She Had Every POTS Symptom. POTS Was Never the Problem.

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Integrative You Radio. I am super excited about this topic, primarily because I got to wear my investigative hat last week. And as Nick said, all he heard from my desk as I was in full investigative mode was, oh shit, no! I was piecing every dot together for a client who presented to us with POTS syndrome. And don't get me wrong, when people come to us with a specific diagnosis like POTS, we do not look at them as that label or that diagnosis. We're always thinking, well, what's the true root cause? Because a lot of these diagnoses. Are just a description of your symptoms. And if we can name your symptoms and we can put it inside of a diagnosis, then there is a medication or a surgery or a procedure that goes along with that. So I want you guys to understand why the system is built the way that it is. And this is one of the reasons why people sometimes get denied when they go get blood work or get a procedure, because they find that it wasn't medically necessary or it didn't coincide with a Proper quote unquote diagnosis. So there's a bunch of people that aren't doctors that make these rules. And don't get me wrong, it works because people want answers. When you are ill for so long, uh, you just you want to know what the hell it is. So when it goes on so long, you are like almost relieved to say, I have pots. Okay, there's a reason, there's an answer. But sadly, it's not giving you the true root. It's just putting a label on you that now has to be managed through the quote unquote textbook of how POTS is treated. And our investigative process, my investigative process, is to really look at the big picture and say, is this POTS? Is it something else? And if it is POTS, what is the actual root cause? And so There was a lot of interesting things that I uncovered, which we're gonna talk about today. Uh, for those of you that are listening to us on your phone or you're listening to us on our podcast Podbean, Spotify, iTunes, all of those things, you can always listen to this later on YouTube because we post in both places, because there's just a couple of visuals that will help you really understand the information that we're going to be talking about today. Uh Because it's a bit of an an anatomy thing. But overall, if you're just listening, you're you're gonna get the gist of it. And the goal is to open your eyes to the possibilities, give you answers around why you might be experiencing very particular symptoms when it comes to POTS, and also to give you some insight on what to do next. So before I dive in, Dr. Nick, got anything to share? You're just gonna let me roll. I'm just gonna let you roll for a little bit. I've been just taking notes as usual. You know, I come very well not prepared. so I've just been taking a lot of notes on my my thought process, which is completely different than your thought process, on the uh the mind-body, you know, correlation creation of the symptoms that one feels and is experienced throughout the body. So Well, for you guys that are here that are new, Dr. Nick and I work together, but we bring different things to the table. I am like the master investigator, it's my jam. I love it. Finding the root cause is is everything to me. And Dr. Nick assists in that process because as we navigate our testing process, one of the very unique things that we do is DNA testing. Dr. Nick then we establish what's stressing the DNA, and Dr. Nick has created a technique to figure out exactly how to neutralize the stress on the DNA. So your protocol, your recommendations, your healing plan is actually completely curated to you, to your DNA, which is one of the reasons why we get great results. But if you don't know the root cause, then that part is irrelevant. And Dr. Nick has a specialty in really helping. with the mind-body connection to the symptoms that we experience. I work with a lot of our clients on vision, helping them see what life is going to be like when they reclaim their health. And Nick is really fantastic at helping them to work through the things that got them where they are in the first place or potentially played a role in the development of these symptoms. Because again, if you're new here, You might not understand that in this moment. The only thing that I feel like is being peddled all over the internet is nervous system dysregulation. And listen, everyone's stressed out. Sadly, that's the world we live in. But in all the years we've been doing this, we have not seen a series of symptoms or a significant diagnosis like POTS without discovering that there is a significant ah emotional event, adversity, a series of events that happens leading up to the decline of health. Yeah, I mean it's it's easy for us to say and understand, but it's you know, coming from the person that doesn't deal with this every single day and every single moment, there's really no difference between the body and the mind. You know, we we we think that they're separate, but they're it's kind of like a musical scale where you think that the notes are separate, but actually when you get to the end of one octave and the start of the other, they overlap each other. And that's how the mind and the body are. They're they're really intertwined. So you can't have like a