Transcript #496 The 4 Step Process to Resolve Chronic Fatigue Naturally with Dr. Evan Hirsch

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1. Find out what’s in store on this Myers Detox Podcast with Dr. Evan Hirsche, mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic fatigue syndrome expert, who joins the show to talk about his incredible 4 stop process to resolve chronic fatigue naturally. Dr. Hirsch discusses how chronic fatigue and mast cell activation can have a lot of the same underlying root causes, like heavy metals and chemicals, lots of different infections, and even EMF exposure and emotional trauma. Lastly, he touches on different things that you can do to resolve chronic fatigue and improve your energy, improve your brain function, your digestion, and your immune function. Great episode today with a ton of important info, so make sure to tune in!
2. Find out why Dr. Hirsch became passionate about addressing fatigue and mitochondrial dysfunction.
3. Find out the main underlying root causes of mitochondrial dysfunction and fatigue.
4. Learn about Dr. Hirsch’s 4 step process for helping people address fatigue and mitochondrial dysfunction.
5. Find out how heavy metals damage mitochondria function, leading to fatigue.
6. Learn about the steps you need to take in order to properly fight infections in your body if you have fatigue.
7. Find out why it is essential to open up your pathways of elimination before doing a detox protocol.
8. Learn about the things that lead up to someone experiencing chronic fatigue, including the toxins your mother passed down to you.
9. Find out why successful protocols can take up to a year and even longer.
10. Find out why conventional medical doctors have a tough time diagnosing and treating fatigue disorders.
11. Learn about mast cell activation syndrome and how Dr. Hirsch addresses this issue with his patients.
12. Find out why you should not rely on your labs to find answers, and why you must work on your emotional health.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and today we have an awesome show for you. We have my friend, Dr. Evan Hirsch, who’s an expert in mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic fatigue syndrome. We also touch on MCAS or mast cell activation syndrome, which is a big problem for so many people. In both these issues, chronic fatigue, and mast cell activation can have a lot of the same underlying root causes that we’ll kind of touch on today. And we talk about Evan’s four-step process to resolve chronic fatigue naturally. And a lot of these things you’re not going to get at your conventional medical doctor, even though they’re well-meaning, but there are so many different things that they don’t learn about in medical school that is underlying root causes of chronic fatigue like heavy metals and chemicals, lots of different infections, Epstein-Barr, Lyme, just to name a few.

  We also have to look at, of course, diet, lifestyle, EMF, electromagnetic fields from computers, and wifi. We touch on emotional trauma, which is a huge, huge underlying root cause of physical health issues. It’s estimated even 65% or more of physical health issues are due to emotional trauma. And this is conventional medical research as well. And then we talk about a lot of different things that you can do to resolve chronic fatigue and improve your energy, improve your brain function, your digestion, and your immune function. And then, as I said, we touch on mast cell activation syndrome, what that is exactly, and why so many people are finding themselves in this position where they can’t take supplements, they can only eat a handful of foods, they can’t detox, they can’t do anything. And what do you do with these people? How do you address this? And so, Evan imparts all his wisdom on the show today, so tune in, it’s a really good show. And I know you guys listening, you’re worried about your body’s burden of toxins, that’s why you’re listening to this podcast.

  So I have a quiz that you can take at heavymetalsquiz.com. It only takes a couple of seconds. You get a free video series after you take the quiz and get your results. So check that out. It only takes a very short period of time. We get a lot of information at heavymetalsquiz.com. 

