This is Part 1 of a two-part Your Thyroid Questions Answered series, wherein I answer a mix of situational and common thyroid health questions submitted by listeners with Graves’, Hashimoto’s, and other thyroid conditions. We cover topics like thyroid antibodies, lab interpretation, medication decisions, iodine, fatigue, hair loss, nodules, and lifestyle factors such as fasting and gut health.  If you would prefer to listen to the interview you can access it by Clicking Here.

In this episode, I am going to answer multiple questions related to thyroid health. While I wish I could answer all the questions submitted to me, I chose questions that I think can benefit a lot of people with thyroid and autoimmune thyroid conditions.

While some of the questions are specific to hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s, many of them can benefit those with any thyroid or autoimmune thyroid condition.

I have gone through all the questions submitted, and since there are a lot of great questions, I am splitting this up into two separate parts. This episode is the first part, and then in two weeks, I will finish up with my responses to the rest of the questions. Next week, there is an interview scheduled.

Initially, I was going to dedicate one episode to hyperthyroidism and another to hypothyroidism. I decided not to do this because some of the questions related to Graves’ can benefit those with Hashimoto’s and vice versa. What I plan on doing is rotating the questions. That being said, let’s go ahead and get started. 

The first question asks if we can cover which specific antibodies affect the eyes and how to reduce them. Is it TSI or TRAB?

This is specific for Graves’, and this probably wouldn’t be of much benefit for those with Hashimoto’s. A small percentage of those with Hashimoto’s can get thyroid eye disease (TED).

With TED, it’s the TSIs that attack not only the TSH receptors but the tissues of the eyes. TSI is a type of TRAB. You could look at both. You could look at TSI and TRAB. Some practitioners will recommend both tests. If you will choose between one or the other, go with TSI because it is the more specific antibody associated with Graves’. 

I am getting conflicting ideas from doctors about taking both T3 and T4 meds. Which is the best blood test to determine what meds to take? One doctor is a naturopath, and the other is an allopath. I lean toward a more natural healing modality. I sure don’t want to be on meds for the remainder of my life. 

Thanks for your question. Karen is taking pretty much bioidentical T3 as well as synthetic T4. I like to look at the free hormones, free T4 and free T3. Some doctors just look at T4. Usually, they will do a free T4. You could do a total T4 and total T3. 

If I have to choose between one or the other, I would say free T4 and free T3. Of course, TSH, too. Even though thyroid hormones are more important than TSH, you still want to look at TSH. TSH, free T4, free T3 is what we want to look at.

What is the difference between hyperthyroidism and Graves’? 

Hyperthyroidism is when you have elevation in thyroid hormone, so you have elevated T4 and T3 and a depressed TSH. Graves’ is an autoimmune type of hyperthyroidism. Most hyperthyroid conditions are Graves’. There are exceptions like toxic multinodular goiter. There is also subclinical hyperthyroidism, when someone has depressed TSH, but their thyroid hormones are normal.

Not all cases of hyperthyroidism are Graves’. You could have different types like I mentioned. Graves’ is a type of hyperthyroidism that is autoimmune. Not only do you have elevated T4 and T3 and depressed TSH, but you also usually have elevated antibodies. Specifically TSIs, which is a type of TRAB. 

Why do none of the thyroid medications I have taken seem to work? This is the fifth one. They seem to give me less energy. The one I am taking now, Armor, seems to make me feel worse, tired, no energy, plus swollen ankle in left foot, which I have read is one of the side effects. I have also tried plain iodine. My hair is like straw, very dry. I have brain fog. I’m at a loss and don’t know what to do. I can’t afford the right blood tests. My doctors said I have the correct blood test. I’ve tried different vitamins but nothing yet. 

I think this is a different Karen who asked this question. I wish you mentioned which blood tests you actually did. I would look at TSH. Maybe they did a T4, but you also want to look at T3. Ideally, in this situation, reverse T3 would be good. I know you said you can’t afford that. That’s ideally what I would be looking at. If T4 is converting into T3, that would be my question. If you are just looking at TSH and T4, you don’t know that. That’s what I suspect might be happening.

There is also the possibility of thyroid hormone resistance where you have too much thyroid hormone, but it’s not entering the cell. Usually, that will present as normal or high TSH, and T4 and perhaps even T3 being on the higher end. 

It’s like insulin resistance. You have plenty of insulin. If you do a fasting insulin, your insulin will typically be high in insulin resistance, but it’s not getting in the cell. Similar with this. A lot of times, you will see thyroid hormones on the higher side, perhaps elevated. Unlike hyperthyroidism, where the TSH is depressed, in the case of thyroid hormone resistance, TSH will be normal or elevated.

Why do my test results show my thyroid levels vacillating between hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism? I have Graves’. 

This person is on 100mcg of levothyroxine. My question, which I know you won’t be able to answer here: You said you have Graves’, but you’re on thyroid hormone replacement. Do you have Graves’ and get radioactive iodine or thyroid surgery? 

I’m thinking that’s not the case. In that case, it would be obvious that you would be hyper, and when you get thyroid surgery, you’d be hypo. Here, it sounds like your numbers are still going back and forth between hyper and hypo. 

If you have Graves’, another scenario is if you’re on block and replacement therapy. This is when someone is on antithyroid medication, like methimazole, and levothyroxine. I don’t know if this is the case because you only mentioned levothyroxine. I am not exactly sure of the situation. 

I don’t know. In a situation like this, I’d love to see some of your past labs, at least your last few labs showing the hyper numbers and hypo numbers, and knowing if you are just on levothyroxine. 

What antibodies do you have? Do you just have Graves’ antibodies? Do you have Hashimoto’s antibodies? There could be a number of reasons why someone would go back and forth between hyper and hypo.

If someone is dealing with Graves’ and is on a higher dose of antithyroid medication, that would potentially make them hypo. Some people are on block and replace therapy, so they are giving thyroid hormone to try to minimize that.

There is also Hashitoxicosis, which is Hashimoto’s but also presents as transient hyperthyroidism. Sometimes, it gets misdiagnosed as Graves’. 

In this case, I don’t have enough information to tell you, but those are some of the scenarios when someone will go back and forth between hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism. I am curious if you are also on methimazole or a different type of antithyroid medication. 

My endocrinologist thinks I have hyperparathyroidism and wants to do surgery, but I’m not sure I want to do that. I don’t think surgery is the answer. I’m trying to cure it naturally to treat hyperparathyroidism. 

Another similar question came in, asking: Could you address root causes and natural solutions for parathyroid issues? 

Even though the word “parathyroid” has “thyroid” in it, it’s completely different. It’s near the thyroid, but it’s still not the same. 

Unfortunately, I don’t work with parathyroid issues. I have written an article and have a podcast episode on parathyroid issues, hyperparathyroidism. Most cases of hyperparathyroidism are usually related to benign adenoma, which if that is the case, I do not know any cure. I have had a few patients who have tried to treat it naturally without success. Very small sample size. 

If you have primary hyperparathyroidism, which is usually the case, surgery for the adenoma is usually required. Maybe there is someone out there who is treating hyperparathyroidism naturally. I am just not aware of anybody doing that. 

I really feel bad when someone asks me about this because I don’t have a natural solution, and I am not sure of any out there. 

I interviewed Dr. Divya Boone on the podcast. She is a surgeon. She is open to functional medicine, but she does surgery on the parathyroid glands. Even though she is open to functional medicine, she is probably still biased. Most endocrinologists are biased. 

Obviously, there are natural approaches for Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. I am not sure of anybody out there who focuses on that or who has had success when the cause is a benign adenoma. 

If there are other underlying imbalances, and it’s not a benign adenoma, of course, I would say make dietary changes. Do things to improve stress management. Get proper sleep. Optimize adrenal health and gut health. Correct nutrient deficiencies, including Vitamin D. I would definitely do those things. 

Like I said, if it is a benign adenoma, unfortunately, the only solution I know of is surgery. 

I am at a crossroads. I have had Graves’ for 20+ years controlled by Tapezol. The recent move and all the stress related to it seems to have sent my thyroid off the charts. I am being held steady by a fairly high dose of 30mg per day. I have worked with a functional medicine nutritionist in the recent past and did many diet and lifestyle changes, which did not affect my labs. My physician is suggesting for me to have thyroid ablation. I am worried about the side effects of this procedure and if it will really help. Do you have any suggestions I might try before giving into the procedure?

Thank you for your question, Kathy. You have been dealing with Graves’ for a long time, 20+ years. You mentioned stress could be a factor. You could take a higher dose, but it’s not a low dose. If someone is on 5mg of methimazole, studies show that 5mg taken for many years is safe. 30mg is a large dose. I know I personally wouldn’t want to be on 30mg indefinitely. 

I know you said you worked with a functional medicine nutritionist and did diet and lifestyle changes, which did not affect your labs. Did you make the right changes? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if you read my book The Hyperthyroid Healing Diet. I recommend that.

Let’s say you did do everything I recommend in the book. In the book, I have a section going beyond the hyperthyroid healing diet, going beyond diet and lifestyle, doing testing to find and remove triggers. There could be triggers other than food and stress. I do have suggestions. That would be- 

I know you already worked with a functional medicine nutritionist, but I recommend working with someone else who has experience with hyperthyroidism. I do remote consults, so I’m an option. If it’s someone else, that’s perfectly fine. 

I wouldn’t give up by working with one functional medicine practitioner who only addressed diet and lifestyle, which is great that they did that, but you want to at least try going beyond diet and lifestyle. 

I agree. Thyroid ablation, radioactive iodine, if you choose that as an option at all, it should be the last option. There is a debate of should you get surgery instead of radioactive iodine if it comes to that? I am not a big fan of radioactive iodine period. I am not a big fan of surgery. Everything is risks versus benefits. 

One of the concerns with thyroid ablation is if you have underlying thyroid eye disease, that could cause a flareup. In your case, maybe less likely since you’ve had Graves’ for such a long time. 

I’m with you. I’d be concerned about the side effects of the process. Concerns with cancer with radioactive iodine. Try to dig deeper. Work with someone to do some testing to find and remove triggers, heal the gut. That would be my recommendation before you give in to the procedure as you mentioned. 

I just had a bunch of immune system blood tests done. The ANA was positive. I know that doesn’t mean a lot until further testing, but I’m not sure if I need an endocrinologist or rheumatologist. I am hyperthyroid. I take 60mg of NP thyroid per day. 

I wouldn’t say you necessarily need to see a rheumatologist because you have a positive ANA. One question I have is have you been tested for the antibodies for Hashimoto’s? TPO and TG. ANA could mean lupus or Shogren’s, but it doesn’t always mean those. Many times, it doesn’t. I have seen people with Hashimoto’s or Graves’ who have positive ANA, but it seems like they’re negative for all other antibodies. 

If you have Hashimoto’s, that could be the reason. In that case, I don’t think it would be beneficial to see a rheumatologist. It won’t hurt to get further diagnosed. A rheumatologist might run some additional testing. 

If you have Hashimoto’s, just remember that’s an autoimmune thyroid condition. While the NP thyroid might be necessary to take, it’s not doing anything to address the immune system component. Whether you have Hashimoto’s or RA or lupus or Shogren’s, you want to do things to optimize your immune system. 

What triggers Graves’ or makes it worse? 

There could be a lot of things that trigger Graves’. The same question could be asked with Hashimoto’s or other autoimmune conditions. With most autoimmune conditions, there are multiple triggers.

I talk about four categories of triggers for both Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. One is food such as gluten. Two would be stress. A lot of people underestimate the impact of chronic stress on our health. Three would be chemicals and environmental toxins or toxicants. A lot of people overlook the impact of environmental toxins and toxicants. They can definitely be triggers. Four is infections such as EBV, H-pylori, parasites, Lyme. There could be a number of triggers. I didn’t mention toxic mold, but that falls under environmental toxins. 

These factors can trigger Graves’ and/or make Graves’ worse. That’s why you want to try to find the triggers. You could maybe just do an elimination diet, do things to manage stress. Some people do need to do functional medicine testing to find and ultimately remove the triggers. 

Why is it that everything I read says iodine is important for the health of your thyroid, but my doctor/endocrinologist tells me not to take any iodine or supplements with iodine in them? He used to tell me that it was because there was iodine in my prescription thyroid medication. Now I have recently quit taking any thyroid prescription meds, and he still tells me not to take any iodine. I took Nature Throid for a few years until they stopped making it, so my doctor put me back on Synthroid. I recently read that it can cause cancer, so I told my doctor I wanted to get off all thyroid prescription meds. He agreed we could try, so I asked him again if I didn’t need iodine. He told me not to take iodine. Is this correct? 

Gwen, thanks for your question. Iodine is controversial in those with both Hashimoto’s and Graves’. In this situation, I don’t think you mentioned that you have Hashimoto’s, but if you’re taking Armor or Nature Throid or Synthroid, you are getting treated for hypothyroidism.

Without question, iodine is important for thyroid function and breast health. You don’t want to not have any iodine in diet for example, but iodine also could be problematic in both Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. it can be beneficial in some situations, but in some situations, it could exacerbate the thyroid condition, moreso with hyperthyroidism. Iodine can also in some cases suppress thyroid when taking higher amounts of it. It could also exacerbate the autoimmune response of Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. 

That’s why your doctor is a bit cautious, which I can understand. I don’t recommend for people to completely avoid iodine. Getting some iodine through the food you eat is fine. If someone is taking a multivitamin with iodine, I am usually not concerned. I know other practitioners express concern. 

It does depend on the person. I get more concerned when someone is eating food really high in iodine, like kelp or shellfish in some cases, or if they are taking separate iodine supplements, especially mg doses of iodine. 

Hope that answers your question. Iodine is important, but I would be cautious about larger amounts of iodine in certain foods as well as supplements.

Can I ask you how to proceed? My TSH is high at 6.21, but my free T4 is 19.1 and free T3 is 4.2. These are considered normal range according to the laboratory. 

This is probably someone who is overseas. Usually in the United States, that free T4 would be a crazy high number. Most labs wouldn’t go up that high. Free T3, that would be on the higher end. Here, it’s normal, but TSH is high. 

Shall I take an iodine supplement or T4 supplement despite the lab findings? 

As I just mentioned, with iodine, I would be cautious. You can do a urinary iodine test and see what your iodine levels look like. In the US, there is one, Hakala Labs. Most doctors would put you on T4 because TSH is high, and they pay more attention to TSH than free T4 and free T3. Your free T4 looks a bit on the higher side from the range. Different range than in the US. 

I’m wondering in this case, is it pituitary? Is it a problem converting T4 to T3? Possibly. Usually, that wouldn’t cause TSH- TSH is more dependent on T4 and T3, but T3 is active form of thyroid hormone. Those are the two things I would look into. 

Is it a pituitary problem, or is it a problem converting T4 to T3? Either way, you’d want to be cautious about T4. If you have problems converting T4 to T3, taking more T4 won’t help with that. If it’s a pituitary problem, taking T4 won’t help with that. 

Although you’ve spoken about this in the past, my one question is how I can stop the rest of my hair falling out. Right now, it’s falling out. Again, it’s purely diet. 

I’m not sure what you mean by that. That’s by Jennifer. Jennifer, hair loss unfortunately is very common with both hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism. Balance the thyroid hormones. 

Nutrient deficiencies can sometimes cause hair loss. I know biotin although I’ve had Julie Olson on the podcast talking about how biotin is overrated and usually not responsible for hair loss. Others don’t necessarily agree. There could be other deficiencies like iron and zinc that could play a role as well. Many times, this relates to gut health, so having a healthy gut is important for healthy nutrient digestion and absorption. 

Those are the main factors. Balancing the hormones, correcting nutrient deficiencies. You’re asking if it’s purely diet. I misunderstood. I am looking at the question again. Is it purely diet? No, I don’t think it’s purely diet. Even once the thyroid hormones are in balance, it can take time for the hair loss to stop and for it to start growing back. I also want to let you know about that. Thyroid hormones are in balance, and hair loss won’t stop right away. It can take a few weeks, sometimes a month or two.

No, it’s usually not just a diet issue. You need to balance thyroid hormones. Eating a healthy diet is a piece of the puzzle when it comes to that. You usually need to do more than just eating a healthy diet.

Just wanted to thank you for all your advice that you share frequently. I have implemented many of your suggestions with diet and environment with great success. While technically my endocrinologist says I still have Graves’, my bloodwork is and has been in the normal range for a year. I continue without symptoms and contribute my success to the things I have learned from you. So thankful not to be on any antithyroid medications and still have my thyroid. Thank you again, and wish you a very happy and healthy new year. 

This was just a compliment. I intentionally left this in because it’s nice to have some people who follow my recommendations and get great results. I was thinking not to include this because it’s not a question. I did decide to leave it in. 

Another example of how there is hope out there. It’s not easy to restore one’s health whether you have hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism, but it’s definitely possible.

Is there anything that can be done to prevent postpartum thyroiditis with Hashimoto’s? 

Research shows supplementing with 200mcg of selenium, especially in the third trimester, can help to prevent postpartum thyroiditis. That is one thing that most people can do. Just doing that alone won’t guarantee you won’t develop postpartum thyroiditis, but it can potentially help.

