MCAS & Histamine: A Holistic Health Deep Dive

Introduction and Evan Brandu2019s background 0:00

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 your sick and tired of being sick? And tired? Did you actually use that adrenaline to then fuel you to make changes? This is Dr. Talks. Welcome back to our Reversing Mass Cell Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Meg Mill, and today I am joined by my esteemed colleague, Evan Brand.

He's a board-certified holistic nutritionist and a functional nutrition therapy practitioner who's transformed 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. 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 store in college I always told is I had IVS. I have skin problems, I've had mood problems and sleep problems. And I started to chip away at those. So I figured out I'd had parasites.

Thought that was the magical cure for everything. Fixed those and got rid of my anxiety pretty much overnight. Then I lost a bunch of weight because I got parasites so I put the muscle back on. And then I started to have more sleep issues and then, I found out I had mold. And, then also I also had three tick bites the same summer. So, than I got Lyme, Bartonella, Babesia and mold all in the summer and I remember really when, you know I guess you would say shit hit the fan. It was probably in Gatlinburg in Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and my wife and i, i think we probably had one kid at the time.

We have three now. You know how it is with kids. Its like what year, what day. And we were in the aquarium and I remember sitting there and got hit with a wave of vertigo. And that was like my first experience with vertigos. I mean, I've had dizziness before, but not this, and then I could barely hold myself up. It was, like, okay, something ain't right. Now looking back, makes perfect sense. Aquarium, what's an 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 too sharp. but I was just drunk basically. And sometimes clinically, we'll see that related to Candida. So we call it autobrewery syndrome. We'll that acetylaldehyde, which is produced from Candid, that can cause like this kind of brain fog, dizziness, disorientation. But it wasn't that. I didn't have Candido.

When I looked at my urine, luckily I did an organic acids test because I thought, okay, you know, what's the best test to investigate? I think the oat test is a great one. And so then running that urine, you can also test mycotoxin. So then I found I had off-the-chart levels of ochratoxin, and ochratoxins comes from aspergillus. Aspergyllus in all-mold colonization or all mold exposure can be a massive mast cell trigger or a histamine intolerance factor. And then, I ran a urine sample for Lyme and Co infections, showed up with Lyne, Bartonella and Babesia.

Personal MCAS journey and root causes 3:40

And this is super under-recognized, especially Bartonella, which is a massive driver of histamine intolerance and mastoactivation. Bartonella is bacteria. You can get it from ticks, fleas, lice, mosquitoes. Lime is sexually transmitted. Semen samples have found Borrelia bucdorferi in there. So if you say, oh, well, I've never had a tick bite. I'm a city girl. Well, if if had sex with someone who's had lime, you could have literally gotten sexually-transmitted Borrelia. So I started peeling apart all the layers to my issue.

And honestly, there's not a silver bullet to this thing. The art of medicine, especially when you're practicing functional medicine is really to try and find all of 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 cant function, and you cannot take care of your kids. And that can be challenging for some. Like we were out of our house while we remediated. We were living in 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 while my wife was pregnant.

You know, like it's just crazy stuff that we went through. Of course, along the way, your nervous system gets totally dysregulated and I didn't realize how important resetting my nervous was until I pulled out of it. And like I told you before we hit record, like when I look back now, I realized that me being stuck in fight or flight was a big piece of the puzzle because we were so irritable and frustrated and fearful and angry at the situation. All that's doing is just aggravating your immune system even more.

and creating more cortisol, more mast cell release, More histamine, and more inflammatory cytokines. And most people can't supplement their way out of that. So, you know, I was taking GABA. I love motherwort tincture. All these herbal remedies that I've done clinically for a decade, but it wasn't enough. 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. Some people have to go to the desert to recover. I just, I like trees. so I didn't want to, to Arizona. I like that, yes. And 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. You said it perfectly when you're saying you can't supplement your way out of it.

