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"I'll be the one putting you under this morning." I was locking my car in the parking lot of the medical plaza in Reno when he said it. I had not signed up to be put under anything. I had driven 41 minutes that morning for what my GP had told me was a routine gastroenterology consultation. The man standing in front of me in light blue scrubs was an anesthesiologist who knew my last name. He had a folder under his arm. He had been waiting for me. I was 53. I was a part time bookkeeper for my husband Carl's plumbing supply company in Sparks, Nevada. I had not had a surgical procedure in 31 years, since the C section when my daughter Megan was born in 1993. And on the morning of March 6th, 2024, at 8:51 AM, in the parking lot of the Saint Joseph Medical Plaza in Reno, Nevada, a stranger in light blue scrubs was telling me he was about to put me under general anesthesia for a procedure I had never agreed to. I want you to picture this. A 53 year old woman in an oatmeal cardigan, in the loose Eileen Fisher pants she had specifically worn that morning because nothing with a button had fit her in three years, standing between her Honda Civic and a silver Ford F-150 with her car keys in her right hand and her purse over her left shoulder, staring at a man whose name she had just heard for the first time. I said, "I'm sorry, what." Dr. Patel did not break eye contact. He opened the folder under his arm. He looked at the top page. He looked at me. He said, "Eileen Halverson? Date of birth April 14th, 1971? Insurance through Anthem PPO?" I said yes. I said yes to all three. He said, "Then we're talking about the right person. I'm a little concerned because nobody from the surgical team called you with your pre-op instructions yesterday. You should have stopped eating at midnight. Did you have anything this morning?" I had eaten two pieces of multigrain toast and a banana at 6:30. I told him. He sighed. He pulled out a phone. He stepped a few feet away from me in the parking lot and made a phone call to a number I could not see. I stood there next to my car with my keys still in my hand. A woman walked past me pushing a stroller. A man in a Carhartt jacket walked past me in the other direction holding a coffee. The sun was hitting the windshield of the silver Ford and making a triangle of light on the asphalt. I want you to understand that what I felt in those 90 seconds while Dr. Patel was on the phone was not fear. What I felt was something worse. I felt like I was somebody else's appointment. I felt like I had been moved through a system for months without knowing I was being moved. I felt like the bloating I had been complaining about for 9 years had quietly transformed, inside the office of my own primary care doctor, into a SURGICAL CASE. And nobody had told me. I will tell you what happened when Dr. Patel got off the phone. I will tell you what he walked me into. I will tell you what the gastroenterologist on the other side of that door said to me 17 minutes later that no doctor had said to me in 9 years. But first you need to know how I ended up in that parking lot. How a 53 year old bookkeeper from Sparks, Nevada, drove herself to what she thought was a consultation and was met by her anesthesiologist before she had reached the front door. It started in 2015. Carl and I dropped our daughter Megan off at her first year of college at UNR. That fall I gained 7 pounds. I told myself it was stress. By the next spring I had gained 11 more. I told myself it was empty nest. By the end of 2016 my pants did not fit and my stomach was hard to the touch when I laid down at night. I went to my GP. She is a kind woman, Dr. Holman, who has been my doctor since 2009. She looked at my chart and said the words I would hear in some form for the next 9 years. "Eileen, your weight is up a little but your labs are clean. This is probably perimenopausal bloating. Try cutting out gluten." I cut out gluten. Nothing. "Try cutting out dairy." Nothing. "Try the Mediterranean diet. Try intermittent fasting. Try managing your stress." I tried all of it. By 2019 I had been on the FODMAP diet for 6 months. Lost 4 pounds. My stomach had not changed at all. By 2021 I had paid $2,200 to a functional medicine clinic in Reno for testing that came back "borderline" and a 14 supplement protocol that did not move the needle. By 2022 I had a drawer in my kitchen that Carl did not know about. If you are the woman I am writing this for, you have one too. On March 5th, 2024, the night before I drove to the medical plaza in Reno, I counted what was in mine. 19 products. Senna. Dulcolax. Magnesium citrate. Two probiotics. Digestive enzymes. Apple cider vinegar gummies. Psyllium husk. Peppermint capsules. Two boxes of detox tea. Glycerin suppositories. A box of disposable rubber gloves from the Walgreens on McCarran that I had bought for a reason I had told no one. I added it up on the back of an electric bill while Carl watched the news. 19 products. 