Other things are of course eat a whole, healthy foods diet. Avoid common allergens such as gluten and dairy. Try to minimize stress. Block out time for stress management on a regular basis. Get regular sleep. Incorporate the foundations: diet, stress management, sleep. 

Some might be tempted to take Brazil nuts. You just don’t know how much selenium you are getting in one nut. That’s why in this case you might, especially if you have a history of postpartum thyroiditis, or if not, are worried about developing it. 

I am not specifically telling you to take selenium because I can’t give specific recommendations here. The research shows that 200mcg of selenium can prevent postpartum thyroiditis from developing.

I do have a few questions related to thyroid health. Graves’, which might also be helpful for others. 

I decide to answer these because they are really good. They are not just beneficial for those with Graves’. Even those with Hashimoto’s can get benefit from these. Or those with a nonautoimmune thyroid condition. 

The first question is related to intermittent fasting. I have read that fasting in general may not be ideal for people with Graves’. However, I personally feel much better when I eat my first meal around noon. Is intermittent fasting truly harmful in this case, or can it be okay if it truly feels good and stress levels are low? 

I am not against intermittent fasting. Most people could do 12-14 hours of that. The concern is if someone is doing a 16-8 fast, that’s not too terrible. If you’re eating at noon, and you’re stopping at 6pm, we are talking about 18 hours without eating, so only a six-hour eating window. 18 hours of fasting, six hours where you’re eating. 

The question is would you be getting enough protein during that time? Enough nutrients? Six hours isn’t a lot of time. It depends. If you’re doing a 16-8, if you’re eating around noon and then eating until 8pm, eating a later dinner, that might be okay. 

I would be concerned if you are going longer than that, especially on a day in, day out basis. Even though you feel good, I wonder if some of that is mental, psychological. Not to say you’re not feeling good. I have done intermittent fasting. When I do it, I feel good overall. It doesn’t mean if you’re doing 18 hours a day, that it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s not putting stress on your adrenals, but I’d be concerned that it might be.

Another concern is if you are getting enough protein and nutrients. 

The next question is related to gut testing and gut protocols. Do you think expensive stool tests and gut protocols are actually worth it? In your experience, do they provide meaningful insight to improvements for thyroid patients? 

This could apply to those with any type of thyroid or autoimmune thyroid condition. Comprehensive stool tests like GI Maps or GI Effects, I don’t recommend it to every single person. I can’t say every single person needs to do comprehensive stool testing. It does depend on the person.

In some cases, they can be helpful. Not necessarily across the board.

Gut protocols, it depends. I am a big fan of probiotics and digestive enzymes. I wouldn’t say everybody needs to take a gut healing supplement, even though I have one, SMT GI Restore, which I do like. I don’t think everybody needs to take it. I don’t think everybody needs to follow an antimicrobial protocol. I do think there is a time and place for comprehensive stool testing.

From a thyroid and autoimmune thyroid perspective, is a vegetarian/vegan or meat-based diet generally more beneficial? Does it depend entirely on the individual? 

There is no diet that fits everyone perfectly. To some extent, it depends on the individual. I do recommend more of a paleo diet or AIP diet, at least while healing. I can’t say I recommend a vegan or vegetarian diet. If someone is following a vegan or vegetarian diet, they can still get good results. 

In my book The Hyperthyroid Healing Diet, I have a level 1 diet, which is suitable for vegans and vegetarians. 

Is complete alcohol avoidance really essential with Graves’? I personally find that having a few glasses of wine with friends once in a while helps me relax. Can even small amounts be problematic? 

Christina asked all these questions. Another great question for all thyroid conditions. I recommend while healing to take a break from alcohol because it can affect permeability of the gut. I know it also can have some benefits as well. The polyphenols. It’s hard to gauge risks versus benefits. 

Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Ultimately, it’s up to you. I am not saying it will be impossible to heal yourself if you’re drinking a glass of wine every now and then. I also wouldn’t say there would be no concern. 

It’s not the same as gluten. I get this question a lot with gluten. If I have gluten once or twice a week in small amounts, can I heal? The answer is you might be able to heal, but it’s a variable that probably is better not to be introduced while healing. Many will continue to avoid gluten, even after they have restored their health. 

I would say, to play it safe, it would be best to avoid drinking wine while healing.

I have had thyroid tests by two different doctors. One a regular medical doctor, the other an endocrinologist. They both said my thyroid dose is fine. Since the meds were lowered at least nine months ago, I am deeply exhausted all the time. My sleep is bad. I have had hair fall out. Eyelashes growing a little back now. Without changing my diet, which has always been really good—I eat organic—I gained weight. Now I am even more careful about what I am eating but not losing weight. Exhausted and frustrated. My question: How can I help my thyroid if the point after testing has not been helpful? Thank you for your help as always. 

Thanks for your question, Susan. Even though you are seeing two different doctors, it sounds like you may need to see a functional medicine practitioner. Your thyroid numbers might be within lab range, but it sounds like they might not be optimal. 

Are they also looking at T3? As I mentioned earlier, some practitioners look at TSH and T4 but not T3. If they’re not looking at T3, you don’t know if that’s optimal, if your body is converting T4 into T3. Even if they did look at it, are the numbers optimal, or are they just within the range? Even though it’s two different doctors, most conventional doctors will just pay attention to the reference range. If your TSH is 4, which is within most lab reference ranges, and your T3/T4 are on the lower side, they will say everything looks good even though it’s not. 

You might want to get an opinion from a functional medicine doctor, especially one who looks at thyroid labs on a daily basis. 

I have multinodular goiter, but my thyroid blood test numbers are all still within normal range. My ferritin is low, and I’m in my mid-40s with many thyroid symptoms. There is a lot of overlap to perimenopause symptoms. If numbers are within range, do I assume my symptoms are perimenopause-related? Some examples are occasional hair loss with some overall hair loss over the past five years; tired; lack of motivation; weight gain; tight fascia throughout the right side of my body; terrible plantar fasciitis for over a year; rib area fascia pain that can’t be explained by any tests; being cold often. 

Let me get to this first question. It’s possible that the symptoms are perimenopause. Again, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier. Normal numbers between optimal. You put “normal” in quotes, so I think you also are aware that it might not be optimal. If your numbers are not optimal, that could be causing it. It still could be thyroid-related, even though the labs are within normal range. 

It could be a combination of the thyroid hormones and estrogen, progesterone. I definitely would be getting this evaluated more. Maybe do a dried urine test like the DUTCH test. Hopefully you had not just TSH but free T4 and free T3 tested. In this case, maybe reverse T3 as well.

Can a thyroid be healthy even with multiple large nodules? 

Right away, I’ll say no. if you have large nodules, I wouldn’t say you have a healthy thyroid. Can you still have normal thyroid function with larger nodules? You could. I wouldn’t say it’s a healthy thyroid because you don’t want any nodules.

Is removing the thyroid nodules, if they cause pressure, a good idea? 

Essentially you are asking if you can do a partial thyroidectomy. Does having a multinodular goiter mean that your thyroid will start having problems at some point that you should start treating now? 

You did have HRT. A couple of things. You could look into addressing the cause of the large nodules. Problems with estrogen metabolism, how you metabolize estrogen. The DUTCH test could look at how you metabolize estrogen. Insulin resistance could also be a factor with large nodules. 

Before looking into surgery, look into radiofrequency ablation, which is not the same as radioactive iodine. It’s in pointing the thyroid nodules, using radiofrequencies to shrink the nodules. I had Dr. Angela Mazza on the podcast to talk about this. That is an option for some people with nodules. It’s not getting rid of the cause. If it’s saving the thyroid, preventing the thyroid from getting surgically removed, even a partial thyroidectomy, I would look into it.

I am curious why thyroid issues cause high cholesterol, particularly high HDL. 

Thyroid issues, I won’t say they typically cause high cholesterol. If HDL is really high, that could be a result of inflammation. Cholesterol thyroid hormones will affect cholesterol metabolism. For example, if someone has low thyroid hormone, so hypothyroidism, typically, you will have higher cholesterol, higher LDL, and you might have lower HDL. High HDL is more of an inflammatory issue. 

If someone has hyperthyroidism, too much thyroid hormone, then that will typically lower cholesterol and LDL. If the question specifically is about HDL, and it’s high, there is some type of inflammation going on in the body, which is common with Graves’ and Hashimoto’s, not to say most people have high HDL. 

I would love a diet plan. What to eat and what not to eat. Also, experiencing blurry vision. I have good and bad days. Today is a bad day. I just got my latest blood test results. Comparing it to the one I did three weeks ago, my thyroid is not responding. They are increasing methimazole to 20mg. In the meantime, I am trying to educate myself. I am planning on meeting with a functional medicine doctor. 

That’s wonderful about meeting with a functional medicine doctor. For what to eat and what not to eat, I am going to pitch my book, The Hyperthyroid Healing Diet. It’s not free. That goes into specifics about what to eat, what not to eat. I would recommend getting The Hyperthyroid Healing Diet, as it would take too long to go over everything here.

It depends. If you have Graves’, you probably want to follow a level 3 diet, which is similar to AIP. If not, maybe a level 2 diet, which is a modified paleo diet.

Blurry vision. It could be related to TED but also blood sugar can cause that as well. I am not sure if you have seen an eye specialist to get it checked out. With Graves’, it’s not uncommon to have TED. Not necessarily an optometrist but probably an ophthalmologist would be a better idea to play it safe. Great that you are seeing a functional medicine doctor. 

If someone has hypothyroidism for a long time, and they have never taken synthetic thyroid or had surgery, is it possible for something to be off with thyroid supplements? 

Sounds like you are not on synthetic thyroid but are on a certain thyroid supplement. 

If I don’t take it, my body falls apart. The first symptom is super tightness around my spine and hips, and I am unable to walk. It is excruciating, and at its worst, I cannot even sit or stand without it taking a whole minute to get up and down slowly from a chair. 

It depends on the situation. I can’t say everyone with hypothyroidism can get off thyroid hormone replacement or a supplement that has thyroid hormone replacement in there. I don’t know if it’s a thyroid glandular supplement or another supplement with nutritional support.

What you want to do ideally is address the underlying cause. If you address the underlying cause, that will increase the chances that you won’t need thyroid hormone replacement. I am not telling people to stop thyroid hormone replacement because there is a time and place for that. 

There are people who need thyroid hormone replacement. There are people who address the cause of the problem, but here is so much damage that has been done to the thyroid gland that they still need thyroid hormone replacement.

The answer is yes, it’s possible to not rely on the supplement. There is no guarantee. You don’t want just to take the supplement. You want to clean up your diet, manage your stress, find your triggers and underlying imbalances, and do things to heal the gut. 

I should have mentioned at the beginning that I am going to have a separate Q&A episode on bugleweed and related herbs. There are a few other questions. We have a decent number of questions related to bugleweed and motherwort. I have answered a few of them between this next one and the next session. A couple of them, I’ll be answering, but I decided to have a separate episode focusing on bugleweed. I am not answering five or six questions related to it here. I’ll have that separate episode coming out soon.

For hyperthyroidism, I take bugleweed, L-carnitine, selenium, and myoinositol. Can I quit taking one or two, or should I take them all? 

It’s up to you. I can’t specifically tell you what to do. I will say, when I dealt with Graves’ personally, I just took bugleweed and selenium. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with L-carnitine. That was in 2008/2009. That was a long time ago. I have seen some studies that selenium and myoinositol can help with antibodies, moreso Hashimoto’s. 

If I had to go in order, I’d say #1 would be bugleweed. #2 would be selenium. We could easily swap that. I could easily say selenium because you can’t have a bugleweed deficiency, but you can have a selenium deficiency. Myoinositol is optional. Even though I like L-carnitine, I would say it’s optional. 

Can you have normal TSH and still have hypothyroid symptoms? 

The answer is yes. If your TSH is normal, but not within the optimal range, then you could have hypothyroid symptoms. It’s not just TSH. You have to look at T4 and T3. They could easily be less than optimal. 

Many doctors don’t look at the thyroid hormones; they might only look at TSH, or TSH and just T4. T4 converts into T3. If you have a normal TSH but less than optimal T4 and T3, or even optimal T4 but less than optimal T3 because T4 isn’t converting to T3, then yes, you could have hypothyroid symptoms.

The question is is your TSH within the optimal range? Also, did you have T4 and T3 looked at? Are those within the optimal ranges? 

If the answer is no to these questions, you definitely can have hypothyroid symptoms. 

What are the foods I should avoid? 

I would refer you to my book The Hyperthyroid Healing Diet. Again, if you have Hashimoto’s, I have a book Hashimoto’s Triggers, which isn’t related to diet specifically, but it talks about diet. For Hashimoto’s, I am recommending the AIP diet, which in my book, is called level 3. It’s like a modified AIP diet. 

Either way, I would definitely refer to the book. I have lists where I talk about the foods that you should avoid. 

I think I’m going to stop here. Next week’s episode will be an interview with Justin Harris. The following week will be part two of this Q&A episode. Definitely tune in. Look forward to catching you then.

In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Scott Sherr to explain why energy dysfunction is so common in chronic illness, and how methylene blue is being used clinically to support mitochondrial function, oxidative stress balance, and detoxification. I also explain why this topic is especially relevant for people with thyroid and autoimmune conditions, based on what I see regularly in practice. If you would prefer to listen to the interview you can access it by Clicking Here.

Dr. Eric Osansky: 

I am super excited to chat with Dr. Scott Sherr. We are going to be talking about a few different things, probably more of an emphasis on methylene blue, but also talking about GABA, maybe a little bit about hyperbaric oxygen. He has a great deal of knowledge. Really excited for this.

Let me dive into his impressive bio here: Dr. Scott Sherr is a board-certified internal medicine physician, certified to practice health optimization medicine and hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) specialist. His clinical practice is built on health optimization medicine as its foundation, complemented by an integrative approach to HBOT that incorporates cutting-edge and dynamic HBOT protocols, comprehensive laboratory testing, targeted supplementation, personalized practices, synergistic technologies, and more. He is the COO of Troscriptions, VP of Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, Chief Medical Officer of OneBase Health. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Scott. 

Dr. Scott Sherr: 

It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Eric. 

Dr. Eric: 

You’re welcome. Like I said at the top, excited about this conversation. How did you get started? You do have a lot of knowledge, like we said. Methylene blue, the hyperbaric oxygen. How did you really start going in this direction and end up where you are right now? 

Dr. Scott: I

’ll try to give you the short story here. The short story is I grew up pretty alternatively in New York, not in Queens like you, Eric, but on Long Island, until I was 18 years old. My father was a chiropractor, so I grew up out of the box. I decided to go to medical school. This high-minded idea that I could find a way to bridge the gap between conventional or allopathic medicine and alternative medicine. There weren’t defining aspects of alternative medicine at that time. There was integrative medicine or functional medicine or those kinds of things. 

I went to medical school and really fell in love with a field called hyperbaric oxygen therapy because it had the capacity to have both the conventional side of treating people in hospitals with acute trauma and infections, but it also had the amazing capacity to help people heal from a systemic way, from things we didn’t have a lot of options for inside the medical system. Things like stroke, traumatic brain injury, and other things that were interesting to me.

About a decade after finishing my internal medicine residency, so I am an internal medicine doc. My fastest way out to figure out what I wanted to do. I developed what I would call an integrative practice around initially hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It’s still a big part of what I do. 

Over a decade, I realized it was very important that we had a much bigger idea of what would be optimal when someone is thinking about using hyperbaric therapy. It wasn’t that everybody should go into the chamber right away. Oftentimes, if you were sick or had a more complex illness or had more long-term goals, it was better to focus on foundational biology first rather than go directly into the chamber. 

This got me in trouble over the years in the hyperbaric community. I would give lectures like, “Please don’t put them in a hyperbaric chamber right now. Let’s wait 3-5 months and optimize them beforehand.”

I trained in something called health optimization medicine in 2017-2018. This became the foundation for what I do in clinical practice. I realized if you want to make energy effectively, you have to have all the machinery to be able to do that. If I am flooding the body with more oxygen, which is what happens in a chamber, then you’re basically requiring the body to have a huge amount of capacity to make energy and to deal with the waste products or end result of a lot of energy made. You don’t just get energy for free in our body. We have waste products like reactive oxygen species or ROS and free radicals and other things.

My framework foundation became this thing called health optimization medicine. I learned it from a colleague and mentor named Dr. Ted Achacoso who had decided on this framework in his own clinical practice and was in the process of creating a nonprofit organization and asked for help. I became the COO of Health Optimization Medicine and Practice (HOMe/HOPe), where we train practitioners on this framework. That became a huge part of what I do as a foundation.

As a result of that nonprofit, we also knew that along the path to optimizing your health, you need help along the way. You need people to help you most of the time. Also, it’s sometimes really important to help with energy, with focus, with sleep, with stress, as you are trying to optimize your health, which can take a while. It’s not something that happens overnight. It happens over 3-6 months or longer. If it took you 50-60 years to get to where you feel now, you can’t expect to feel tomorrow back like you did when you were in your 20s. 

Troscriptions, the company, came around, initially as an offshoot of the nonprofit, but then as its own company, to develop products that could help people right now along the path.

