MCAS & Histamine: A Holistic Health Deep Dive

Introduction and Personal Health Journey 0:00

Welcome back to our Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Meg Mill. And today I'm joined by my esteemed colleague, Evan Brand. He's a board certified holistic nutritionist and a functional nutrition therapy practitioner who's transform the lives of thousands of clients with his online practice by finding the root causes of fatigue, depression, anxiety, digestive disorders and other issues. He also has a great podcast and I'm so excited to share his knowledge today.

Thank you for being with us today, Evan. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Well, I'm excited to get started because you were sharing with me before we were online that about your actual personal journey with MCAS and what you are feeling? And before we get into the nitty gritty, I'd love for you to just share a little bit about your own health history. I think so many of us have these great stories that really brought us to this area in a personal way. Yeah, well, I mean, my story kind of evolves, like as you learn, right?

So years ago, I thought I just had IBS. That was my story in college. I always told as I had IBS, I had skin problems, I had mood problems and sleep problems, and I started to chip away at those. I figured out I had parasites sort. That was the magical cure for everything. Fix those, and got rid of my anxiety pretty much overnight. And I lost a bunch of weight because I had parasites. So I started to put the muscle back on, and then I started to have more sleep issues. And then I found out I had mold.

And then I also had three tick bites the same summer. So then I got Lyme, Bartonella, babesia, and mold all in the same summer. And I remember really when, you know, I guess you would say shit hit the fan. It was probably in Gatlinburg and the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. And my wife and I, and I think we probably had one kid at the time, we have three now. You know, it is with kids. It's like, what year? What day? and we were in the aquarium, and I remember sitting there and I got hit with a wave of vertigo, and that was like my first experience with vertigo.

I mean, I've had dizziness before, but not this. I mean, I could barely hold myself up. I was like, okay, something ain't right now. Looking back makes perfect sense. Aquarium. What's in aquarium? Water? Lots of water and mold. It's going to be feeding on moist environments and moist walls. And so I think that was really like the the check engine light for me, that something wasn't right. So I literally took off about two years of not driving. I was still working clinically, like my brain was still sharp, but I was just drunk basically.

And sometimes clinically we'll see that related to Candida. So we'll call it auto brewery syndrome. We'll see that acetal aldehyde, which is produced from Candida that can cause like this kind of brain fog, dizziness, disorientation. But it wasn't that I didn't have Candida. When I looked at my urine. Luckily, I did an organic acid test because I thought, okay, you know, what's the best test to investigate? I think the O test is a great one. And so then running that urine, you can also test mycotoxins.

So then I found I had off the chart levels of okra toxin and liquid toxin comes from Aspergillus and Aspergillus and all mold colonization or all mold exposure can be a massive mast cell trigger or a histamine intolerance factor. So I found that and then I ran a urine sample for lyme and co-infections showed up with Lyme, Bartonella and Babesia. And this is super under-recognized, especially Bartonella which is a massive driver of histamine intolerance and mast cell activation. Bartonella is a bacteria.

You can get it from ticks, fleas, lice, mosquitoes, Lyme is sexually transmitted. Semen samples have found Borrelia burgdorferi in there. So if you say, oh, well, I've never had a tick bite, I'm a city girl. Well, if you've had sex with someone who's had Lyme, you could have literally gotten sexually transmitted Borrelia. So and I started peeling apart all the layers to my issue and honestly, there's there's not a silver bullet to this thing. And, you know, it's the art of medicine, you know, especially when you're practicing functional medicine is really to try and find all the issues that I had.

And then how to approach those in a step by step process that doesn't make you so ill that you can't work, you can't function, you can't take care of your kids and that can be challenging for some. Like we were out of our house while we remediated.

Nervous System Regulation and Root Causes 4:42

We were living in a hotel for six weeks in the middle of winter when it was like 12 degrees and we're walking our dog and trying not to break our neck, falling on ice when my wife was pregnant, you know, like it just crazy stuff that we went through and of course, along the way, your nervous system gets totally dysregulated. And I didn't realize how important resetting my nervous system was until I pulled out of it. And like I told you before, we hit record, like when I look back now, I realize that me being stuck in fight or flight was a big piece of the puzzle.

