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"Ma'am, you need to come with me right now." The TSA agent did not let go of my arm when she said it. The supervisor was already walking over from the conveyor belt. A second agent had appeared from a doorway I had not noticed. 81 people were watching. The man in the Patriots cap who had been kind to me 4 minutes earlier was now staring at me like I was a criminal. I was 54. I was a retired second grade teacher from Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had not so much as run a red light in 11 years. And what the body scanner had just picked up under my navy t-shirt was about to humiliate me in a way that no court verdict could have. I want you to picture this. A 54 year old woman in elastic waist pants from Chico's, on the morning of October 14th, 2023, at 6:47 AM, at Gate B23 in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, being walked by the arm past 81 strangers toward a windowless room behind the security checkpoint. I was not carrying a weapon. I was not carrying drugs. I was not carrying anything at all. The body scanner had not flagged a bag. The body scanner had flagged a BODY. Mine. The agent's name tag said MARCIA. She walked me into the small room. She closed the door. She did not sit down. She looked at me for a long moment and then she said, very quietly, the seven words that have not left my head since. "Honey. How long have you been like this." I did not answer her. Because for the first time in ELEVEN YEARS, somebody had said it out loud. Not "have you tried cutting out gluten." Not "have you considered talking to someone about your anxiety." Not "some women just carry weight in their abdomen at this stage of life." Just one question. How long. I will tell you what Marcia said to me next. I will tell you what she gave me before I walked out of that room. I will tell you what was on the piece of scrap paper she put in my hand. But first you need to know how I ended up there. How a retired second grade teacher from Tulsa got walked across an airport security checkpoint in front of 81 strangers because her own stomach had set off an alarm on a federal body scanner. It started on a cruise in 2012. Third night out of Miami. I noticed my stomach was sticking out under a sundress in a way that did not match the rest of my body. I told my husband Dean it was the buffet. It was not the buffet. By Christmas I was unbuttoning my pants at the dinner table. By March I had stopped wearing jeans. I went to my GP that spring. She looked at my chart and said the words I would hear in some form for the next eleven years. "Mary, it's probably just IBS. Try cutting out dairy." I cut out dairy. Nothing. "Try cutting out gluten." Nothing. "Have you tried Metamucil. Have you tried probiotics. Have you tried managing your stress." I had tried all of it. By 2017 a gastroenterologist in Oklahoma City had run a colonoscopy on me. Clean. He looked at me from across his desk and said, "some women just carry weight in their abdomen at this stage of life. Have you considered talking to someone about ANXIETY." ANXIETY. I was not anxious. I was BLOATED. There is a difference. By 2019 I had paid a functional medicine clinic in Tulsa $1,847 for a stool test that came back inconclusive and a protocol of 11 supplements that did nothing. By 2021 I had a drawer in my kitchen that Dean did not know about. If you are the woman I am writing this for, you have one too. On October 13th, 2023, the night before I flew to Phoenix, I counted what was in mine. 23 products. Senna. Dulcolax. Magnesium citrate. Three different probiotics. Digestive enzymes. Apple cider vinegar gummies. Psyllium husk. Peppermint capsules. Two boxes of detox tea. Glycerin suppositories. A box of disposable gloves from CVS that I had bought for a reason I had told no one. I added it up on a yellow legal pad while Dean watched football in the living room. 23 products. 4 years. $4,847. NONE OF IT WORKED. This is the part where I am supposed to tell you that I had given up. I had not given up. I had done something worse. I had ACCEPTED IT. I had accepted that this was what 50 was. I had accepted that the woman from the 2012 cruise was a woman I was no longer going to see in my own mirror. And I had started making the people who loved me accept it too. When my granddaughter Eliza, who is 6, climbed onto my lap last Easter and laid her head against my stomach and said "grandma your tummy is hard, like a basketball," I laughed. I LAUGHED. Like it was a joke. Then I sat in my car in their driveway for 14 minutes before I could drive home. At my daughter Hannah's wedding in 2022, the photographer asked where I had been for the bridal suite photos. I said I had been "helping with the dress." I had not been helping with the dress. I had been on the toilet in the bridal suite bathroom for 73 minutes, holding my stomach with both hands, while my daughter got married in the room next door. There are no photos of me before the ceremony. There are 4 of me at the reception. In every single one, I am holding a glass in front of my stomach. I had been hiding from cameras for 6 years and I had not realized I was doing it. Now back to Marcia. In the windowless room. After eleven years. She had asked me how long. I had not answered. She did not push. She