  Our guest today, Dr. Evan Hirsch, he’s also known as the Energy MD, and he’s a world-renowned expert on energy and he’s a bestselling author and professional speaker. He’s a creator of the Energy MD method, and it’s the science backed by a clinically proven four-step process to resolve chronic fatigue and long COVID naturally. And through his bestselling book, podcast, and international online programs, he’s helped thousands of people around the world. He’s been featured on TV, podcasts, and summits. And when he’s not in the office, you can find him singing musicals, dancing hip hop, and playing basketball with his family. You can learn about Dr. Hirsch and his four-step process at energymdmethod.com. Dr. Evan Hirsch, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Thanks for having me on, Wendy. Good to see you again.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s always a pleasure. And I just filmed you for my heavy docuseries that’s coming up soon. I’m really excited about that and did an amazing interview. And I wanted to pick your brain also for the podcast. You are an energy expert. You focus on fatigue and mitochondrial dysfunction. So talk a little bit about that and why you got so interested in that.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Absolutely. So, like so many people, I had my own journey. So I actually started my residency, fell in love with my wife, and three months later she couldn’t get out of bed for the better part of three years. It wasn’t that dramatic, but it felt like that. And then we ended up, we got married and I finished my residency and we had a kid and I started my practice. And then a couple of years after that I got chronic fatigue and it lasted for about five years.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Oh, wow.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: And after taking a nap under my desk for the thousandth day in a row I just felt so much shame because here I was already practicing as a functional medicine doctor and I couldn’t get myself better. I was like, “F this, I’m going to go find out all my causes,” because I knew if I did, I would be successful. It’s always a process.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I had that too. I had that shame also when I was practicing, and then I was waking up feeling like I got hit by a truck and I’d be exhausted and wanting stimulants. “What is going on here?” I think so many people were dealing with this.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Yeah. And I couldn’t get the help that I needed, so I went on this journey of finding out all the causes and I figured out that I had a bunch of things that I had never learned about, even in functional medicine that molds heavy metals, chemicals, infections especially were really big for me. And so then I got over my fatigue and then I wrote a book about it and then launched my fatigue practice. And so that’s what I do now, fortunately, I’ve helped thousands of people and I’m on a mission to help a million.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I know that’s where I met you. I met you at a conference to help publish our books and we’re both publishing books on fatigue, so we kind of bonded over that.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Right, I remember.

Dr. Wendy Myers: But your book is doing really, really well. I mean, it’s really hitting home for so many people because that’s the number one complaint that most people have. And even if you have energy, say you don’t have a diagnosis of chronic fatigue, everyone wants more energy. So what are some of the underlying root causes of why we have mitochondrial dysfunction and fatigue?

Dr. Evan Hirsch: When I look at the causes, I’m always kind of putting them into different categories. So there are deficiencies. These are things that are not in the body that are supposed to be in the body. These are oftentimes hormones, vitamins, minerals, mitochondrial function, lifestyle habits, and neurotransmitters. All of those things are not in the body and they’re supposed to be, and so they’re lower levels. And a lot of people have worked on that with their naturopath or their functional medicine doc or whatever. And then there are the toxins. These are things that are in the body that aren’t supposed to be there. So this is heavy metals and chemicals and molds and infections, whether it’s parasites or Lyme or Epstein-Barr virus or now the new pandemic virus, whether it’s allergies, food allergies, inhaled allergies, electromagnetic fields, structural issues. So those are the things that are kind of in your body or in your life, or negative emotional patterns or trauma. Those are the things that are in your body or in your life that you need to get out.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, great. Yeah, so that’s a lot to unpack. When you’re chronically fatigued, brain fog, it’s a mountain to climb to kind of figure all this stuff out. So where do you usually start with people on that road to recovery?

Dr. Evan Hirsch: So we have a four-step process that we take people through. And so the first step is figuring out what causes they have. And so of these 30-plus different causes that we’re looking at, everybody that we work with has a combination of about 20 or more of those causes, which can also be daunting and overwhelming. But the reality is that fortunately 75% of those causes can be determined by history and symptoms. So after the first visit or once, if they’re joining one of our group programs, they can work through the checklist. They’re going to know based on their history and symptoms 75% of their causes, and then they can actually use their money wisely for the 25% that we can’t really tell by history and symptoms. So that’s the first thing we’re doing because then the rest of the process is really matching up, “Okay, you’ve got this cause, this is the remedy for that.” And we work through that. And so then step two. Should I just go into step two?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, do it.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: So then step two, we start replacing the deficiencies. We talked about deficiencies and toxins. And this process really is all about the toxins, what I call the root, root causes. There are five of those, and that’s the heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, and trauma. Now we can’t just go directly after those because you’re going to feel worse and you’re not going to get better. And so we have to set the body up for success. And so we have to replace the deficiencies first, make somebody stronger by replacing their adrenals, which manage the stress in the body and give you that get up and go and helps to manage your circadian rhythm and your ability to wake up and fall asleep. It’s the thyroid, it’s the mitochondria, which make 70 to 90% of our energy. It is B vitamins, it is vitamin D. So some of these vitamins and minerals, it’s your lifestyle habits. We have to do that first so that the person can get more resilient.

