Neurofeedback + Root Cause Medicine: Trauma, Addiction, ADHD (Dr. Josh Hersh) | Part 3

Can brain training help someone find joy again… after years of depression and trauma?

In Part 3 (finale) with Dr. Josh Hersh of Transformative Medicine (Utah), we go deeper into why neurofeedback can create lasting change — and why Dr. Hersh still insists it works best when paired with root-cause medicine (gut health, infections, nutrition, sleep, stress, IV therapies, and more).

You’ll hear powerful real-world stories:
* A teen with severe depression + repeated suicide attempts who, after months of combined care and neurofeedback, said: “I feel happy.”
* Addiction recovery support, including difficult cases like Suboxone tapering (with NAD + neurofeedback)
* ADD/ADHD + insomnia turnaround: sleep restored, meds reduced, life stability regained

This episode also answers:
* How many sessions are realistic (kids vs adults vs seniors)
* Are results permanent? When do “tune-ups” matter?
* Why Dr. Hersh focuses on treating multiple root causes simultaneously
* Why gut testing is foundational (including comprehensive stool testing)

If you’re exploring neurofeedback, functional medicine, or integrative care, this episode ties the series together with a clear message: find root causes, retrain the nervous system, and stack therapies intelligently.

Listen to the full episode her or watch it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Y_wvKjs6NM0

Visit UltraBotanica.com to learn more about us and how you can get a free sample of our products.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): And we kept working at it. And then during that entire time, her energy improved. And she didn't try to commit suicide once, which was phenomenal. And we just kept working at it. And in about six months, it was like a light switch got turned on. And she walked in the office, and she was talking about things she liked. And she said, Dr. Hirsch, I feel happy. For the first time in many, many, many, many years, she felt joy and happiness.

0:00:30 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Wow. And she wrote me a letter saying, thank you, Dr. Hirsch, for doing what no other doctor could do for me and giving me a chance at life.

0:00:48 - (Josh Bellew): Hey, everyone. Ultralife today. Josh Bellew here. And I've got on my left, Adam Payne. Yeah. CEO of Ultra Botanica, by the way, inventor of the protozorb technology, which ties right into our guest, Dr. Joshua Hirsch. I bet you were sitting on the edge of your chair like we were in the episode one and episode two. We got this guy's brilliant origin story. Kind of been on this path since a young man, and then through his own health crisis and bringing himself out of that, he's been on this incredible path. A Bastyr graduate. Bastyr School of Naturopathy. Kind of the Oxford Harv of naturopathy.

0:01:28 - (Josh Bellew): Colleges, schools, you know, we. We touched on neurofeedback, the philosophy of transformative medicine. His clinic right out there in Utah. We kind of got some practical applications, some use case scenarios. We talked about a patient experience last time, which. Yeah. But really helped me get inside the patient's mind of what's happening, because I was thinking they were going to have to work really hard to make this neurofeedback thing work. And it's very passive, which I thought was absolutely. I mean, would work for anyone. I love that.

0:02:00 - (Josh Bellew): So, anyway, we're gonna move into episode three today with Dr. Joshua Hirsch. Welcome back again. We're gonna have to do this again sometime. I think I could sit around all day, Adam, and just listen to patient stories. And I think I'm gonna, like, figure out a way to get one of these machines or go out and see him. Pretty amazing. Okay, we've got questions. Go ahead.

0:02:22 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Joshua, you touched on something. You know, it really is a passive type of treatment. The more relaxed you are, the better it works. And even if you're not relaxed, it helps your brain relax. And so it puts you in a state where you can accept the training and make the changes.

0:02:44 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. And Adam, you know this person, so I'm not going to get too personal, intimate here, but I know someone that has had some Results recently that's had real struggles emotionally, a lot of autoimmune disorders. And they have been working their tail off to get better. They are getting a little bit better, but it's like two steps forward and then like one and a half steps back and it's just so hard for them.

0:03:13 - (Josh Bellew): And when I look at this as a passive modality that can be implemented with someone, it's, it just blows my mind, brother.

0:03:21 - (Adam Payne): No, the possibilities here are enormous. The feedback mechanism here, and I was doing some background research while we were between breaks here, there is actually some work that the brain is doing, I guess your patients, when they're getting the treatment, do they see a movie or do they see, are they watching a movie or something like that?

0:03:43 - (Josh Bellew): Dr. Yeah.

0:03:45 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): So either a movie or a TV show.

0:03:47 - (Adam Payne): Yeah. And so in order to reward the brain for the right kind of or trending in the right kind of patterns, it will make the movie clearer or brighter. And if the brain strays from the correct patterns, it dims so that it rewards the brain for the right patterns.