Because we are so irritable and frustrated and fearful and angry at the situation. Oh, that's doing is just aggravating your immune system even more and creating more cortisol, more mast cell release, more histamine, more inflammatory cytokines, and most people can't supplement their way out of that. So, you know, I was taking Gaba, I was doing passionflower. I love mother work tincture. So I was doing all these things, all these herbal remedies that I've done clinically for a decade. But it wasn't enough.

And, you know, eventually it led to us changing our environment. We left Kentucky the Midwest completely. We're down in Florida and people say, oh my God, Florida mold, how are you getting better there? The answer is, I can be outside pretty much all day, every day. So yeah, there's a ton of moldy buildings everywhere. And you know, you're playing with fire sometimes when you go in to stay places. But overall for me was the fresh air was like the magical cure. And some people have to go to the desert to recover.

I just, I like trees so I didn't want to go to Arizona. I like that, yes. And do you bring up so many good points here? But let's start with talking about that nervous system regulation, because I think that that is a big piece of this puzzle. And I mean, you said it perfectly when you're saying you can't supplement your way out of this because I think, you know, we're looking at a conventional medicine and they're doing a lot of Band-Aid approaches with medications, you know, putting you maybe on an antihistamine, that, okay, that's not really ever finding the root cause.

But you could actually take that again and say, okay, if you're having histamine issues now we're just going to stay on a sub on supplements, and we're going to try to Band-Aid that reaction, sometimes with supplements or different things. But you need to find the root cause. And one of the pillars of that, I do also agree, is working on the mindset and the nervous system regulation to really calm everything down for healing. Yeah, and it's hard to do that because when you have infections like the Bartonella that's creating inflammation in the capillaries, you have brain fog, you have cold hands and feet.

So your circulation sucks, your sex drive sucks. So marriages start to fall apart because the spouses or resenting each other because their sex life is dead. So you know that that whole part of the relationship that used to lift them up and make them feel close and to bond them, that's gone. So now you feel like roommates, you're sitting on opposite sides of the couch from each other on your phones at night, rather than cuddling like you should be. So I see this thing all day, every day and how it manifest and how it tears people apart and you know, you really have to be stubborn when it comes to taking your health into your own hands.

I mean, really, what you and I are teaching here is we're teaching a message of empowerment and unfortunately, no one is going to come and save you. I was for, for so many years, I was looking at and seeking this Savior. Like, if I could just find this, this next thing, this next person, this next remedy, this acupuncturist knows this, and this herbalist knows this, and this massage therapist knows this, and this chiropractor knows this, and this naturopath knows this, and really, no one is perfect at all of it.

So you just have to extract everything you can from all these people. And then I've basically formed my own protocols in a way to fix it. And that may sound overwhelming to some, but if you just get the proper data, you can really pull out of this. So, you know, if I may, I'd like to just kind of lay out the framework of how I would approach a histamine mast cell issue, and I throw those in the same bucket, because to me, histamine intolerance is just one of the flavors of mast Cell activation. So for me mast cell activation was histamine intolerance with the diet.

But it was also some of the dizziness. It was some of the joint pain, the fatigue. the post, you know, I guess you call like a post exertional malaise. Like you try to hike, you try to bike, you try to lift weights, and then you crash. So I think histamine intolerance is just a subset, if you will, of this big constellation of symptoms that is mast cell activation. Yeah. Let's go through it I love that idea okay okay. So I mean really what I would do let's just roll play here. Let's say we've got a 46 year old woman.

She's got two kids. She's having trouble with hormones. Her sex drive shot. She can't sleep very well. Her energy sucks or hairs falling out. She's got a lot of food sensitivities. She's bloated so she doesn't feel sexy anymore. And, she wants her husband to love her again. Okay, so. So we take her, and we're going to look at her gut because likely if you've had some exposure to mold, which is extremely common, especially when it's like seven degrees up north right now and people are stuck in their houses potentially breathing in and whatever kind of air.