This is where methylene blue came around. This is where optimizing the GABA system came around. And much more than that. 

My clinical practice right now, the foundational framework is health optimization medicine, which I do with clients all over the world. Optimizing vitamins, minerals, nutrients, cofactors, etc. a little bit differently than most functional medicine looks at the root causes for illness. We are more the root cause of health perspective and looking at optimized markers when you are about 21-30 years of age. It’s a different framework. We can go into it if you have questions.

In essence, that’s a big part of what I do foundationally. I do it by telemedicine. I have the Troscriptions company that I help run that works on the product side of things. I am also still very involved in helping people on the hyperbaric oxygen therapy side, but within the confine of maybe it’s not right for you to do right now. Let’s optimize you before we start considering the chamber. 

Dr. Eric: 

You don’t recommend HBOT for everybody. When someone does get HBOT, it’s usually down the road. 

Dr. Scott: 

It really depends on the person. If there is more of an acute issue, more of an acute trauma, inflammation, low oxygen state, then HBOT may be beneficial to somebody right now, even if they are not as well optimized as they could be.

What I often say is it’s not if hyperbaric oxygen therapy will be helpful, it’s when. When will it be the most optimal for you? It might not be now; it might be later. Or it might be now depending on what’s going on. It’s very individual.

In general, if it’s more of an acute issue, with an acute inflammatory cascade, HBOT could be great for that. It might be something you want to use now, even if you don’t have all your ducks in a row, all your foundational biology figured out, or at least in the process of doing that.

The other bucket is the bigger bucket, which is the chronic medical illness and/or health optimization performance/longevity world. I even argue that in the world of longevity, which is so popular these days, we are still chasing things. HBOT is one of those things. You are chasing a tool where you are not getting your foundation in order first, so you will not benefit from using that tool, either short or long-term. If you don’t have that foundation in order primarily, or at least ongoing while you’re thinking about doing some of those other things. 

Dr. Eric: 

Makes sense. You always want to incorporate those foundations. I’m glad you mentioned that. 

Definitely want to talk about methylene blue, but I want to stay on HBOT for a minute. When I dealt with chronic Lyme in 2018, I was doing a lot of foundational stuff, but I decided to look into other methods, like I ended up doing UV light IV ozone, but the clinic I went to, which focused on Lyme and other chronic health conditions similar to Lyme, HBOT was an option given to me. 

At that point, I did more research on the IV ozone. I’m not super claustrophobic, but looking at the chamber, I was like, I don’t know if I could be in there for an hour and a half. 

For conditions like Lyme, bartonella, chronic health conditions, how does HBOT help? How would that potentially have helped with my Lyme condition, or someone else who is listening to this who might be dealing with chronic Lyme or some other chronic infection? 

Dr. Scott: 

I first learned about HBOT and how to practice it from a nurse in my clinic in San Francisco, where I was at the time, who had chronic Lyme. A lot of chronic Lyme and chronic coinfection patients would come in. 

What I found out very early, and this is alluding to what I said so far, is if you used HBOT in somebody who was very sick, they would not often do well in a hyperbaric chamber. Their system was so inflamed, so toxic already, and had so much infection. If they didn’t have the machinery to support them throughout the process.

Over the years, I had gotten to a point where people need to be about 50-70% better already before even considering HBOT. That is so they have a more foundational biology that can tolerate and leverage going into a hyperbaric chamber. 

With Lyme as an example, what happens is that Lyme, which is called a facultative anaerobe bug, which means that it does not like high oxygen conditions. If you flood the body with a lot more oxygen, especially deeper pressures in the chamber, you will flood the body with more stress on the Lyme bugs, which will kill them off. You will get more Lyme inflammation when the Lyme dies. There is all the inflammation associated with that. Can you actually get rid of the Lyme? Do you have the detox pathway capacity? Are you pooping every day? All these things.

I found that almost all the Lyme patients I’ve worked with over the years, I will highly recommend they work with a Lyme-literate physician at the same time. If they don’t, and they just use HBOT on its own with Lyme, I don’t typically recommend that. 

There is an anti-infective capacity for HBOT, which we can use it for. I have in the past. You have to be mindful of what’s going on physiologically, that it will either tolerate killing a whole bunch of bugs, or it won’t.

When you have a chronic complex medical illness, like chronic Lyme, EBV, or mold, you have long COVID, etc., if there is an infection component, HBOT might be able to address that, even from a viral perspective, there is some evidence that HBOT can improve immune system function as well. There is a capacity there as well to potentially have anti-inflammatory, immune system activation, antimicrobial aspect. 

It also has to be thought about in the ecosystem of how well the body and the person is going to be able to tolerate these kinds of exposures. Typically, you have to go to deeper pressures to see that kind of benefit. A lot of Lyme patients, chronically inflamed patients don’t typically tolerate very deep pressures, at least initially, because they don’t have the capacity to use that oxygen and detox from the energy they make and also use that oxygen to kill bugs and detox from the bugs they are killing. That’s why over the years I have gotten to the point where being 60-70% better is likely a better starting point for HBOT. 

The other thing I would see is people maybe slightly getting better over time using a hyperbaric program for Lyme, even if they were super sick. I remember even the nurse I worked with, she told me about the first time she did a hyperbaric program. She was going in every day in a wheelchair. They had to wheel her out because she couldn’t even walk. She did better for a little while after finishing her program, but then she got worse again. 

This is common if you don’t have enough support throughout the process if you are not 60-70% better already. This is why having a foundation is so important, and having the right doctors to work with who really know how to help you in a foundational way, whether you’re coming from a health perspective or complex medical perspective.

Dr. Eric: 

Makes sense. Methylene blue also has antimicrobial properties from what I understand. Let’s transition to methylene blue. For those who are unfamiliar with it, what is it? 

Dr. Scott: 

We got interested in methylene blue because we were looking for ways to support mitochondrial function very quickly in people who had significant mitochondrial dysfunction. The spectrum is wide. We have about 94% of adults who have some element of mitochondrial dysfunction. 

The mitochondria, for those who don’t know that part, is the part of our cells that make energy. We used to think that if you took biology class in 7th and 8th grade, like my kids just did, you actually see a cell that has one mitochondria in it. We have some cells that have thousands of mitochondria, and we have some cells that have very few. The cells that have the most mitochondria are ovaries and sperm. Fertility is a big lever that mitochondria either will help with or not. Brain, heart, liver, musculoskeletal tissue as well. 

Keeping that all in mind, as I start talking about methylene blue here. 

The thing about methylene blue, to give a little bit of a history, is it’s been around for over 120 years now as a compound. It started as a textile dye back in the 1870s. There are very few antimicrobials around at that time. If you got an infection, there was very little you could do, except hopefully the body walls it off, and you survive. This is one of the reasons why mortality rates and the age we live is much lower compared to now. 

The first indication of methylene blue was it treated malaria. That’s why it got a lot of interest in 1897 and became the first drug registered with our nascent FDA at that time. It got a name called the Magic Bullet as well, which was interesting. The reason why they called it that is you could give very high doses of methylene blue, around 3mg/kg or higher. You would be able to see significant killing of microorganisms or bacteria, fungi, and viruses because you wouldn’t see the killing or harming of the human host. That was something that was very difficult to find. It still is now actually. It was very unusual at the time. 

Between 1897-1950, it was one of the major antimicrobials around. It was used for UTIs. It was used for fungal infections. If you were a WWII soldier, and you were getting shipped off to the Pacific part of the war, you were taking methylene blue prophylactically as something that would prevent you from getting fungal infections from the jungles and islands in the Pacific. There were songs about taking methylene blue at the time because it concentrates in the urine. The higher the dose you take, the more blue your urine would be. They talked about “being blue in the loo,” the loo being the bathroom. 

That was the original chapter of methylene blue being an antimicrobial. When penicillin and other antimicrobials came around in the 1950s, methylene blue became less in favor. They were using more of the antibiotics, as many of you know now, like penicillin and derived drugs.

Fast forward 80 years. A lot of the drugs we use are now resistant because the bugs have created resistant patterns to antibiotics over the years. Methylene blue is coming back a little bit because of this mechanism of action, which we can talk about if you have interest.

The next chapter of methylene blue was the first antipsychotics were derived from it back in the 1950s and 1960s because it has a capacity of what’s called the monoamine oxidase inhibition, which just means it increases norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine in a dose-dependent way. The first antipsychotics were derived from methylene blue.

If you were in chemistry class, methylene blue has been used for a long time as a chemical stain of cells. Interestingly, it concentrates in the mitochondria of the cell. That’s where things get interesting. 

There are two medical indications for using methylene blue. If you have a condition called methemoglobinemia, which is when your red blood cells cannot carry oxygen very well, what methylene blue can do is facilitate the carrying of oxygen by those red blood cells. 

If you get poisoned by cyanide, which I don’t recommend, cyanide destroys your mitochondria. Methylene blue can rescue in that case and prevent you from dying if you get poisoned with cyanide if you get it soon enough.

It’s also used in medical marking as well because of the fantastically blue color it is.

In essence, that’s a long way of saying it has a lot of history. It’s been around a long time. Where we’re really focused on using it primarily now is with mitochondrial function. Over the last several decades, there have been a number of researchers who have looked at methylene blue as a mitochondrial support because it has this capacity to compensate for mitochondrial dysfunction, which I said earlier. 

94% of US adults have, from insulin resistance or toxins in our environment or stress in our lives, stressful relationships, stress partners, stressful jobs, even stress from trauma in our childhood we haven’t dealt with, along with medications and infections and things like COVID, medications like metformin or PPIs, we have a lot of insults going on in our mitochondria all the time. 

What’s really interesting about methylene blue is it works both on helping you make more energy in the mitochondria as well as the detoxification side. It’s called a redox cycler, which means it has the capacity to do both, energy production and detoxification. That’s extremely rare. Most compounds either help you make more energy or detox, like antioxidants. There are very few that do both. 

Dr. Eric: 

Go a little bit deeper in how it’s supporting detoxification? 

Dr. Scott: 

Methylene blue can work directly as an antioxidant. When you make ATP, which is our energy currency, which by the way we make just about 150 pounds of ATP every single day, making energy is not free. It’s like gasoline fumes or burning gasoline in your car. You obviously can run your engine with gas, but there is exhaust. 

We have exhaust in our cells. One of the reasons why we age is mitochondria are making so much energy for such a long period of time, and there are these exhaust products that are being made at all times when we have energy production. We make carbon dioxide and water every time we make energy. 

We also make reactive oxygen species. These are free radicals, unpaired electrons that are in our mitochondria and are important. They give the mitochondria a sense of their capacity, their need to make more energy, slow down, speed up, etc. 

What’s required actually is you need to have a balanced neutralization of that reactive oxygen stress with antioxidants. These are things like Vitamin C or glutathione or melatonin, which is a very powerful antioxidant in the mitochondria. The body is always trying to balance this energy production with this capacity to neutralize the stress that is happening from energy production.

What methylene blue can do at low doses, even 4, 8, 12mg, is work directly like an antioxidant in the mitochondria, picking up these free radicals and neutralizing them. 

Fun fact: When methylene blue does this, it turns its color from blue to colorless. 

In addition to working directly as a free radical scavenger in the mitochondria as well as the cytosol as well, at higher doses, around 1mg/kg or so, you start getting the upregulation of the pathway called the Nrf2 pathway. This particular pathway increases your production of an antioxidant called glutathione, which is also known as our master antioxidant. 

It does this in a very interesting way actually. It creates the production of hydrogen peroxide at these higher doses. People know you can buy HPO, but our cells make HPO. This is how they kill bugs. This is how they kill errant cells that are potentially precancerous. HPO is a very important mechanism as to how our body and cells specifically regulate themselves. 

What methylene blue does at these high doses, around 1mg/kg, which is around 50-70mg for most humans, although maybe that’s slightly increasing now because of obesity. In essence, that dosing is antimicrobial. It also is antioxidant-producing if you have the capacity to actually make antioxidants in the first place. That’s what it comes down to with methylene blue. 

Often, you want to start off at low doses and make sure someone tolerates it before going too high. If you do go higher, you might get more of a need for antioxidants, and you potentially don’t have the capacity to make them.

Dr. Eric: 

Thanks for the comprehensive explanation. I know in phase one detoxification, you get those reactive intermediates. It sounds like methylene blue can be helpful acting as an antioxidant to reduce those reactive intermediates and possibly also play a role in phase two detox as well. 

As far as the antimicrobial properties, maybe you could confirm or clarify. It’s not really killing. Its antimicrobial properties are through its antioxidant properties? 

Dr. Scott: 

It’s through its production of hydrogen peroxide. Higher doses of methylene blue create stress on bugs. One of the major antimicrobial mechanisms that we use in a cell is by releasing hydrogen peroxide to kill organisms that shouldn’t be there. Methylene blue enhances that process. It doesn’t have a direct killing effect itself. 

What you can do is make it more anti-infective by adding in red light therapy. High intensity red light at around 680nm or so combined with high amounts of methylene blue, 15mg or above typically, becomes even more anti-infective. Not only do you make hydrogen peroxide, but you actually make what are called free electron O1s. You actually make OH radicals, too. Those are much more oxidative stressful than just hydrogen peroxide.

When you’re making more oxidative molecules, you’re putting more stress on the system. What the body does there as a result is it tries to upregulate pathways that increase antioxidant production. Unfortunately, if you have a chronic complex medical illness, you may not be able to do that easily. 

There are some interesting studies looking at high intensity red light laser along with methylene blue. Really significant studies looking at COVID for example and how you can create more stress on the COVID virus as a result of combining these things together. I use that in clinical practice definitely as an antimicrobial. 

You can use it from an acute perspective. You have an acute infection. You can use higher doses of methylene blue, sometimes up to 2mg/kg, for 5-7 days, depending on the person, and wean them down, along with red light. Methylene blue in these cases can act as a photosynthesizer. You can use that red light in combination.

What’s also interesting is low doses of methylene blue, around 25 or 37.5mg or so, combined with lower intensity red light, the combination is really supportive for mitochondrial function. It can both help enhance energy production, cycle in mitochondria electron transport chain, specifically complex 4, which is also called cytochrome oxidase. Methylene blue can donate electrons directly to that. So can red light. You have that combination be very effective. You obviously can do this with red light panels or by doing it out in the sun. The sun has red light in it as well as other spectrums. 

I combine methylene blue with red light a lot. Typically, it’s lower doses of methylene blue and lower intensity red light. The combination is more supportive for mitochondrial function. The higher doses of methylene blue plus more intense lasers of red light are fantastically anti-infective.

If you want to get fancy, I have done all three. Using methylene blue, then having some red light exposure, then getting into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. We were using that early in COVID, people going from positive to negative tests in three days and feeling fantastic compared to how they did three days earlier.

To bring that together from an anti-infective perspective, you can have a combination of things. In my world, that became a very important way of looking at how we can help people during the pandemic. 

Dr. Eric: 

For acute infections, you said 2mg/kg of body weight? 

Dr. Scott: 

Typically for an acute infection, I would use higher doses, up to 2mg/kg, for 3-5 days, and then wean them down from there. 

If it’s a more chronic infection, like chronic Lyme, mold, long COVID with potential protein spike replication, they typically respond to 1mg/kg. What you want to do with the chronic people is start them at a lower dose. Every 3-5 days, increase the dose. 

I start the dose at 4, 8, 12.5mg, and increase it every 3-5 days until they get a response. The first response will probably be more of a mitochondrial response. From there, do you want to keep going up? What other therapies are you doing alongside using methylene blue? 

For bartonella, for example, a lot of colleagues use around 15mg twice daily for a period of time. Bartonella also has biofilms that tend to build up. Methylene blue can break up biofilms at these higher doses in the gut, the bladder. There is some evidence clinically that it can help with this condition called intestinal interstices, which is a pretty painful condition of the bladder. Most people are told this is just all in their head. Often, there is a biofilm that is protecting various sets of bacteria and maybe fungi as well from being treated by antimicrobials. Nothing can be used in conjunction for a treatment program for those kinds of things. 

Dosing ranges from 1-2mg for infection. On the higher level, it’s given for a shorter period of time. The lower end of that range, 1mg/kg, you can use that for a relatively long period of time if needed while trying to optimize the infection and get rid of it in other ways, too. 

Dr. Eric: 

A regular UTI, what typically is the recommendation for dosing and duration? 

Dr. Scott: 

At this point, we can’t recommend you take methylene blue instead of an antimicrobial for a UTI. In my clinical practice, what we’ll typically do is if someone has a UTI, which are gram negative bacteria usually, they are more sensitive to being killed by methylene blue, which is good.

For compliant patients, I’ll give them 2mg/kg of methylene blue for about three days. From there, if their symptoms are resolving at that point, we will potentially continue for another 2-3 days. We may start weaning it down the third day. I will usually recommend it being used in conjunction with antimicrobials as a way to support the process and maybe shorten the course you need from an antimicrobial perspective. 

Most of the regimens for acute illness are about 5-7 days. Between 1-2mg per kg. If they are more severe, higher end of the range. If they are less severe, lower end of the range. An acute viral infection that you get coming off an airplane or something like that, that would be more like 1mg/kg for 5-7 days. If you have a UTI or COVID or a more significant infection. 