0:04:13 - (Josh Bellew): Fascinating. And.

0:04:17 - (Adam Payne): I don't know, it beats up the brain with the wrong pattern so that the brain wants to be rewarded. It wants the positivity of the movie. And so it could.

0:04:32 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): It's either the presence of positive feedback or the absence of positive feedback. Yeah.

0:04:43 - (Adam Payne): Neuroplasticity. How quickly are or how much change is reasonable within one session? Doc, are we looking at like 10 sessions to get to a meaningful clinical endpoint or could there be some meaningful progress within one or two sessions?

0:05:06 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): That's a great question because with the three year old boy, there was a lot of neuroplasticity potential there before the age of 5, 6 years old. The brain doesn't differentiate. And so there's been cases of people with severe seizure disorders where they remove half their brain and parts of the brain or up to 90% of their brain. And there's one case I'm thinking about 90% of his brain was removed when he was a little kid and he went on to be a rocket scientist.

0:05:38 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): So the brain can differentiate very quickly at an early age, or there's a lot of neuroplasticity at an early age, but past the age of 5, 6 years old, then you're looking at 15, 20, 30 sessions to get the same results, maybe more. But even patients in their 80s, I've seen improvements, but it takes advantage of it.

0:06:06 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. And I've been thinking this one question, Adam Joshua, for each conversation that we have had in these episodes, and it's like, well, what if a person gets a result? Does somebody fall off the wagon in their brain and all of a sudden begin to readapt into old behaviors? Do you come in for a tune up? Do you backslide? Or do you see permanent change after 5, 10, 15, 20 sessions?

0:06:38 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): So over 98% of my patients have never needed additional neurofeedbacks. Once we reach the goal, you know, if you go through something really stressful like a death in the family or chronic stress of some kind, then yeah, you'd probably need to come in for a tune up. One example I'm thinking about that it took a little bit longer to improve. There was a 17 year old girl who came to see me. She had very severe depression.

0:07:11 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): She was sexually abused on a school bus when she was five years old. And she told people about it and nobody believed her. And it kept happening, finally stopped. But she developed extreme anxiety followed by very, very severe depression. And she had absolutely no desire to live. She tried to commit suicide many times. She would down bottles of pills if she found them at home, and she ended up in the mental hospital over and over again.

0:07:46 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): She didn't have a very good experience in the mental hospital because she was somewhat defiant. She wouldn't want to take her pills and they'd put her in a straight jacket. So she didn't want to go back there, but she didn't really want to live either. And her parents were like, what do we do? So when I saw her, we ran tests and her serotonin was super, super low. Ran all the tests looking at her gut function.

0:08:10 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): We found a bunch of chronic infections and she was willing to do something to try. And so we did neurofeedback. And for about six months we did neurofeedback. We did IVs for about three months. We did hyperbaric for about four months and we kept working at it. And then during that entire time, her energy improved and she didn't try to commit suicide once, which was phenomenal. And we just kept working at it.

0:08:40 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): We gave her a lot of phosphatidylcholine to help with her membranes, help with her brain. And, and about six months, it was like a light switch got turned on and she walked in the office and she was talking about things she liked. And she said, Dr. Hirsch, I feel happy. For the first time in many, many, many, many years, she felt joy and happiness. And she wrote me a letter saying, thank you, Dr. Hirsch, for doing what no other doctor could do for me and giving me a chance at life.

0:09:11 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): And it was really, really wasn't me. It was her own brain working through all those years of. Of trauma, subconsciously processing it and then putting itself in a state where it can function again. So, yeah.

0:09:27 - (Josh Bellew): So six months. Approximately how many of the neurofeedback sessions was she engaged in over this half a year?

0:09:37 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): We started at three times a week, and then we. We dropped to two times a week at some point. But yeah, yeah, man, she had to travel from out of state. So, yeah, we might have done a little bit more if she was close by.

0:09:49 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. You know, Adam, most often we don't hear about individuals recovering from that type of trauma. It literally carries them to their grave or an early grave. It. Wow.

0:10:02 - (Adam Payne): It will definitely color the. Everything in your life because it's kind of like you're always. You're on the edge for being intimately violated at any moment. And that's such a. The body can't sustain that kind of stress. I don't think the brain can't sustain that kind of stress.