So if you've had mold exposure, it suppresses the immune system, it allows bacterial overgrowth. Now these bacteria so Klebsiella Pseudomonas Morgan Ella we can measure these in the stool. There's a lot of histamine producing bacteria that fill up your histamine bucket. So now when you go to the kombucha or the fermented this or fermented that you've been told is good for you, you can't handle it because your bucket is already so full of all these histamine producing bacteria. So we're going to look at the stool test to try to investigate what level of dysbiosis is present, how much gut inflammation is present, and then what are we seeing that maybe other doctors might miss, like H.

Pylori, which is going to reduce your stomach acid levels and then affect how you digest your food. So you've got this 20 supplement list that you're taking,

Environmental Triggers and Mold Exposure 10:40

but it's not working well because you have malabsorption due to the gut bugs. Okay. So that's like one big piece of the puzzle. And then you've got the whole Lyme co-infection. So you told me you're up in PA, I see tons of Lyme and Bartonella up there. There's tons of ticks and mosquito bites. And if if I were to pick one part of the country where I'd say the most of that exist, it's probably in the northeast corner and so I would say whatever your favorite test is, there's urine, there's blood, there's controversy over testing.

But I would try to do something to look at Lyme and Bartonella and Berbizier. There's also a yeah, there's an a plasma, there's Rocky Mountain spotted fever, there's Borrelia recurrences, which is called tick-borne relapsing fever. But those make up a whole other wrench in the gears, if you will, for mast cell. So we've got the gut test biopsies piece. We've got the Lyme co-infection piece. And then we've got this toxin piece which could be metals. So heavy metals in the mouth, heavy metal toxicity from injections as a child or into adulthood.

We've got the potential for say lead pipes. I mean there's so many people drinking water that's still not filtered enough for heavy metals. And then you have pesticides if you're living next to agriculture, which we did in Kentucky, any pesticide, even in trace amounts, can damage the gut bacteria. So back to the dysbiosis histamine problem again. And then you've got the whole mold mycotoxins issue. So let's say your child who's suffering there in a daycare that had a roof leak and they don't really care, they don't have the budget.

You know, it's expensive to to fix and replace a whole roof. So they just like, patch it up. And the building is not good. And so your child's sick every couple weeks. And now they're allergic to every food. And now they're starving to death because you're only on a couple of foods. But if you get those pieces of data, the environmental piece and the toxin piece, the infection piece, the gut piece, to me, that is, I'd say at least 80% of the battle trying to find and fix those issues. And then the other roadblock is just you.

It's your relationships. It's your emotional state and how you approach this. Do you approach it as a poor me, poor me, like feel bad for me and you just want to mope around about it or. Just to be frank. Or do you get pissed off enough at all this suffering and you're sick and tired of being sick and tired? Did you actually use that adrenaline to then fuel you to make changes? We're going to fix this thing. We're going to get out of here. We're going to find a new school for my kid where he feels, well, we're going to get out of this house.

I'm going to get out of this toxic relationship. I'm going to cut these toxic people out of my life. You know, it really takes some massive, you know, cojones to to really do this sometimes. And if you're not miserable enough, you might just continue on the path a year on now and you're just like, I'm just going to hunker down and get through it, and you just kind of put blinders on and you look the other way. But I encourage people to try to be as bold as you can. It takes massive action. I mean, I've bought and sold homes, I've remediated homes, I've built homes from scratch.

I've, you know, I've done renovations on places, I've bought and sold cars. I've moved 600 miles. You know, I've done drastic, drastic steps. And it was because I needed to. I was trying everything else and it wouldn't work. And that's an interesting point. So, you know, it's something that can when you have activation of mast cells and you calm everything down, when you're looking at all these pillars, you can hit a flare. If something comes back up that you're exposed to. Do you feel like you have had once you were really able to bring yourself back into that calm place?

Do you feel like the moves and everything when you're saying you've bought and sold like times that you've flared back up? Well, I would say that. Here's the hard part too, right? Like everything I'm describing is also stressful. So you could almost flare by doing something good. you know, because in, let's say you get into the new house, that's not mold anymore, but now you have all the voices and the off gassing of the new home, the cabinets and the paint and the lacquers. Right. So, so, you know, if I'm hearing your question correctly, it's kind of like, well, are there flares associated with all that?

Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Because you were saying you've bought and sold and you've had to change cars. And I'm was thinking of, okay, you're making these changes. It's sort of a light. It's a lifelong journey, I guess is maybe what I'm trying to to get. You're always needing to think about these things, but if you can really keep each one of the when you've done the healing work, and then we can look at some of the environmental changes and like really pay attention to those over time. And you feel like, okay, I'm in control of that.

You can keep your your flares down. Yeah. Well, you know, another side of the coin too is what I'm saying. Some people will just shut down because they'll say, well, it's too expensive. I don't have the money to get rid of this car, buy the new car, get rid of this house, buy a new house, and some of the things I've done, some of the mistakes and the moves and changes I've made were cheap and some of them were expensive. And I will admit, I've had to dump money into trying to fix things to make things better.

But now that I am in a better place, I could tolerate a car that had leftover air freshener in it where previously that would have set me off those fragrances. The chemical sensitivity I developed, which comes along with massive activation. You know, previously if I was around air freshener, it would have killed me. I go into a restaurant bathroom and the little puffer thing sprays me. I mean, I want to take a sledgehammer and knock it off the wall. Now I can handle it. I'll smell it and I'll go.

I despise that smell. I can't believe that these people are using Fabuloso toxic cleaning products in their place, but it doesn't knock me down the way it used to. Whereas before it was a several day recovery period after a massive flare like that. So I think depending on where you're at right now or financially and in what you can stomach in terms of cost and you know how much you're willing to change your lifestyle and how much you're able to change your lifestyle. I think the big changes are helpful, but is it possible to stay in bad relationship ups, bad environments, whatever, and still make it out?

Yes, but I think it's going to take a lot more brain work. Meaning you're going to have to work so hard on reprograming your nervous system to tell your body that this is okay, because at the end of the day, your body is just trying to alert you of these dangers. It's just that it gets stuck and it's like, hey, this this office, this home is bad for you. Alert, alert, alert. Mast cell activation. You're having headaches, sinus issues, fatigue. Your body's trying to say, like, get out. Maybe you get out for a week or two and you're on vacation.

Everything's fine. And you snap out of your fog and you go, oh my God, I didn't realize I was in this funk and fog until I got out of it.

Testing for Mold, Lyme, and Dysbiosis 17:28

And then when you come back, it hits you harder. And that was really the final straw for me to get out of the Midwest was when I came back. We took a vacation to Florida and we we were gone for maybe a week or so, and I feel 80% better. And people may say, oh, of course you're on vacation. You're not working. I was still working. I was still messaging my staff and my my whole practice is telemedicine. Like I was still doing work. It's just that my environment shifted so significantly. I got out of cold and gray skies and wet and decomposing leaves to a place.

It was pretty dry and sandy, and that was enough for me to really, like, snap out of that. And then I'm like, okay, this is drastic, but we're going to have to do this. And that's a great point. I actually asked that as one of my intake questions when I'm working with people, do you feel better when you're actually in a different environment. And people aren't always putting that connection together. Like do you go away for a week like you're saying? And oh wait, I'm not getting the headaches. Oh, I might can think more clearly.

I feel, you know, just more energy. And then you go back into your regular environment and feel worse. And that can just be even a little clue. Like, how do you feel on vacation versus how you feel in your home? Is is a simple thing. You can start to evaluate. Yeah. And and you could do petri dishes too if you just look up the link. Evan brand.com/petri petri. It's like three bucks you can buy these petri dishes. You could scatter them around your house. There's different test out there. But I find the petri dishes a very, I would just say an underrated tool because they're cheap, they're easy, and you put them on the floor for an hour, you put the lid on, and after five days or so, you take a look and you see what happens and what's growing.