walked across the small room, sat down on the folding chair across from mine, and said: "I have a sister. She's 51. Lives in Stone Mountain. She has looked like you for nine years. She has been to six doctors. They told her all the same things they have been telling you." I started crying. I did not mean to. I had not cried in front of a stranger since 1997. Marcia did not move. She did not hand me a tissue. She did not say it was going to be okay. She just leaned forward in the folding chair and looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then she said the eight words I have not stopped hearing since. "You are not bloated. You are infested." I did not understand what she meant. I asked her. She told me. Here is what Marcia explained to me in that small room. For 2,000 years, doctors in the Mediterranean and the Middle East assumed that chronic bloating, chronic fatigue, chronic constipation, and chronic gut pain in adults were almost always caused by ONE thing. Not stress. Not food. Not anxiety. PARASITES. Worms. Organisms with eyes and mouths and digestive systems of their own, living in the warm dark folds of an adult human intestine, eating the food I was eating before my body could absorb it, laying eggs in the lining of the colon, and producing waste my own body had to filter out as if it were mine. I want you to read that sentence again. I want you to read it again because for eleven years, three different American doctors had told me my problem was behavioral, dietary, hormonal, or imaginary. And a TSA agent in Atlanta had just told me, in a windowless room behind a security checkpoint, that the reason a federal body scanner had flagged my stomach was that something was LIVING IN ME. She showed me her phone. She pulled up a page on the CDC's own website. The CDC estimates that more than 60 MILLION Americans are carrying chronic parasitic infections right now and do not know it. 60 million. That is one in every five adults you saw at the grocery store this week. One in every five women you sat next to at church on Sunday. One in every five mothers in the school pickup line. The CDC has called parasitic infection "one of the most neglected categories of disease in the United States." The American medical system does not screen for it. The American medical system does not test for it. The American medical system has been trained, since the antibiotic revolution of the 1950s, to assume that parasites are something you get in Africa, or in Southeast Asia, or in the developing world. The American medical system is wrong. The symptoms of carrying parasites are, almost word for word, the symptoms I had been carrying to my doctor for eleven years. Chronic bloating that does not respond to diet changes. Constipation that does not respond to fiber. A stomach that pushes out four inches past your actual body by 4 PM. Fatigue that no amount of sleep fixes. Sugar cravings that feel like somebody else is driving them. Brain fog that nobody can explain. A sense that something inside you is wrong that nobody believes. Marcia's sister had not figured this out from a doctor. She had figured it out from a functional medicine practitioner in Decatur who had asked her ONE question her gastroenterologist had never asked. "When was the last time you swam in a lake. Ate sushi from a strip mall. Pet a dog at a campground. Drank water from a hotel ice machine in another country. Ate a salad at a chain restaurant." Her sister had done all five of those things in the year her stomach started swelling. The practitioner explained to her that the average American adult is exposed to parasitic organisms 14 different ways every single year. Pets. Pools. Produce. Soil. Restaurant kitchens. Plumbing. Public bathrooms. Hotel ice machines. Sushi. Undercooked pork. Salad bars. Petting zoos. Children. Daycare. Most people's bodies fight them off. Some people's bodies do not. When your body does not, the parasite does not leave. It feeds. It multiplies. It lays eggs. It produces gas as a byproduct of digesting your food before you can. It produces inflammation that swells the lining of your intestine and makes your stomach push out the way mine had been pushing out for six years. It slows down the movement of the colon because a slow colon is a comfortable home. And it stays. For 9 years in the case of Marcia's sister. For 11 years in the case of a retired second grade teacher from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Marcia tore a piece of scrap paper off the security desk pad. She wrote two words on it. She put it in my hand. The two words were: HERBIES OREGANO+ She said, "Mrs. Holloway, your flight boards in 17 minutes. You're going to make it. But I want you to look this up when you land in Phoenix." I made it. I sat in seat 24C of Delta 1247 from Atlanta to Phoenix and I held that piece of scrap paper in my left hand for the entire 3 hour 47 minute flight. I buried my father on the 15th. I got home on the 17th. I looked it up. Here is what I learned. 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 the 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. The reason almost no doctor in America has read it 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 54 year old women in Tulsa that the answer to eleven years of bloating might be something that has been growing on a hillside in Greece for 4,000 years and used by Mediterranean grandmothers for parasite cleanses since before Christ was born. The second ingredient on Marcia's piece of paper was 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 the parasites caused. 