3 years. $3,940. NONE OF IT WORKED. By the end of 2023 I weighed 187 pounds on a 5'5" frame. My weight had gone up 38 pounds in 8 years. My stomach had become hard, distended, and shaped in a way that looked, from the outside, like late second trimester pregnancy. In February of 2024 Dr. Holman wrote me a referral. She handed it to me at the end of a 12 minute appointment. She said, "Eileen, I'm sending you to a specialist who I think can help you. They'll explain everything when you get there." I had taken the referral. I had stuck it in my purse. I had made the appointment based on the phone number at the bottom of the page. I had not read the words at the top. The words at the top said BARIATRIC EVALUATION. I had been carrying a referral for weight loss surgery in my purse for 23 days and I had not opened the envelope. Dr. Patel ended his phone call. He walked back over to me. He said, "Mrs. Halverson, there's been a scheduling miscommunication. The surgical team had you down for a sleeve gastrectomy this morning at 9:15. The gastroenterologist on the other side, Dr. Wei, has you down as a consultation. We're going to walk in together and figure out what was supposed to happen with you today." SLEEVE GASTRECTOMY. I did not know that word. I knew that word later. What I knew standing in that parking lot at 8:53 in the morning was that the medical system that had been telling me for 9 years that my problem was perimenopausal bloating had quietly transitioned, somewhere in the previous 23 days, into scheduling me for the permanent surgical removal of 80 percent of my stomach. I let Dr. Patel walk me through the front doors. I let him take me up to the second floor. I sat in the chair he directed me to in the waiting room of Dr. Wei's office. I did not say a word. Now back to the consultation. In the small exam room. After 9 years of perimenopausal bloating. After 23 days of carrying a surgical referral in my purse. Dr. Wei walked in 17 minutes later. He was a thin man in his late forties with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a manilla folder under his right arm. He sat down on the rolling stool. He looked at the folder. He looked at me. He looked at the folder again. He said, "Mrs. Halverson. I just spoke with Dr. Patel in the hallway. Before we discuss what almost happened this morning, I want to ask you a question." I said okay. He said, "Has Dr. Holman ever, in any of your appointments, asked you about the SHAPE of your stomach? Has she ever asked you whether your stomach is soft or hard? Has she ever asked you whether it changes size throughout the day, or stays the same size from morning to night?" I had not been asked any of those questions. Not once. In 9 years. I told him. Dr. Wei sat very still for a moment. Then he said one sentence. He said, "That is not a fat problem. That is not a weight problem. Mrs. Halverson, what you are describing is not bariatric. It is parasitic." The room went quiet. He turned the computer monitor around to face me. He pulled up a page from a medical textbook he had open in another tab. The page showed a diagram of a human abdomen with an outline of an organ I had never seen before in my life. It was not the stomach. It was the LARGE INTESTINE. Distended. Bulging. Filled with what the caption described as a "chronic helminthic burden" combined with severe constipation and bacterial overgrowth. Dr. Wei said, "The sleeve gastrectomy is for adipose tissue. For body fat. For people whose stomachs are stretched by food. What you are describing is a colon that has been carrying something it should not be carrying for a long time. And in my experience, the surgeons who do bariatric procedures on patients like you do not realize, until they open you up, that the problem is in the wrong organ." I asked him what he meant. He said, "I have personally seen patients on this surgical schedule who, on imaging, turned out to have chronic parasitic infections that had distended their colon to the point that surgeons mistook the distension for adipose mass. Those patients did not need surgery. Those patients needed treatment." I did not respond. I could not. Because the man on the rolling stool in front of me, with the reading glasses on his forehead and the manilla folder in his lap, was telling me that the woman I had been for 9 years, the bloated tired woman in elastic pants who had been told to manage her stress and try the FODMAP diet, was a woman whose body had been quietly hosting something her own primary care doctor had never tested for. He did not say the word. He had said helminthic. Helminthic means worms. He left the room to schedule the ultrasound. I sat in that exam room for 11 minutes alone. I cried. Not the way you cry when you are sad. The way you cry when something inside you that has been screaming for 9 years finally hears somebody else say its name. The ultrasound was the next morning at 7:15. I will not describe to you