And sometimes they look really ugly and nasty, and the wife can show it to the skeptical husband and say, hey, honey, I told you there's a problem here. Or sometimes you're like, hey, it's cool, it's fine, and we can stay here. And just that confirmation, good or bad, is really helpful for clients because if you feel unsafe in your home, no matter how much meditation and brain retraining exercises you do to calm your nervous system, if you feel like your home is a threat to you, it's really tough to counteract that with just your mind.

But when we have some actual real data like these petri dishes that would grow mold if there's mold in the home. Okay, so the mold spores fall to the petri dish. It grows and you can see sort of a microbial fungal, I guess an overview is what you could call it. And when you see okay, it's actually fine. okay. I'm not going to freak out in here anymore. It's actually not as bad as I thought. And we've saved a lot of marriages from that because, you know, the wife is suffering more often so than the man.

Or maybe the man's just in denial. And so she's seeking help, and the man's like, okay, who's this, like online guy? Who was he? Some random guy on the internet telling you that your house is your problem? And then when we do the petri dishes and then we match up the mold in her home to the mycotoxins in her urine, and I tell either if I can get the guy on the call or I'll just send the message, I'll use the wife as the the messenger. I'll be like, oh, hey. And by the way, the reason her sex life with you is like zero is because of this.

And if you want that back, listen to me. Oh, they come running and now they want to listen. Oh, what are you saying? You have this thing for her hormones. It could also help me too. And you have, like, some hormone support for me too, because, you know, mold and mycotoxins, these directly affect the testes. If you put in pot mad mold mycotoxins, testosterone lowers testosterone. On average, males have lower testosterone than ever in recorded history. Sperm quantity and sperm motility and sperm concentration the lowest ever.

Like we're facing this giant, potential population collapse due to the mass of infertility we're seeing. If you look up mycotoxins and testes, you will see that the testicles, as well as the ovaries have direct impact from mycotoxins. So we are literally sterilizing ourselves as a society. And of course, you know, the you know, the luxury and the pleasure that that sex brings is great for couples and marriages, but it's it's more than just, you know, the hedonistic thing. I'm trying to point out here.

I'm pointing out that this lack of libido culture that we have this kind of apathetic, depressed culture that we have now, it's gotten way worse in the last six, seven years that I've been paying attention to this. But the the dead bedroom, we'll call it, that is a direct indicator that there's something deeper and that these hormone levels are off. I mean, I'm seeing guys in their 20s that have erectile dysfunction, they have histamine tolerance, they have mast cell activation. They're allergic to every food, every fragrance.

They can't get an erection. They're 22 years old. They're depressed, they're anxious. They have chronic fatigue. That's crazy. You know, I went seeing guys in the 20s like that even 5 or 6 years ago. While we're being exposed, like you said, to so much more than we used to be. So let's dive into. Well, actually, one thing I want to talk about, because we haven't talked about this at all yet on the summit, and you mentioned the test is the Oat test, the organic acid test. And I think this is a great test for a lot of things because it can direct you in some ways to like, really see, okay, do I need to dive further into different areas like and there's clues in that.

So I know a lot of people might not be familiar with this test, so I thought we could give some more information. Sure thing. if you turn on the screen sharing, we will, we'll look at one together. Okay? Yeah, let's do it. Actually, give me I'm going to cut this for one second. It's making me try to share. No problem. I got to give you permission to share. So there we go. Okay. Let us cut. All right. Okay, so there are several companies that run organic acids testing. I personally use what was Great Plains.

They got bought out there now called mosaic. And it's a great company. And I don't get paid to say that. I actually do train a lot of doctors and practitioners though. So if you go on their like practitioner side, you will see some talks that I've given, which is it's available for the general public as well. But you know, I've been grateful to run thousands of these. And so I have a lot of data points and you know, what we're looking at here is a three year old little boy. This was a little boy who his mother had, but I think she had 4 or 5 kids total.

And they lived in Pennsylvania and they had a large tree that had busted through their foundation. So the tree roots had busted through the foundation. Every time it rained, they had water in their basement. So they had massive, massive mold. And this is a urine sample that we can even get young kids to do. There's even pediatric collection bags if they're tiny kids. And we need to test babies, which we do clinically. And we can measure so much information. So I just want to kind of give people like a, a little look at, you know, under the hood, this is kind of the, you know, the, the 121 point inspection they sell you on at the, at the car dealership.