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 23 different products in a kitchen drawer in Tulsa had not done in 4 years. Herbies is the only company I found that combines them in the right ratio. 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. Sold only on their website at herbies.co/products/herbies-oregano. You cannot buy it on Amazon. You cannot get it at Walmart. Only from them. I ordered it on October 18th. I ordered three bags. Each bag is a 30 day supply. I will tell you why I ordered three instead of one in a minute. It arrived on October 22nd, in a small padded envelope, with the three brown bags inside and a single sheet of paper folded around them explaining how to use it. I took my first dose on the morning of October 23rd, in my kitchen, in my robe, with a cup of coffee, while Dean was already at work. I am not going to lie to you and tell you something happened overnight. It didn't. Day 4, I went to the bathroom in the morning without taking a Dulcolax the night before. First time in 8 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 9 minutes looking at it. And I will tell you that I understood, in those 9 minutes, what Marcia had meant in the windowless room. I had not been bloated. I had been INFESTED. For eleven years. Something had been LIVING inside me. And on the morning of October 27th, 2023, in a bathroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, my body finally started letting it go. Day 9, I put on a pair of jeans I had not been able to button since 2019. I buttoned them. Day 14, I sat through the entire Sunday service at First Methodist without getting up once. Day 22, I made it through Thanksgiving dinner at my son's house in Bartlesville without unbuttoning anything. Day 41, Eliza climbed onto my lap and laid her head against my stomach and did not say anything. Day 67, Dean said at the breakfast table: "Mary, you look like yourself again." I had not realized I had stopped looking like myself. Day 94, I flew back to Phoenix to visit my sister Carol for what would have been my father's 81st birthday. I went through security at Hartsfield-Jackson. Gate B23. The same gate. I did not see Marcia. I went through the body scanner. I stepped out the other side. Nobody put a hand on my arm. Nobody asked me to come anywhere with anyone. I sat in 24C. I held nothing in my left hand. I cried for about 4 minutes somewhere over New Mexico. The man next to me asked if I was okay. I said yes. For the first time in eleven years, I meant it. I am writing this because somewhere out there is a woman in a navy t-shirt and elastic waist pants who is about to walk into a TSA line, a Costco, a church pew, or her own daughter's wedding, and her body is going to do to her what mine did to me on October 14th. I am writing it because I had eleven years of doctors who never once asked me when the last time was I swam in a lake or ate sushi from a strip mall. I am writing it because I had a drawer with 23 products in it, and the only one that worked was the one a TSA agent in Atlanta wrote down on a piece of scrap paper. I am writing it because if Marcia had not put that paper in my hand, I would still be carrying it. 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 eleven years, I tried 23 products. I tried Senna because my friend Pat at church told me about it. I tried Dulcolax because Dean's mother used to swear by it. I tried apple cider vinegar gummies because a woman on a podcast said they changed her life. I tried digestive enzymes because the woman at the GNC at Woodland Hills Mall pulled them off the shelf and said, "honey, you need these." I tried a $147 probiotic from the functional medicine clinic because the practitioner told me my microbiome was "compromised" and made me feel like I had no other option. I tried "morning detox tea" because somebody on Instagram with 400,000 followers told me her bloating was gone in three weeks. I tried magnesium citrate because the woman at the Sprouts Farmers Market on 71st Street said it would "get things moving." NONE OF THEM TOUCHED IT. Some of them worked for three days. Some of them worked for a week. Most of them did nothing at all. A few of them made me feel worse and I quietly put them back in the drawer because I did not want to admit I had spent another $40 on something that was not going to fix me. 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 before October 14th, 2023. 