December 12, 2017
Heidi suffered from severe asthma, allergies, sinus infections and headaches, and could not go anywhere without her inhaler. She could not do anything outside. Today, Heidi does not have any more issues with allergies and has not needed to use her inhaler for a very long time! Dr. Hotze reveals how to never suffer from asthma and allergies again.
2:36: Heidi: I was unable to walk from the parking garage into work without stopping, and that was only a 10 minute walk. I was still having plenty of symptoms for thyroid, and I insisted that he test me again for that.
5:06: Heidi: I had been taking weekly allergy shots. I was seeing the head of Internal Medicine for my allergies and asthma. I was on two daily asthma inhalers plus an emergency inhaler in case things got really rough. I was taking a nightly asthma pill, but that caused such migraines, I had to decide, do I want to breathe tonight? Do I want to have migraine and try to function at work? I had sinus infections every six to eight weeks.
6:09: Dr. Hotze: You tell me your doctor basically told you your symptoms were all in your head.
Heidi: Yes. Every one of them. My hair falling out, my brittle nails, being terribly constipated, my tongue being swollen. It was all a manifestation of my worry, my stress, and in my head.
6:29: Dr. Hotze: Now, I was trained in medical school, my first year in medical school when we took the history, clinical and physical diagnosis, the head of our school, the dean of our school, University of Texas Medical School in Houston said, “If you have a woman in mid life who has more than one symptoms when you review her symptoms, she is a hypochondriac and needs to be placed on an antidepressant.”
12:53: Dr. Hotze: And, if you had a low body temperature, that is just prima facie evidence that you’re not producing enough energy within your cells. And the likely cause of them is low levels of active thyroid hormone within the cells to activate the power plants, mitochondria, which produce energy in your cells. So he put you on some natural progesterone.
14:03: Dr. Hotze: Okay. So you got started on the program. How long did it take you before you felt any significant change?
Heidi: On the thyroid aspect of it, it was about a week. When I started taking the sublingual drops and the magnesium for the asthma, it was about 10 days, and I was no longer using an asthma inhaler.
15:02: Heidi: I had both allergy and environmental asthma attacks. I was not having problems with that anymore. So the first 10 days was pretty significant for me, and then the first six weeks became really significant. I notice I’m not going through the tissue boxes like I was.
16:17: Heidi: Before I started coming here. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even stand… We’d have to turn the air conditioner off so it wouldn’t pull in any outside air when my husband mowed the grass. It was that bad. And now I’m excited, he’s embarrassed, because I will mow the grass. He says, “That’s a blue job, dear, that’s for me.” But I’m excited because I can, and I’ve never been able to do it.
17:05: Dr. Hotze: So you’ve had no asthma attacks for 14 years.
Heidi: No, sir. No.
Dr. Hotze: How frequently do you get sinus infections?
Heidi: I haven’t had one in … I haven’t had one since I’ve been coming here.
17:54: Dr. Hotze: And you quit taking the inhalers, so you haven’t been on inhalers now for the last 13 or 14 years.
Heidi: Fourteen years.
19:28: Dr. Hotze: So, do you think our allergy treatment has been effective?
Heidi: Let me see. I’d say 2000% it’s been effective. Because the first part of my life, I wasn’t able to do…I wasn’t able to do any of this until in my 30s.
Stacey: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. This is Stacy here with Dr. Steven Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. Just a reminder to go to Hotzepodcast.com, that’s hotzepodcast.com to download all of our radio podcasts. And we have a great story for you today. Heidi Christopher, one of our wonderful guests, has got a great testimonial. We hope that this will provide some encouragement to you as you go through your health journey.
Dr. Hotze: Thank you, Stacy. Let me remind you what I believe. I believe that you need a doctor, a staff of professionals who will coach you onto a path of health and wellness naturally so you enjoy a better quality of life as you mature without having to use pharmaceutical drugs. Does this make sense to you? Well, it did to our guest, Heidi Christopher, who’s joining us today. Heidi, so glad to have you, and welcome to our program.