what the radiologist saw on the screen. I will tell you that she stopped talking halfway through the procedure. I will tell you that she called Dr. Wei from the room. I will tell you that Dr. Wei was in the imaging suite within 4 minutes. He walked me into his office afterward. He closed the door. He sat down across from me at his desk. And then he did something I did not expect. He looked at the door behind me. He looked at the closed blinds on the window to the hallway. And then he leaned forward across the desk, lowered his voice, and said, "Mrs. Halverson, I am about to say something to you that I cannot, in any official capacity, recommend in writing. I cannot put it in your chart. I cannot send it to your pharmacy. I cannot include it in the report I send back to Dr. Holman. Do you understand." I said yes. I did not understand. But I said yes. He said, "What you have is treatable with two ingredients that have been used for this purpose for 2,000 years. The first is oil of oregano. The active compound is called carvacrol. The second is black seed oil. The active compound is thymoquinone. Together, taken daily for approximately 90 days, they have shown the ability to clear what is currently in your colon." I asked him where I could get it. He said, "Any pharmacy. Any health food store. CVS, Whole Foods, the vitamin section at Smith's. But Mrs. Halverson, listen to me very carefully. The two have to be combined. Oregano oil alone will not do it. Black seed alone will not do it. And the concentration of carvacrol has to be high enough to actually do the work." He paused. Then he said, "I am not allowed to tell you which brand to buy. I can only tell you what the ingredients are." He looked at me for a long moment. Then he raised his right index finger and placed it gently in front of his lips. The universal sign. SHHH. He said, "What I am telling you is between us. If anybody asks, I gave you dietary guidance. Do you understand." I said yes. This time I did understand. I understood that the man in the reading glasses across the desk from me, the man who had just walked me out of an unauthorized surgical referral 17 minutes after meeting me, was now risking something by telling me how to actually fix the problem. I understood that there are doctors in America who are not allowed to recommend the things they know work. I understood that the system Dr. Wei worked inside of had rules about what he could put on paper and what he could only say with the blinds down and his finger to his lips. I drove home that afternoon with two ingredients written on the back of a parking validation slip. Oregano oil. Black seed oil. Combined. High carvacrol concentration. 90 days. I stopped at the CVS on South Virginia Street on my way back to Sparks. I went to the vitamin aisle. I stood there for 31 minutes. I am not exaggerating. I timed it on my phone. CVS had four different oregano oil products on the shelf. None of them were combined with black seed. None of them listed a carvacrol concentration. Two of them were diluted with olive oil at a ratio I could not figure out from the label. CVS had two different black seed oil products. Neither was combined with oregano. Both were sold as standalone supplements for what the label called "general wellness." A young woman in a CVS vest walked past me twice while I was standing there. The third time she stopped and asked if I needed help finding something. I said I was looking for a product that combined oregano oil with black seed oil. She walked me to the shelf. She pulled down both bottles. She read the labels with me. She looked up at me and said, "Ma'am, we don't carry anything that combines them. You might try Sprouts or Whole Foods. Or you can usually find that kind of combination online from a specialty brand." I left CVS empty handed. I drove to the Sprouts on Mae Anne. Sprouts had a much larger selection. Six different oregano oil products. Four different black seed oils. One combined formula that turned out, when I read the label, to be 90 percent grapeseed oil with trace amounts of the actual active ingredients. I left Sprouts empty handed too. I drove home. I sat at the kitchen table that night with my laptop and I typed into Google exactly what Dr. Wei had told me to look for. OIL OF OREGANO COMBINED WITH BLACK SEED OIL HIGH CARVACROL CONCENTRATION. The first three results were generic oregano oil brands sold on Amazon. None of them paired with black seed. The fourth result was a small company I had never heard of called Herbies. Their product was called Oregano+. It was the only product in my entire Google search that combined wild Mediterranean oregano with cold pressed black seed oil at a concentration that matched what Dr. Wei had described. I read every word on their website. I read the lab tests. I read the founding story. I read 47 reviews. I read the FAQ. By the time I closed the laptop at 11:47 PM I had ordered three bags. That night I told Carl what had happened. He