This is the same thing for the body. And so just one through nine alone. This can massively make or break your mast cell issue and or your histamine intolerance. Because in this case this poor boy you can see these markers here. So high is a problem okay. So we're measuring organic acids meaning the byproducts of an internal issue. So this long word here five hydroxy methyl two farrokh. This indicates Aspergillus. It's supposed to be less than 28. This skin to 358. So we already know right out of the gate looking at this test in 10s, this dude's got a major mold problem and he's going to have histamine intolerance, food sensitivities, dark circles under the eyes, bad skin tone, bad behavior, etc.

we saw Romano's, which is the gas Candida produces. So right away we know there's a massive Candida problem. We see here. Bacterial overgrowth issues really quickly. And this test goes on to look at mitochondrial dysfunction. It looks at nutrient deficiencies. It looks at brain chemistry. So when we're talking about anxiety chronic fatigue those type of situations it is a massive window into that.

Case Studies and Treatment Timelines 25:48

And you know, I don't have all of his names and date of birth and all that stuff blurred out. So I won't scroll through it. But what I do have is the after test result. And so we worked on this boy for about a year before we retested. And you can see here we cleared almost everything tiny bit of bacterial overgrowth remained here. But in terms of like yeast and fungal stuff, we totally resolved it in just about a year. And it's not just about the numbers, but it's about what happened with the kid.

I mean, he was much easier to deal with at school. The teachers were writing letters home like, this kid's amazing. What do you doing? The mom obviously has an easier time now because his behavior is better. Because when kids have mold and they have histamine intolerance, there's a lot of behavioral stuff. So pans and pandas are often, simultaneously occurring, meaning their brains are basically on fire. So these kids have sensory issues like crazy with clothing, with food, with scents. So, I mean, you know, fragrance, lights, sound.

And some of these kids might even be diagnosed as on the autism spectrum. And really, that diagnosis is not helpful because you'll see these license plates everywhere. I think, like every state has some autism awareness, okay. Awareness is not helping, like awareness of this made up term that doesn't have a true test. Right. So this is autism is a clinical diagnosis in this kid. And many other kids have been to occupational therapist or pediatricians. And they'll get slapped with that. Hey, he's autism spectrum, right?

And then the parents go, oh man. Like let's raise awareness about this. Let's go to run A5K race to raise awareness. Cool. Why? What happens if you stop there and you don't investigate? Because these kids that I've seen six, seven, eight years old that are diagnosed on the autism spectrum can't ride bikes, sensory issues, whatever we fix those kids, we retest them using the Tech Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist and they can go from over a hundred, which is severely autistic, to single digits, where they no longer meet that diagnosis or that criteria to be on the spectrum.

And it was all using these functional medicine strategies. So I just I want to tell, you know, this is for adults also. But you know, if you have kids and you're listening and you feel, you know, distraught with the situation of your kid, don't just get slapped with the label like that and just give up because there's stuff just like what I showed you on paper that you can do at home. You only have to go to an office to do that. That's a huge point. I think that just an overall umbrella like major point to make because you're right, I mean the awareness or even sometimes just the I think it's often like just that aid too.

So when we, we either have just the awareness or just like, oh, what's the band aid for this issue when you're never really getting to the root cause, you're never fixing the issue. And I think with an issue like mast cell activation syndrome or histamine intolerance is getting root cause. Cause is usually, as you explained, it's more than one cause that we're seeing. But really, when you're addressing all of those different pillars, you can see this amazing difference in your health. Oh yeah, and kids get better faster too.

So in that case, I mean, any year he was totally transformed on average for adults that have been chronically suffering. I would say on average you expect one year to reverse. Maybe five years or so of suffering. You know, something like that. I've I've said it other ways on on different interviews before where I would say that you should expect one month of recovery for every year you've been sick. So like if you've been sick for, say, ten years, you should expect at least ten months to start doing good.