Heidi: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Hotze: You bet. Heidi has been a guest of ours since 2000 and-
Heidi: Three.
Dr. Hotze: Three. So Heidi, you had a very interesting story leading up to your coming to the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. Why don’t you share that with our listeners.
Heidi: Well, I’ve had allergies and asthma my entire life, but I had been seeing a specialist for that. I started having problems that I thought were related to my thyroid, and I started seeing one of the top five endocrinologists in North America. We went through the exam, and he said, “Well it’s not your thyroid.”
Dr. Hotze: Did he do blood tests on you, too?
Heidi: He did. And I said, “Oh, okay, can I see a copy of that?” He said, “You don’t need to worry about that.” He said, “But I’ve got some medicine for you. It’s going to help you.” And he ended up giving me a medicine that, after I researched it, the name of it’s Parlodel, it was used to treat Parkinson’s disease.
So I talked to him about that on my next visit, and he said, “Do you feel any better after taking it for a month?” I said, “No, I don’t feel better. I feel a lot worse. My symptoms have gotten worse. I was unable to walk from the parking garage into work without stopping, and that was only a 10 minute walk. I was still having plenty of symptoms for thyroid, and I insisted that he test me again for that.
And he said, “Well, it wasn’t your thyroid, but I will run the blood tests again.” And he did, and I went back for yet another office visit. And he said, “Well, how’s the Parlodel working out for you?” I said, “It still isn’t.” And he said, “Well, you’ve got to get this business about the thyroid out of your head.” He said, “that’s not the problem.” He said, ‘But all of these symptoms, they are in your head, and I’m going to recommend a psychiatrist.”
And I said… Yeah, that was my reaction. I said, “I don’t need a psychiatrist. I’m not imaging this, and he insisted that I was, was writing out the name. And I said, “You know what?” I told him to go do something that was anatomically impossible, which probably confirmed to him that I was nuts. And I decided… I just snapped. I thought, I don’t need antidepressants. I don’t need to see a psychiatrist.
So I left his office. I called my sister. I was really upset. I was crying. She set, “Go on about.com. Look up what you think is the issue, and start looking at doctors in the area and what patients actually have to say about them.” So repeatedly what came up was Hotze Health & Wellness Center, how you guys actually listened, you took the patients seriously, you treated the symptoms, and so I decided I’ll go ahead and make a phone call, and I did.
Dr. Hotze: When you said we treated the symptoms, we listened to the symptoms to make the underlying diagnosis of the cause of the symptoms.
Heidi: Yes, absolutely.
Dr. Hotze: Okay.
Heidi: But yeah, this was more in patient speak.
Dr. Hotze: Right. I got you.
Heidi: Absolutely. So, I made the call. I set up an appointment with the consultant to take my family history. She told me it would probably be about an hour long conversation, and I said fine. We get around to having that conversation and taking my history. She comes around to, do I have allergies, and do I have asthma? I said, “Yes, but don’t worry about that, sweetie. I’m seeing a specialist. It’s okay.” And then she just insists, she says, “No, no, no, no, no.” She said, “Let me just take the history of it.”
I said, “Really, we don’t have to waste time on that.” And she said, “Oh, it’s not a waste of time.” So, she wasn’t going to let it go. And I was really glad that she didn’t, because we went through my history, and at the time, I had been taking weekly allergy shots. I was seeing the head of Internal Medicine for my allergies and asthma. I was on two daily asthma inhalers plus an emergency inhaler in case things got really rough. I was taking a nightly asthma pill, but that caused such migraines, I had to decide, do I want to breathe tonight? Do I want to have migraine and try to function at work?
I had sinus infections every six to eight weeks. Usually by about May, my doctor would tell me, “I can’t give you antibiotics anymore.” And so I would stress and think, what am I going to do for the rest of the year, ’cause I’ve got to get these cleared up, and they just kept getting worse.