Dr. Eric: 

Sticking with the UTI, have you tried combining that with the D-mannose, or do you still need an antimicrobial along with that as well? 

Dr. Scott:

I found in my compliant patients, they can get away with just using methylene blue. We are using D-mannose, a common one. Cranberry and hydration and other things. 

Where I have found it shine as well is you can use lower doses of methylene blue prophylactically to prevent recurrent UTIs in those who are more subject or have more of a predilection for those potentially. 

Typically, I have seen 4-8mg every other day in patients with chronic UTIs. I have had some good clinical success using it that way as a preventative. 

It’s not the only thing I’m doing. We talked about D-mannose. We talked about cranberry. Vagina estrogen, if it’s a female who is peri or menopausal. There are other things we can do. I have seen a significant lever and something very easy to do three days a week as a way to help with prevention as well.

Dr. Eric: 

Some expressed concern with it affecting the good microbes, kind of like oregano oil. Everything comes down to risks versus benefits. I also assume the dosage matters, too, when it comes to potentially- Or maybe it doesn’t. 

Dr. Scott: 

No, it does. You’re right. It’s a dose dependent kind of thing. Once you get around to that mg/kg, it becomes more anti-infective. If you’re at a lower dose, 4-8-12-16mg of methylene blue, no major indication from the last five years I have been working with it that it has any detrimental effect on the gut microbiome itself. 

Now, the higher doses, as you mentioned, it’s a risk versus benefit ratio. What I would typically do is use it for a short period of time at these higher doses, if at all possible. If you have a chronic infection, where it might be helpful to be on it for a longer period of time, you have to consider that and have that, as a practitioner, be something you’re considering, that you may be decreasing commensal organisms, like the normal bacteria in your gut, over time. That may be okay if you are trying to address the biofilm that has been difficult to address in other ways. 

I’m not a big fan of ever using antimicrobials, even methylene blue, at higher doses although I feel like it’s less of a nuclear bomb than using penicillin or sipro or urimax or whatever. Those are much more nuclear bombs, at least in clinical practice, that I have seen. 

The reason for that is it also has some mitochondrial support aspects and antioxidant upregulation. It’s not like just giving an antibiotic and calling it Hiroshima and having to completely rebuild the gut from there. Sometimes, that’s necessary. That’s totally okay. We now know there are various strategies that can be helpful in that capacity.

What it comes down to is a risk versus benefit ratio for using higher doses in a shorter period of time in practice. Most of my colleagues who use methylene blue regularly are mostly using it for mitochondrial support. 94% of adults have a need for this in the U.S. This is energy deficit, brain fog, concentration problems, mental health disorders, exercise-induced fatigue, infertility. So many things that the common denominator is mitochondrial dysfunction.

Start out at 4, 8, 12.5mg, a low dose of methylene blue, and slowly titrate that dose until you start feeling better. Every 3-5 days, increasing the dose.

A good example is a lady I spoke to a couple of years ago. She always rings very true in my mind. A physical therapist who had mold exposure. She’d done a lot of great work getting the mold remediated both internally and externally in her home. The mold was gone in her house. The mold wasn’t showing any issues in her blood or urine, but she still felt terrible. Why did she feel so terrible? She had mitochondrial dysfunction, trashed mitochondria from all the years of having those exposures. Even if the mold was gone. 

All she did was 4mg of methylene blue. In five or seven days, she thinks she felt pretty good. She increased it to 8mg, and she felt amazing. She was back to work a week after that. She just needed to have that mitochondrial support along the way, especially now that everything else had been resolved.

I’ve seen this time and time again. They are really doing the hard work of dealing with the Lyme, mold, or infections. They still feel terrible. Often, this is because they have significant mitochondrial dysfunction because of those infections, toxins, and stress. 

If you could start at these lower doses and then increase the dose, the good thing about methylene blue is you don’t need to wait for it to build up in your system for 30 days or two months to see a difference. Once you find the right dose, you know you’ve found the right dose, and you stay on that dose. It depends on why you’re taking it as to how long you take it and how frequently you take it from there.

Coming from a pretty sick place, you might need to take methylene blue seven days a week for a period of a month or two months or longer until you can start weaning it down. Hopefully, you can optimize it in other areas of your life. Hopefully, methylene blue has helped you do that because you now have more energy and detox capacity. You can take that walk around the block. You can do that dietary shift you have been trying to do for a while. 

In other nations’ populations, you’re just using methylene blue even shorter than that for a small amount of support as they do something more stressful or because they have something ongoing that is requiring more support, like they are traveling more for example.

The cool thing about methylene blue is it can work just like oxygen in your cells. If you have less oxygen around, it can work like the oxygen that isn’t there to help you maintain energy capacity for longer as well. 

That’s why it’s great for flying on airplanes for example. Everyone who flies is going to be hypoxic. You’re instantly from sea level, where you are probably at in the moment, then going on an airplane and being pressurized at 8,000 feet, which is 16% oxygen compared to 21%. Another example of how you can use methylene blue more short-term in those examples.

Dr. Eric: 

Because my audience consists of those with thyroid and autoimmune thyroid conditions, could you tie it into thyroid health? Some of the things you mentioned like oxidative stress is a factor when it comes to all autoimmune conditions. Methylene blue can help in that respect. Of course, infections can be a factor with certain autoimmune conditions. Is there anything else showing direct correlation or relationship between methylene blue and thyroid autoimmunity? Any other way methylene blue can potentially help? 

Dr. Scott: 

You’re correct. There are no direct studies looking at methylene blue and thyroid function. However, we have had a good amount of experience over the past five years talking to people who have been having the challenges of thyroid issues for many years, Hashimoto’s and otherwise. 

What it seems to be is the inflammatory component is a big one. If you can decrease inflammation in the system by helping the thyroid and mitochondria neutralize oxidative stress and decrease inflammation, that’s a big deal. That goes across the board for a lot of thyroid conditions at this point.

In addition, what I hear a lot from patients who have thyroid conditions is they feel like they get more energy. That is seeming to correlate with a need for potentially less thyroid medication and also potentially even thyroid antibodies that are going down associated with taking methylene blue.

I’m not making any claims here specifically. Don’t want anybody to stop their medications or change anything without talking to their practitioner. It’s happened enough where people have reached out and said, “I started methylene blue, and I need less of what I was using before because I feel better, and my numbers look better.” It’s a metabolic support in the sense that it’s helping with energy production. 

We didn’t get into the major details here. There are some cool ones. When your mitochondria aren’t working very well, you have these complex mitochondria called protein complexes. Typically, the first two are the ones that are dysfunctional. Those are the two that are most important to help you take energy from the food we eat and bring it to the mitochondria, so we can make our energy currency called ATP. 

What methylene blue can do is it can compensate for dysfunction in any of those complexes, especially 1 and 2. It’s almost like a switch for a lot of people. Especially with autoimmune/inflammatory conditions, once you get enough of that methylene support and play, you can bypass those complexes if you need to and make the electron flow go further down the chain into a place where you can still make energy more effectively. 

You’ve taken those off the table for now. They’re not as involved in the cascade of making energy or the inflammatory result of not being able to make energy effectively. 

You have this really cool combination with methylene blue, this energy enhancement capacity and the detox capacity. That’s the other reason why it’s supportive in a lot of complex medical conditions. It’s not just making more energy. If I can bypass a couple complexes and give you more energy, but you still don’t have the capacity to address the detoxification that is required for making more energy, you will feel worse. 

When you drink caffeine, you get a headache or crash afterwards. You have some nicotine, which is becoming more interesting in the world of thyroid as an anti-inflammatory, something that can help with autoimmune conditions, maybe as a cognitive enhancer as well. Even nicotine is increasing energy production without the additional support of detoxification. 

Methylene blue has that redox side, which is energy and detox at the same time. That’s also why I’ve seen it so clinically effective for patients who have fatigue related to autoimmune inflammatory conditions. We’re not just giving more energy; we’re giving the detox at the same time.

Dr. Eric: 

Are there any contraindications for methylene blue? Anyone who shouldn’t take it? Second question is what differentiates Troscription’s methylene blue from others out there? 

Dr. Scott: 

When it comes to contraindications or reasons why you should not take methylene blue, the first two are unfortunately common across lots of different pharmaceuticals or supplements, which is if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, please don’t take methylene blue. There is some indication, especially in later trimesters, that there may be a problem. Earlier, there doesn’t seem to be an issue. If you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, just be careful.

The other thing to talk about here is something called serotonin syndrome and another thing called G6PD deficiency. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter. Many of you know that, I’m sure. 

Serotonin is something that is thought to help us regulate our mood. For many years, we used to think people with depression had serotonin deficiency. Doctors were told that your patients with serotonin deficient, give them serotonergic reuptake inhibitors, so these are antidepressants, to make them feel better. 

We now know that serotonin deficiency is not any more common in depressed people as it is in non-depressed people. Fun fact. Many people are on these drugs, SSRIs, SNRIs, and they can be very helpful. I don’t want to say they can’t be helpful because they can.

These drugs increase the amount of serotonin in the synapse in the brain. Methylene blue also increases metaserotonin along with norepinephrine and dopamine. If you’re combining methylene blue with SSRIs and SNRIs, there could potentially be an interaction here. The potential interaction for very low doses of methylene blue, 4, 8, 16mg, the only study that showed the potential interaction could be very severe is using IV methylene blue with SNRIs, causing something called serotonin syndrome. This is where you can get what’s called hemodynamic instability, where your blood pressure can go up and down, and your heart rate, too. It has never been described with oral methylene blue and SSRIs. 

That being said, if you are on any of those medications, you should not take methylene blue without practitioner supervision. 

The most common symptom we see is GI distress. You make more serotonin in your gut than your brain. 95% of those hormones are made in your gut.

The other thing is G6PD deficiency. G6PD is an inherited disorder of red blood cells, where they have a higher risk of breaking under stress. IV methylene blue combined with this particular genetic condition can cause what’s called a hemolytic anemia, where your red blood cells start breaking up. It’s never been described with oral methylene blue. If you’re worried about this, you can always get a genetic test. 

In general, low doses of methylene blue, especially the ones at our company, are extremely safe. We do have a practitioner-only version that is slightly higher dosed. If you are taking that for a longer period of time, consider getting the test done.

Those are two major things that people talk about. The other one to discuss is hypertension. If you have high blood pressure, methylene blue can potentially increase your blood pressure. If you are pre-hypertensive, so you’re not taking meds, but your blood pressure runs kind of high, you can do it as well. That’s because of the norepinephrine that is in there. You have to be aware of that. 

If you are on hypertensive medications, or really any medications, you should be working with a provider closely before starting anything new, supplement or otherwise. Sometimes, people have interactions that you don’t know about. Certainly, high blood pressure medications would be a red flag to take methylene blue without practitioner supervision.

There is also blue urine. Methylene blue concentrates in the bladder itself as it’s being excreted. It’s excreted by the kidneys and bladder. You will have blue urine. 

If you have CKD, you have to be careful taking methylene blue as well because it can build up in the body.

If you’re on dialysis, you shouldn’t take methylene blue because it won’t get excreted through a dialysis machine.

There is this category I call detox symptoms. It’s not uncommon, especially if you start with a too high dose of methylene blue to get more detox symptoms. Your headaches, muscle pain, abdominal comfort, bone pain, joint pain. 

You can get a detox reaction if you start too high of a dose. You’re making that hydrogen peroxide that you talked about before. You may not have enough antioxidants to support that system. Almost always, unless it’s an acute trauma, issue, low oxygen state- 

There are some studies in strokes with animals, where methylene blue can be helpful, along with acute infection. That is where you would want to start off with a higher dose immediately. 

In general, you want to start off at a lower dose, 4-12.5mg, somewhere around there, and then increase your dose slowly over time until you find the right dose for you. You’re addressing the issue you’re looking to address.

Those are the major things to consider when taking methylene blue. 

The other one, which dovetails into your second question, which is quality of methylene blue. That is the biggest additional one. Methylene blue is not made from the ground; it’s made in a lab. One of the naysayers of methylene blue is it’s a synthetic compound. My response to that is that not everything synthetic is bad for us. We live in a synthetic world, under synthetic lights, food, people, like AI bots. We have a lot of synthetic things in our life right now. Sometimes, we need synthetic things to help us, and methylene blue is one of these things. 

If it’s dosed appropriately and clean. In the sense that methylene blue made in a lab can be contaminated with lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. You don’t want those. 

In 2020, Troscriptions was the first company to come out with a commercial methylene blue product. We came out with two, one in February and one in June. The first year of the pandemic. We took about a year and a half longer to launch the company because it took us that long to find a reliable source that wasn’t contaminated with heavy metals, that had the right purity and potency that we were looking for.

Until 2024, there was about 6-8 companies that were making methylene blue. 2025, it was extremely ramped up in popularity because of a number of things. The zeitgeist, everyone was talking about it. There are now 60 companies. 

We have tested them. The liquids cause the big issues because liquids of methylene blue never meet the potency standards. If it says it’s 1mg/ml or 1mg/drop in your liquid methylene blue, the average that we’ve found is between 60-80% potency of what they say. They are getting much less than you think. Sometimes, they are down to 45-50% potency. Even some of the capsules we tested are down at that level.

Then you have to think about the heavy metal component. The heavy metals being cadmium, mercury, lead, and arsenic. You have to be careful what you’re buying out there.

The bigger issue here, and this is more from a supplement at large issue, is most companies, including us, are getting ingredients from outside the United States. Methylene blue we get is coming from Korea and Japan mostly. Also China. 

What these manufacturers do is they are supposed to give you a certificate of analysis with the ingredient. This is supposedly an “independent” review of their ingredients, saying this is exactly what is made in the lab. 

The problem is you can’t trust those certificates of analysis. They can be completely forged. There was a recent scandal on creatine gummies with this thing. Or they can be completely wrong. You test it yourself, which is what we do with all our ingredients, including methylene blue. You find it doesn’t meet the same standards as they said it met when it came from their lab. That’s why we retest everything that comes into the United States independently, to make sure it meets our criteria. 

You have to be careful what you get. A lot of these companies are trusting those ingredient certificates of analysis. Some of them might be saying they are made in the USA. I had someone reach out to me who said, “I bought liquid methylene blue that says it was made in the USA, but it took three weeks to get through customs.” 

What we do at Troscriptions is we have really trusted manufacturers. We do our own independent testing. After we make our Troches, which is the lozenge delivery mechanism, we test them all again to make sure it still meets our purity and potency standards. Only then does it go out to be sold. You will find very few other companies doing that kind of quality control. 

Dr. Eric: 

Wonderful. Troscriptions also has GABA support supplements. It was a long time ago that I learned from- are you familiar with Dr. Datis Kharrazian? He has a book on Hashimoto’s, and he mentioned the GABA Challenge. If you take a regular GABA supplement, if you notice anything different, you probably have a leaky blood/brain barrier. That is the first time I heard of that. Then I was listening to one of your interviews, and you were talking about something similar as well. If you could talk about what Troscriptions offers as far as GABA support, that would be great. 

Dr. Scott: 

How long ago was he talking about that? Out of interest. 

Dr. Eric: 

I think his book was 2016. It might have been before that. I think that’s when his book was published. 

Dr. Scott: 

It’s interesting because we have this blood-brain barrier that is supposed to keep things out. GABA is too big of a molecule to get across under normal circumstances. However, if you have a leaky brain allowing things in that are not supposed to be in there, GABA can get across and make you feel relaxed. 

Typically, what this corresponds to is a leaky gut. Optimizing your gut will optimize the blood-brain barrier and make that less leaky as well. 

GABA is a really interesting compound, neurotransmitter. GABA is our primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in our brain. It’s the brakes of your brain. We have a lot of on switches. Our main on switch is glutamate, our primary excitatory neurotransmitter. Your main off switch is your GABA system. 

Interestingly enough, glutamate is converted into GABA in the brain. It requires Vitamin B6 and magnesium to do that. These two are always supposed to be in this beautiful balance. You have enough glutamate and GABA working together. They are helping regulate your nervous system, so they go up when you’re up and down when you’re down.

Unfortunately, so many of us are stuck in what I call this sympathetic spiral of doom at all times. This sympathetic activation, our fight or flight system is on all the time. We don’t know how to relax. We are constantly anxious. We have depression. We can’t sleep. 

A big part of this is we have become GABA deficient. Our system stops working well, and we don’t have any brakes to press. That truck that has to go down the hill, we don’t have a place to turn off. The brakes are gone. GABA deficiency is associated with anxiety, depression, insomnia. 

Our mind is having a hard time calming down because it also regulates our thought patterns. We typically on average have about 70,000 thoughts every single day. That is just average. If you have anxiety or depression, you have upwards of 120,000 thoughts every single day. We’re not saying these are unique thoughts, but these could be perseverating thoughts about something you’re anxious or depressed about.

What you want to do is think about the GABA system in its totality and see how you can optimize it from the ground up. This is what I do in my health optimization medicine practice, looking at gut health, vitamins, minerals, nutrients, and precursors, like glutamine for example, which is an amino acid that is the primary fuel of the small intestine. If you have a leaky gut, you need more of it. It’s also the precursor to glutamate in the brain. You want to think about that.