dysregulated body without a dysregulated mind. And you can't have a dysregulated mind without having a dysregulated body. The awareness will be, oh, you know, I have these mental issues or I have these body issues, but really there's there's issues in both. There always is, they're entangled. Of course. And this is being proven by neuroscience on on the regular nowadays. It's just sadly it hasn't really been brought into conventional medicine because everything is a bunch of separate special spe specialists and it's thought everything is these separate entities. So we will no longer derail, but for those of you that have pots, know someone with pots, there's a variety of different symptoms that come up. And a lot of times You don't have two people with the diagnosis of POS and it looks exactly the same. And their history sure as heck doesn't look exactly the same. But this is classified as postural orthatic tachycardia syndrome. Some people have racing heart, some people don't. Some people have racing heart occasionally, some people don't. And the other thing is that some people get up and they start to get off kilter, they get lightheaded, dizzy, some faint. It depends on the severity of the situation and it depends on the root causes. This is really congruent with all diagnoses. This is why they look different amongst people, because it can vary person to person depending on what is truly at the root. So this individual that came to us, she is a young woman in her early 20s and in a wheelchair. She literally graduated from college with a very prestigious degree. ah She said it was one of the hardest things that she ever did. And it was a very, very stressful time for her. Then fast forward, she ended up in the hospital. ah Her right ovary was taken because it was completely necrotic. What that means is there was no blood flow to that ovary. It turned black, the tissue was dead, and they had to remove it. The typical answer for that is torsion. And if something twists and cuts off blood flow, then that could be the reason why that happened. That was what she was told. Fast forward, then we start to have these different symptoms. Can't get up for long periods of time in a standing position without getting light-headed, dizzy, nauseous, and feeling extremely poor. Fast forward, now we're to the point that we can't even get up for a minute to two minutes, and we're pretty much Consistently in a seated or laying down position. And so thinking about the catastrophic effect on this person's life, who's really just starting her life, and being labeled with pots and being told that there's not really many options for her. So they ended up, I've worked with the mother before. They reached out and we said, just let us investigate and see what's going on. So I'm doing our DNA testing. I'm gonna give you just a quick understanding of this. When you go and you get blood work, and let's say a virus comes up, the question you might have to your doctor is: well, is the virus active? Is it not active? What is it doing? What problems is it causing? What symptoms is it causing? Same thing. your liver enzymes are elevated. Okay, what's causing my liver enzymes to be elevated? What is this doing to my health? What symptoms is this causing me? And a lot of times they don't have the answer to that. They just say, you know, it must be hereditary genetic. Not true. Anywho, when we do our DNA testing, what we're doing is we're looking to piece the puzzle together with the different labs that we see. So in running labs for this individual, there was a multitude of blood clotting factors that came up. The start of what's called antiphospholipid syndrome, and there was also presence of an autoimmune against the platelets. So these are two contradictory things because if you have an attack on your platelets, you're going to have very thin blood and the risk of bleeding out. But when you have the very particular combination that this person had, she had a combination of antiphospholipid syndrome, a combination of an autoimmune against platelets, and a combination of a positive ANA. This is actually showcasing that there is increased hypercoagulability, aka blood clotting that's happening. So that was first part. So I'm like, okay, this can definitely cause some problems with what she's experiencing. As we then started to navigate our other piece of data, which is our DNA testing, one of the primary things that I saw was a varicose dilation of the left kidney in particular, the vein going to the left kidney. So when you guys look at people's legs, old they you see it a lot in older people, and they have those big, puffy veins that you could see they're bulging out. That's a varicose vein. You can have varicose veins inside of your body. You could have varicose veins that are going to different organs. So this individual particularly had this varicose vein and inflammation in the left kidney and the left vein of the kidney. So, as you then we I continued my investigative process, it turns out that she actually had something called nutcracker syndrome. And this is the part where I mentioned that being on YouTube might help a little bit because I'm gonna just give you guys the the verbal. If you take your hand flat, which of course I have ink on my hand, you take your hand flat and then you create a C with your other