0:10:25 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. Well, I want to kind of help balance out a patient expectation. And by the way, you've set the bar so high, Joshua, in my belief that neurofeedback is an absolutely necessary tool that every. I wish conventional MDs would, would. Would adhere or embrace this, but every integrative and functional orthomolecular, naturopathic doctor, health coach needs to employ this as a really, really amazing tool. But you. You frequently say, now, when we started, we did labs, we did nutrition, we looked at lifestyle, you know, sunshine walking, barefoot, exercise, you know, we look at IV therapy. What does a typical patient expect?

0:11:11 - (Josh Bellew): Intake. What is it that you are immediately dialing in on? So that you can say, here's where we got a problem. Here's where we've got a problem. What. What kind of labs or diagnostic testing is kind of a routine thing? Or when you look at a patient, based on that hour that you spend with them, talking about their health history, are you quick? Are you just going, oh, yeah, they need three tests or five tests or six tests. How do you do that?

0:11:40 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Yeah.

0:11:40 - (Adam Payne): So first you go to medical school, you go to best year.

0:11:43 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah.

0:11:44 - (Adam Payne): And then you get a degree.

0:11:45 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Right.

0:11:46 - (Josh Bellew): Thanks, Adam.

0:11:49 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Right, right. So the degree definitely helps quite a bit. So, but, you know, gut health. Gut health is foundational, so we usually run at least one test and determining what their gut health is like. And then, you know, depending on what we're treating, we might look at food sensitivities, we might look at heavy metals, we'll look at toxins. Adrenal function is essential to get that right. And then like sleep patterns, dietary, what they're, what they're eating, how much water they're drinking, exercise, movement.

0:12:29 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Yeah, all the things. So. And every patient's different. Every patient's an individual. So it's not just one size fits all. It's what does this patient need? And we go from there.

0:12:44 - (Josh Bellew): So before we move back into heavy duty neurofeedback conversation here, you mentioned the foundation of gut health. Of course, Adam and I, in this world and around integrative physicians know that for the last 15 years, everybody goes, gut health, gut health, gut health first. You kind of alluded to that being that what are one or two or three tests that you do on gut health and what are you actually trying to measure?

0:13:10 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): So one of the things that we run is a comprehensive stool analysis. We do a three day collection and we send it in. So then we can see what's happening with absorption. Are they absorbing fats? Well, are they absorbing protein? Do they have inflammation? Do they have leaky gut? What's happening with their gut microbiome? And do they have any pathogens, parasites, protozoa, fungus, et cetera? Yeah.

0:13:40 - (Josh Bellew): So you learn all of that just from being able to do a three day collection, stool sample. Right.

0:13:46 - (Adam Payne): And other tests?

0:13:47 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah, right, right.

0:13:48 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Well, that's just, that's actually just one test. It's a, it's a comprehensive stool analysis. But, yeah.

0:13:55 - (Josh Bellew): I like that. That's amazing. You literally kind of said, if you take all my toys away, I'll die on this neurofeedback thing. I'm not gonna let go of it. Do you look at that now when you see a patient coming into your clinic, transformative medicine, do you literally look at that as like a first line medical intervention for a lot of your patients?

0:14:18 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Well, you know, it makes me think about the research done by Candace Perth. Are you familiar with her book Molecules of Emotion?

0:14:27 - (Josh Bellew): I'm not, no.

0:14:28 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Yeah. So she was a graduate student in the 60s and she discovered how to discover receptors on cells. Phenomenal work, groundbreaking work. Her team was nominated for a Nobel Prize. But because she was a woman and a graduate student in the 60s, her name wasn't listed on the nomination. And that led to a lot of really negative emotions and anger and so forth, and led to some health challenges that she had.

0:14:59 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): But then she went on to discover that every thought you think becomes an actual molecule peptide. And those peptides, the building blocks of amino acids, they float around your body and they affect your mind, they affect your organs, they affect your cells. So you think about peptide therapy, how big it is, but your mind can create peptides. You can create your own peptide therapy with the thoughts that you think.

0:15:30 - (Josh Bellew): Well, I don't know if all of you guys, but you probably have heard the scripture. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. That's what I was hearing. When you're talking about Candace Perth's journey, that's just kind of staggering to me. Do you feel like with all the gadgets out there, Joshua, that, like, neurofeedback as a concept is oversold? Or is it just that everybody's jumped on the bandwagon like they do, and they're making little electrical gadgets out there trying to make a quick dollar?

0:16:05 - (Josh Bellew): What. What are your thoughts there about that? Is it oversold? Or to you, does it need to be on the front page of Inc. Forbes, Fortune, people, every magazine out there? Because to me, after this interview, I'm like, it needs to be literally on a rocket ship trajectory in the media for people to discover what this can do for them.