You also want to think about probiotics. Certain types of bacteria in our gut help signal our GABA system and make it work better.

Your cofactors, things like magnesium and B6. 

This is important. That’s a long-term play though. That takes time. The other long-term play is how can you understand why somebody is stuck in this fight or flight mode? Is it because they’re married to someone who they don’t like? Do they have a poor relationship with their kids? Did they have trauma as a child? Are they stressed at work? You have to address this stuff to get the brain to start working again. You can give the experience to someone to what it feels like to have those brakes back and be available again by modulating the GABA in a way that doesn’t require you to give GABA itself. 

Fun fact. I have worked with patients over the years where GABA supplements are working for them. We optimize their gut, and their GABA supplements stop working because they no longer can get GABA to the brain. This is clinically very useful for all who are listening to think about this.

What you really want to do is work on all the stuff that takes a harder, longer amount of time. Optimize nutrients, cofactors, gut health, and stress. What we did at Troscriptions is create some products that can help you modulate the GABA system in a much more holistic way without giving GABA itself. Things that modulate the GABA receptor and enhance the GABA receptor. 

We combine locations of where things bind on the receptor together. The combination is really great because it helps support the GABA system right now without depleting more GABA. If you are drinking alcohol, taking benzos, using sleep drugs, these are enhancing the amount of GABA to bind the receptor. If you don’t have a lot of GABA around, you will become more GABA deficient than you were before, and this is also why you have a higher risk of tolerance withdrawal and dependence on those drugs.

In Tro Calm, for example, we use a combination of B3 GABA and cava together. B3 GABA gets across the blood-brain barrier because GABA is attached to B3. B3 is mildly activating, whereas GABA is relaxing, binding to where GABA would bind. Cava comes in and binds to a separate site on the GABA receptor, enhancing the amount of GABA to bind.

In addition, we have CBD and CBG, nonpsychoactive cannabinoids. You can take the Tro Calm and get an anxiolytic, relaxing effect without feeling too tired as well. This is a great combination to support the GABA system. If you are just using cava, you deplete GABA over time because it’s not giving something that is supporting where GABA would bind as well. We use that combination effectively. 

It’s in a troche form. You dissolve a lozenge. It goes between your upper cheek and gum. They are scored. You can take a quarter, half, or full. These lozenges go directly into circulation. These ingredients are more potent because they don’t go through digestion. You can titrate them, too. You can take the dose that works well for you.

We have another combination in our sleep product called Tro Z, which includes something called agaric, which is from amanita muscaria mushroom derivation. It’s a psychedelic mushroom, but this is not a psychedelic compound. At low doses, it binds directly to where GABA would bind.

We also have something called honokiol, from magnolia bark. That combination is great for working on the GABA system in a holistic way. As I mentioned earlier, like Tro Calm does, Tro Z also has things like melatonin, 5HTP, some CBD, CBN, both nonpsychoactive, something called cordycepin, which is from the cortices mushrooms, also increasing deep sleep. It’s a comprehensive formula.

In essence, we are focused on breaking that sympathetic spiral, getting people that GABA urgent tone now, so they can feel like this is what it feels like when my nervous system is more regulated.

From there, hoping they can get back there over time, using the more physiologic and psychological support that is often required to do it more long term. 

Dr. Eric: 

If someone is stuck in that fight or flight response, that is one indication to taking GABA support. 

Dr. Scott: 

If you have a lot of anxiety or depression, we know now there is a new drug that was just released last year, potentially the year before. It was the first antidepressant that works instantly for postpartum depression. It’s a GABA-A agonist. The GABA-A one is the most prominent receptor. It works immediately because it’s working on that GABA system.

Just to be clear, if you have overactivation, depression, issues with sleep, GABA things will likely be helpful for you. Not to say you should stop your medications or do anything you shouldn’t be running by your doctor first. This GABA system is such an underappreciated aspect of why people are having such a hard time now, especially with that sympathetic activation, that synthetic spiral that so many people are going through.  

Dr. Eric: 

One more quick question with GABA. Do you know if liposomal GABA crosses the blood-brain barrier? 

Dr. Scott: 

The only company that I’m familiar with that has a liposomal GABA that has been shown to cross into the brain is QuickSilver Scientific. Otherwise, I would be staying away from it. Even if they say it’s liposomal, I wouldn’t believe it with most companies. 

I do think a combination of GABA itself, whether it’s GABA directly through liposomal or B3 GABA that we have or agaric that binds to where GABA would bind, plus something like cava, CBD, CBG, that combination is really important. If you are just giving something like cava, or even honokiol, or valerian, L-theanine, lemon balm, these are also working on the GABA receptor, without actually modulating or supporting where GABA would bind, so you’re not causing GABA deficiency over time, you will get into trouble. 

You have something like cava that works for somebody. You have to keep increasing the dose for that same reason. With our products, we haven’t noticed any tolerance issue. The same dose works every single time because we’re doing it in this comprehensive way. 

We have higher strength products, too. We have a Tro+ Calm. A Tro+ Somnia, which is our practitioner line. You can get access to those by signing up on our website as a practitioner. If you are a patient or client or someone without a practitioner, we have a practitioner map on our website. You can find someone who might help you if you need higher potency kinds of things as well. 

In essence, the troche is great as a delivery device. It dissolves directly in the mouth. The natto liposomes, like the small liposomes, may also work from a GABA delivery perspective. 

Dr. Eric: 

This was awesome. Others have mentioned you’re a wealth of knowledge. I will say that here. So much great information. Where can people find out more about you, Dr. Scott? Your website, social media? Anything else you want to say? 

Dr. Scott: 

Thanks for having me, Eric. I appreciate it. I tend to take our time, whatever that time is, and use it for a lot of information. Don’t be afraid to wind back down to the beginning and go back over some of this info if you have interest.

I have lots of additional support for you in other locations and resources. Check out my personal website, DrScottSherr.com. You will find my consulting there both on hyperbaric therapy and health optimization medicine, which is the framework we were talking about in the beginning.

It’s also linked to my company. I have a company called Troscriptions. You can find it at Troscriptions.com. You can also find us on socials @Troscriptions. You can find me @DrScottSherr on Instagram. 

If you’re interested in the nonprofit, you can check it out at HomeHope.org or @HomeHopeOrg on Instagram. 

I have a hyperbaric company that specializes in hyperbaric technology and the connection of systems together, One Base Health. OneBaseHealth.com. @OneBaseHealth on Instagram. 

Those are the major places to go. Start with either my website or Troscriptions. You can check out Just Blue, our pure methylene blue troche, at 16mg. 

We have another one called Blue Cannatine, which is a combination of methylene blue, nicotine, caffeine, and CBD. That is for focus, flow, giving you that stimulant feel. Pure methylene blue doesn’t give you a stimulant feel as much; it elevates you and makes you feel more awake, more up, your brain is working better, your mood is better. From an inflammatory perspective, downregulating and helping with that inflammatory load, which can be super helpful for many reasons, especially thyroid conditions. 

Dr. Eric: 

Wonderful. I learned so much about methylene blue. This was awesome. Some things about GABA and HBOT, too. Definitely will need to have you back in the future. Thanks again. Really appreciate it, Dr. Scott. 

Dr. Scott: 

Thanks for having me.

 

In this episode, I share ten (10) healing priorities for Graves’ disease and Hashimoto’s to focus on as we settle into the new year. We talk about why stress management and nervous system support remain foundational, how extreme fasting can actually slow progress, and why small, consistent adjustments tend to be more sustainable and more effective than drastic changes.  If you would prefer to listen to the interview you can access it by Clicking Here.

I know when I dealt with Graves’, or prior to my diagnosis, I didn’t take stress more seriously. Even right after I was diagnosed, it did take some time. It wasn’t until I saw my adrenals and how bad they were before I started blocking out time on a regular basis for stress management. If I didn’t see my adrenal results, who knows what would have happened? That was definitely a big factor. 

It wasn’t just emotional stressors, but the physical stressors. Many of you who have listened to this know I was overtraining, wasn’t listening to my body. 

You definitely want to make sure that you focus on stress management because there’s only so much you can do from a stress reduction perspective. I always talk about starting out with blocking out five minutes per day every single day. It doesn’t matter what you do. I mean, it does matter. You want to do things that help shift your body into more of a parasympathetic state. 

I bring this up because of exercise. I go to the gym a few times a week, typically 3-4 times a week. That’s more of a sympathetic activity, not a parasympathetic activity. I feel like it does relieve stress. I spoke with many people over the years who say they exercise as a form of stress management. 

You really want something that helps with the rest and digest system of the body, the parasympathetic system. Whether that’s simply deep breathing, meditation, yoga, up to you. You don’t have to practice the same technique every day. You could if you wanted to. If you just want to do deep breathing every single day, that’s fine. Let’s say maybe you’re practicing yoga three days a week, and the other four days a week, you do some deep breathing or meditation. 

Either way, start with five minutes. Everybody can find five minutes a day. As I always say, if you can’t find five minutes a day, you really need those five minutes a day. Obviously, we want to eventually increase that duration, but we want to get into that routine. Five minutes a day. Eventually, you will increase to 10, 15, maybe 20 minutes a day. Maybe it’s not every day. 3-4 days a week, you have built up to 15-20 minutes a day. Other days, it’s only 5-10 minutes a day. The #1 healing tip is to take stress more seriously. 

I can’t say that all of these are in the order of importance, but I can definitely make the argument that this is the most important healing tip for those with Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. 

Healing tip #2 is work on your nervous system. This ties a little bit into the first healing tip, but in the past, I would just talk about mind/body medicine. I started talking about vagus nerve exercises, things like vigorous gargling, cold showers, cold plunges, singing out loud, coffee enemas, something Dr. Datis Kharrazian speaks about. Definitely consider incorporating vagus nerve exercises. 

I’m not saying everybody needs to do this. I’ve been learning more about nervous system retraining, brain retraining. I have been familiar with it for quite some time. One of the big reasons is because of the podcast, having people on the podcast, like Dr. Amie Apigian. 

Recently, in 2025, Dr. Evan Hirsch, who deals with chronic conditions such as long-haul COVID and Lyme, he was talking about how much of a gamechanger incorporating nervous system retraining into his practice has been. You might want to listen to his episode. I think it was spring 2025. In 2026, hopefully, I’ll have someone else maybe focusing more on the nervous system retraining, the brain retraining. 

Actually, I did recently have Dr. Louise on who spoke about that. There are different approaches. She uses more energetic healing. I can’t say that everybody utilizes that. 

Either way, work on your nervous system. The nervous system controls everything. I focus on thyroid health, so I talk about how thyroid hormones affect pretty much every cell and tissue in the body, which is true. The nervous system innervates the thyroid gland; the pituitary gland, which communicates with the thyroid gland; the immune system. 

This is something I’ve known for a very long time because as a Doctor of Chiropractic, we learn all about the nervous system. It’s amazing how long it’s taken me to talk more about nervous system retraining. They don’t speak about that. As chiropractors, we address the nervous system by adjusting the spine, so that’s what they teach in chiropractic school. They teach other things, too, but they don’t talk about nervous system retraining. I don’t know if that was even around in the 1990s when I attended chiropractic school. 

Healing tip #3: Say no to extreme fasting. I’m not against fasting. There is a time and place for intermittent fasting, or in some cases, longer fasts. You want to be cautious. Over the years, I have found that- I won’t say most people, but more people than I like to see with Graves’ and Hashimoto’s take it to extremes. It’s 16-8 fasts, which for some people are even extreme. I’m talking 18-6, 20-4 every single day. As a result, it’s putting stress on their adrenals. They are not getting enough protein or nutrients. 

A 16-8 fast, I don’t want to say it’s better, but for someone who is dealing with Graves’, it might be safer. Even so, especially for many people with Graves’, a 16-8 fast is too extreme. When I dealt with Graves’ back in 2008/2009, I wouldn’t have wanted to incorporate any extreme fasting while healing. 

I know there are resources out there, like Dr. Mindy Pelz and other practitioners who talk about how fasting can help with autoimmunity. Like I said, you need to go about it cautiously. If you’re dealing with Graves’ or any type of hyperthyroidism, losing a lot of weight, you probably don’t want to utilize fasting. If your adrenals aren’t in the best shape, which is the case with a lot of people, you also want to be cautious. 

Like I said, there is a time and place for fasting. I know fasting has benefited a lot of people. I have done fasting, even now. I do more 12-14-hour overnight fasts, which I think most people should be doing. A 12-hour fast should be the norm. Sometimes, I’ll do 16 hours, but I can’t say I do it routinely. 

Say no to extreme fasting, at least while healing. After healing, work with an experienced practitioner.

Healing tip #4: go to bed 30 minutes earlier. I realize that maybe this won’t apply to everybody. There are some people who might already be going to bed at 8pm or 9pm. That’s pretty early, especially 8pm. 

The majority of people, that’s not the case. That includes me, too. I have been making an effort to go to bed earlier. Even 15 minutes earlier is better. If you start out with 15 minutes, that’s fine. 30 minutes is pretty reasonable. 

If you’re staying up until midnight, it would be great to go to bed two hours earlier. For many, you’re not going to do it in all likelihood. If you’re up until midnight, go to bed at 11:30pm. That’s not too bad. If you go to bed at 10:30pm, which is what I do, I’m usually 10-10:30. I’m now trying to be 9:30-10. It’s difficult for me. I’m a workaholic. I’m not just working up until I go to bed, but I like to do some reading because I’m a workaholic and take time before going to bed to do some reading or some walking on the treadmill. Either way, make an effort to go to bed 30 minutes earlier. 

Healing tip #5: Reduce exposure to microplastics and glyphosate. Now, I could just say healing tip #5 should be reduce your toxic burden. That would be a really good healing tip still. I’m focusing on microplastics and glyphosate because they’re widespread. I know some other toxins and toxicants are widespread, too. These specifically are toxicants. 

You’re not going to completely eliminate microplastics. Same thing with glyphosate. You can definitely do a lot to minimize exposure, especially in your own home. Eating organic food most of the time, you still will get exposed to glyphosate, but it will be decreased. 

With microplastics, try to minimize plastic exposure. I know microplastics are elsewhere, like in the water. Use reverse osmosis, and you can add minerals back in if you’re concerned about that. Drinking out of plastic water bottles is a no-no. Try to store your food in glass and not plastic. Most people can make a better effort to do things to reduce their exposure to microplastics and glyphosate. 

I know we might have the perspective of why. We are going to be exposed anyway. The lower the toxic burden, the better. Some do a better job of detoxifying than others. For some people, smaller exposures might still be problematic. The least exposure you have to these toxicants and other toxins, the better your health will be. 

We’re halfway through the healing tips for 2026. The sixth healing tip for Graves’ and Hashimoto’s, a little bit controversial for some, is to eat broccoli, if you can tolerate it. 

Why specifically broccoli? First of all, broccoli is controversial because it’s labeled as a goitrogenic food. Goitrogenic means it can inhibit thyroid production, which might be a good thing for those with hyperthyroidism and Graves’. If someone has hypothyroidism, not a good thing. 

It’s not just my opinion, but other experts have found that goitrogenic foods, especially more debatable with soy because that’s a goitrogen. When it comes to cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, I’m not really concerned about eating those. If someone was eating five cups of raw cruciferous vegetables every day, might be a problem. Most people aren’t doing that. 

Of course, listen to your body. If you’re eating broccoli or other cruciferous vegetables, and you feel like you are experiencing some thyroid swelling because of that, or if you can’t tolerate it, like if you experience a lot of gas or bloating, you might have SIBO, or you might need to avoid those. 

Otherwise, cruciferous vegetables are really healthy. They do a great job of supporting detoxification. I do recommend eating more cruciferous vegetables, especially if you’re not eating them in the first place. If you are eating them, maybe add another serving or two.

I’ll say one other thing with goitrogenic properties. Cooking them, even lightly steaming them, will reduce goitrogenic properties. Rather than eating raw broccoli, have some steamed broccoli.

Healing tip #7: incorporate the 5R protocol. I have spoken about this elsewhere. There are five steps necessary when it comes to healing the gut. 

The first is to remove the factor(s) that are causing the leaky gut. Whether it’s food such as gluten, an infection like H-pylori or parasites, you want to remove the factor that is causing the leaky gut. 

The second R is replace things like digestive enzymes, stomach acid, bile salts. Supplementation definitely can be helpful with this. 

The third R is reinoculate. Prebiotics, probiotics. I would recommend both food and supplementation. Maybe you eat some sauerkraut or other fermented foods. Eat fiber-rich foods to get prebiotics. Perhaps you also supplement. Even on a wellness basis, I supplement with prebiotics and probiotics. 

The fourth R is repair. Repair the gut with foods such as bone broth or perhaps cabbage juice if you’re vegan/vegetarian. Take certain supplements. My supplement SMT GI Restore, my gut healing supplement that has L-glutamine, aloe vera, zinc carnosine, and a few other healing agents.

The fifth R is rebalance through mind/body medicine, vagus nerve exercises, and nervous system retraining. Those are the five Rs of the 5R protocol. 