hand. And what you're gonna be showcasing is the flat hand is something called your aorta. The C-shaped hand, connected to your flat hand, is going to be your superior mesenteric artery. So overall, the only thing you need to know is that inflammation in both of those is going to smash the left, particularly left, vein that is coming from the left kidney. Not the right, the left. So then I take this a step further, and I'm like, wait, which ovary did she have removed? Go back into her history. Hol shit, it's the left ovary. And then when you look at the anatomy, The vein to the left ovary is directly connected to the vein of the left kidney. So essentially, what's happening is that she is having clots in the vessels of her liver. She's having clots in the vessels associated with her aorta and the mean vessels in the uh thora the what am I trying to say? That's not a scientific term. Your your thorax, it's pretty much like where your heart and your lungs and everything is. So she's having this blood stagnancy because of these clots that are building up. She has a clot that's showing up directly in the venous system of her kidney. And now this is creating all of this back pressure of blood, and it's also occluding blood from other parts of the body. So essentially, this blood clotting disorder started and the ovary was the first to be compromised. And now, as it has worked its way up to completely compromising the left kidney. Now the POT syndrome has come or the POT symptoms, I should say, have become extremely problematic. So this is huge because feedback number one for this person was the loss of the ovary. But she was told it's just torsion. That is all. There was no proper due diligence to check if there was clotting or if there were any other possible root causes. She was given a series of medications and shipped on her way. Then We have pot syndrome. And because she had the textbook symptoms, she's just you have pots, that's all. No connection of the two, and no answers as to what the fuck is going on. And so she's really, really smart, this girl. And she goes, Are you mean to telling do you mean to tell me that what happened to my ovary could happen to my kidney? I'm like, it it could, but we now have this data and we now have solutions. So no, but If we did not do this due diligence of understanding all of the pieces and understanding the root cause, that could have been part of your future. I your smirk, what do you gotta say? Mm-hmm. It's you know, one of the th I'm always just like writing down notes of words you say. And, you know, coming I'm always looking at everything how energy first flows through not getting too deep, but from the spirit to the mind to the body. You know, it was one of the Paul Braggs, um, he was really amazing at understanding the the bigger picture and how the the body actually worked, and he said that The spirit guides the mind, the mind dictates the body. So everything that the mind perceives, that stress actually goes and gets processed and expressed by the body. You directly said that, you know, looking at the autoimmune issues, the varicose veins, that there is this huge back pressure buildup of the blood. That the blood is your circulation of love. It's your life force around the body. And when you look at the venous system and the artery system. You know, arteries is pumping blood out, veins are bringing blood back. So the veins, when the veins are the issue, it's bringing the there's an issue of bringing love back into yourself, back into your heart system. And the that back pressure of blood buildup shows that there is an extreme back looking at the past buildup of pressure that hasn't been dealt with for a long time. And when you think about pressure, pressure is always something that we perceive when we're trying to achieve a form of success that's actually not in alignment with who we are. It's it's not authentic. So the the body is always going to express symptoms as a feedback mechanism for the mind to be able to use as a teacher, as an opportunity for us to get back into alignment, to to get back into what some call the flow state when we look at, you know, athletics and things like that. But it's really just helping us to become the the true version of ourself, our higher self, connected with our spirit, the the the the the most. Were you waving to me? the the our spirit, which is the our highest, truest version of ourself. And so it's not that these are bad things, they're they're really just um You know, the body is just a symbol for us to be able to to learn what that symbol means and to use that information to better serve our mind, which actually directs us to living a congruent, authentic, highly quality life. But I don't think a lot of people have that level level of awareness or clarity because we no one's taught that to us. They sure as hell are not teaching it in school. And I feel like the only time we really learn about this is when we hit these extreme adversities and challenges that almost crush us. That if we are committed to not letting it kill us, we are like, I gotta now explore what this means and how to use it. Otherwise, I'm just gonna crawl up in a ball and Maybe fucking die. But Well and I mean and it's just that's just how we're processed. I mean, we're programmed, I mean like we're we're programmed is, you