What No One Is Telling You About Autoimmune Gut Conditions

hello hello everyone welcome to our new webinar series for the new year so for those of you that are on your already if you want to just write in the chat box to just let me know if you can hear me okay I just want to make sure the sound quality is on before I start so feel free to add to the chat let me know if you can hear me in addition referencing the chat box we will be doing a QA closer to the end so definitely feel free to add questions to the chat at any point I am happy to answer your questions towards the end anything's more specific on any of your specific conditions so so definitely feel free to do that and then for those of you that are new to our webinar so we've been doing the webinar for a couple of months now but in 2019 I wanted to do something a little bit different and I wanted to feature a theme every single month because there are so many different types of conditions that we are all dealing with and we always want to know a little bit more about you know what's the root cause number one but also what can we be doing about it to start feeling better so today our big focus is really honing in on autoimmune gut conditions but we're definitely going to be just kind of talking about the limitations and testing and some of the things that get really really confusing when we're trying to research what's best for us so I'm going to be shedding light on all of those different things so again feel free to write in any questions I am definitely going to touch on those towards the end all right so I did make a fancy PowerPoint slide for you guys primarily because I don't want to go off on tangents so so I'm going to be kind of going through some of these slides and shedding light on all of these different topics but I do want to just kind of give you a little bit of a background of who I am a little bit about what I do and why I do it so for those of you that are new can kind of understand a little bit more about the whole concept of Integrative Medicine at the end of the day so this webinar is going to really be able to dive in to just kind of have you understand the limitations in testing which really brings me to this quote that I constantly say with patience is you don't know what you don't know if you haven't had the right testing it's not possible for you to really know what's going on in your body and there's also a lot of false beliefs that we have one of the big ones is that where our health is a hundred percent going to decline with aging and I'm going to shed light a little bit on that and how that relates back to the gut and then obviously being able to give you some tools of how you can start this process of actually getting answers and then obviously starting to feel better which is most important so a little bit about our practice integrative Wellness Group is we have always done things a little bit differently but I think that primarily in my experience and going through school and going through clinical practice I just found that this concept of always seeking out the specialist or seeking out the experts even when I was going through just learning and trying to learn about Lyme and learn about mold and learn about gut issues I found myself really taking pearls of knowledge from all different places and all different people and I never found that sticking with one protocol or or one concept or following you know one set of research was what was getting me results in my clinical practice so I really wanted to think beyond just focusing on this one approach and truly move into an integrative space which has really been such an evolution number one but also number two it's really allowed us to get amazing clinical results in a very very short amount of time which I personally find to be really really exciting so for me my education has definitely been a journey I would classify myself now as being an integrative medicine physician that specializes in complex cases and what I call mystery conditions and I primarily love being able to play detective with my patients and being able to dig in and ask better questions do better testing and figure out what is the true root of what's going on with them and because of that approach and using the right testing and asking better questions I'm able to work with so many different populations and so many different pathologies because at the end of the day when we really think about this concept of a diagnosis our diagnosis is strictly a description of our symptoms and for those of you on this webinar specifically you're you know you may be dealing with irritable bowel syndrome also known as IBS if you really think about irritable bowel syndrome it's just describing your symptoms it's describing that your gut is irritable it's actually not necessarily giving you a definitive answer as to why your gut is irritated so when you truly dig deeper and you understand the root the the approach and the protocols become a lot easier so in addition to working in clinical practice I do wear many hats but I'm also I run the business in addition to being a speaker for other physicians because at the end of the day the biggest way that we're going to be able to have doctors thinking outside the box and doing more for their patients playing detective doing better testing is by having them understand the limitations of what they are potentially doing and what they've been taught so I do really focus on educating a lot of physicians to kind of understand this bigger picture that I'm gonna share with you guys today so I'm kind of a little bit further on how I got into this is I don't have that story that I was really really sick and I went through all different types of treatments and then I ended up with a functional medicine or integrative medicine doctor that got me back to health I actually had a pretty different scenario and I was when I did my testing I primarily thought that everything was gonna check out perfect I thought I was in really good health I thought that I felt great I worked out I was conscious of my diet and at the end of the day what I found is I was just comparing myself to the people around me because I knew more than them and I did more than them but when it came to really truly understanding what health was I really had no idea at that time in my life so I did my testing and it actually came back that I had massive gastrointestinal distress I had a lot of infections in my gut which I'm gonna elaborate further on in reference to these different pathologies of the