And then she took all of that information down from me, and we made the appointment, and the rest is just history.
Dr. Hotze: So you came in. Now, there are a couple of points I’d like to make to those in our listening audience about her comments about the way her doctor made her feel. You tell me your doctor basically told you your symptoms were all in your head.
Heidi: Yes. Every one of them. My hair falling out, my brittle nails, being terribly constipated, my tongue being swollen. It was all a manifestation of my worry, my stress, and in my head.
Dr. Hotze: Now, I was trained in medical school, my first year in medical school when we took the history, clinical and physical diagnosis, the head of our school, the dean of our school, University of Texas Medical School in Houston said, “If you have a woman in mid life who has more than one symptoms when you review her symptoms, she is a hypochondriac and needs to be placed on an antidepressant.”
And unfortunately, in conventional medicine, this is the way most physicians view women, particularly because they come in and they have problems as their hormones become imbalanced that lead to all the signs and symptoms, and really a hypothyroid situation. And the doctors rely strictly on a blood test rather than on the clinical symptoms which are a manifestation of poor thyroid within the cells, and they say, “Everything’s fine. Your blood tests are normal. You just need to go on an antidepressant or see a psychiatrist who’s going to put you on an antidepressant, an anti-anxiety medication and sleep medication.”
So, you did right by telling him that he ought to just go hang it on his beak, basically, and he was wrong about that. So you, at that time, did 180 and took charge of your health. You said, “I’m not going to accept what this doctor says about me.” Now, the other problem you were having was recurrent and chronic sinus infections and asthma, both of which are classical features of allergic disorders, for which you were seeing a conventional allergist, right?
Heidi: Yes.
Dr. Hotze: And even receiving shots. You’d been on shots for how long?
Heidi: Oh, my gosh, I’d been on them twice in my life for many years each. One from age 13 to age 18-ish, and then again in my 20s up until the time I came here in 2003. So, for many years.
Dr. Hotze: And you were living with daily asthma problems.
Heidi: Yes.
Dr. Hotze: And recurrent and chronic sinus. So what does that tell you about the allergy treatment? Was it effective?
Heidi: Not to me, it wasn’t.
Dr. Hotze: Well, then it wasn’t effective at all, if you had continued allergy problems, and you were being treated by an allergist and given allergy shots for literally decades, and they weren’t working.
Heidi: Who told me it was normal to feel this way, that I was going to have to learn to live with it. And that’s why I was so insistent with my consultant. “We don’t need to address this, sweetie. A specialist told me.”
Dr. Hotze: That I have to live with it and it’ll never be better. Okay, so you came in, you saw Dr. Sheridan here at our office, and tell me about that visit, what it was like.
Heidi: It took hours, actually. I had blood work drawn. I went into some basic allergy testing, and he actually listened. I’ve never spent hours with a doctor before, ever. In fact, my husband called my cell a couple of times, and he said, “I’m getting worried about you. I haven’t heard from you. It’s been a couple of hours. Are you holding somebody hostage because they’re not listening?” And I said, “No, they’re listening. It’s so strange. I’m not used to this.”
So what your patients were saying on about.com about you guys was true, that you actually listened. He took me seriously. He said, “Well, the blood work is going to confirm this for us, but,” he said, “We can help your allergies and asthma.” And he said, “I bet you we can confirm your thyroid is outside of the normal range and low.”
And sure enough, it happened. But I left with a plan for supplements that will help me, and also the medicine that I could expect, and why bioidentical medicine was possible.
Dr. Hotze: Right. Now, he made a clinical diagnosis of hypothyroidism. I don’t happen to have your blood work way back from 2004 but at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center that any individual who has the signs and symptoms of hypothyroidism, that’s the fatigue, it can be one, some or all of these symptoms, fatigue, difficulty with weight, inability to focus or think clearly, brain fog, low body temperature, insomnia, joint and muscle aches and pains, stomach disorders, maybe constipation as you had, or maybe irritable bowel syndrome. Surprisingly you didn’t, from all the antibiotics you had, I’m surprised you didn’t have terrible irritable bowels and loose stools from yeast.