0:16:24 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Yep, it'd be great if they saw it more in the media. I saw Harvard Health magazine, published a little article on it and called it one of the top three drug list treatments for anxiety and depression. So it is getting a little bit of publicity. But, you know, if, you know, and to be fair, if you're using it as a monotherapy, I think you'd get some improvement, but it would take a long time. You have to look at the gut, you have to look at nutrition, you have to look at everything else that's happening in the body.

0:16:55 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): And combining those. Those different treatments together, that's where you get the best results. But if I could only pick one, it'd be neurofeedback.

0:17:05 - (Adam Payne): So because if you're thinking about a change, I mean, this is. Yeah, this is exactly right. In Dr. Hirsch's hands, we have a tool that can fundamentally change how the brain is functioning. And where it's depressed, we can make it more active. Where it's overactive, we can train the brain to bring it down into regular biorhythms. So it's truly. I think it's been an ignored field.

0:17:35 - (Josh Bellew): Yep.

0:17:37 - (Adam Payne): We've tried to affect the brain with medications like the SSRIs, and we've tried to deal with people behaviorally. But when, in fact, it is the core functioning of the brain in its electrical and biochemical functions that truly are the core of manifestation of a lot of these Diseases and a lot of these behaviors. Right. With this tool, we have something that can directly interface with the root of the problem.

0:18:15 - (Adam Payne): So. So amazing.

0:18:16 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. I just thought of a tagline with my marketing hat on. Sit back, relax, and let your brain do all the work. It's like, wow. You know, that's what it sounds like to me. It's just so very, very cool. Yeah, I'm like addicted to. Go ahead, go ahead.

0:18:33 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): You touched on something that I really, really resonate with. You mentioned as a man thinketh in his heart. So he is. And I think that's very true. You know, when people come to see me, they at least have a little bit of a desire to change the way that their bodies are working. Usually a lot of desire. They want to see themselves in a different state. They want to think of themselves in a different state. But it's hard to do.

0:19:04 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): With neurofeedback, you can help put the brain in a state where it can function better and then help the heart realize its desires better. I think that's foundationally how it works.

0:19:19 - (Josh Bellew): Joshua, while this is on my mind, because we're going to have a few more questions and I'm addicted to your use case scenarios, so I'm going to make you pull another rabbit or out of the hat before we wind down this episode. But if an individual can't make it out to Utah, is there some kind of website that people could potentially locate someone that has the skill set and the equipment that you have?

0:19:41 - (Josh Bellew): So maybe they're out in California, they can't make it to Utah. Maybe they're right here in the heart of the nation in Oklahoma and they can't make it. Is there a way for people to locate practitioners that have your skills and utilize this amazing equipment?

0:19:56 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Yeah. So the aanp, American association of Naturopathic Physicians. The website, I think is naturopathic.org you can locate a naturopathic doctor or naturopathic medical doctor. And then you can, you can put in like there's different filters. You can search for practitioners that focus on oncology, on neurology, on autoimmune conditions, et cetera. At that point then you just gotta call them and see if they, if they do neurofeedback.

0:20:29 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Some, some of us do, some of us don't.

0:20:30 - (Josh Bellew): Nice. Okay. Okay, so give us one or two more use case scenarios because each time you tell us a story, I don't think my mind is going to be blown anymore. And then you like pull a use case scenario out of your patient population. I'm like it just keeps getting better. So. Yeah, tell us a couple more experiences.

0:20:54 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Yeah, so some of the other experiences I can kind of lump together with addictions. So neurofeedback isn't the only thing we do for addictions. But I've helped treat patients with meth addictions with alcohol addiction. And then Suboxone. Suboxone is one of the most difficult things to get off of. So after someone has been on heroin for a while, they're addicted and they're given either methadone or Suboxone and then they're addicted to the methadone or Suboxone.

0:21:26 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): And it's a healthier addiction than it is to be addicted to heroin. But it's very, very difficult to get off of. And so we typically use high doses of NAD and we'll dose some NAD up to tolerance. So up to a thousand milligrams or a lot. Yeah.

0:21:50 - (Josh Bellew): And you're talking 50 milligrams or maybe 100.

0:21:55 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): But we go a thousand, maybe sometimes even 2,000. And those IVs can take a long time. They could be like eight hours sitting there with an AD IV, but that helps to re establish normal cellular function. And then we do neurofeedback on top of that. And I haven't seen a case where we got a. Haven't got a patient off of Suboxone yet. So it can, it can be very, very beneficial.

0:22:24 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. Swinging for the fence is batting a thousand. That just blows my mind. It's like your experience has been. Every single one of them has been able to go ahead and walk away from the addiction to that.