gut one of the biggest things that I was dealing with was actually parasite issues and for those of you new to that concept when you're dealing with parasite issues first of all they're very very hard to diagnose number one and number two is they create a lot of different effects also from a mood standpoint they can create a lot of anger irritability almost like fluctuations you could even call it bipolar so for me when I actually reflect it back on my gut my testings obviously telling me that I had a lot of issues in my gut but the stress on my gut actually for me manifested more mentally and emotionally because I had these organisms in my system that were completely throwing off my neurological pathways and I'm gonna actually dive into that a little bit more talking about some of the research that references how parasites can actually hijack your behaviors which is completely fascinating but in addition to that I also had a lot of mercury toxicity and when it comes to my my parasite exposure and my mercury exposure that was actually had a lot to do with my diet so I thought I was being super healthy by being a pescetarian primarily what that means as I was only eating fish and and vegetables so I was not eating any poultry and I was not eating any types of red meat and I thought that this was really smart I was getting a lot of omega-3s I was you know low calorie I was eating you know really clean and fresh and I didn't really understand that not all fish is created equal and not all sushi is created equal so it was kind of the more the merrier and I found myself ending up with mercury toxicity in addition to a lot of microorganisms in my gut that should have never been there and that had a lot to do with things that I thought I was doing right but I wasn't so that's really the biggest thing is you don't know you don't know number one and it's not your fault it's not your fault that you don't know these things because we're working against media that is giving us a lot of really bad information and it makes us really really confused so I know it is 7 p.m. maybe a little after 7 p.m. now and we have a lot of things going on in our house we probably have people that want dinner and kids running around and people that need to get ready for school tomorrow so I just want to give you guys the opportunity to kind of slide your cellphone's away shut down your email browser and kind of just hone in on this information because the information that I'm going to give you is not the information that you're reading on Google it's not the information that you're necessarily getting from your traditional physician this is information that has the ability to really transform how you think about your health how you think about your body and also the action steps that you take in order to start getting better so take this time to really dive in with me and again ask the questions I'm happy to answer them ok so I kind of said this already but I just want you to understand that if you have tried to get better you've tried to seek out help you've tried supplements you've tried to change your diet and you haven't gotten better it's not your fault there is so much information out there it is extremely hard to navigate it is so hard to know what diet is good for you because you may have a friend who did keto and it's like oh my god this was life changing and you do keto and you feel like crap and then the same thing goes for paleo the same thing goes for being a vegan you have to understand on that every single and is extremely different and their needs are really different so unfortunately we don't in this you know day and age of health care we don't really test for those specifics we don't look at every person as a whole we don't look at everyone as being an individual we kind of assume that okay if you have an infection you take an antibiotic or if you have uh you know gut issues you go low fodmap diet and it's always like this black and white and unfortunately when because I've been in clinical practice for nine years now nothing is black and white nothing is there is so much gray and there is so much difference person-to-person despite if their diagnosis is the same so it's really trying to understand that you need approach that's gonna help you understand your body and your needs and it's all about strategy when it comes to getting better it's not about what you do it's about how you do it and some of you listening may have done amazing expensive supplements and you may have gone on this most hardcore elimination diet and are mad because you didn't get the results that you hoped for and sometimes it's not about what you did it's about not having the strategy in place and not having the guidance and maybe not doing things at the right time so when it comes to treatment I'm gonna kind of expand about upon this concepts you understand a little bit more in depth so this is a really important slide of the entire presentation and this slide is not just going to apply to gut issues but it's actually going to apply to a lot of the issues with the way medicine is being done and the reason I say that is because when we're talking about always wanting to work with the expert or always wanting to go to a specialist that specializes in our condition we can sometimes find ourselves falling flat and it's because we are not necessarily looking at the body as a whole and we are assuming that all systems are functioning separately and that kind of brings me to the second point of understanding basic physiology so those of you listening are probably here because you're dealing with a gut issue so I don't know if many of you know but ninety and some research says 95% of your serotonin which is your feel-good hormone is made in your gut so if you're a person who's been struggling with gut issues even if it says mild as this moderate indigestion that you get sometimes or if it's extremists ulcerative colitis you've sold a gut issue so if you have a gut issue but you're also struggling with your mood or you feel depressed or you've been diagnosed with Bipolar or even as extreme of being schizophrenic you can easily have a major problem with what your treatment protocol is because we're trying to fix a neurological system without considering the gut being connected and at that point you're usually working with a psychiatrist or a psychologist and you're also working with a gastroenterologist and nobody is talking to each other so when we take this linear approach or we start to break up the systems of the body that's when we