Heidi: Well. I was diagnosed with that.
Dr. Hotze: Yeah. As a matter of fact, anybody that’s taken antibiotics of any quantity is always going to have problems with yeast. And in women, they may get yeast vaginitis that can be cleared up, but they get yeast in the colon, as do men, too. Whenever you take an antibiotic, it kills not only pathogenic bacteria, maybe in the sinuses or in the lungs, or anywhere else in the body the infection exists, but it also kills the normal healthy commensal bacteria that live within our system in the colon.
So that can cause host of problems, a leaky bowel syndrome where you end up getting large food particles into your blood, and you make antibodies to them. It can lead to autoimmune disease and a whole host of problems. You probably have heard of gluten sensitivity, which is a wheat allergy or a grain allergy from the gliadin which is a protein that passes into the blood stream, and the body makes antibodies to that, which is related to autoimmune thyroiditis. We notice that people with gluten sensitivity have a much higher incidence of autoimmune thyroiditis where they make antibodies to their thyroid gland. Anyway, so Dr. Sheridan made a clinical diagnosis. He listened to you.
Heidi: Yes.
Dr. Hotze: He’s only seen thousands and thousands and thousands of patients here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center, and was very much aware of the symptoms of low thyroid and the signs of low thyroid, so he put you on some natural desiccated thyroid.
Heidi: And it raised my temperature, actually, because 96.4 was my temperature.
Dr. Hotze: 96.4. It should be 98.6. So she’s two degrees low, which is classical… Remember, the thyroid hormone enables the cells to produce and use energy. The excess energy’s given off as heat. That’s what gives your body a temperature. It should be 98.6. That’s when all the enzymes, all the biochemical processes work well in the system.
Dr. Hotze: And, if you had a low body temperature, that is just prima facie evidence that you’re not producing enough energy within your cells. And the likely cause of them is low levels of active thyroid hormone within the cells to activate the power plants, mitochondria, which produce energy in your cells. So he put you on some natural progesterone.
Heidi: Yes.
Dr. Hotze: Were you having some menstrual irregularities at that time, or do you remember?
Heidi: Oh, I remember very clearly, very much so. Abnormal cycles, mood swings you wouldn’t believe, or you probably would. You’ve seen everything. But yeah, terrible mood swings, breasts swelling and leaking, everything.
Dr. Hotze: Did you have headaches associated-
Heidi: Oh, massive headaches. I’d around 15 to 16 headache days a month.
Dr. Hotze: Now, this is a classical feature of low progesterone, and estrogen dominance is the other side of the coin, which adversely affects your body’s ability to utilize thyroid hormone as well. He put you on natural progesterone, and then we allergy tested you and treated you for air borne allergies using sublingual allergy drops under the tongue.
Heidi: Yes.
Dr. Hotze: Okay. So you got started on the program. How long did it take you before you felt any significant change?
Heidi: On the thyroid aspect of it, it was about a week. When I started taking the sublingual drops and the magnesium for the asthma, it was about 10 days.
Dr. Hotze: And, what-
Heidi: And I was no longer using an asthma inhaler.
Dr. Hotze: So that was in 2003.
Heidi: Three, yes. I would go through, you know, you go to Sam’s and you buy tissues in bulk, right?
Dr. Hotze: Right.
Heidi: I’d go through a box of those every night. And so we should’ve had, I think we should’ve had stock in Kleenex. But I noticed I was able to sleep at night. I was able to breathe at night, and I wasn’t sneezing. Within the first even six weeks, I didn’t have a sinus infection. I had no infection.