And then in step three, we start opening up the drainage pathways, so the liver and the kidney and the lymph and the lymph and the brain and the intestines and the gallbladder. All of these pathways, when you have fatigue and some of these other mystery illnesses, they’re all these pathways are clogged. So we have to unclog them and we use herbs and nutrients and a bunch of other things to open up those pathways so that when you actually go after the toxins in step four, you have a place to put them. Because if you’re going to grab mold and you’re going to bring them into your drainage pathways and they have no place to go, they’re just going to go right back into that compartment, into a different compartment, wherever. So you have to make sure that step three is done properly in order to make sure that they’ve got an exit strategy.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes. And heavy metals, as you guys I’ve talked about a lot, are a big underlying root cause and they really throw a wrench in that whole mechanism to produce energy. Can you kind of go into that a little bit?

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Absolutely. So when we take a look at some of these heavy metals, there are over a hundred thousand pounds of mercury that are dumped into our oceans every year. And so consequently, anything that we’re consuming from our oceans will have mercury in them with the bigger fish having more. So I no longer actually recommend the consumption of fish besides sardines and anchovy. Some of the smaller ones lead even still today, 70% of all lipsticks still have lead in them, and other cosmetics as well. There’s cadmium, which you can get from firsthand and secondhand smoking. There’s aluminum which is all over the place, including antiperspirants and deodorants. So there are a lot of these different heavy metals that are now found in our environment that build up in our bodies over time and they end up damaging the mitochondria, which decreases our ability to produce energy. They hijack the immune system so that then infections can become opportunistic and they can start causing problems in the body. So that’s some of the major things we see with heavy metals.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay. Yes. And there are so many metals like arsenic and aluminum, tin, thallium, cesium, lead, and mercury, and there are radioactive elements and they’re deuterium. And there are just so many different elements that can throw a wrench into our mitochondria, it’s amazing we’re still walking. But there’s a reason some people were tired, and so that’s why you and I were trying to sound the alarm bell, there are so many things that you can do, but you have to pick through all of these checkboxes to get to all this stuff.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Exactly.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And so when it comes to, so infections, this is a big issue. It’s kind of like a catch-22 when you’re fatigued, you don’t have enough energy to power your immune system and you become more vulnerable to opportunistic infections and also stuff you get your immune system just can’t fight off. Can you talk a little bit about that phenomenon?

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Absolutely. And so these infections really require that, if you’re going to get rid of an infection, you’re going to need some sort of antimicrobial that’s going to kill the infection. You’ve got to be able to have a way of getting it out of the body like we talked about in step three. And then you have to have a somewhat intact immune system to help you with that process. You can’t just beat this infection and expect to have success. And then in order to have a somewhat intact immune system, you’ve got to make sure that you’re addressing heavy metals, chemicals, and molds because those are the things that are going to hijack the immune system and then you’re not going to have success with the infections. Whenever we talk about infections, we always have to talk about them in the context of all of these other things as well in order to be successful.