The eighth healing tip is to optimize your Vitamin D and omega-3 index levels. Pretty much all my patients test for Vitamin D. At least I recommend doing a 25-hydroxy Vitamin D. According to the United States units, you want the levels to be at least 50; some will say 60-80. If you’re overseas, using nm/l, you want 125. A lot of people are less than optimal. That might not be truly deficient, but less than optimal. 

Vitamin D has anti-inflammatory properties. It’s important for optimal immune system health. It’s also important for calcium absorption, bone health as well. From an autoimmune standpoint, you want healthy Vitamin D levels.

Having a healthy omega-3 index, I can’t say I have everybody do a fatty acid profile. Many times, I just recommend supplementing with omega-3 fatty acids, especially if they don’t eat fish on a regular basis. If they don’t eat fish on a regular basis and are not supplementing, chances are they’re deficient. If they really want to see what the omega-3 index looks like, they can do so.

Vitamin D, you can test pretty much anywhere. Omega-3 index, there is a company called OmegaQuant. Quest Diagnostics also offers an omega-3 index. I’m sure other labs offer this as well.

Healing tip #9: always work on optimizing your immune system. With Graves’ and Hashimoto’s, they are more immune system conditions than thyroid conditions. You always want to do things to improve your immune system. 

Many of the things we spoke about here already will help improve your immune system health. Managing stress will help. Getting more sleep will help. Reducing your toxic burden will help. Having a healthy gut will help. Most of the immune system cells are located in the gut. If you incorporate that 5R protocol, that will help. Having healthy Vitamin D levels and omega-3 fatty acid levels. 

There are other things you might need to do to optimize your immune system health. If mold is an issue, you might need to address mold and mycotoxins. Even electronic pollution is something to consider. There are a lot of factors.

That’s the goal when you have Graves’ or Hashimoto’s. Whether it’s taking antithyroid medication for Graves’ or natural agents such as bugleweed or L-carnitine, or if you have Hashimoto’s, you may need thyroid hormone replacement. Ultimately, you want to do things to optimize your immune system health.

The 10th and final healing tip is to work with an experienced natural health care practitioner. Probably not a surprise that I mention this. I’m a natural health care practitioner, so I’m biased. It doesn’t mean to work with me. There are other practitioners, especially those who work with Hashimoto’s. Not as many who work with Graves’. 

I do recommend working with someone who has experience. You’ll find a lot more with Hashimoto’s. With Graves’, you need to be cautious. Someone might say they have experience, but you can easily visit their website and look at their reviews. You can even call the office and speak with the front desk person and probably get a feel. Just a website search or Google search. 

If you type in my name in Google, which I don’t love Google, but it’s the best search engine, you’ll clearly see I focus on Graves’. I say things about Hashimoto’s, too, but most of the focus will be on hyperthyroidism and Graves’. Same thing if you visit my website. You’ll see that there is hyperthyroidism and Graves’ there. Same thing with reviews and testimonials. Those are things you can look for. 

If you have Hashimoto’s. Keep in mind, a lot of practitioners have experience with Hashimoto’s, but they also focus on a lot of other conditions. I think there are enough Hashimoto’s experts where you can work with someone who solely focuses on Hashimoto’s. That’s at least one of the top two or three conditions. 

If you visit someone’s website, and they have 20 different health conditions, and Hashimoto’s or Graves’ is one of those, I’m not saying they can’t help you, but I would say try to find someone who focuses on Hashimoto’s if you have Hashimoto’s. Try and focus on someone who focuses on Graves’ if you have Graves’.

That is it. Hopefully, you found these tips to be valuable. Figured I’d start off 2026 with some things. I think most of these- Not to say do all of them at once. Maybe you focus on stress management this week. Next week, start incorporating some vagus nerve exercises. You could say no to extreme fasting right away. Maybe third week, you go to bed 30 minutes earlier, for example. Continue to do things to reduce exposure to microplastics and glyphosate. Maybe later this month or early next month, you start eating some more broccoli. 

I’m not saying to do all these things at once even though some of these are relatively quick. The next time you do a blood test, make sure you test Vitamin D. Maybe consider doing a more comprehensive fatty acid profile. Based on the results, hopefully you work with someone who can give you guidance on supplementation.

Those are my tips. Before wrapping up, I want to let you know that for those with Hashimoto’s, I know I focus a lot on hyperthyroidism and Graves’ because there aren’t a lot of resources there. 

Before I talk a little bit about a specific resource for those with Graves’, if you have Hashimoto’s, of course, I have a book, Hashimoto’s Triggers, that you can check out. I also have a Facebook group for those with Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. You might want to consider joining that. My website, NaturalEndocrineSolutions.com, has hundreds of articles on both Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. A little bit more emphasis on hyperthyroidism, but there are some articles on Hashimoto’s as well.

If you have Graves’, I have a free training called the Graves’ Disease Survival Roadmap, which you can access in my free Healing Graves’ Naturally community, which is on a platform called Skool. You can visit SaveMyThyroid.com/HealGravesDisease. 

For now, it’s free to join. The plan is for it to eventually become a paid community. While If I go through with this, it will probably be at a very low cost. It won’t be hundreds of dollars. 

I don’t want it to be as big as my Facebook groups. The Graves’ and Hashimoto’s Facebook group is not crazy large; it’s about 10,000 people, which is pretty large. I have a hyperthyroidism and Graves’ Facebook group that has over 25,000 people. I don’t want this to be nearly as big. I know it would take a while to get that large. Still, that’s why I’m considering something very low cost because that will cut down on the number of people joining.

I also want to help as many people as I can. I feel as the groups get larger, it’s more difficult to help people and to interact and engage. 

Anyway, as of recording this, there is over 700 people who have joined this community. There is a number of benefits that members have found. Obviously, you’re getting guidance from someone who has been there. I personally dealt with Graves’. I have been engaging in the group. 

With Facebook, I do so very little because there are so many people. When I post, most people aren’t seeing the posts. Here, I am making a much better effort, which you can see if you join the group. 

Of course, access to the Graves’ Survival Roadmap training. This is a step-by-step training that goes into the SAVED Thyroid Framework I created. It even has action steps at the end of each lesson, so you can implement what you learned. When people respond to the action steps, that’s when I respond to them. That’s how I’ve encouraged people to engage. So far, it’s working really well. There are eight modules and action tasks. You’ll notice a lot of people have gone through the action tasks.

One more benefit I’ll mention. There are monthly Hyperthyroid Healing Diet group Q&A calls with one of my nutritional health coaches. Once a month, one of my coaches will answer all of your questions related to diet and hyperthyroid healing. 

There are different levels to the community. When you join Skool, everyone is at level one. You need to engage and get to level two, which is very easy to do. If you go through the training action tasks, you will get to level two very quickly. Many people have done it in an hour or less, going through some of the trainings. They aren’t that long. Definitely check it out. The website is SaveMyThyroid.com/HealGravesDisease. Hope to see you in the group. 

Thanks for listening. Hope you found this first solo episode of 2026 to be valuable. Of course, I look forward to catching you in the next episode.

 

Recently, I interviewed Dr. Louise Swartswalter, and he explains how neurobiofeedback and trauma release work can influence regulation, resilience, and the body’s ability to heal. This conversation helps connect the dots between brain health, emotional patterns, and chronic symptoms, especially when standard approaches haven’t gone far enough. If you would prefer to listen to the interview you can access it by Clicking Here.

Dr. Eric Osansky: 

I am excited to chat with Dr. Louise Swartswalter. We will be talking about brain health. Let’s start out: How did you get started in this field? If you could talk about your own health journey and why you do what you currently do. 

Dr. Louise Swartswalter: 

Absolutely. In my 30s, after my kids were born, I crashed. Nobody could figure it out. It was probably hormonal back then, but I had all my mercury fillings taken out in one day because a dentist said it would help me. It was a big dental trauma. I ended up on oxygen for three years. I couldn’t breathe. I became chemically sensitive to everything in the world. I was full of heavy metals. Doctors didn’t know the diagnosis back then, if it was fibromyalgia, MS, chronic fatigue. I had these autoimmune things going on. It took me 16 years to heal. That’s how I created my system.

It was quite a journey. I became a pesticide activist in Illinois. I worked with the mayor and city of state because I lived on oxygen when they were spraying for mosquitoes. I watched all of the kids in our neighborhood have asthma. What are we doing? We have to change this scenario. 

I was like a shy special ed teacher prior to that. Here I am, going to board meetings with my oxygen tank, speaking about stop spraying our kids, stop creating all these health issues for people. I was pretty passionate about that.

Then I got really sick of being in that liquid war zone soup, if you will. I was like, I’m outta here. I’m going somewhere where the air is clean, where they don’t have mosquitoes, where there is low mold, and Mom can heal. 

We ended up in Taos, NM of all places, way up in the mountains at 7,000 feet. My kids were little. They were five and eight. We made it work, and we had a ball. We saw double rainbows every day.  It felt like I came to god’s country. It was just amazing. We hiked. We did so many hikes. We made snow forts and snow pigs and snow ferrets and snowmen. We made it work. It did take me a long time. 

Along that whole journey, what I actually figured out was all of the physical things that I was doing for my body—eating organic food, taking good quality supplements, seeing chiropractors, acupuncture. I saw about every practitioner you can imagine. I still wasn’t me. I still wasn’t well. 

What I figured out was it’s not just the physical body we have to work on. It’s emotional, it’s spiritual, and it’s the energetic field. It took me on this whole path of learning.

The very first thing I did was keep a grateful journal. Oprah Winfrey said you should do that, so I did the grateful journal. That put me on a higher vibration. I started working on that mindset piece, too. 

Then I had to figure out how to work on the emotions. I was introduced to energy work and neurobiofeedback. I have five different neuralbiofeedback programs. I have eight computers all over my house. That whole world was opened up to me.

Then I became a teacher of that work. I was a teacher and taught a lot of people that. My first clients were really my special ed students. I became a dyslexic therapist, and then a naturopath. That’s the journey. 

I have always been involved in the brain. I used to sit across the table from those kids when I was teaching them reading and go, “Why are they off balance today? They did so much better yesterday. What’s going on?” I would trace it back to the fact that they had tons of food allergies. They were all autoimmune, too. They had things going on. 

That’s what really sparked my interest in even going to naturopathic school and figuring this out, not just for myself, but for the kids that I was teaching and working with. Then it grew. 

I started at my house, and the kids would come for reading therapy. Then I would put them on biofeedback, and they would manipulate me. “I have a headache today. You have to put me on biofeedback.” “You have to work on my mom.” Mom comes in, and they’re like, “Wow, my mom is so different. Whatever you did, it really helped her. Thank you.” Then Grandma would come in. That’s how my business started. 

I started in my house, helping people. Then I ended up renting an office. I bought an office. Then I moved back home during COVID and started a whole success academy about 11 years ago, where now I am teaching people the whole system of working with the brain, the body, the emotions, the soul, and the energetic field. 

Dr. Eric: 

All right, that is an awesome story. You said it took 16 years to heal. Just curious, at any point, did you want to give up? Were you just like, “No matter what, I’m going to heal myself?” Were there any times where you were skeptical or doubtful that you would accomplish what you did? 

Dr. Louise:

Good question. When I had down days, I had detoxing days, and I wasn’t feeling good. I had to work really hard at pulling myself back up. But I would say my first why, we all have a why or a direction, right? My first why was to be a mom to my kids. When I saw their little faces, and I just wanted to play with them and be there for them, that was my inspiration to keep moving forward. 

Later, I said to myself, “Okay, I’m a little bit better.” My prayer to God was, “Now, how many more people can I help? Can you help me help others now?” That became my next why. 

Dr. Eric: 

Wonderful. If you could talk about the difference between biofeedback and neurobiofeedback? 

Dr. Louise: 

There isn’t any difference. At least in my view, it isn’t any different. The kind of biofeedback that I do is more like energy work. It could be called bio resonance. I can use it long distance. I can even get people out of the hospital during COVID. I would send them the frequency and a whole protocol to help with balancing the lungs and doing all that stuff and zapping the COVID virus. 

You can use quantum physics. It’s quantum physics really. Everything is energy. Energy medicine is more known today than 10 or 15 years ago, or more accepted, I guess you could say. There is a whole world out there. We don’t realize that we’re energy beings. Your frequency. Your DNA is a light photon. It’s about light. It’s about the spiritual body. 

What I figured out that’s unique is there is a connection between the brain and the soul. For all your thyroid people, they all have trauma somewhere. When we clear the trauma in the spaces of the brain, it now opens up the physical body to accept the frequency of the supplements, the good food, the changes they’re making. 

I see it as more multidimensional than that one thing. It came from my own learning, my own crashing. 

Dr. Eric: 

Thanks. It’s funny because you say that it’s more accepted now. I agree as far as energy medicine. I remember when I was in chiropractic school in the late 1990s. I graduated in 1999. Maybe it was 1997, 1998 when one of my colleagues was practicing some type of energy medicine. I thought he was kooky back then. It’s just what he was doing. 

As I learned more, of course having people on my podcast talking about it, and realizing that I had my own biases. I realized you need to go beyond- For example, I definitely do functional medicine testing, which I still recommend. Many times, you need to go beyond that. 

What you’re doing is amazing. You’re right. A lot of us have hidden traumas. Healing the gut and eating well and managing stress all play important roles, but sometimes, you need to go beyond that. Arguably, many times, you need to go beyond that. For 11 years now, you have been helping people, at least with this current program. 

Dr. Louise: 

Yeah, with my current program. My first business was Albuquerque Natural Health Center. I helped a lot of families here. I closed that in 2020. I sold my office. I was already kind of home anyway because of COVID. Why keep the office? 

I ended up moving home. I was doing two businesses at the same time for a number of years. Brain Soul Success is really my baby. I really love teaching practitioners and coaches and therapists how to work with the whole body, mind, soul, spirit and some of these techniques I learned along the way. I put it all into an academy called the Brain Soul Success Academy. It’s like an online school.

What’s really cool is a lot of my certified coaches now are doing some of the teaching. They’re awesome. I just have to pat myself on the back here out loud. I am a control freak, okay? I had to let go and allow. It’s been good. It’s been really awesome. I have an amazing community of heart-centered people who are so incredibly giving and working together. 

What I have seen about communities now is it’s more about cooperation and not personal masterminds that you may join. A lot of people in the coaching world. It’s not about the person at the top who has all the knowledge, imparting it. It’s a cooperative thing. It becomes more cooperative. I love that. We need this in our corporations. 

Dr. Eric: 

Agreed. It’s amazing that you can work remotely. Back to my friend and other people doing energy work, I think about how even if it does work, me back then, years ago, even if this energy medicine does work, how would you do it remotely? You just mentioned how you work virtually, and you send frequencies to people. It really doesn’t matter where they are, whether they’re in NM like you or across the world. You can help these people, correct? 

Dr. Louise: 

Yeah. It’s a combination thing. If you think about the bioresonance or biofeedback, that’s a computer program. A computer program has all these different vitamins in it, nutritional things, digestive things, physical body things, affirmations, flower essences, essential oils. It has a whole bunch. I added my own stuff. I added all my energy work in there. I added my own digestive tray. I added my own muscles. I added my own stuff and customized it. I had my whole brain system in there. I put all the nutritional parts of the brain, the parts of the brain, the neurotransmitters. I literally could energetically give you dopamine or serotonin. 

Dr. Eric:

Very cool.  

Dr. Louise: 

That’s the biofeedback. The energy work piece has to do with clearing the trauma that’s in the spaces of the brain. It’s actually based on Dr. Hamer’s work. Dr. Hamer was a German doctor who discovered that trauma causes illness. He was working with cancer patients, but his son was shot and died at age 17. The trauma caused him to get testicular cancer. He said, “I was healthy before. Why did I get this cancer?” He traced it back to the trauma. He said it must be him losing his son. He was a boy. It makes sense. 

I love the brain. He took spec scans of the brain, and he saw bumps where the different traumas were. He put whole charts together. You’d be fascinated with this. These charts are online. You can look it up. It’s Hamer New Medicine. He traced different kinds of illnesses and cancers—he mostly worked with cancer; he was a cancer doctor—to the different “it stinks” moments, as he called them. He would take a picture of the brain, find the lesion, be in the temple of the brain. After the treatment, it would be gone. I’m doing it energetically. It’s a combination of my brain system with the neurobiofeedback. 

I’m able to open people up. What happens is they get to be what I call 100% their soul truth and achieve their goals, whether it’s a health goal, a business goal, a relationship goal in their lives because now all those emotional blocks in that stuff has been released. 

Dr. Eric: 

That is awesome. How common is it to have traumas that are preventing someone with chronic conditions? Listeners of course have thyroid and autoimmune thyroid conditions. If you want to put a percentage on this, or maybe everybody. Obviously, people who see you are seeing you for this. 

Dr. Louise: 

Good question. How can we heal those autoimmune things is what we’re talking about. Thyroid issues and the fatigue that people feel or the hyperness, whatever is going on in their nervous system. I think it’s 85%, that’s just a guess, have some kind of trauma. It’s sometimes not known. It can be like childhood abuse. Not feeling safe is a big thing for a lot of people. It also can be something that they didn’t even know was there. It’s kind of buried. We have to find it and release it. 