Heidi: I had both allergy and environmental asthma attacks. I was not having problems with that anymore. So the first 10 days was pretty significant for me, and then the first six weeks became really significant. I notice I’m not going through the tissue boxes like I was.
And then after the first two months, I wouldn’t even go through one tissue box a month. That’s how I measure everything right, is in tissue boxes, because that was my life, going through one tissue box in 24 hours, 180 tissues, I think it was, in a box. But that’s how I measured it.
And I was completely not using inhalers by the end of the second week.
Dr. Hotze: Okay, so that’s 2003. Let’s fast forward 13, 14 years. How often do you have asthma attacks?
Heidi: I haven’t.
Dr. Hotze: You’ve had no asthma attacks?
Heidi: No, no. I go hiking, so I’m outdoors. I get to garden. I never thought I’d say, I get to mow the grass. Because that-
Dr. Hotze: That’s what husbands are for, dear.
Heidi: Yeah. But that was impossible for me.
Dr. Hotze: Sure.
Heidi: Before I started coming here. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even stand… We’d have to turn the air conditioner off so it wouldn’t pull in any outside air when my husband mowed the grass. It was that bad. And now I’m excited, he’s embarrassed, because I will mow the grass. He says, “That’s a blue job, dear, that’s for me.” But I’m excited because I can, and I’ve never been able to do it.
Dr. Hotze: Isn’t that amazing?
Heidi: Yeah. I’ve never been able to go hiking, and hiking anywhere, right? I’ve never been able to garden outside, grow my own herbs. I’ve never been able to mow grass. Any of that. You don’t go outside in the spring, fall, part of the summer, you know, because it’s just this constant bombardment of allergies. And now I can go outside and say, “Oh, my car’s yellow,” and I’m not bothered by it.
Dr. Hotze: Isn’t that wonderful?
Heidi: I don’t notice the season changes like I used to.
Dr. Hotze: So you’ve had no asthma attacks for 14 years.
Heidi: No, sir. No.
Dr. Hotze: How frequently do you get sinus infections?
Heidi: I haven’t had one in … I haven’t had one since I’ve been coming here.
Dr. Hotze: And you had recurrent and chronic sinuses every three to four weeks.
Heidi: Yes. Yes.
Dr. Hotze: And you had chronic asthma since you were 13 or 14.
Heidi: Yes. Yeah. I remember when I was 15 years old going to the doctor, and he said, “Stand up against the wall.” And he put his hand on my chest, and he pushed, and I could feel the water come up. And he said, “Oh, well you’ve got asthma.” And I thought, “No kidding. I’m wheezing. I’ve told you I’m wheezing. I know I’m 15, but I know what’s happening to me.” And that’s when I started the inhalers, and I’d been on them since… I mean I’m 50, 51. So I’d been on them since I was 15 years old.
Dr. Hotze: And you quit taking the inhalers, so you haven’t been on inhalers now for the last 13 or 14 years.
Heidi: Fourteen years. Every year, for the longest time I would ask Dr. Sheridan or Dr. Ellsworth to renew my prescription because I was just paranoid. I thought, “Oh, my God, if I have an asthma attack, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?” And every year they’d say, “Well, have you had one?” And I’d say, “No.” “Well, are you sure you want me to renew it?”
So eventually, after around five or six year, I said, “Quit renewing it. I don’t use it. It’s just a waste.”
Dr. Hotze: Now, this is an amazing story. Here’s a young woman who had had asthma since she was 13 or 14 years old, had been treated for allergy with allergy shots, had recurrent and chronic sinus infections and asthma on a daily basis, her asthma, and she was taking daily inhalers, asthma medication and still taking allergy treatment, which obviously wasn’t working, and she also the classical signs and symptoms of hypothyroidism which occurred as she marched through her menstrual life, and that had to do with the estrogen dominance and the progesterone deficiency.
