health condition, including chronic fatigue.

I developed a mitochondria detox supplement kit especially for that purpose, to detox aluminum, arsenic, tin, thallium and cesium, because these metals interfere in mitochondrial energy production, our mitochondria, our little cells’ powerhouses that are meant to make our body’s energy, and we don’t have the nutrients to do so because these metals interfere in nutrient uptake in the mitochondria, you’re not able to make the energy that you are capable of. You can learn more about my mitochondria detox at store.meyersdetox.com.

Today we have my friend, Evan Hirsch on the store to talk about some of the other underlying root causes of chronic fatigue. He’s going to be talking to us about the surprising prevalence of Bartonella infection, how you can track Bartonella, the connection between Bartonella and thyroid disease, and his four-step system to resolve chronic fatigue. Dr. Evan is affectionately known as the best selling author of Fix Your Fatigue: The four-step process to resolving chronic fatigue, achieving abundant energy, and reclaiming your life!, and is one of the nation’s leader on finding the root causes of chronic fatigue and resolving them. He suffered with chronic fatigue for five years before he achieved resolution using the Fix Your Fatigue program that he developed at the Hirsch Center for Integrative Medicine in Olympia, Washington. He has helped hundreds of people resolve their chronic fatigue and is on a mission to help 100,000 more through his videos, online courses, books, one on one consults, and the training of providers. He has lectured nationally and internationally on topics in integrative and functional medicine and is board certified in family medicine and integrated medicine. When he’s not at the office you can find him singing musicals, playing basketball, traveling, dancing hiphop, and spending time with his wife and daughter. You can learn more about Evan at fixyourfatigue.org.

Evan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast!

Evan Hirsch: Thanks so much for having me.

Wendy Meyers: We’re gonna talk today about fatigue, but why don’t you give us a little bit about your background and how you came to focus on chronic fatigue.

Evan Hirsch: Absolutely. About 10 years ago, so in 2004 I graduated medical school, moved cross country, started residency in Olympia, Washington in family medicine, and I met my wife and fell in love, and unfortunately-

Wendy Meyers: Aww.

Evan Hirsch: Yeah. Unfortunately just a couple months into our relationship she developed chronic fatigue.

Wendy Meyers: Oh wow.

Evan Hirsch: So I’m this new doc and I’m trying to figure this stuff out but I don’t have any time because I’m working 80 hours a week and her adrenals are crashed and flat lined, and I can’t help her, and it felt awful, you know, I was just completely powerless. She got better after several years, she worked on her adrenals, she got a sauna, she did coffee enemas, she worked a lot on her emotional health, made a huge difference, and then I graduated residence in 2007, started my own practice, and then I got fatigue, and I had fatigue for five years. As I kind of went through my education and I learned more and more about the different causes of fatigue for myself, but also for my patients, I realized that I pretty much had every single potential cause, and it was only a matter of time before it hit me and before I had fatigue. So then I got over my fatigue and I just, I’m just on a mission to help 100,000 people resolve their chronic fatigue so that nobody has to suffer the way me and my family did.

Wendy Meyers: Yeah. And so you actually wrote a book on fatigue. Can you tell us a little about that?

Evan Hirsch: Absolutely! It’s called Fix Your Fatigue. It’s on Amazon. I basically dumped all of my protocols into this book. It goes through all of the major causes, what tests you can do that you don’t need a doctor for. You can go onto these different websites and order these tests, how to interpret those tests, and then what supplements to take in order to fix it. So it’s really, I mean if you are motivated you can really get better and fix your fatigue using this book.

Wendy Meyers: One of the underlying root causes that we’re gonna focus on today is Bartonella. That’s an infection, and why don’t we talk about its role in chronic fatigue.

Evan Hirsch: Absolutely. I see, obviously, everybody, I mean I’m focusing on fatigue, and there is just a huge component of my population that has Bartonella. Bartonella is this bacteria. It travels with Lyme and other co-infections, but it can really be transmitted by anything that takes a blood meal. So it could be ticks, it could be mosquitoes, it could be chiggers or biting flies or fleas, or any one of those. Could be from a blood transfusion, could be from sexual transmission from a partner, could be from mom, you know moms dump all their good stuff and all their bad stuff into their children through the placenta.

So there’s a lot of different ways that we can get it and it really just takes a few stressful events in order to trigger it. So the classic example is someone who comes in, you know, I had this breakup or I had this car accident and then all of a sudden I started getting neck pain, headaches, pain on the bottom of my feet and it’s not going away, and it’s all because of the motor vehicle accident. And it’s like no, it’s not because of that. It’s because that stress allowed the immune system to get distracted and then all of a sudden Bartonella came out and started causing problems. So like 50% of all domestic animals have this. So if your cat or your dog has ever licked you, if you sleep with an animal, it’s so easily transmitted and that’s why I find that so many people have it, and it only takes these triggers in order for it to come out and start causing problems.