A very simple thing that people can do right now is journal. Just free flow. Let yourself write and go back to those places. You don’t want to focus on the past always. That’s what I like about my brain system. We have to clear the old and rewire with how you want to be now. Then we have to put in the good stuff. 

Think about words for a minute. Words have energy or frequency to them. If you say, “I’m super angry,” or “I hate that,” that has a negative feeling. Very different than “Wow, that’s beautiful. I love that,” or “I love you.” Love, passion, inspiration, excitement have an energy or frequency. We have to release the old, take that trash out, and rewire with how you want to feel, what you want to be doing now in your life. 

Dr. Eric: 

When you mention that, the first thing I would think of is mindset. It’s beyond mindset. It’s not just, “I’m going to be positive and say ‘I love myself. This will be a great day.’” The mindset aspect is important. You’re talking also about the energy, changing one’s energy, and that over time can play a big role in healing. 

Dr. Louise: 

You’re right. It’s a combination of mindset and staying in that positive place. Sometimes, we’re human, too. I always say, “This is faith, and this is fear.” I’m holding up a pen up and down toward the ceiling. The bottom is fear, and the top is faith. You can’t be halfway. You’re either in faith, or you’re in fear. 

I don’t care if you’re a priest, a shaman, a monk, whatever. We think of those people as always being in faith. They’re human. They’re going to get the flu one day, or something will happen, and they will dip down to fear because it feels yucky in their body. 

What will happen for them that may be different than you and I that we have to practice is they don’t stay there long. They come back up to faith quickly. Maybe they’re praying to feel better. 

Our goal as humans is to stay in faith, not fear. Not that we shouldn’t have a little bit of fear if we have to run from the bear. That’s good fear. We know that then puts the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems out of balance, when we go to that deep fear. It’s about staying in balance with that. 

Dr. Eric: 

Getting back to the traumas. You mentioned that someone could have a trauma that they don’t even remember, maybe a hidden trauma. Let’s say 20 years ago, someone had a trauma. They don’t remember it. Back when it happened, does that mean it dysregulated the nervous system, and that maybe is what led over time to the person developing, whether it’s Graves’, Hashimoto’s, cancer, something else? When you’re clearing those traumas, combining the neurobiofeedback with clearing the traumas, trying to regulate that immune system? 

Dr. Louise: 

Absolutely. Sometimes, it’s something in the womb. It’s not something that is known. We know that everything is energy, and we know that the emotions of Mom may be in the womb. I clear a lot of womb energy. Even something as specific as it could be the third trimester. That would be an unknown trauma. It could be Mom had fatigue or wasn’t feeling good, or their mom and dad were arguing. We have to clear that energy, so that person can uplift themselves and heal. 

Dr. Eric: 

When someone talks about rewiring the brain, how does that tie into this? Is it possible? I assume the answer is yes. Assuming that is the case, what is meant by that? 

Dr. Louise: 

The way that I rewire the brain is I use energy work, and I use NLP questions. I would ask you, “What do you want to have change or be different?” If you had a thyroid issue. How would you answer that? Think back to when you weren’t feeling well, or some of your patients that you work with. What would you want to have change or be different? Give me a sentence about that. 

Dr. Eric: 

When I was dealing with my thyroid, what would I have wanted to be different? 

Dr. Louise: 

Yeah, when you were dealing with Graves’, what would you want to have instead of that? What would you want to feel? 

Dr. Eric: 

I definitely had an elevated heart rate and palpitations, so I would have loved not to experience those specific symptoms. A lot of people have anxiety, so that’s very common with Graves’. Maybe it was, but not to the extent that other people have. They don’t want to feel anxious. The cardiovascular symptoms, like I said, are pretty common with Graves’. There are other symptoms. Let’s go with the anxiety. Let’s say someone is dealing with a lot of anxiety, and they don’t want to experience that anxiety anymore. 

Dr. Louise: 

What’s the opposite of anxiety? 

Dr. Eric: 

Relaxed. 

Dr. Louise: 

You would want to feel relaxed. What would you want your heart to do? 

Dr. Eric: 

Not beat over 100 beats per minute. To also be relaxed. Normal heart rate. 

Dr. Louise: 

I had a normal heart rate. If you were relaxed and had a normal heart rate, what would you tell yourself that you’re not telling yourself now? 

Dr. Eric: 

If I already had the normal heart rate? 

Dr. Louise: 

You’re feeling more relaxed, and your heart rate was normal. What would you say to yourself? 

Dr. Eric: 

I would say, “This is a pretty happy state. I’m feeling pretty good.” 

Dr. Louise: 

Awesome. “This is a pretty happy state. I’m feeling pretty good.” Yay. I’m writing this down. If you’re telling yourself, “Hey, this is a pretty happy state, and I’m feeling pretty good,” and you’re feeling relaxed with a normal heart rate, what would change or be different in your life because of those things? 

Dr. Eric: 

Getting to the fear, that’s a big factor. When dealing with those symptoms, it’s scary. The anxiety, too, but especially if someone has an elevated resting heart rate and heart palpitations, it’s scary because we don’t want anything bad to happen. We don’t want anything happening to our heart: arrythmia, atrial fibrillation. That’s what I’m thinking. 

I could say other people are also concerned. It’s maybe different with anxiety. They don’t want to feel anxious. They don’t like that feeling. With the heart rate, it’s more of that fear. When you have an elevated heart rate in the 90s or triple digits, you don’t want to end up in the ER. It’s bad enough having Graves’ and hyperthyroidism and dealing with symptoms. Having something bad happen to your heart. There’s something called thyroid storm.

Dr. Louise: 

What you’re saying is the thing you would change is you would release the fear. 

Dr. Eric: 

Yeah. 

Dr. Louise: 

If you easily release the fear, how would you feel? 

Dr. Eric: 

If I released the fear, I would feel liberated. 

Dr. Louise: 

And another feeling word. If you’re feeling liberated, how else will you feel? You don’t have heart palpitations anymore. You’re feeling pretty good. You’re more relaxed. Your heart’s normal. 

Dr. Eric: 

Healthy? 

Dr. Louise: 

I feel liberated and healthy. That’s awesome.

What we just did, I didn’t know we were going to do this, but it’s fun. We did what I call walking down the goal or intention. 

Your question was how to rewire the brain. First, I get the person’s intentions, goals. Then we release the trauma around that. Then we rewire using energy work that uses codes. It’s codes in the field; it’s numbers. Numbers is the universal language. It actually speaks to your energy field. 

The codes are done with spin points. Just like acupressure or acupuncture points on different points of the body, they’re done in the field with a spin. They’d be four or five inches out from that point on the body. It’s not acupuncture or acupressure. It’s more energy work, but it’s really cool. 

We do before and after pictures because people change so much. Once they’ve had what we call an integration, which is these goals or intentions that we just wrote, and then we do the energy work to put that in their field to rewire their brain.

Here’s the difference between what I do with brain work and what other people do. No one is really doing the energy field part of the brain. You have rings around your brain in the energy field. Almost like an atom. Here’s the nucleus of the atom. You picture those rings around the atom. When those rings are off balance, you’ll be off balance. When we put those back in balance, it now allows the physical body to heal. This is the energetic piece. 

That is kind of the best way I can describe it because, just like you and I know, 10-20 years ago, this looked woo-woo. It looked out there. Today, I do boot camps online with hundreds of people, twirling my hand on Zoom, and they’re all changing in the field. It’s the coolest thing. We know that energy work works long distance, too. 

Would you like to experience a little mini integration on your goals here? 

Dr. Eric: 

Sure. 

Dr. Louise: 

Let’s do it. I think everyone in the field will feel this, too. I’m going to have you say, “I feel relaxed.” 

Dr. Eric:

I feel relaxed. 

Dr. Louise: 

I have a normal heart rate.

Dr. Eric: 

And have a normal heart rate.

Dr. Louise: 

Awesome. I tell myself, “I’m feeling pretty good.” 

Dr. Eric: 

I’m feeling pretty good. 

Dr. Louise: 

I easily release the fear. 

Dr. Eric: 

I easily release the fear. 

Dr. Louise: 

And I feel liberated and healthy. 

Dr. Eric: 

And I feel liberated and healthy.

Dr. Louise: 

Let me see if there’s anything we can clear. Yes. 0-5, 5-10, five, six, seven. Something at age seven. Age seven for you, age seven for someone in the field. I don’t think this is for you. This is for the audience. Age six or seven. We are going to clear age six or seven really quick. Let me find my words. We will rewire the brain with these. 

Age six or seven. What happened? Anything happen for you at age six or seven that you remember? 

Dr. Eric: 

Hmm. I don’t think this was too traumatic. The only thing I can think of is I got lost in the Bronx Zoo. 

Dr. Louise: 

Okay. 

Dr. Eric: 

In the monkey house. I was with my dad, and I got lost for a few minutes. When I was outside the monkey house, my dad wasn’t there. I was just walking around the Bronx Zoo for a little bit by myself, thinking I would be there for the rest of my life. 

Dr. Louise: 

Thank you for sharing that. That’s a good point in. I’m so glad we’re doing this. That feeling of loss. 

Here’s how we clear the energy. It’s pretty simple. It was lost. You’re feeling unprotected. I name the words or the truth about the situation. I have word lists I look at just to give me some ideas. “Fear” right? “Unprotected.” “Trapped.” You’re a little kid who doesn’t know what will happen here. Fear, unprotected, trapped. Is there another word I need to name? One, two, three. “Panic.” For a moment. 

We always have to clear the panic and the shock moments to heal. Here’s the negative words. Then we will reclaim the positive and rewire your brain. Unprotected, trapped, fear, panic, shock. That’s a thief. We ask, “Is it a liar, thief, or fraud? Did it kill, steal, or destroy?” They cleared the soul level of the trauma. It was taught to me by one of my teachers. Then I expanded it. 

All that energy from that time you were lost and feeling unsafe and unprotected is a thief. It stole your peace. It stole your peace, freedom, energy, comfort to have, the vision of what you thought would be, trust, security, protection, and safety. It’s like we reclaimed it.

I say a statement to clear up more energy. Good and bad, right and wrong, pot on pot, go online shorts, boys and beyonds. You might be feeling just a slight bit less tense. Do you notice anything different just from me saying that? 

Dr. Eric: 

Mmm? In all honesty, no, I can’t say I feel any different. 

Dr. Louise: 

That’s okay. Other people listening might. Oftentimes, when I do this, even if it’s age eight or nine or something that you remember that’s similar. If you’re listening to this, that happened with you. If those places where you had shock, panic, or fear, or were feeling unprotected or unsafe, hopefully, we cleared some of that for you on a very subtle level. Like peeling the layers of an onion. This could be one little piece.

I had you say your intentions. Those intentions of feeling relaxed and having a normal heart rate and saying to yourself, “Wow, I feel pretty good.” Easily releasing the fear and feeling liberated and healthy. Then we integrate those. 

This is the rewiring of the brain rings. Often, I have people do something. It’s my freebie. It’s called Mind Gems. There are 12 little handheld positions that actually balance those rings around the brain. The one that we’re going to do right now that’s real simple is balancing polarity.

I will have you take your right hand over your left shoulder and your left hand on your right shoulder. We hold that for 12 seconds. This balances right and left brain, yin and yang, masculine and feminine. Then we will switch and put the other hand on top. I love when this happens because I never know what’s going to happen when we do this work. Yay. Good for you. Okay. 

Then we can relax. Then I will do these circles around your body. I am doing spin points. I am actually going down your left leg. I am saying 23, love. 53, forgiveness. 65, choice. 92, freedom. 42, greater love. We will come down your front. 42. Dr. Eric, I’ll have you say, “I have positive self-worth.” 

Dr. Eric: 

I have positive self-worth. 

Dr. Louise: 

Good. 22. Say, “I choose to succeed.” 

Dr. Eric: 

I choose to succeed. 

Dr. Louise: 

44. “I choose to live in joy.” 

Dr. Eric: 

I choose to live in joy. 

Dr. Louise: 

62. “I choose to live by the higher laws.” 

Dr. Eric:

I choose to live by the higher laws. 

Dr. Louise: 

Excellent. I will do some extra ones. 147 is on your backside. It’s balancing the ring this way around the brain. Then I have you look at my X. 45 is the code. It’s the alignment ring. It’s balancing this ring around the brain. 

96 is the consciousness ring, over the top of your head. It’s the cranial ring. 

86, over the ear is the hearing ring. 

68 is on the knees, the seeing ring. 

3-9, 26 complete cycles, 5,859 times. 

2-8, 23 complete cycles, 2,623 times. That resets your emotions. 

375; 377; 45; 86; 469; 467, releasing trauma. 

10/578; 28775; and the shot, one, two, three. Place with peace, 52. 5-11, 37 complete cycles, 87,357 times. 2-8, 24, 32 times. 4222; 44; 62. 

Awesome. Did you feel the wind? 

Dr. Eric: 

That was pretty cool. You do this in group settings, too? Not just one on one. 

Dr. Louise: 

Yeah, I do it in big group settings. It’s amazing. We want to lock it in though. I will have you say that last one again. Say, “I feel liberated and healthy.” 

Dr. Eric: 

I feel liberated and healthy. 

Dr. Louise: 

That represents all those goals, those intentions that you had. Then we lock it in. The way we lock it in is we clasp our hands together above our head. If I was there, I would try to pull them down, and you would just stay strong. 

I will have you comb your fingers on your right hand and make a circle in front of your heart. Say “22.” 

Dr. Eric: 

Dr. Louise: 

I choose to succeed. 

Dr. Eric: 

I choose to succeed.

Dr. Louise: 

Then tap your belly button eight times. That locks in that process that we just did. 

Dr. Eric: 

Wonderful. 

Dr. Louise: 

How do you feel? 

Dr. Eric: 

I feel good. For those listening or watching, this was not pre-planned. I did not expect to- 

Dr. Louise: 

I didn’t either. It just flowed. I’m glad we got to do that. 

Dr. Eric: 

My question is, again, the Bronx Zoo experience. To me, it’s such a small trauma. Can a trauma like that really impact one’s health? Can it lead over the years to a chronic health condition? 

Dr. Louise: 

Yes. Here’s why. Here’s what happens. If that happened when you were seven or eight, if you were lost or panicking, we always have to clear shock, those places in our lives where we had shock, for us to heal. This first shock could have been your birth. All of a sudden, you’re not in Mom’s womb anymore. That’s a shock.

If there is a shock when we’re younger, what happens is that shock and that panic begin to call in other shock and panic moments throughout life. You could have had another shock thing when you were 16. A little car accident or a girlfriend who broke up with you. If you look at your life. That was a precedent or the core issue that began that. 

I usually ask when I’m doing these. When I’m clearing energy like that, oftentimes there are five, six, eight strings, meaning there are eight people or situations affecting one goal or intention. You literally can clear energy on anything. I have cleared energy after the fact. 

Years ago, I remember when I was learning this, I lived off a side street off a busy street, and it’s a bike path. I had a white van at the time. I was turning right onto the busy street. All of a sudden, this bike, not a motorcycle, but a biker, hit my front. I hit him, he hit me, I don’t even know, the front of my van. We both were in shock a little bit. It was an accident. Pulled over to the side. 

He was fine. He was not hurt, but his bike tire was bent. I was like, “Wow. Are you okay?” I gave him a ride home. I had a van, put his bike in the van, because he couldn’t ride it. He was mad. He was kind of angry about the whole situation. He said, “You need to buy me a new bike. It’s a $4,000 bike.” We exchanged insurance cards. I drove him home.

The next day, I called my insurance company and then called him. He was really angry. He said, “I don’t want to talk to you. Let the insurance company handle it,” and he hung up on me. 

I used my process, Dr. Eric. That was not very nice. I decided to clear the energy. I was just learning this. Cleared the energy. He dropped it. Never called me again. 

Dr. Eric: 

Wow. 

Dr. Louise: 

There’s no such thing as time. Or God was on my side, too. That wasn’t nice, the way he handled himself. I was trying to be a good steward there. Compassionate about what had happened. I don’t know. 

I do that all the time. We can do that. Once you learn the tools, you don’t have to feel sick. You can be awesome. You have Dr. Eric here helping you with all of your physical stuff, everything you need, helping you be 100% healthy and vibrant and living your best life. Work on the emotion stuff, too. Realize that you’re a soul body.

Dr. Eric: 

That is awesome. I’m sure there are people listening, watching who are like, “How can I get this done to me? How can I work with you one-on-one or in a group program?” Where can they experience what I just experienced? 

Dr. Louise: 

You do look lighter. I’m really excited we did this. My website is LouiseSwartswalter.com. There is a Brain Soul Assessment, which is four or five questions. Once you fill that out, my team schedules a call. I’d love to meet with you if this is resonating with you. I love helping people. I love my people. 

Also, Mind Gems is on there, too. That’s a really good place to start. I do them every morning. They take five minutes to do. This is present time. You switch your hands. This is clearing fear and switching on the brain. Then you switch. Most of them are done switching, so they’re helping balance the whole right-left brain. We did polarity balance today. We’ll give you those, too.