held me on the couch for an hour and said almost nothing. The next morning I waited for the package. Here is what I learned about Herbies Oregano+ before it arrived. Oil of oregano contains a compound called CARVACROL. Carvacrol has been studied for over 30 years for one specific purpose. It is one of the most powerful natural antiparasitic compounds on the planet. In the year 2000, a clinical study was published in the journal Phytotherapy Research. Adults whose stool samples had tested positive for chronic parasitic infections were given emulsified oil of oregano daily for 6 weeks. By the end of 6 weeks, the parasites were GONE in the majority of participants. Their bloating resolved. Their digestion returned. Their energy came back. The study exists. It was published. It has been cited hundreds of times in the natural medicine literature. Almost no medical doctor in America has read it. Dr. Wei had. The reason almost nobody else has is that oil of oregano cannot be PATENTED. There is no pharmaceutical company on Earth with a financial reason to push it. There is no money in telling 53 year old bookkeepers in Sparks, Nevada, that the answer to 9 years of bloating might be a plant. There is, however, money in telling them their stomach should be cut down to 20 percent of its original size and replaced with a permanent surgical scar. That is the part I want you to sit with for a moment. The American medical system was about to schedule me for an irreversible surgical procedure to remove 80 percent of an organ that was not the source of my problem. The procedure would have cost my insurance $32,000. The procedure would have shrunk a stomach that was not the actual issue. The procedure would have left the actual issue, which was in my COLON, completely untouched. And six months after the surgery I would have been a 53 year old woman with a permanently mutilated digestive tract who was still bloated, still tired, still hard to the touch when I laid down at night, and now also unable to eat a normal meal for the rest of my life. That is what almost happened to me on the morning of March 6th, 2024. That is what was almost done to me because three different doctors over nine years had not asked me one single question about the SHAPE of my stomach. The second ingredient in Herbies Oregano+ is black seed oil. Black seed has been called "the remedy for everything but death" in the Middle East for 2,000 years. The active compound in black seed is thymoquinone. Thymoquinone reduces inflammation in the gut lining. It calms the swelling. It supports the body's natural ability to clear what should not be there. Carvacrol kills the parasites. Thymoquinone calms the damage they did on the way out. Together, they do something that 19 different products in a kitchen drawer in Sparks, Nevada, had not done in 3 years. Herbies turned out to be the only company in my entire CVS, Sprouts, and Google search that combined them at the concentration Dr. Wei had described. Wild Mediterranean oregano. Cold pressed black seed. It comes in a small brown bag, not a bottle. The bag has a tear strip across the top, the kind you find on coffee. Inside is the daily protocol Herbies developed with a master herbalist in Crete. One bag is a 30 day supply. Sold only on their website at herbies.co/products/herbies-oregano. You cannot buy it on Amazon. You cannot get it at Walmart. You cannot get it at any vitamin store or any pharmacy in any town in America. I know this because I tried. I ordered three bags on the night of March 7th. They arrived on March 11th in a padded envelope with a single sheet of paper folded around them explaining how to use it. I took my first dose on the morning of March 12th, in my kitchen, in my robe, while Carl was already at the warehouse. I am not going to lie to you and tell you something happened overnight. It didn't. Day 4, I had a bowel movement that I had been chasing for 3 months. What came out of me that morning, I am not going to describe to you in detail. But I will tell you that I sat on the toilet afterward for 11 minutes looking at it. And I will tell you that I understood, in those 11 minutes, what Dr. Wei had been trying to tell me with his finger over his lips. I had not been overweight. I had not been bloated. I had been INFESTED. For 9 years. Something had been LIVING inside me. And on the morning of March 15th, 2024, in a bathroom in Sparks, Nevada, my body finally started letting it go. Day 12, I put on a pair of jeans I had not worn since 2018. I buttoned them. Day 19, I sat through the entire 2 hour service at Holy Cross without getting up once. Day 31, my daughter Megan came home for Easter and said, "Mom, your face looks different." She could not tell me why. She just kept staring at me at the dinner table. Day 47, Carl said in bed one night, "Eileen, you look like you did when we got married." I had not realized I had stopped looking like that. Day 67, I went back to Dr. Wei for my follow up ultrasound. I