Wendy Meyers: What are some of the symptoms of Bartonella? You listed a couple, but what are some of the main symptoms?

Evan Hirsch: Headaches. I’m gonna start from the top and work our way down. So headaches, neck pain, body pain, muscle pain. Oftentimes it’s been misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia. Sleep issues, so problems falling asleep, problems staying asleep, anxiety, depression, muscle cramping usually at night and usually in the calves. Pain on the bottom of the feet which is incredibly characteristic, usually misdiagnosed as plantar fasciitis, and then sometimes there’s little red dots that are on the body. These are hemangiomas that are produced … ‘Cause Bartonella goes through a skin phase where it can cause this stretch mark-type rash as well as these little dots. So if you have stretch marks in weird places, where like, I didn’t go through any big weight fluctuations, why would I have that, oftentimes that’s considered the Bartonella rash. Then it also lives in the blood vessels in endovascular phase where it gets into all of these things like the nervous system and the muscles and whatnot. Sometimes high blood pressure can show up, and then thyroid. It can play a huge role in causing Hashimoto’s or autoimmune thyroid issues.

Wendy Meyers: Yeah, and there’s so many different underlying causes of thyroid issues, and it’s interesting that an infection like Bartonella can promote thyroid issues. So how can people test for Bartonella?

Evan Hirsch: I do a lot by symptoms. So when somebody comes in and they have that conglomeration of symptoms that I just mentioned it’s pretty pathodiagnostic. I can say, you know, you probably have Bartonella. In fact even the Centers for Disease Control say that these Lyme-type infections are really a clinical diagnosis, which means they’re based off of being diagnosed by a clinician. Now that said, one of the best confirmatory tests that I like really is a urine PCR test. This is basically a DNA test for the bug that’s picked up in the urine. The company that I like you don’t need a doctor’s order to use, it’s called DNA Connexions, which is dnaconnexions.com. It’s 500 bucks. You go to their website, you order it, it comes to your house, you do the test, you find out the results. You just have to make sure that you flush out the Bartonella from its hiding places before you do the collection, so that’s basically exercising for 30 minutes or so prior to collecting, or it’s getting a vigorous lymph massage if you can’t do that kind of exercise. But that is really the best test out there and that’s going to test for Bartonella, Borellia which is known as Lyme, Ehrlichia, babesia, so a number of these Lyme-type infections.

Wendy Meyers: So what is the incidence of Bartonella? I mean Lyme disease is becoming more and more prevalent, and so are its co-infections. What about the incidence of Bartonella?

Evan Hirsch: I believe that pretty much everybody has Bartonella, it’s just a question, because it’s so ubiquitous and it’s so easy to get transmitted and it doesn’t have to be just from a tick but it’s just a question of whether it’s been triggered in the body. You know, with a lot of these bugs it’s really about balance. We don’t have to destroy these bugs completely. People are always amazed when I say we’re 90% bug cells and 10% human cells. People are always blown away by that. And it’s true. Bacteria makes our vitamins, and everybody is hearing about probiotics and the importance of how that’s improving the immune system and overall body function, so it’s super important that we keep these bugs in balance. So we don’t have to get rid of them, we just have to bring them back in balance, and part of that is because it’s already here, it’s already in us, it’s just not causing problems for most of us.

Wendy Meyers: Yes. And when people have, like you said, a big stressor in their life or their immune system tanks for various reasons, that’s when these opportunistic infections can come out and begin causing problems and causing symptoms. So what are some of the factors that would make one person sick when another is unaffected by Bartonella, who you said the incidence is highly prevalent, that most people have this just kind of lying in wait, lying dormant, why would one person get sick and another not?

Evan Hirsch: Everything that we deal with in medicine and health is really genetics plus environments, right? But the genetics aren’t as important as we think, and I went to a functional medicine conference recently on genetics and what’d they talk about? It was all about the environment, because the environment triggers the genetics. They say the genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. So it really is about, the difference between two people is really about the number of hits that they’ve had. Heavy metal toxicity, chemicals, molds which is so ubiquitous it’s crazy, infections, allergies, emotions, EMFs. So all of the toxicities from these things are going to cause stress on the body and end up triggering the Bartonella or some of these other infections to come out. And everybody has multiple causes of infections, and everybody has different causes of infections. So one person might have heavy metals and Bartonella and another person might have Epstein-Barr and mold.