And then it really is, that’s really where the art comes in and where a lot of times people really appreciate having me in their back pocket because this is where it gets bumpy. This is where people have died off and they have Herxheimer reactions. When you’re killing the infections, they’re releasing their toxins into the bloodstream and you’ve got to make sure you’re getting the infections and their toxins out of the body through that exit strategy like we talked about in step three. So there’s kind of a bit of a push and pull, how much can we kill the infection and with the amount that we’re able to get out. So that’s one of the arts of all this.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And I think people have to have realistic expectations. When you’re detoxing, when you’re killing off infections, it’s not just a straight upward, “Oh my God, I’m doing this protocol, I’m going to feel amazing, I should be feeling better and better and better and better.” And like, “Nope, that’s not really how things work.” And it’s not the protocol. There’s a bottleneck in the body. The body has to process all this stuff and it doesn’t always feel good. So it’s not necessarily the protocol, that’s just how the body works.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Yeah. You said it perfectly. The way that I think about this is kind of like a funnel, like when you’re changing your oil or whatever, and it really depends on how tight is that funnel at the bottom. If the funnel’s really tight and you’re trying to dump these toxins as you’re killing them or removing them into that funnel, it’s going to get overflowed and just go right back into the body if that bottom is not open. So that is the rate-limiting step, as they say, where the amount that you’re able to get rid of the infections and other toxins is directly equal to the amount that you can exit out of your body and the openness of those drainage pathways.

Dr. Wendy Myers: You said you had four steps in your process, were there three infections?

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Three was the drainage or the opening up step, opening up the drainage pathways. And then step four is removing the toxins. So it’s marching through in a way to make sure that you’re addressing molds and heavy metals and chemicals and these infections where most of the time really is spent on the infections because each one of these things is going to take probably six to 12 months to get out of the body. We can do them all at once, but we have to realize that we need a binder to bind up the mold. We need something to address the heavy metals.

We need something to address the chemicals because most of the time it’s not a question of do you have these things? It’s, how much of these things do you have and how long is it going to take to get out of the body? So we give you things to bind those up so that they’re gently being removed from the body because the body likes slow changes. Slow and steady wins the race. Detoxifying at a slow rate definitely makes the body happier. And then we can address the infections because that’s really where there are a lot more nuances.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And let’s talk about how people get into this situation in the first place. So many people are just going, going, going on their screen, staying up late, watching their TV shows, going to work or school without enough sleep and they’re just burning the candle at both ends. While you can do that when you’re young, at some point the body’s like, “F you, I’m not doing this anymore.” And eventually, you have to pay the price. You’ve got to pay off that credit card that you’ve been borrowing against.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Right. Exactly. So pretty much if you’re human and you’re on this plane and existing in this globe, you’re going to be accumulating toxins over time. So we start off where mom dumps all their good stuff and all their not-so-good stuff into their babies. We now know that over 280 different chemicals are found in babies’ cord blood. So babies come out with a whole bunch of toxins. This is part of the reason why we’re getting so much higher rates of autism. And so then you accumulate over your lifetime. So for me, I grew up eating a lot of tuna fish, so there’s my mercury. I got mercury fillings, and every time I used to bite down, I’d release mercury vapor. I was constipated for most of my life or the first 20-some-odd years of my life because I was eating gluten and dairy and then lived in a moldy place when I was in medical school and had a really intense, stressful breakup and went to medical school and went to residency, and so was burning the candle at both ends and was very stressed.

And then got formaldehyde poisoning from gross anatomy lab in medical school and used to heat things up in plastic and used to drive around the country with a water bottle next to me that was full of water, that the sun would bake it and the plastic would get into the water and then I would drink a bunch of that water. When I ran these tests on myself, I was just FOS, just full of stuff. And so it accumulates over time. And then any stressor, whether it’s mental, emotional, or physical, can kind of put you over the edge. So for some people, it’s the pandemic virus. For other people, it’s going to be a stressful breakup. For other people, it might be a motor vehicle accident where all of a sudden they’re like, “Yeah, I can’t get rid of my body pain.” Well, most of the time what I’ve seen is that it’s no longer about that car accident.