Because I thing we're looking at conventional medicine and they're doing a lot of band-aid approaches with medications, putting you maybe on antihistamine that okay, that's not really ever finding the root cause. Okay, if you're having histamine issues, now we're just going to stay on supplements and we are going 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 Bartonella that's creating inflammation in the capillaries, you've got brain fog, cold hands and feet, so your circulation sucks, your sex drive sucks. So marriages start to fall apart because the spouses are resenting each other because their sex life is dead. That whole part of the relationship that used to lift them up and make them feel close and to bond them, that is 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 manifests and 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. For so many years I was looking and seeking the savior like if I could just find this next thing, this person, next remedy, acupuncturist knows this and this herbalist know this, and massage therapist knows, chiropractor knows and naturopath knows.

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 basically formed my own protocols in a way to fix it. That may sound overwhelming to some, but if you just get the proper data, you can really pull out of this. So, 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 histamines intolerant with the diet but it was also some of dizziness. It was some the joint pain, the fatigue, I guess you call like a post-exertional malaise. Like you try to hike, you tried to bike, to try lift weights and then you crash. I think histaminin intolerances is a subset, if you will, of this big constellation of symptoms, that is mastoactivation. Yeah. Let's go through it. I love that idea. Okay. So, I mean, really what I would do, let's just role play here.

We've got a 46 year old woman. She's got two kids. He's having trouble with hormones, her sex drive shot. she can't sleep very well. Her energy sucks. her hair's falling out. And she's bloated, so she doesn't feel sexy anymore. and she wants her husband to love her again. okay. 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 whatever kind of air.

So if you've had mold exposure, it suppresses the immune system and allows bacterial overgrowth. Now, these bacteria, so Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, Morganella, we can measure these in the stool. There's a lot of histamine producing bacteria that fill up your histamines bucket. So now when you go to the kombucha or the fermented this or fermented that 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 gonna look at the stool test to try to investigate what level of dysbiosis is present, how much gut inflammation is presented,

Nervous system regulation and environmental triggers 10:20

and then what are we seeing that maybe other doctors might miss, like H. pylori, which is gonna reduce your stomach acid levels and affect how you digest your food. You've got this 20 supplement list that you're taking, but it's not working well because you have malabsorption due to the gut bugs. So that's like one big piece of the puzzle. And then you've the whole Lyme co-infection. You told me you are up in PA. I see tons of Lymen Bartonella up there. There's tons ticks and mosquito bites. If I would have picked one part of a country where I'd say the most of that exists, it is probably in the northeast corner.

I would say whatever your favorite test is. There's urine, there's blood, and there is controversy over testing, but I will try to do something to look at Lyme and Bartonella and Babesia. wrench in the gears, if you will, for mast cell. So we've got the gut hispiosis piece. We've the Lyme co-infection piece, and then we got this toxin piece which could be metals, so heavy metals in mouth, heavy metal toxicity from injections as a child or into adulthood. 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 mycotoxin issue. So let's say your child who's suffering, they're in a daycare that had a roof leak and they don't really care that they have the budget, you know, it's expensive to fix and replace the old roof. They just like patch it up and the building is not good.

And so your children stick every couple of weeks and now they are allergic to every food and are now starving to death because they only on a couple foods. But if you get those pieces of data, the environmental piece and toxin piece, 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 your 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 are going get out of here. we're gonna find a new school for my kid where he feels well. We're going to get out of this house. I'm going get outta this toxic relationship. you know, cojones to really do this sometimes. And if you're not miserable enough, you might just continue on the path that you are on now.

You're just like, I'm just going to hunker down and get through it. and you just kind of put blinders on and 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 have remediated homes, built homes from scratch, done renovations on places, bought sold cars. I've moved 600 miles. You know, I have done drastic, drastic steps and it was because I needed to. I was trying everything else and they 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 are 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 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, cause then let's say you get into the new house that's not mold anymore, but now you have all the VOCs and the off gassing of the home, the cabinets and paints and lacquers, right? So, you know if I'm hearing your question correctly, it's kind of like, well, are there layers associated with all that? Is that what you're asking? Yeah, because you were saying you bought and sold and you've had to change cars. And I was thinking of, okay, you're making these changes.