So, we did what we normally do. We got you on a good, healthy program. We replenished your hormones with natural desiccated thyroid hormones and natural progesterone. We put you on vitamins and minerals which help you detoxify and helped your cells produce more energy along with the thyroid hormone, and then you were able to exercise now because you didn’t have asthma. You were able to get out and work, mow the yard, get out and be active and hike and all those sort of things.
Dr. Hotze: So, do you think our allergy treatment has been effective?
Heidi: Let me see. I’d say 2000% it’s been effective. Because the first part of my life, I wasn’t able to do…I wasn’t able to do any of this until in my 30s.
Dr. Hotze: Now, imagine having to go in for shots and still being sick all the time, and now you simply have to take sublingual drops under your tongue.
Heidi: Yep.
Dr. Hotze: We literally treat with sublingual drops. We put the allergy, instead of in an injection, we dilute it out, and you take three drops under your tongue on a daily basis. That helps built up blocking antibodies to block the allergy reaction. Also, the hormones are very important. When the hormones are out of balance, it can adversely affect and bring on allergies.
So, it’s not uncommon to see somebody, maybe when you enter puberty, and probably that’s about the time you were entering puberty when you developed these problems, and so your hormones may have been imbalanced all your life, and that adversely affected the immune system, and stimulated an underlying allergic disorder at that time. So balancing the hormones out can have a profound effect on quelling allergy problems and allergy symptoms along with thyroid.
Well, this is a great story, and I want to congratulate you, because you did a 180 and took charge of your health. Now, I like to say this. We’re the health coaches. Heidi was a health athlete, like all our guests are. She’s in the health Olympics, and we wanted her to get gold medal, and I think you won about three or four. Congratulations.
Heidi: Thank you, doctor.
Dr. Hotze: I’m proud of you, so proud of you, Heidi. And thank you for sharing with us your story, because I hope this will be a tremendous encouragement to you, who may have health issues. Maybe you don’t have asthma or allergies. Maybe you do. Maybe you have all the symptoms of hypothyroidism and imbalance in the female hormones. This is a great story to show you how, if you will take charge of your health and take natural approaches to health, you can get off all these pharmaceutical drugs, and you can be healthy and well and enjoy a better quality of life as you mature, as Heidi has done.
Dr. Hotze: So she’s a great example, and I hope you’ll follow her example. Now, if you would like to consult with one of our new guest consultants about your health issues, please feel free to contact us online or call for a free consultation at (281) 698-8698. That’s (281) 698-8698. We would be pleased and count it a privilege to have the opportunity to serve you.
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Since 1989, Hotze Health & Wellness Center has helped over 33,000 patients get their lives back using bioidentical hormones that restore hormones to optimal levels, strengthen immune systems, and increase energy levels. Our treatment regimen addresses the root cause of hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, menopause, perimenopause, low testosterone, allergies, and candida.
Led by best-selling author, radio host and leading natural health expert, Steven F. Hotze, M.D., our medical team has over 100 years’ combined medical experience backed by a staff of nearly 100 caring professionals who provide an environment of hope and extraordinary hospitality for each of our patients, who we call our guests. It is our deepest desire to help you obtain and maintain health and wellness naturally so that you may enjoy a better quality of life, pure and simple.
Do you want to live a healthy, happy, purpose-driven life? Do you want to restore your health so that your loss of energy, weight gain, joint pain, depression and lack of drive or motivation won’t hold you back from achieving your personal and professional goals?
Dr. Steven Hotze wants that for you, too. In fact, in his powerful and passionate video entitled, “What I Believe”, Dr. Hotze shares how his Christian worldview and pivotal experiences have ignited a deep desire to offer the message of hope and optimal health to all who need to hear it.
At Hotze Health & Wellness Center, our doctors are changing the way women and men are treated through the use of bioidentical hormones. Our natural treatments have helped over 33,000 individuals with hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, menopause, perimenopause, low testosterone, allergies, candida, detoxification and nutritional deficiencies.
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