sat in the same chair. I wore a different cardigan. I weighed 16 pounds less than I had on March 6th, even though I had not changed anything about my diet. Dr. Wei did the ultrasound himself this time. He was quiet for about 4 minutes while he moved the wand across my stomach. Then he set it down on the side of the table. He looked at the screen. He looked at me. He said, "Mrs. Halverson. Your colon is clear. Your distension has resolved. I am cancelling the bariatric referral." Then he leaned forward. And he raised his finger to his lips again. SHHH. And he said, "Whatever you found at CVS or wherever you ended up. Tell the women in your life. Do not tell their doctors." I have not told Dr. Holman yet. I keep meaning to. I am writing this instead. Because somewhere out there is a woman in an oatmeal cardigan who is about to lock her car in a medical plaza parking lot, and an anesthesiologist she has never met is about to walk up to her with a folder and tell her she is going to be put under in 24 minutes. If she walks into the wrong office, she is going to be in surgery within an hour. If she gets lucky and walks into Dr. Wei's office, she is going to be told something with his finger over his lips that he is not allowed to write down. I am writing it because I had 9 years of doctors who used the word "perimenopausal" when they should have been using the word "parasitic." I am writing it because I had a drawer with 19 products in it, and the only one that worked was the one I had to find on my own at 11 PM with two ingredients written on the back of a parking validation slip. I am writing it because if Dr. Patel had not been waiting for me in the parking lot that morning, I would have walked into the wrong office at 9:00 AM, signed whatever they put in front of me, and woken up that afternoon with 80 percent of my stomach in a hazardous waste bag. I want to be honest with you about something before I tell you the rest. I am not somebody who buys things on the internet because of an ad. In 9 years, I tried 19 products. I tried Senna because my sister in Reno told me about it. I tried Dulcolax because Carl's mother used it for her diverticulitis. I tried apple cider vinegar gummies because a woman on the Mel Robbins podcast said it changed her life. I tried digestive enzymes because the woman at the Whole Foods on Mae Anne pulled them off the shelf and told me I needed them. I tried a $189 probiotic from the functional medicine clinic because the practitioner told me my microbiome was "depleted" and made me feel like I had no other option. I tried "morning detox tea" because somebody in a Facebook group I was in swore by it. I tried magnesium citrate because the pharmacist at the Smith's on Pyramid Way said it would "get things moving." NONE OF THEM TOUCHED IT. I tell you that because I want you to understand the difference between a woman who is recommending something to you and a woman who is selling you something. I am recommending this. I am not selling you anything. I do not work for Herbies. I had never heard of Herbies until I sat at my kitchen table on the night of March 6th, 2024, after the most disturbing morning of my life, and typed two ingredients into Google. I have no connection to the woman who runs the company. I have no idea who packs the bags or who answers the phone if you call them. What I know is that I started the protocol on March 12th, in my kitchen in Sparks, Nevada, and by Easter my daughter was staring at me across the dinner table trying to figure out what was different about my face. What I know is that my husband Carl noticed before I told him I had started anything. What I know is that the woman who sat in Dr. Wei's office on May 12th was not the woman who had sat there on March 6th. And what I know is that if a woman I trusted had told me 9 years ago to look for oregano oil combined with black seed oil at high carvacrol concentration, I would have walked into CVS the same afternoon, walked out empty handed the same way I did in March, and finally ended up on the Herbies website where I should have ended up in 2015. So I am going to be that woman for you. This is the search I had to do alone. If you have a drawer like mine, please do not buy a 20th product before you try this one. If you have already been told that you should "consider weight loss surgery," please do not assume that surgery is the answer to a stomach that is HARD instead of soft, that is the SAME SIZE in the morning as at night, that does not respond to diet, fasting, or stress reduction. That is not a fat stomach. That is a colon that is carrying something. And you do not need to surgically remove an organ to fix it. It is sold only on the Herbies website at herbies.co/products/herbies-oregano. You cannot get it on Amazon. You cannot get it at Walmart. You cannot get it at CVS or Sprouts or Whole Foods or any other store I drove to that week. I know because I drove to them. The reason I am telling you that is because