That car accident triggered things and then the infections become opportunistic or whatever ends up happening. But it’s just that stressor that people are like, “Oh, I was fine until this moment,” but that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was all this other stuff that was happening over time that got built up in the body that allowed that to happen.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And then also people have to have realistic expectations about how long it’s going to take to get better or to detox or get rid of infections. I think people give up before they get to that pinnacle point where they’re going to recover. And I think people can talk to different protocols and different programs and that they really have to have caution and patience and allow their body to enjoy the benefits of whatever protocol that they’re doing.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Yeah, absolutely. All of our programs are for 12 months. People are like, “Can I get better in 12 months?” Yeah, you’re going to get better throughout the process, but this is a 12-month process in order for you to get to a place that’s going to significantly improve your energy. And oftentimes it takes longer than that. It depends on the number of causes that somebody has, the severity of the causes, the length of time that they’ve had those, how entrenched are those causes, and how sensitive they are to supplements. So it can take longer, it can take 24, it can take 36 months. But the reality is that if you’re going to be addressing all of these things, you’re going to be successful. And it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. It’s like what you’re talking about. People get to a point where they’re like, “Oh, it’s not working.”

And oftentimes I’ll tell people, “If you’re not noticing anything at six months into the program, that’s not a problem. The reality is that until you get into step four and you start getting rid of all of these heavy metals, chemicals, molds, and infections, and the fact that it’s going to take you six to 12 months to get rid of those and it’s going to take you four to six months to prepare the body in order to be able to do that, that’s just the reality of the situation.” So expectations, absolutely what you’re saying is true, expectations are everything.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And so when people are going to their conventional medical doctor, I mean all this stuff you’re saying, the doctors aren’t.  So you go in, “I’m just tired, I’m chronically fatigued, I can’t work,” or whatever it is. The doctors aren’t doing any of this stuff that you talk about. And many times they’re not even looking at infections, they’re not looking for infections typically when people have a chronic fatigue diagnosis. So what’s going on? When someone goes to their conventional medical doctor, what is a doctor typically trying to do to address chronic fatigue? Because it doesn’t seem like they really are going to have much in their back pocket.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: You’re exactly right. Yeah. So when we say we’re looking at over 30 different causes, oftentimes those doctors are looking at about five. And I went through that system, I got my MD, went through medical school, did my residency. And for the most part, it was, okay, what’s their thyroid doing and what’s their heart doing? Is there congestive heart failure? Do they have any liver issues going on? Is there HIV? Some of these other things that you would think of from a conventional standpoint, but that was generally about it. If nothing comes back there and they’re looking at the wrong thyroid or they’re interpreting the thyroid labs incorrectly anyway, you’re not getting a good gauge on that.

But if you’re just looking at those, then yeah, you’re not going to be successful if you’ve got all these other things that we’re talking about today. So yeah, unfortunately, it’s just a different paradigm and they’re all trying their best. They mean well, but it’s just being curious and going outside the box. I had to, I didn’t want to, but I had chronic fatigue, my wife had chronic fatigue and I couldn’t get the help that I needed. And then as I got better at functional medicine, I just got more and more people who were sicker and sicker and sicker, and I wasn’t willing to say, “I can’t help you.” I was just going to keep learning and keep going into and being like, I just need to keep learning more in order to help these people.

And unfortunately, those conventional doctors, the other challenge is that they’re also human. And when somebody sits in front of them and they can’t help them, they feel awful about themselves, they feel shame. And guess what? They turn the shame to blame and they blame the patient in front of them and say, “This is your fault. This is in your head, get out of my office.” And oftentimes they kick people out because they feel so bad about themselves. And they give these people stress and medical trauma, and it’s just a really uncomfortable place for those people to be in when they’ve been told so many times that it’s all in their head and that there’s nothing wrong with them.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, or that they’re given a card for a psychiatrist and a referral for that and things like that. It’s terrible. It’s very traumatizing. And let’s talk about mast cell activation syndrome. So this is something, again, kind of a component of fatigue. Fatigue of the immune system or dysfunction of the immune system. What is that exactly, and why are people getting that?

Dr. Evan Hirsch: People can have mast cell activation syndrome and not have fatigue. So it really just depends on how much the mitochondria are affected. Since the mitochondria make 79% of our energy, if it’s not negatively affected to a certain degree, then generally they’re not going to have fatigue, but they can have mast cell activation syndrome, which is basically a sensitivity to your environment. The mast cells in the body will produce histamine when they come into contact with an antigen. So basically the way that our immune system works is that its job is to get rid of things out of the body that aren’t supposed to be there. So sometimes if you were exposed to pollen, if pollen is not an issue for you, the immune system kind of takes care of it, pushes it out of the body, no problem. But if the immune system has been triggered, if it’s got a bunch of things like we’ve been talking about, heavy metals, chemicals, molds, and infections already on the immune system, the immune system is hyperactive, and then it becomes more reactive to things.