know, we go into that, you know, w it's not that she didn't have Potts syndrome, it's just that Potts syndrome was a broad diagnosis and it wasn't really the root cause. You know, sh she she did have issues from sitting and she does have issues from sitting to standing and and having that change. And when you look at that, that's you know, a form of unstability, that unsafe, you know, there's a aspect of fighting against time. uh with that pressure, you know, that pressure is really explain what what that is because i everything you said, she literally went was in college in a very prestigious university, going for a very um difficult degree in engineering. And that was the key word she said. She's like, it was just so much pressure. She's like, Masters, no chance. She's like, I can't go through that again. It was Such an intense time in my life. There was so much pressure. It was unbearable. Like these are her words. And the self-love, we ended up talking a little bit about this in an indirect way. But I said to her, you know, we were we were talking about the heart and how. Anatomically, you know, X, Y, and Z can happen, but how this really goes back to sometimes not really like our identity being wrapped up with things that are outside of us. And I was telling her my own story and she's like, you know, I relate to that because essentially what I said was when I was going through the start of my, you know, mm-hmm mental, spiritual, emotional healing journey, I was asked, Who are you as a mother? Who are you as a business owner? And the the third question was, who are you? As Nicole. And I didn't actually understand the question. I had uh one, I had no way of answering it. And I honestly didn't even understand the question because my identity was wrapped up in what I did. It it wrapped up in who I was as a mother, how I was performing in my business, and how what my clients thought of me, etc. And she was describing something very similar of, you know, my identity has been wrapped up in what I do and what I achieve and what degrees I acquire. And she was struggling alone with the fact that she might not get a master's because it, you know, she's like, I don't even know where my health would be if I went down that road. But she did not really know who she was beyond what she did and what she accomplished, which I think is a lot of people these days. Well, and that's that's honestly what drives the truer root cause, you know, I don't like labels, but the label and diagnosis of nutcracker syndrome. You know, the nutcracker syndrome is that not having the boundaries, the boundaries of, you know, am I am I doing for an identity or does my identity come from who I am and from who I am I do? You know, those those seem like very similar things, but when you really stop and pause on it. It's it's not what you do. It's your favorite quote, how you do it, and how you do it is actually based off of your identity, who you are. And if you're in that alignment, then there's there's no pressure. You're you're not actually there's there's no pressure of the achievement of doing, but there's also no pressure of time. You don't care how long something takes. Something may take a week, a month, years, and it's just because you're you're doing it out of love for who you are. And and then you that's the the veins. That doing is actually bringing love back into yourself. If you're doing if you're doing something that's not in a true alignment with who you are, you're not that doing isn't bringing any love back up to who you are. So there's gonna be a buildup of back and back and back pressure. Yeah. But I think it's that's the thing, is a lot of us are doing things to overcome what we don't want to be, overcome the fears of being poor or irrelevant or non-visible or be like our parents or whatever the case may be. We are not necessarily making decisions that are truly inspiring, that are aligned. A lot of people don't even know what that actually means. And you know, this can sound like a silly quote, but I remember watching the The movie The Great Gatsby, the newer one. And that super famous actress. I'm forgetting. Margot Robbie. And she was at the Great Gatsby party, literally trying to get in. They're like, You're not on the list. We don't even know who you are. And he's like, Are you a star? Kind of like talking down to her. And she's like, You either are or you're not. And I am a star. And she wasn't. She was not an established actress at that point, but she was being. Who she felt she was, who she believed she was. And she said, I am a star. And then fast forward in the movie, she becomes this super famous actress. And this is kind of the idea of what we're talking about of being versus doing. When you're doing, doing, doing for achievement, you will hit a plateau. I did it. I know it. You will do, and I was doing to overcome what I didn't want to be. I was trying and controlling every step. So that I could create a s level of success that I never even visibly saw in my childhood. And then you get stuck, and then so it was really intense. Scorpio and I'm a projector and a Puerto Rican and Italian. Yeah, it's like a whole fucking mix. But the moral of the story is that one, you deserve to understand the root cause. And you guys need to stop settling for these diagnoses that when you go on Google and