if you Google "oregano oil" you are going to find 200 brands selling some version of it for cheaper, and most of them are diluted, oxidized, or cut with carrier oils that the manufacturer hopes you will not look up. The difference between the cheap oregano oil and what is in the Herbies bag is the concentration of carvacrol, the fact that it is paired with black seed oil at the right ratio, and the fact that Herbies cold presses everything instead of using heat extraction, which destroys most of the active compound. I am not a chemist. I do not understand half of this. I am telling you what I read on their website at 11 PM on March 7th while I was sitting in my kitchen still wearing the cardigan from Reno. You follow the protocol on the sheet that comes inside the bag. That is the whole thing. You open the bag in the morning. You follow the sheet. You do it every day. Here is what I would do if I were you. I would order the 3 bag option, not the 1 bag. One bag is 30 days. Dr. Wei told me the protocol needed to be 90 days. He was very specific about that. The parasite literature is clear that 30 days is not enough. Parasites lay eggs in the lining of the intestine, and those eggs hatch on a cycle of roughly two to three weeks. If you take only a 30 day supply, you will clear the adults but the eggs will hatch into a new generation while your body is still recovering, and you will be back where you started. A 90 day protocol kills the adults, kills the larvae that hatch in week 3 and week 6, and then kills any final stragglers in week 10 before they can lay their own eggs. I ordered three bags. I used the first one through April 11th. I used the second through May 11th. I used the third through June 11th. By the time I opened the third bag, I had already had the follow up ultrasound and Dr. Wei had cancelled the bariatric referral. But the third bag mattered. The deepest changes happened in those last 30 days. The energy came back in week 9. The brain fog lifted in week 11. My skin stopped looking grey in week 12. If you order one bag, you will feel better. You may not stay better. If you order three, you finish the job. They have a 90 day money back guarantee. Not one of the 19 things in my drawer came with a 90 day refund. If Herbies did not believe what was in their bag was going to do something for you, they would not give you three months to send it back. You use the bags through the full protocol. If your body does not tell you something has changed by the end of the second bag, you mail the rest back and they refund you for all three. That is a fair arrangement. I have never been offered a fair arrangement from a supplement company in 9 years. And if it does not work for you, you send it back and you have lost nothing. But I do not think you will be sending it back. If you are reading this in an oatmeal cardigan, sitting on a couch at 9 PM with one hand on your stomach, wondering if the next phone call from your doctor's office is going to be a surgical pre-op confirmation you did not ask for, I want you to know three things. You are not alone. You are not overweight. You are INFESTED. And there is a 4,000 year old plant on a hillside in Greece, packed by hand into a small brown bag by a company called Herbies, that may finally help you put it down before an anesthesiologist named Dr. Patel walks up to you in a parking lot in Reno and tells you he is about to put you under for a problem in the wrong organ. 👉 herbies.co/products/herbies-oregano P.S. I had spent $3,940 on 19 products in 3 years. Not one of those companies offered me a refund. Herbies gives you 90 days. You use the bags through the full protocol. If your body does not tell you something has changed by the end of the second bag, you mail the rest back and they refund you for all three. That is the entire arrangement. I have never said this about a supplement before in my life, but if I had to throw out 18 of the 19 things in my drawer and keep one, this is the one I would keep. One bag for a curious try. Three bags if you actually want it gone. P.P.S. Dr. Wei, if you ever read this, I want you to know that I have told three women in my church about what you did for me. One of them was on a list for the same surgery I was almost scheduled for. She cancelled her consult last week. She started the bags on June 3rd. I have not told you because I do not want you to feel responsible for what other doctors do. But I am telling you here. You put your finger to your lips twice. That is two more times than most doctors are willing to. P.P.P.S. If you have a daughter or a sister or a friend who has been told her bloating is "just weight" and that she should consider surgery, please forward this to her. The American medical system performs over 230,000 weight loss surgeries every year. A significant percentage of those women did not have a stomach problem. They had a colon problem. And nobody asked them about the shape of it. 👉 herbies.co/products/herbies-oregano