So pollen goes from a runny nose to not being able to tolerate going outside, or foods go from maybe having some reflux or having a skin rash to only being able to eat five foods. So it’s kind of this extreme where this range of having an allergy or sensitivity to something, to being sensitive to “everything” or to a lot of things. So what we find in our program is there are a couple different ways that we help these people. The process is kind of the same where we go through the four steps, but oftentimes we have to pivot a little bit and do things a little bit differently. So a lot of these people can’t tolerate things orally. And since 80% of the immune system is in the gut, so anything you put in the mouth, the immune system can potentially react to. So we do things topically. We have people take tinctures, and rub them on their hands. You’re going to absorb about 20 to 30% of it. We can still get you what we need, but we’re kind of bypassing going through the gut.

So that’s one of the things that we do. And then the other thing is that sometimes we’ll have to use some treatments that are kind of outside the body. So whether it’s a coffee enema, whether it is a foot bath, whether it is a sauna, and it’s kind of like we have to go through this in small gradations where it’s like, lets kind of see what we can do in this particular step through the process in order to move things in order to help people get success. And then as they remove these toxins from their bodies, then they can tolerate a lot more. I recently saw somebody who came to us who could only tolerate very few foods, and now she’s eating almost everything that she could possibly want within reason. She’s following a clean diet and gluten-free, dairy-free, alcohol-free, and sugar-free, which is what we recommend. But a lot of that is because she was able to go after the infections, able to bind up and remove some of these toxins.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I love ionic food. They’re amazing. A very easy, simple, effective way to remove toxins, all different types of toxins that can be difficult, especially if you have a hard time tolerating oral supplements or you don’t tolerate heat from the sun, the foot bath is great. I like the ion cleanse by AMD. Is there anything else that you want to add to our conversation, Evan, about anyone with chronic fatigue and maybe giving them a message of hope for recovery? Because I know so many people, I’ve had patients too, that are in that revolving door, going to doctor after doctor for even 20 years before they figure out what’s wrong with them or get a diagnosis of Lyme or other underlying root causes of their chronic fatigue. So what is your message to those people that have been searching for so long for answers?

Dr. Evan Hirsch: I would say that there definitely is hope. I would say that there’s way too much of a focus on treatment. You ask your buddy, “Oh hey, what treatment did you get that helped you get better?” And way less of a focus on causes. But when you focus on the causes and you go through this process, and as I said, 75% of those causes can be determined by your symptoms alone, including infections. So if you got a test that said you don’t have Lyme, but you still think you have Lyme or you’re still sick, it’s very possible you have Lyme or you have Epstein-Barr virus. The testing is incredibly erroneous. What I tell practitioners when I lecture to them is that if you lean too heavily on your labs, you’re going to fall over. You just have to go back to your basics. And what I learned in medical school is that 90% of all diagnosis is history and symptoms.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, there is a big problem with labs. There’s a big issue with labs and their accuracy.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Yeah. And as humans, we love the data, but the reality is that it’s just when you’re looking at, and especially this is a bit of an aside, but when you’re looking at Lyme or Epstein-Barr virus, the tests are serology tests. So you’re looking at the immune system’s reaction to an infection. But if you have heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, and trauma, your immune system’s dysfunctional. So then you’re asking a dysfunctional immune system to give you an accurate test and it just doesn’t work. So we get people better by going based off of history and symptoms alone for many years now. So just very important, to focus on your causes, focus on the history and symptoms, and focus on your mindset. We’ve been talking a lot about the physical here, but there are the mental and the emotional components that we deal with also in our programs and the mindset.