Wendy Meyers: Yeah. Let’s talk about the thyroid, and the connection between Bartonella and the thyroid. Thyroid health issues are extremely prevalent, and thyroid medications are the number one medications prescribed. Do you think that Bartonella is a factor in Hashimoto’s disease, which is autoimmune thyroid disease?

Evan Hirsch: I’ve seen it so many times. It’s not always present, but a lot of the times when people have the conglomeration of symptoms that I mentioned and thyroid disease, usually they have Bartonella. One of my favorite stories … I love serendipity, where you learn things from your patients just by accident. You’re like oh, maybe that means something. And so I was treating somebody for Bartonella, and this patient came in and I couldn’t figure out what was going on with her. She was in a hyperthyroid storm. She’d never been hyperthyroid before, where her thyroid was too much. And I said, well, let’s start to wean you off of your thyroid medicine, let’s decrease it down, and we were able to wean her completely off of her thyroid medicine, and that was just from treating Bartonella. So I find that about half my patients who have Bartonella and thyroid disease can wean down, either all the way down or to a significant degree where they don’t require much thyroid medicine at all.

Wendy Meyers: Oh wow! That’s really, really interesting, ’cause there are people that say that Hashimoto’s can just be an infection in the thyroid, that the immune system is attacking it and attacking this infection of the thyroid, but if you clear up the infection, whatever it may be, then the body stops attacking the thyroid.

Evan Hirsch: Absolutely. Yeah, ’cause the immune system is just, it’s trying to get rid of what’s not supposed to be there. So whether it’s heavy metals or whether it’s an infection, it’s doing its thing and if the infection is gone then it’s quiescent again.

Wendy Meyers: So how do you go about treating Bartonella?

Evan Hirsch: I’m a big fan of herbs that work. So I don’t like to waste my time, I don’t like to waste anybody else’s time. I am just a big fan of using strong things but I wanna use safe things. Now the research on antibiotics versus herbs for Lyme and its infections indicate that herbs are better. When you stop antibiotics, the infection comes back nine times out of ten. And so using strong herbs are great. Neem is an herb that’s incredibly helpful in treating Bartonella. Poke root, [inaudible 00:15:05], so there’s a number of these, grapefruit seed extract, a number of these that work in combination that are incredibly helpful and incredibly strong. I had a patient today that we were talking about, you know, some of these products are so strong that I have to take one drop of these tinctures, rub it into the hand, and do it every other night to start people off on, and working them way up to five, 10, 20 drops one or two times a day, but it’s that strong where you have to be really careful with these products.

Wendy Meyers: Wow. Is there a die off that can happen with Bartonella, and how do you go about addressing that?

Evan Hirsch: Absolutely. Any time you’re killing a bug it has the potential to cause a die off, or a Herxheimer reaction, and this is basically when the infections are dying, they release their stuff into the body, and the body and the immune system react and it causes an inflammatory reaction or a cytokine reaction, and so what you want to do is you want to make sure that the detoxification pathways, which I know you love to talk about, that those detoxification pathways are patent, that they’re open. So liver, kidney, lymph, you know you want to get everything out of there, make sure that people are pooping regularly, that they’re sweating regularly so that those things aren’t clogged. All of those pathways can get clogged by what I call the usual suspects, which are heavy metals, chemicals, molds, and infections. So they can clog those things up. So sometimes you have to remove those in order to really open up those pathways. But some of the things that I like to use are sarsaparilla, sarsaparilla is kind of like my big one that I like to use, and I just keep ramping it up as needed and put it in a certain ratio with the Bartonella treatment to make sure that those pathways are more open than those bugs are being killed.

Wendy Meyers: That’s what root beer is made of, sarsaparilla.

Evan Hirsch: That’s right. So go drink a whole ton … no, no, no.

Wendy Meyers: A gallon of root beer.

Evan Hirsch: But that’s exactly right, and sarsaparilla is this amazing blood cleanser that’s really great for cleaning up these pathways and getting these toxins out.

Wendy Meyers: You wrote your book on chronic fatigue, so what are some of the other causes of chronic fatigue that you talk about in your book?