But it's hard with histamine mast cell. You know, some of these people, it's such a tangled mess of hormones and toxicity that it's really hard to give those timelines. Some people really beat those timelines and then some people are slower. So, you know, this is why I referred to earlier to the fact that you have to be kind of stubborn and, you know, you got to push through this stuff because there's times where I've wanted to give up and I can't. I'm a dad and my husband. I'm a, you know, I'm a practitioner or I got too many people to help.

I can't just give up. Yeah. And I think another to piggyback on that is people are often very sensitive when you're having mast cell activation. So sometimes it just going it may take you longer because you have to go slower. But each baby step I had someone, you know people that will call it like when we're talking, we'll celebrate like I got the whole capsule in. And that's a big win for someone who's reacting to everything and can't take anything. And and once you start to put some of those pieces and you get some of those wins, I see the ball roll a little bit faster after we can get break some of those points.

But if you react to everything, you just need to be patient and do it in a slow process. But it's a marathon, not a race. Agreed. Yeah. I mean, I unfortunately was that guy, you know, like I'd have to take like a quarter dose of something and then I'd go half dose and then three quarter and my God, you're a month in and you're still not the full dose yet. And so obviously that's going to extend your treatment timeline now because if someone, a practitioner gives you a timeline which is a highly requested item.

So I'll just say to, you know, patients, clients listening, health seekers like, look, you're putting them on the spot and their timeline is based on you doing like normal dosing and like, how much, how long till I feel better even? It's like, I don't know, you're on a 10th of a dose. Like you're taking one drop. I need you to take 30 drops. So gosh, like, I have no idea because you're, you're you're fairy dusting here. You're just sprinkling this stuff in. We have to, like, really catch you somewhere. So.

And I want to encourage you, like your timeline could be longer if you're sensitive, if you're dealing with Marcel. But you're right, it does snowball up to the point. Now, I could take double, triple, quadruple dosing that I used to be able to take. So as you get better, as your sensitivities decrease, you can really start to exponentially gain. It's just getting out of that, that hellhole really, you know, getting it out of the hole to to baseline. That's the hardest part. Yes. Yep I totally agree.

Well this is all been so helpful. I thank you so much and thank you for going through that test. That was a little surprise that we got to see because I know there's so many tests out there that people might not know. You know, another one that we didn't actually get to talk about too much, but we could just touch on here. is the the actual Lyme and tick borne illness test, because that's another one that in the in conventional medical system, you're getting a false negative a lot of the time. And so I think people can feel like they don't have that issue

Resources, Courses, and Closing Remarks 32:48

and have been told by their trusted professional that they don't have it. And when we see that actually happening a lot of the time. Yeah, I can show you one instance. This is the you know, this is the the in-depth part of the interview where people have, financially invested into you, which is, I think, a great choice. And hopefully I motivated people to to pay and invest because this is important stuff. I'll show you real quick a, a line co-infection panel. We use a company that I mean, there's several like, I just I did another histamine Maslow interview like a couple of weeks ago, and the lady was actually schooling me on a couple of labs that she was using that I wasn't familiar with.

So there's always going to be new technologies, but, you know, it's kind of a delicate balance to not only just the treatment side of this, but the testing side, because, you know, there could be a test, it's a little bit better, but then it's four times as expensive, right. And so it's three grand versus this one here is like less than 700 bucks. So this is one we use called DNA connections out of Colorado. This is a female who was 14 years old and she had massive activation in histamine intolerance.

She was sensitive to everything. It was very, very difficult case. And I just suspected something was up because it didn't just seem like a mold toxicity. She was seeing ghost. Her anxiety was through the roof. You know, this was extreme. And so I thought, well, let's just run this, you know, she says she's in California. She's never had a tick. She's never even seen a tick. I'm like, I don't believe it. So what we're looking at here is a urine sample where we did do provocation. So we did do sauna and or exercise before before collection of urine and she showed positive for Lyme, which is Borrelia picked off ry positive for three different strains of Babesia.