You’ve got to have gratitude for where you are, even though it’s incredibly uncomfortable and you have a vision, you have to have a vision for where you want to go. And every single day you have to tell yourself, “What is one thing that I can do today to improve my health?” And then you’ve got to go ahead and you have to take action. Way too many people are also stuck in learning about it, they listen to a ton of podcasts and summits and all that sort of stuff, which is great, but they don’t do anything about it. So you have to find a mentor, you have to get educated, and then you have to follow that mentor for about six months, and at least in order to be able to see whether or not you’re going to make progress. But if you’re in six months and you don’t have a mentor who’s got a plan, who knows how to address all these causes we’re talking about, then it’s time to move on. But those are just some general messages of hope and kind of how to navigate this.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love that. And the mindset is so important because I think a diagnosis or an illness really is a wake-up call to your lifestyle, you just can’t keep going how you’re going. Your body is just like, “Nope, I can’t, I’m not doing this anymore.” And also I think people overlook their emotional trauma, childhood development trauma, and other traumas that they have experienced throughout their life, and that’s so easily overlooked even by the best practitioner because it’s not an infection or something happening to you physically or nothing that can’t be measured in a lab. So it’s something that’s overlooked and it’s a huge underlying root cause of physical health issues.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: Yeah. Everybody has trauma. A lot of people say, “Oh, I don’t have trauma,” because they weren’t physically abused, sexually abused, emotionally abused, that sort of thing, they came from a loving home. But the reality is that the way that we’re kind of created in terms of our development is to make sure that we are kept safe. And so our parents are imperfect. And consequently, in order for us to be safe in our relationship with our parents, we had to navigate that and make sure that we were safe in that dynamic. And you don’t have to have a parent who had any sort of emotional issues or any sort of severe issues themselves in order for this dynamic to end up happening. And then if you have anything that happens as you grow up, like peer stuff, rejection of a peer group, anything that makes the universe seem to be more stressful and less safe, that is going to influence your immune system, your nervous system, and contribute to this whole picture. Everybody needs to work on their emotional health, that’s just what I’ve learned.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, I mean, a parent can just be out to lunch dealing with their own depression, or they can totally love you, but maybe just not emotionally attuned to you, or even just neglectful, they’re not in touch with their own emotions. They have their own stuff. That was with my parents.. They were just neglectful or not a hundred percent present. And even that can have as much of an impact on you as someone who was outright abused. And that’s why I overlook that too. I think it’s very easy to overlook things if you weren’t outright abused emotionally, physically, or sexually. And so it can have a big impact on you. And I also, mindset going back to that, I think it’s so important to send positive messages to your body and think positive thoughts. Dr. Bruce Lipton’s work and many others, Dr. Joe Dispenza, and really paying attention to your self-talk and how that’s affecting you physically can have a big, big impact.

Dr. Evan Hirsch: A lot of people know about organic food, and so they’re going to try to put the right food into their bodies, but they forget about putting the right messages into their minds, and it’s more important.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, this is super. Well, Dr. Hirsch, thank you so much for coming on the Myers Detox podcast. So why don’t you tell the listeners where they can learn more about your work and how they can work with you?

Dr. Evan Hirsch: I’m at energymdmethod.com. And if they scroll down a little bit on the right-hand side, they can click on that button, then they can text me directly and we can start a conversation. If you’re interested in seeing if we’re a good fit to work together, we’ve got free 20-minute calls that we can jump on and see if that’s the case. But on my website, you can find most of what you need. We’ve got quizzes that you can take under the learn tab to see if you’ve got some of these infections. And then I’m on all social media channels. But yeah, reach out if you’re interested in seeing if we’re a good fit to work together.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic. Well, Dr. Hirsch, thanks so much for coming to the show. Always a pleasure to have you on, and I love your work. This is the hot button for so many people who are overcoming their fatigue, and it’s really something that is really tough to do alone because there are so many underlying root causes. So thank you so much for your work and everyone, thanks for tuning in every week. I’m Dr. Wendy Meyers. I really appreciate your presence every week and you tuning in. And I love doing this, love doing my work and bringing you experts from around the world to help with those, little nuggets or two, or that missing piece of the puzzle that you need to get better and to heal because you deserve to feel good. So thanks for tuning in.