Evan Hirsch: Sleep is a huge one. Sleep has multiple causes and usually the causes of fatigue are also the causes of sleep. Heavy metals we kinda talked about, lead, mercury. You know 100,000 pounds of mercury are dumped in our oceans every single year. 70% of all lipsticks have lead in them so it’s just so incredibly important to go to a site like environmentalworkinggroup.org/ I think it’s skin deep, and search for all of the cosmetics and make sure that everything that you’re putting on your face, in your body has low toxicity. Hormone deficiencies, so adrenals, which are responsible for the stress response in the body, thyroid, sex hormones when women hit menopause and then all of a sudden they get fatigue, it’s usually because of estrogen and progesterone, and adrenals and thyroid. They all really work together in this beautiful dance. And then of course the infections, whether it’s Epstein-Barr, Bartonella, other Lyme-type infections, nutrient deficiencies like B12, vitamin D. For some of the more healthy people sometimes it’s just a lack of exercise, where they haven’t exercised, they’ve gotten sedentary over the years and they need to start moving, but exercise and movement is so important and it’s so inherent, so even if you are fatigued, trying to do some movement every day is really great for opening up the lymph pathways.

Dehydration, people not drinking enough water, you know we’re supposed to be drinking about half of our body weight in ounces, two to three liters of water a day. And then there’s constipation, there’s chemical toxicity, there’s poor oxygenation, like if you can’t breathe in through your nose, there’s mitochondrial dysfunction which is the energy center of every cell in the body that gets damaged by the usual suspects. There’s mold issues, there’s methylation or detoxification issues, there’s depression, and then there’s food allergies. So that’s kind of, that was like the 15 in 15 seconds.

Wendy Meyers: Yes! That’s a lot of potential triggers, lot of potential underlying root causes. Yeah. So it’s really important to, if you have chronic fatigue, to be thinking about toxicity and get Evan’s book, Dr. Hirsch’s book, and go through step by step every single potential root cause so that you can relieve yourself of your fatigue. I personally believe mitochondrial dysfunction is one of the main underlying root causes of all disease, especially chronic fatigue, and a lot of different things can interfere in their functioning including heavy metals.

Evan Hirsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Wendy Meyers: Is there anything in our conversation that we haven’t mentioned yet that you want to discuss regarding Bartonella or chronic fatigue?

Evan Hirsch: I think it’s just really important for people to get tested, or figure out what their causes are, because you have to start there. Like I said, everybody’s got multiple causes and everybody has different causes. That’s why they look at their neighbor and say, well how did you get better taking that supplement and I’m not getting better taking that supplement? So it really has to be individualized, but you have to start there. I’m actually, in the next month I’m launching a course on helping people find the causes and then helping them map out a plan to be able to get rid of those causes.

Wendy Meyers: That’s fantastic, because the number one complaint that all of my clients have had is fatigue. That was my number one complaint, and even people that have energy want more of it, so I think it’s great that you have a troubleshooting course to find out the underlying root causes of your fatigue. I think that’s really, really needed.

Evan Hirsch: Thank you.

Wendy Meyers: Yeah. So tell us again about your book. Give us another synopsis of your book, Fix Your Fatigue.

Evan Hirsch: Sure. I basically go through all of these causes and we look at exactly how to test for them. So if you are highly motivated you can use the book and you can get rid of your fatigue, because I’m gonna tell you what tests to run, how to interpret them, and what supplements to get. If you need more help … And then I’ve got a free Facebook group that you can jump into, Fix Your Fatigue with Dr. Evan for more support, and then if you want even more support I’m gonna be having the online classes, and then of course there’s one on ones with me and now I’m set up so I can help people all over the world. I’ve got patients now in Sweden and Australia, and the UK, and all over America. So if you need help the help is there, you just have to reach out and grab it in one of these different ways.

Wendy Meyers: That’s fantastic! Tell us where we can find you, what your website is, social media, and anything you want the audience to know.

Evan Hirsch: Absolutely, thank you! So fixyourfatigue.org is my website, and you can find all that information there. The Facebook group is Fix Your Fatigue with Dr. Evan Hirsch, and that’s where you can find me.

Wendy Meyers: Fantastic! Well Evan, thank you so much for coming on the show. You’re a good friend of mine and we’ve met at a few different health conferences and I just love you, I love your energy and I love you’re really heartfelt, wanting to help people, and I really like you a lot so I’m glad that you came on the show to share your knowledge about fatigue.

Evan Hirsch: Thanks for having me on Wendy, I appreciate it.

Wendy Meyers: Yeah. And everyone, I highly recommend going to his Facebook group and joining if you have fatigue and you want to learn more about how to address it. Everyone, thanks so much for listening today. My name is Wendy Meyers of meyersdetox.com where I specialize in heavy metal detoxification and how to address, how to test for it, how to detox it, the best supplements for heavy metal detoxification, that’s my area of expertise. So go to my site, meyersdetox.com to learn more about that. You can also download my Top 10 Tips to Detox Like a Pro checklist. This is the top 10 tips that I’ve distilled down after working with thousands of clients that you can use to detox at home inexpensively. You can download it for free at detoxforenergy.com.

Thank you so much for joining us today and we will talk to you next week.