It's sort of a life, it's a lifelong journey, I guess, is maybe what I'm trying to get. You're always needing to think about these things. But if you can really keep each one of the, when you have done the healing work, and then we can look at some of these environmental changes and really pay attention to those over time. 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 am 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 this house, by a new house. And some of things I've done, some mistakes and the moves and changes I have made were cheap and some were expensive and I'll admit I had to dump money into trying to fix things to make things better. 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 mass activation.

You know, previously if I was around air-fresheners, it would've killed me. I go into a restaurant bathroom and the little puffer thing sprays me, and I want to take a sledgehammer and knock it off the wall. Now I can handle it. I'll smell it and I go, I despise that smell. Can't believe 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 financially and what you can stomach in terms of cost and how much you are willing to change your lifestyle and to how you change it, the big changes are helpful.

But is it possible to stay in bad relationships, 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 have to work so hard on reprogramming your nervous system to tell your body that this is okay. Because at the end of the day, your is just trying to alert you of these dangers. It's just that it gets stuck. And it's like, Hey, this, office, home is bad for you alert, alert alert. Massive 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 go, Oh my God. I didn't realize I was in this funk and fog until I got out. Of it. Then when you come back, it hits you harder. That was really the final straw for me to get. Out of the Midwest was when I came back. We had took a vacation to Florida.

Root-cause framework for histamine and mast cell issues 17:20

And we were gone for maybe a week or so and I felt 80% better. And people may say, oh, of course, you're on vacation. You're not working. I was still working, I still messaging my staff and my whole practice is telemedicine. Like I'm still doing work. It's just that my environment shifted so significantly. Yeah, got out of cold and gray skies and wet and decomposing leaves to a place that was pretty dry and sandy. That was enough for me to really like snap out that. And then I'm like, OK, this is drastic, but we're going to have to do this.

Mm-hmm. 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 were saying, and, oh, wait, I am not getting the headaches. Oh, my, can think more clearly. You know, just more energy. Then you can go back into your regular environment and feel worse. That can just be even a little clue.

How do feel on vacation versus how you felt in your home? is a simple thing you can start to evaluate. Yeah, and you could do Petri dishes too. If you just look up the link, evanbrand.com slash petri, P-E-T-R-I, it's like three bucks. You can buy these Petris dishes, you Could scatter them around your house. There's different tests out there. But I find the Petrit dishes a very, I would just say an underrated tool because they're cheap, they are 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' 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 feel like your own 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 Petrie 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 not as bad as I thought. 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 mans just in denial.

So she's seeking help. And the man's like, okay, who's this like online guy? Who is he? Some random guy on the internet is 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 your urine and I tell either if I can get the guy or the call or I'll just send the message. I would use the wife as 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, well, they come running and now they want to listen.

Oh, what are you saying? You have this thing for her hormones that could also help me too and you have like some hormone support for me to because, you know, mold and mycotoxins, these directly affect the testes. If you put in PubMed mold, mycotoxin, testosterone, Lowest testosterone. On average, males have lower testosterone than ever in recorded history. Sperm quantity and sperm motility and sperms concentration, the lowest ever. Like we're facing this giant potential population collapse due to the massive infertility we are 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 luxury and the pleasure that sex brings is great for couples and marriages, but it's more than just the hedonistic thing I'm trying to point out here. I am pointing out that this lack of libido culture that we have, this kind of apathetic oppressed culture, that it has gotten way worse in the last six, seven years that I've been paying attention to this.