0:22:39 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Right. And then we do a speed hunting, slow taping. But, yeah, but, but how long does.

0:22:44 - (Adam Payne): It take for somebody to, to get off Suboxone?

0:22:48 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): So it depends on the dose, depends on how long they've been on it, but typically three to, three to nine months.

0:22:57 - (Adam Payne): So that's, that's, that's very, that's amazing.

0:23:01 - (Josh Bellew): All right, I'm going to throw one. I'm going to come out of left field on this next one. Individuals, ocd, add, adhd. I know you've got really significant protocols related to lifestyle and supplementation and nutrition for add, ADHD type thing, but in those kinds of behaviors where there's really no addiction, you know, it's not like they've got a physically challenging health problem. Autoimmune cancer.

0:23:29 - (Josh Bellew): Do you also see neurofeedback working for individuals that may be OCD or have ADD and ADHD?

0:23:37 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Yeah. So I can give you a case 56 year old male, ADD, ADHD and insomnia. He's a truck driver. And so he had trouble falling asleep at night and would need trazodone and then quintiapine. Quintiapine is a rather strong medication to fall asleep. And then he would need a ton of caffeine and Ritalin to get him up in the morning and keep him awake so he doesn't fall asleep. And he kept going to his doctor and his doctor's like, well, we can give you another drug and sometimes take the drug. And sometimes he'd be like, what else could I do?

0:24:23 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): He saw another practitioner in the area who did a nine channel neurofeedback. And after about 30 sessions, he was falling asleep a little bit better, but still super, super tired. And then after he stopped doing the neurofeedback, he had problems falling asleep again. When he came to see me, he was hesitant doing neurofeedback again because he's like, I'd done it before, but he was willing to give it a try.

0:24:50 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): And we found some chronic infections like Epstein Barr and cytomegalovirus in them as well. So we did IV vitamin C and IV ozone therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, nutrients supplements, some dietary changes, and neurofeedback. And I prescribed him 30 sessions. But after about 10 sessions, he started falling asleep super easily. And by 20 sessions, we had weaned him off all his medications. And somewhere around 23, 24, he's like, I don't need this anymore. I feel great.

0:25:23 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): And his ADD adhd, that's awesome. Also greatly improved. And his, his mom, not his mom, his. His wife wrote me a Google review and it said, thank you for giving my husband back, for changing his life. Yeah, like he hadn't been himself for a decade or more. And, yeah, completely changed their lives. So, yeah, man.

0:25:47 - (Josh Bellew): Dr. Joshua Hirsch. You know, kind of the stories we're hearing, Adam, I almost kind of put him in the category of a miracle worker, but, you know, he has an understanding, but he's using these. He's using these incredibly cool tools. Hyperbaric oxygen, IV therapy, neurofeedback, which he said, if I couldn't have anything else, that's what I'd have. It's like me with desserts to take away everything else. But if I have ice cream, high fat, Haagen Dazs, you know, Benninger, I'm good, you know, so anyway, is there like, okay. Transformative-medicine.com

0:26:20 - (Josh Bellew): Dr. Joshua Hirsch in Utah. Do you have any kind of final takeaway thoughts that our viewers and listeners can kind of walk away and go, I, I need to change my path so that I can change my health, change my mind so I can change my health. Anything you want to share before we, we head out on this third conversation?

0:26:43 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Yeah, yeah. So one of the things we haven't really touched on is root cause. So it's imperative to find the root cause. So everybody's root cause may be different. It might be traumas, it might be low serotonin, might be gut function, it might be all the above and then some. So finding the root cause is really important. And treating the root causes, you know, I typically treat them simultaneously.

0:27:10 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Some I've, some of my colleagues would do one at a time, but I see the best results when we treat everything together.

0:27:16 - (Josh Bellew): So, yeah, I love that. It's a shotgun approach. Right. We're not just trying to take a high powered rifle and keep prolonging the agony. Get in there and get them better in all these different areas of their world where they have a root cause disease. Awesome. Dr. Joshua Hirsch, Transformative Medicine, Utah. You can even do a remote consultation with this brilliant guy. Transformative-medicine.com

0:27:42 - (Josh Bellew): I'm Josh Bellew.

0:27:43 - (Adam Payne): Adam Payne, and you've been here with us with Dr. Josh Hirsch at Ultralife Today. Thanks for joining us.

0:27:49 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah, thanks for joining us. We'll see you again next time.

0:27:52 - (Adam Payne): Thank you, Doc.

0:27:54 - (Dr. Josh Hirsch): Thank you.