Undiagnosed Infections Are Silently Causing Chronic Disease | Dr. Richard Horowitz

**Dr. Richard Horowitz** (0:00)
At this point, like you, I've seen over 13,000 chronic leal patients who've been to 30, 40 doctors. The most was 100, by the way, who ended up getting better. The key six root causes that I was finding is, number one, these infections, abacterial infections like Lyme, but also one that a lot of people don't know about, which is Bartonella.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (0:15)
What you're saying here is that all of these have similar underlying causes. If you treat those underlying causes, the downstream effects tend to get better without treating them directly.

**Dr. Richard Horowitz** (0:24)
Correct. And that's the problem in medicine. The way we were taught is name the disease, throw the drug at it. But you didn't get to the root causes of why they were sick.

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You and I are those kinds of doctors that people go to after they've seen everybody.
I used to work at Canyon Ranch, and my joke was it was a health resort, and I was the doctor of last resort.
I'm a resort doctor.

**Dr. Richard Horowitz** (2:37)
That's exactly what they would call me as the doctor of last resort.

**Dr. Mark Hyman** (2:39)
Resort doctor, yeah. I think we're going to talk about this chronic disease epidemic. You recently wrote a book called Ending Chronic Illness, which is a really important book. We've come to all the same conclusion. Anybody who's really seriously looking at chronic disease, who's looking at root causes, who's trying to understand the body, who's seen 10,000-plus patients, knows that what we thought in medical school was not the right map for the body, and that so many of our chronic diseases have very similar underlying root causes and need a very different approach to address the dysfunctions we see in people. Your book is really a roadmap on how to do that, which is amazing because so many people are struggle and they suffer and they don't need to suffer. Maybe you can take us back to how you're a regular doc, and you got trained traditional medicine like I did.
When did you go, wait a minute, I think we're missing something here. When was that moment for you and you're like, wait, shit, this isn't the whole story.

**Dr. Richard Horowitz** (3:31)
For me, what was interesting, it was almost a spiritual path because I did my medical training in Belgium and French for seven years, and I started studying with Tibetan Buddhist Lamas in 1981 When I was leaving, I don't know if you knew the story.