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 intolerance, they have mastoid activation, allergic to every food, every fragrance, They can't get an erection, their 22 years old, depressed, anxious, have chronic fatigue. That's crazy. You know, i wasn't seeing that guys like that even five, six years ago. Well, we're being exposed, like you said, to so much more than we used to be.

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. I think this is a great test for a lot of things because it can direct use in some ways. to really see, okay, do I need to dive further into different areas? 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. Okay, so there are several companies that run organic acids testing.

I personally use what was Great Plains. They got bought out. There are now called Mosaic and it's a great company and I don't get paid to say that. Uh, 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 available for the general public as well. But you know, been grateful to run thousands of these. And so I have a data points and. What we're looking at here is a three-year-old little boy.

This was a little who his mother had about, I think she had four or five kids total. And they lived in Pennsylvania and they had a large tree that had busted through their foundation. So the tree roots had buses through the foundation every time it rained, they add water in their basement. They had massive, massive mold. and this is the 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 little look at, you know, under the hood. This is kind the, the 121 point inspection they sell you on at the car dealership. The same thing for the body. Just 1 through 9 alone, this can massively make or break your mast cell issue and or your histamine intolerance because in this case, these poor boy, So high is a problem, okay? So we're measuring organic acids, meaning the byproducts of an internal issue. So this long word here, 5-hydroxy-methyl-2-ferroic, this indicates aspergillus.

It's supposed to be less than 28. This gets to 358. We already know right out of the gate, looking at this test in 10 seconds, his dude's got a major mold problem and he's going to have histamine intolerance, food sensitivities, dark circles under the eyes,

Organic acids testing and pediatric case study 24:20

bad skin tone, We saw Rabinose, which is the gas Candida produces. So right away, we know there's a massive Candidia 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 that brain chemistry. so when we're talking about anxiety, chronic fatigue, those type of situations, it is a mass of window into that. And 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. 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 the numbers, it was 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 are you doing? The mom obviously has an easier time now because his behavior is better because when kids have mold and then they have histamine intolerance, there's a lot of behavioral stuff. So pans and pandas are often simultaneously occurring, meaning their brains basically on fire. These kids are sensory issues like crazy with clothing, with food, and with scents. 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. And this kid and many other kids have been to occupational therapists or pediatricians and they'll get slapped with that. Hey, he's autism spectrum, and then the parents go, oh man, let's raise awareness about this. Let's go run a 5K race to raise the awareness, cool. But 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 ATEC 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 if you have kids and you're listening and 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. Mm hmm. That's a huge point. I think that's just an overall umbrella, like major point to make because you're right. The awareness or even sometimes just the, I Think it's often like just that bandaid too. So when we either have just awareness, or just like, oh, what's the band aid for this issue? When you never really getting to the root cause, you are never fixing the issue and I think with an issue like mast cell activation syndrome or histamine intolerance getting root cause slash causes 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 in a year he was totally transformed On average for adults that have been chronically suffering, I would say on average they expect one year to reverse maybe five years or so of suffering, you know, something like that. I've said it other ways 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 have been for say 10 years, then you would expect at least 10 months to start doing good, but it's hard.

With histamine mast cell, some of these people, it is such a tangled mess. of hormones and toxicity that it's really hard to give those timelines. Some people really beat those time lines and then some people are slower. So, you know, this is why I referred earlier to the fact that you have to be kind of stubborn and you got to push through this stuff because there's times where I've wanted to gave up and I can't. I'm a dad, I am a husband. You know I got too many people to help. 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. 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 those wins, I see the ball roll a little bit faster after we can get break some points. But if you react to anything, you just need to be patient and do it in a slow process, but it's marathon, not a race.

Agreed. Yeah. I mean, I unfortunately was that guy, you know, like I have to take like a quarter dose of something and then I'd go half dose and three quarter and my God, your 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, patients, clients, listening, health seekers, look, You're putting them on the spot in their timeline.

is based on you doing like normal dosing and like how much, how long till I feel better, Evan?