Two different strains of Bartonella positive, more Borrelia positive in a. So this was a mess. And so we worked on her for about a year. We retested her. We cleared most of this. The only thing that showed left was a little bit of indeterminate Lyme. Just because Borrelia so hard to eradicate. But this is another really important piece of the puzzle. If you have been suffering, if you are sensitive to everything, this is somewhere I would look, and your practitioner can order that and you can do it at home so you don't even have to go sit and do blood work like this is urine.

Yes. Yeah. Because that we often see those come up positive even when you've had a negative Western blot or you know the and I think it's confusing because you, there's a false sense of security in some ways because of testing. Agreed. And this lady that I was talking to a few weeks ago, I forgot her name. She was another practitioner. You know, she's like, well, the test you're using is good, but we even see false negatives there. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, I believe it. So, you know, in some cases it's that's the clinician's discretion to just say, I don't believe the test result.

Let's try XYZ to kill it. And hey, if you got better on a Lyme tincture, probably got Lyme. Yeah. If nothing happened, maybe you don't. So we're not talking about putting people on antibiotics here. We're using natural medicine, herbal medicine. And so I really I feel totally fine and okay if we're coming in blind like that sometimes maybe they couldn't afford they're already so in debt from their medical bills that they can't afford to do that test. And so we'll say, well, it looks and quacks like a duck.

Let's treat it like a duck. And boom, it was Bartonella. We hit Bartonella, they got better. So sometimes, you know, it's that's the art of this, right? There is no black and white. Sometimes we have to just I'm sure you've experienced this too. Sometimes you just have an intuition and, you know, people just think you're like a voodoo person, but, like, I'll just sit here, even if it even if it's telemedicine, I'll sit here with the person and I could just read their energy and I'll just go, man, this this just sounds or feels like busier.

They've got the anxiety, the shortness of breath, they've got the dizziness, they've got the brain fog. They've got the blurry vision. They've got the anemia. Let me just try this tincture. This herb blend that kills babesia. Yeah. And see what happens. And boom, they get better. So testing is great. I would love if everyone could get the labs we recommended today, but if you can't afford it or whatever reason, I mean, logistics shouldn't be a problem. I have clients everywhere, like we've done this in Australia, we've done it all across Europe.

I declined in Kenya the other day. That was my first client in Kenya. He had all the testing done before our first appointment. I was like, how did you get an oak test in Kenya? Like I look at his address, he's like in the middle of the desert. I'm like, this is crazy. So, you know, it's relatively possible to test everyone everywhere. That's that's amazing thing about the world today, right? Yeah. We're all connected. Well, you've provided so much helpful information for today, Evan, thank you so much for joining us.

And can you let our audience know where they can find you if they'd like to learn more? Sure. Thanks for the opportunity. I had a blast. And the website evanbrand.com has all the details. If you want to reach out and do consults, it's me and I have another functional medicine provider on staff and I do a podcast. I've done it for over a decade. So, there's like five, 600 episodes there. It's all free, obviously. I do YouTube videos as well, where I do some case studies like this and I have an online school also for health seekers and for practitioners alike.

It's probably an 80/20 split, 80% health seeker, 20% practitioner. And it's called Functional Academy of Medicine and Epigenetics, or FAME for short. And I have a course with over a thousand students in there called Better Belly, where we talk all about histamine, mast cell activation. There's a lot of case studies in there and then about to launch. And by the time this interview's out, it'll be live. We have a long haul course for people with long haul syndrome, either from the virus or from this.

And it's going to be amazing. And it took me months of research and months and months and months of like, clinical experience. I interviewed a guy, Dr. Pierre Kory. He's like one of the best, like, ICU lung doctors out there. So it's my effort to put a dent in what is now the biggest epidemic, even in, paper came out in Africa. That anywhere between 50 and 70% of the population that had the virus, they now have long haul, reduced productivity, reduced energy, everything. So, you know, that's my my next big thing.

Yeah. That's great. Well that's helpful for this population too because we're seeing much more MCAS come up after Covid too I that's. You're 100% right. Thing. So yeah. Well thank you so much. And everybody can go check that out. And thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Have a great day everyone.