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 from the brown bag on October 23rd, 2023, in my kitchen in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and by the time Christmas came around I was wearing a sweater I had bought in 2017 that had not fit me in 4 years. What I know is that my husband Dean noticed before I told him I had started anything. What I know is that my granddaughter Eliza stopped saying my tummy was hard. What I know is that the woman who sat at Thanksgiving dinner at my son's house in Bartlesville last November was the same woman who had been on a cruise out of Miami in 2012. And what I know is that if a woman I trusted had handed me a piece of scrap paper at any point in those eleven years with the words HERBIES OREGANO+ on it, I would have ordered it the same night and saved myself thousands of dollars and the better part of a decade. So I am going to be that woman for you. This is the piece of scrap paper. If you have a drawer like mine, please do not buy a 24th product before you try this one. If you have already tried a probiotic and a fiber supplement and a detox tea and a cleanse and a low-FODMAP diet, please do not assume this is more of the same. The 23 things I tried over four years all had one thing in common. They were trying to manage symptoms. This is the only thing I have ever taken that worked on the cause. 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 any vitamin store or any pharmacy in any town in America. Only directly from Herbies. 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. I made that mistake the first time. I ordered a $19 bottle on Amazon two weeks before I ordered the Herbies bag, and I want you to know I took the Amazon one for four days and felt nothing at all. The difference between the cheap oregano oil and what is in the Herbies bag is the concentration of carvacrol, the way it is paired with the black seed oil, 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 October 17th while I was sitting in my kitchen still wearing the elastic pants from the airport. You follow the protocol on the sheet that comes inside the bag. That is the whole thing. You do not change anything else you are doing. You do not change your diet, you do not change your medications, you do not buy any other product from them. You open the bag in the morning. You follow the sheet. You do it every day. They have a 90 day money back guarantee, and I want you to think about that for a minute before you decide what to do. Not one of the 23 things in my drawer came with a 90 day refund. Not the $147 probiotic. Not the $89 detox tea. Not the $58 digestive enzymes. None of them. 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. That is not how companies that sell hopeful nonsense operate. Companies that sell hopeful nonsense take your $40, ship you a bag of leaves, and disappear. 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 a fair arrangement. I have never been offered a fair arrangement from a supplement company in eleven years. That arrangement is the reason I clicked the button on October 18th when I was sitting in my kitchen in my robe with a piece of scrap paper from a TSA security desk in Atlanta in my left hand. 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. The parasite literature is clear that 30 days is not enough. The reason is that parasites lay eggs in the lining of the intestine, and those eggs hatch on a cycle of roughly two to three weeks. If you only take a 30 day supply, you will clear the adults but the eggs will hatch into a new generation while your body is still trying to recover, 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 November 22nd. I used the second one through December 22nd. I used the third one through January 22nd. By the time I opened the third bag, I had already buttoned the jeans, sat through Thanksgiving without unbuttoning anything, and stopped hiding from cameras. But I want you to know that the third bag mattered. The deepest changes happened in the last 30 days. The energy came back in week 9. The brain fog lifted in week 11. The skin on my face 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. I would follow the protocol on the sheet exactly the way it is written. I would keep a small note on your phone for the first 30 days. Just the date, and one sentence about how your stomach felt that day. I did this on the back of an envelope and I am glad I did because the change is gradual and you forget what week 1 felt like by the time you get to week 4. 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 elastic waistband, sitting on a couch at 9 PM with one hand on your stomach, wondering if anybody else lives the way you have been living, I want you to know two things. You are not alone. And you are not bloated. 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. 👉 herbies.co/products/herbies-oregano P.S. I had spent $4,847 on 23 products in 4 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 22 of the 23 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. Marcia, if you ever read this, I went back to Hartsfield-Jackson on January 16th. I looked for you. I had a card in my purse. You weren't there. I asked the supervisor where you were and he said you had transferred to a different terminal. I left the card with him. I hope you got it. You handed me my life on a piece of scrap paper in a windowless room. I have not forgotten. P.P.P.S. If you have a daughter or a sister or a friend who has been complaining about her stomach for years and getting nowhere with her doctor, please forward this to her. I almost did not write it. I am glad I did. I would have liked somebody to forward something like this to me in 2014 instead of 2024. Ten years is too long to carry something that has eyes and a mouth and is laying eggs in the lining of your colon while your doctor tells you to drink more water. 👉 herbies.co/products/herbies-oregano