Lyme and tick-borne testing discussion 30:20

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 fairy dusting here. You're sprinkling this stuff in. We have to like really get you somewhere. So I want to encourage you like your timeline could be longer if you are sensitive if your dealing with mast cell. But you right, it does snowball. I'm 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 hellhole really, getting it out to baseline. That's the hardest part. Yes, yep. I totally agree. Well, this has all been so helpful. 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 didn't actually get to talk about too much, which we could just touch on here. is the actual Lyme and tick-borne illness tests, because that's another one that 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 and have been told by their trusted professional that they do not have it, and we see that actually happening a Yeah, I can show you one. And since this is the, you know, this isn't the in-depth part of the interview where people have financially invested into you, which is, uh, think a great choice. Hopefully I motivated people to, to pay and invest because this important stuff. I'll show. You real quick. A align co-infection panel.

We use a company. I mean there are several, like I just—I did another histamine mast cell interview a couple of weeks ago and the lady was actually schooling me on a couples 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, there could be a test that's a little bit better but then it four times as expensive. Right? And so it's 3 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 mastoid activation and histamine intolerance. She was sensitive to everything. It was a very, very difficult case. I just suspected something was up because it didn't just seem like a mold toxicity. She was seeing ghosts. 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 has never had a tick, She's never even seen a tic.

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 do sauna and or exercise before collection of urine. and she showed positive for Lyme, which is Borrelia burgdorferi. positive for three different strains of Babesia, two different strings of Bartmela positive, more Borrelia positive and Erychlea. 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 is 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 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 blood or, you know, that I think it's confusing because 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 and she was another practitioner. You know, she's like, well, the test you're using is good, but we even see false negatives there. 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 tests result. Let's try XYZ to kill it and hey, if you got better on the Lyme tincture, probably got Lyme. 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 feel totally fine and okay if we are 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 do that test. It looks and quacks like a duck. Let's treat it like it duck and boom, it was Bartonella. We hit Bartronella, they got better. So sometimes, you know, that's the art of this, right? There is no black or white. Sometimes we have to just, I'm sure you've experienced this too.

sometimes you just have an intuition. And, people just think you're like, a voodoo person, but like I'll just sit here, even if it's telemedicine, and I could just read their energy and all this go, man, this This just sounds or feels like Babesia. They've got the anxiety, the shortness of breath, they've the dizziness, They have the brain fog, blurry vision, anemia. Let me just try this tincture, this herb blend that kills Babsia and see what happens and boom they get better. 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,

Where to find Evan Brand and closing remarks 35:40

logistics shouldn't be a problem. We have clients everywhere. Like we've done this in Australia. we have done it all across Europe. Had a client in Kenya the other day. That was my first client and Kenya. He had all the testing done before our first appointment. And I was like, how did you get an O test in Kenya? Like I look at his address, he's like in the middle of the desert. This is crazy. So, you know, it's relatively possible to test everyone everywhere, Yes, and that's amazing thing about the world today, right?

We're all connected. Well, you've provided so much helpful information for us today. Evan, thank you so for joining us. And can you let our audience know where they can find you if they'd like to learn more? 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. They've done it for over a decade. So there's like five, six hundred episodes there.

It's all free. Obviously, I'd do YouTube videos as well where I did 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, so FAME for short. And I had a course with over a thousand students in there called Better Belly where we talk all about histamine muscle activation. There's a lot of case studies in their and then about to launch And by the time this interview is 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 month, months like clinical experience. I interviewed a guy, Dr. Pierre Corry. He's like one of the best like ICU lung doctors out there. So it is my effort to put a dent in what is now the biggest epidemic. Even in a 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 next big thing. Yeah, That's great. Well, not helpful for this population too, because we're seeing much more MCAS come up after COVID too. You're 100% right. I think so. Thank you so much. And everybody can go check that out. Thanks for having me. Have a great day. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on Doctor Talks, real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.