you read about your diagnosis, and all it's doing is it's telling you all the symptoms you have. But if it's not telling you what the root cause is, your doctor's not telling you, you deserve that information because that is the most empowering place where you can take action on it. Maybe on your own, maybe with a partner, maybe with a health advisory board, who knows? But at least you have enough data to start making better decisions. And then the second part of this is that if you're working with a team or a practitioner and they are not considering your life, they are not considering your relationships. They are not considering the amount of pressure that you feel. They're not considering the fact that you do everything for everyone else, but not yourself. They're not considering your deepest fears that keep you stuck. They don't consider the cycles that keep running. You're always abandoned. You're always losing this. You're always, you know, having this type of experience, then you will get stuck. You will. And don't get me wrong, you can take the reins on this in your life, but it could take a really long time because you don't potentially always have the right data and the right framework. And you know, Nick and I have been compounding this type of work, but also experiences with real families and real people with real health problems. And then we've been in tandem going along our own journey of our own, you know, glass ceilings we've hit and our own limitations and our own like, well, things look good on paper, but I don't feel fulfilled. Like, holy shit, I just had a son. Who the fuck am I? I don't even know who I am unless I'm running a business. There's There's so many things that we navigate in life. There's so many transitions. There's so many challenges. And if you can have the right data, the right people in your field that have already achieved what you want to fucking achieve. Literally, this was a quote by um Hermosy. It's not my quote. Maybe it's not even his quote, because I think everything is recycled these days. But he said, Stop listening to the people closest to you and start listening to the people closest to your goal. And you have to think about this when you hire a doctor, even. You can't just assume they're a doctor, so they're trustworthy, or they're a doctor, so they're gonna help me. If this is a doctor that is, you know, has no relationships and no family and their own poor health or overcame cancer, had cancer three times, like you have to start thinking about who you're hiring to help you. Have they actually achieved what you want to achieve? And if you just want to get rid of your symptoms, take the pill, go for it. That's That's the easiest way to be really honest. But if you're the person that's here because you want more information, you are trying to get your health back because you have goals. You have a life to live. You want to see your family grow and be well. You want to play with your kids, your grandkids, you want to see your business succeed. You want all the things out of life, then you're in the right place because we're going to give it to you straight. And guess what? It might be simple. But it's not always easy. And that's that's a quote from Napoleon Hill, because he's the guy who wrote drink and grow rich. Oh, always, always. Jeez, here we go. well this might be very new information for a lot of people. And anytime you have new information anytime you have new information, it it you know it there's parts of it there's parts of it that may seem simple, but you could be also be like, fuck, I'm overwhelmed right now. This is everything that I don't know anything about because I've never been taught this. I've never and like you said, we weren't taught this either. We just continued asking better quality questions because the shit we did learn, it it it didn't work. Um, unfortunately. So, you know, if you are and our biggest challenges were our biggest roast birds. If you are feeling overwhelmed right now or frustrated, that's 100% okay. But if you stay in that frustration, you stay in that overwhelm, that's the problem. So it's always about, you know, change is uncomfortable. And if you just want to be comfortable, take the pill. But if you want to live a better quality life, it's gonna be uncomfortable. The the journey isn't comfortable, but the the uncomfortableness doesn't fucking matter. when you're actually being who you are, because that's when you feel the gratitude. That's when you feel the love. That's when the blood circulating that can actually fuel every single cell, tissue, and organ of your body. That's when life is actually great. Not comfortable. Comfortable isn't a great life. A great life is being grateful for your life. Hundred percent. I'm gonna leave you with one last thing. Do not betray your future by staying loyal to your past. So exactly what Nick said. If you are the person that's overwhelmed, you're like, holy shit, I just drank from a fire hose, I'm never listening to their podcast again. Cool, that's okay. But but overall, it's step one in a new level of awareness. And the more that you stay loyal to your past programs and your past adversary uh adversities, you will betray your future and you will betray all of your potential for a fucking amazing future. So you marinate on that, everyone. Ciao ciao.