Another great thing to hook into is we’re doing workshops. The first Wednesday of the month at 5pm MT, so that’s 7pm ET. It’s different themes. The theme this week coming up, because it’s Christmas, is how to stay calm during the holiday season. I get your comments, so we have that happening. Hook into those, too. Those are free workshops. I’d be happy to meet you. 

Dr. Eric: 

They can find out more about the free workshops on your website, too? 

Dr. Louise: 

Yep. LouiseSwartswalter.com. It’s all right there. We have a big event coming up in March. In the spring, I have a big boot camp where you learn some of this. If you’re wanting to learn, you can hook into that, too, and learn some of these codes and tools. 

Dr. Eric: 

This was amazing. Just like I said, wasn’t expecting this. I got more than what I paid for, which was nothing. Seriously, this was amazing. Thank you so much for that, Dr. Louise. 

Dr. Louise: 

You’re welcome. 

Dr. Eric: 

I’m sure the listeners found this to be valuable as well. Looking forward to- March is that boot camp? 

Dr. Louise: 

Yep, March 20-22. Mark your calendars for that one. 

Dr. Eric: 

I’ll do that, too. I might have to check that out as well. Thank you. 

Dr. Louise: 

You’re welcome. Thank you so much for having me on your show, Dr. Eric. I just love you. I love your energy. I love what you’re doing with your people. You’re doing such good work. A really unique niche you have. People really need this. They struggle. They’re looking for answers, and nobody has the expertise you do. Thank you for the work you’re doing in your world. 

Dr. Eric: 

Thanks for those kind words. Same with you. There are people who do energy work, but everybody is different. Can’t say I have experienced anyone who does it quite like you, which is awesome. Really looking forward to collaborating with you in the future. Looking forward to your boot camp in March.  

Dr. Louise: 

Awesome, thanks so much. Thanks again. 

Dr. Eric: 

Take care. Thanks again for this conversation.

 

Every now and then, someone will ask me, “What is a gut cleanse?” I wanted to talk about this here. Maybe you’ve heard from others that a gut cleanse can help with autoimmune conditions such as Graves’ and Hashimoto’s. Perhaps you even gave one a try, hoping it would calm your autoimmune thyroid condition, but you didn’t notice much of a difference. Does this mean that these protocols don’t work? Maybe you’re missing the real issue?  If you would prefer to listen to this episode, you can access it by Clicking Here.

I’m bringing this up because recently, a member of one of the Facebook groups posted the following: “Doing a gut cleanse today to take out toxins, mucus, parasites, and impurities. Trying to eat and drink right to defeat this Graves’ Disease. We all can’t stop until we get it right. That methimazole will try to wreak havoc on our weight.” 

First of all, what is a gut cleanse? There are really different definitions. Some people might be thinking about a parasite cleanse and feel that is synonymous with a gut cleanse. When I think about a cleanse, I’m also thinking detox. 

What is the difference between a gut cleanse and a detox? With detox, you’re also involving the liver and kidneys as well as the lymphatics. Some parasite protocols involve supporting the lymphatics first, doing things to support the detoxification pathways, opening those pathways, and focusing on microbes, things like parasites, for example. An example of a company that takes that approach is CellCore. 

I don’t typically use the term “gut cleanse” with people I work with. I recommend detox support, gut repair protocols, such as the 5R protocol, which you might have heard me talk about in the past. Gut repair protocols might include antimicrobial protocols for parasites, but it’s not just parasites. It could also include protocols if someone has H-pylori or other gut microbes. It really does depend on the person. 

The question is, “Can a gut cleanse or whatever you want to call it move the needle for Graves’?” While liver detox, a parasite cleanse, a gut cleanse might make you feel better mentally, if the gut lining is still inflamed or your immune system is still on edge, there are deeper issues that aren’t being solved. 

That’s where we need to pause. Instead of just asking, “Should I do a cleanse?” it might be helpful to ask, “What is my gut really trying to tell me?” Is it about parasites? Toxins? Is there something else going on? 

I’m not saying that an occasional gut cleanse might not help. Again, people have asked me about that with parasite cleanses. Do I just recommend routine parasite cleanses? Do I personally do parasite cleanses? I do not. I don’t recommend to people I work with just to do once or twice a year a parasite cleanse. I personally don’t do it. 

I do regular detox- I don’t want to say programs. We are always detoxifying. I am always doing things to support detoxification and can talk about that. Even differentiating here between a liver cleanse, gut cleanse, gut repair protocol. 

When someone is talking about a parasite cleanse, that almost always, to me, involves herbal antimicrobials, things like wormwood, black walnut, clove oil. When I do treat parasites, I like to recommend herbal antimicrobials, just like I recommend for treating with H-pylori. I am not against doing those. I just don’t recommend for people to routinely do those once or twice a year. 

When I say I’ll maybe do a three-week detox, or DesBio has something called the OmniCleanse, which is an eight-week purification program, that does involve taking antimicrobials. It involves taking things to support detoxification. One could argue we maybe don’t want to do that either just randomly. I agree. 

It’s good to work with a practitioner. Of course, I will be biased since I’m a practitioner. There are other things that also need to be in order as well before you just do random detoxes. I definitely want to talk about this a little bit. 

Like I said, when I think about a gut cleanse, things like probiotics, prebiotics, digestive enzymes. If you want to incorporate gut healing agents such as L-glutamine, aloe vera, zinc carnosine, I think that’s fine. When you’re incorporating herbal antimicrobials, that’s completely different. I’m thinking more about a parasite cleanse or a general antimicrobial cleanse. I’m not saying there is never a time and place for that. I want to talk more about that. 

The person who posted on Facebook also spoke about methimazole, which is of course an antithyroid medication. Methimazole would try to wreak havoc on her weight. It could do that. Methimazole lowers thyroid hormones. That’s the reason why someone takes it. They are taking it because they have hyperthyroidism and are looking to lower those thyroid hormones. That can result in weight gain. 

The research also shows that methimazole could affect the microbes in the gut. It could cause dysbiosis, which is an imbalance in the gut flora. It potentially can affect the intestinal barrier. I am not a huge fan of methimazole, but I understand there is a time and place for it. A lot of people I work with take it because you want to be safe while addressing the cause of the problem. 

When I dealt with Graves’, I took the herbs bugleweed and motherwort, which many of you know. Those herbs aren’t a good fit for everyone. Not everyone can effectively manage their hyperthyroid symptoms by taking those herbs.

Getting back to the gut cleanses, the liver detoxes. Many of these promise a reset in 7-10 days. I mentioned a three-week detox, an eight-week detox, things that I do. Like I said, I am continuously detoxing. We are always doing it regardless. You don’t have to take supplements to detox.

You’re doing a lot of it through the food you eat, especially if you eat a lot of plant-based foods. If you are eating more of a carnivore-based diet, you need protein to support detoxification. It’s not like you’re not detoxifying. Definitely the plant-based foods play a big role in detoxification. 

I also do sauna. Typically, three days a week. Another way of eliminating toxins. 

When I do a so-called liver detox, let’s say, and again, it’s not just liver. When I do the OmniCleanse from DesBio, which I try to do once a year, it’s not just focusing on liver. It’s focusing also on kidneys and supporting lymphatics and even supporting cerebral spinal fluid. When I do it, I recommend someone else to do this for eight weeks or another detox for three weeks. You need to have realistic expectations. 

When treating parasites, even 7-10 days or two weeks is a short period of time. It could take a month, a few months to eradicate parasites. Once you eradicate it, you usually want to do things to repair the gut. That’s part of the 5R protocol. 

The first R is Remove. That’s what the cleanse typically focuses on: removing. Removing toxins, removing parasites, for example. Then there are the other four Rs. 

The second R is Replace, things like digestive enzymes, stomach acid. A lot of people have gut infections because they’re low in stomach acid. Things like butane HCl can help although you want to try to address the cause of the low stomach acid. If you’re chronically stressed, that will suppress stomach acid. If you have H-pylori, then you need to get rid of that to help restore stomach acid balance. 

The third R is Reinoculate. Prebiotics, probiotics. 

The fourth R is Repair. Things like glutamine, L-glutamine, zinc carnosine, aloe vera, drinking bone broth or cabbage juice.

The fifth R is Rebalance. Through mind-body medicine, incorporating Vagus nerve exercises, nervous system retraining. You want to do more than just kill parasites or eliminate toxins. It’s important, but that’s why just doing a so-called gut cleanse itself usually isn’t the only solution.

What should you do first? If there is a detoxification component, or even if you’re just killing things through antimicrobials, should you do this? Should you do other things to support the gut? 

For example, if someone is constipated, they probably don’t want to be aggressive when it comes to detoxification. Also, they might have issues when following an antimicrobial protocol. You need to eliminate the toxins released from killing these microbes. If you’re constipated, that’s not a good thing. You could try to do it at the same time. Work on moving bowels. Really, you want to have at least one daily bowel movement before getting really aggressive when it comes to especially detoxification, but even arguably, when doing a parasite cleanse, for example. 

I wouldn’t say having a 100% healthy gut is necessary to incorporate detoxification, to follow an herbal antimicrobial protocol. In other words, it’s not like you have to spend six months on the 5R protocol before incorporating detox. The first R of the protocol is remove. It’s a bit of a catch-22 because you can’t always jump into that remove step. Maybe you have to be very gentle. 

There is nothing specifically about constipation in the protocol. If you are constipated, if you are not having regular bowel movements, you do need to have those regular bowel movements. It’s just a matter of being hydrated, maybe. Maybe it’s a matter of being more active if you’re sedentary. That won’t help. What you eat as well. If you’re eating a lot of refined foods and sugars, fast food, that’s not going to help. You definitely want to focus on diet and hydration and regular movements, but you might need to go beyond that when it comes to chronic constipation.

Getting back to parasite cleanses. Some listening to this might wonder why don’t I recommend parasite cleanses? It seems obvious that we all have parasites, and we should do a parasite cleanse at least once if not multiple times a year. Definitely a controversial topic. I have had different podcast guests here offer different perspectives. 

When it comes to treating parasites, Dr. Jason Hawrelak is a prebiotic researcher and educator. He is also a clinician and has been in practice for over 20 years. He actually was my instructor when I went through my master’s in nutrition back in 2013. 

He is definitely not an advocate of routine parasite cleanses. When I interviewed him on the podcast, he mentioned that even if someone tests positive for a parasite, treatment is not always necessary. An example he brought up is Blastocystis hominis, which is definitely controversial. If I see Blastocystis hominis on a GI Map, I will recommend a treatment for it. He said it is not always necessary to treat it. 

I didn’t specifically ask him if someone with Graves’ or Hashimoto’s has positive Blastocystis hominis, should you treat it? He was saying just in general, if he sees something like Blastocystis hominis, it doesn’t mean you always need to treat it.

On the other hand, I’ve had other practitioners on the podcast who do recommend regular parasite cleanses. Elizabeth Yarnell, I have had her on a couple times. She is a traditional naturopath. She has personally dealt with MS, and she was able to reverse it. Just like I have been in remission from Graves’ for a number of years, same is true with her and MS. She has helped many others with MS and other autoimmune conditions. She believes everyone should undergo routine parasite treatment. Maybe not routine. She does recommend working with someone like her and getting guidance, not just a regular parasite cleanse.

The point is, she recommends it across the board. She doesn’t do any stool testing, for a number of reasons. They are not perfect, which I agree with. Also, she doesn’t treat parasites in the gut but parasites elsewhere. 

I am not saying there is not a time and place to put someone on an herbal antimicrobial protocol for parasites. It’s just something that I don’t recommend routinely for people to do.

Let’s say I am suspecting parasites, but a GI Map comes back negative. Maybe we still focus on other things, and the person is still having GI symptoms. At that point, maybe I will recommend an herbal antimicrobial protocol and assume that there are parasites. 

I have done that with SIBO as well. I like testing for it in the form of a breath test, but they’re not perfect either. 

I also should mention when I dealt with Graves’ personally, I didn’t follow an antiparasitic protocol. Therefore, I can’t say that treating parasites was necessary for my recovery. Again, I’ve worked with so many people over the years. Some people I do put on an herbal antimicrobial protocol. Almost always, I am doing testing and finding something first, whether it’s H-pylori or parasites or SIBO, etc.

Where does this leave us? Hopefully, you understand that if you were to do a gut cleanse or a parasite cleanse or a detox, by itself, it probably won’t be a cure for your Graves’ or Hashimoto’s. Again, it could have some short-term benefit and long-term benefits. 

I don’t do parasite cleanses, but I do detox for a reason. I do sauna. Sauna is more consistent. I do it every week. Do I absolutely need to do a three-week detox every now and then? An eight-week detox once a year? I don’t know. Honestly, I might not with everything else I do. I figure it doesn’t hurt. 

Same thing with people I work with. I wouldn’t say everyone I work with needs to go through the OmniCleanse or a three-week detox. I almost always recommend something to support detox, whether it’s NAC, which is a precursor to glutathione, or one of my products, Hepatommune Supreme, which not only has NAC but milk thistle and schisandra and other ingredients to support detox as well as immune system health. 

Just want to let you know that the real solution isn’t just about doing a one-time cleanse or any other individual protocol. It’s really about creating an environment where your thyroid and gut both have the chance to heal. This requires a number of different things. 

I definitely recommend, if you haven’t done so already, to read my books, Natural Treatment Solutions for Hyperthyroidism and Graves’, third edition, as well as The Hyperthyroid Healing Diet. The latter talks about food and food triggers, not just guessing, but trying to pay attention to what inflames your body. 

Some practitioners recommend food sensitivity testing. I can’t say I’m a big fan of that. I like the elimination diet, which also isn’t perfect, but they don’t give false negatives typically, like food sensitivity testing, and sometimes false positives. Like I said, the elimination diet and reintroducing foods is the way I prefer, but it’s also not perfect. 

I do talk about food sensitivity testing in my book. The pulse test as well. You can definitely check it out if you haven’t read it already.

Of course, you want to rebuild the gut. You want to incorporate that 5R protocol. Before supporting the gut lining, removing what you need to remove. Like I said, you might also need to do other things as well. If you’re constipated, address that. Again, a lot of different things. Sleep, managing stress, regular movement, all of this is important. 

When you’re navigating Graves’ or even a different type of hyperthyroidism, it can feel isolating. You’ll have to sort through confusing options on your own. That’s why I wanted to make a space where these conversations can continue in a more personal and supportive way. 

That leads me to talk about my Healing Graves’ Naturally community, which I recently launched. This community is off of Facebook, on a platform called Skool. It’s a place to take what we talk about here and apply it to daily life, whether that’s figuring out which foods are triggering symptoms, hidden triggers, or having a safe place to ask questions.

For now, it is free to join. Eventually, it will become a paid community. It will probably be at a very low cost. I just don’t want it to get too large; that’s why I’m strongly considering making it paid in the future for a low monthly rate. At this stage, you can be part of it at no cost. 

This means you can take advantage of the support, resources, discussions while it’s still open and freely available. I’ll talk about one of the resources shortly. 

As far as what members are finding most valuable, there is hope beyond the standard three options. When you go to an endocrinologist, you are told the only choices are antithyroid medication, radioactive iodine, or thyroid surgery. Here, we talk about root cause approaches that can help you move forward and doing things to save your thyroid. 

Also, you will get guidance from someone who has been there. I personally overcame Graves’. The fear and uncertainty. I created what’s called the SAVED Thyroid Method to give others a clear step-by-step path. I have been helping people with hyperthyroidism since 2009. Evidence-based natural solutions. It’s also based on what I do in practice, but I also do a lot of research. 

Access to the Graves’ Survival Roadmap training. This is in the Skool community. This step-by-step training goes into the SAVED Thyroid framework in great detail. It even has action steps at the end of each lesson, so you can implement what you learned. 

This is new also. I’m starting to do monthly Hyperthyroid Healing Diet group Q&A calls. This will be hosted by one of my nutritional health coaches. Every now and then, I will pop in. She will answer your questions related to diet and hyperthyroid healing. Trying to provide a lot of value.

Progress with Graves’ doesn’t just come from doing these seven-day gut cleanses. It comes from listening to your body, making steady adjustments, getting the right kind of support along the way. You don’t have to figure this out in isolation. Having a place to ask questions, share experiences, and learn what actually works can make the path much clearer. 

If you have been looking for a place that goes deeper than quick fixes, where you can learn, ask questions, get practical strategies, definitely come join the community. It’s currently free to join. It’s where I share resources, guidance, and direct support to help you move forward with confidence. 

You can visit SaveMyThyroid.com/HealGravesDisease. Hope to see you in the community. Right now, as of recording this, there are over 300 people in the community. That’s of course just going to grow. The reason we don’t want it free forever is because the Facebook groups are just way too big. One of them is almost 25,000 members, which is great for my ego, but to me, it’s too big. Here, I want it to be more intimate. So far, it’s been great. We have been getting a lot of engagement, which is wonderful. 

That is it for this episode. Hope you found this information I provided to be valuable. When it comes to gut cleanses and liver detoxes, parasite cleanses, whatever you want to call them, I am not saying there is not a time and place for them, but definitely not a cure-all when it comes to saving your thyroid. Thank you for listening. Look forward to catching you in the next episode.