end up on a ton of medications and a ton of unnecessary you know protocols procedures surgeries etc so when we start looking at the body as a whole we have a completely different perspective on how heal and part of this comes down to the way that we do testing especially in the US so most of our testing is chemistry based so when you're talking about what that means is most of our testing is blood work it's urine analysis some integrative functional doctors are doing stool samples and doing saliva tests so at the end of the day all of these tests are still chemistry based so think about it if you get your blood work back and something is wrong with your chemistry or your biochemistry then we are going to use chemistry altering substances to fix the problem so those chemistry altering substances are drugs medications so when people come to our office and they go why do you guys do this and nobody else does why doesn't everybody have this technology why doesn't everybody do things integrative lis it's because our system is for-profit and that's the case for many places in the world but medicine is for-profit and there is a big influence with drug companies and I'm not you know saying this to create waves it's just the reality of it so when we look at broken chemistry through our testing we are going to fix it with pharmacology so the system is built on that so when we're talking about you know why is nobody telling me about what I should eat and what I shouldn't eat and why is nobody talking to me about supplements that will complement my medication it's because this system is not set up that way and in addition your doctors don't have the ability to spend time with you there is limitations depending on the environment that they work in especially if you're working in a hospital setting so with all of that being said this is what does not allow us to understand the root cause we're always kind of looking at the the effects and we're also looking at the symptoms so we're constantly treating the symptoms and we're not necessarily focusing on the root cause because if we focus on the root cause then the problem goes away and then there is no need for further surgeries and further medications so at the end of the day we need to start thinking bigger and we need to start really being our own advocates to say I want better information and I want more answers about what is the route to my condition so in addition to all of this when we talk about you know looking at chemistry is it broken is it not then that kind of leads us also down a rabbit hole of using the same protocols for the same diagnosis you come in with your irritable bowels nobody's necessarily figuring out the root cause but if it gets bad enough and all the sudden you spiked a fever we're gonna put you on an antibiotic we're not going to check to necessarily see is it viral is it bacterial is it fungal is it parasitic we just kind of assume oh it's bacterial because you know that's the only thing the research has proven is that there's bacteria in the gut which is so beyond not true so we have to also think about you know this concept of always using the same approach we're always using the same approach when it comes to the gut we're using anti-inflammatories we're using antha asthma and then we're also using antibiotics when our white blood cells count or count spikes or we spiked a fever so we're not necessarily even doing the proper testing to figure out what type of infection it is or what is the root cause of the massive amounts of inflammation that is correlated to our symptoms so we blow minds on a day to day basis I always love when I get that like jaw dropped face so some of the really interesting things that I see on a day to day basis it definitely varies but I obviously when I made this slide I wanted to gear it more towards different things with the gut but one thing I'll say is in my consultation I constantly asked about the moon cycles meaning how do you feel around a full moon sometimes people have you know hard time thinking about that because we don't always know when there's a full moon but interesting enough is you most of us have heard that phrase uh-oh you know everyone's acting crazy must be a full moon or everyone's driving crazy it must be a full moon and we kind of think that that's a funny saying but the reality of that saying is because parasites which are organisms that can get into our systems from contaminated fish contaminated animal protein if we get exposed to parasites they can hijack our behaviors and they are the most active under a full moon so when people are acting bizarre under a full moon there is a reason for it so parasites are a lot more prevalent than people realize and the reason why they're not being acknowledged is because they're very very hard to diagnose through testing which again I'm gonna elaborate further on so another thing too is we have many patients that I've dealt with a lifetime of constipation and they often have done protocol supplements dietary changes medications and colonics and they haven't been able to resolve their issue so dr. NIC and I actually just did a podcast about this so if you check it out on our website it's called the brain and gut connection and we dive a lot deeper than I am right now but what's fascinating about it is when you're dealing with this chronic constipation that nothing is helping no laxatives are helping nothing that is a brain problem so that is a neurological problem because your brain controls everything but you also have a vagus nerve that runs from the brain all the way down and innervates most of your gastrointestinal system so when you're not having that proper communication you are going to have either constipation or what we call gastroparesis which means that it's almost like the gut is paralyzed so you have to consider if you've had this long-term constipation and have had no results you probably haven't gone to a neurologist not necessarily saying that they would know how to help you but it's a neurological condition that comes back to the vagus nerve so for those of you that are kind of wondering like oh my gosh is that me a couple of ways to know is if you have either an overactive or a completely under active gag reflex so either one is an extreme and that is an indicator that your vagus nerve is not working properly so that's kind of a key little thing to know when you're trying to decipher is your gut or are your gut issues a brain problem so another thing to diabetes with the gut so diabetes is running rampant and don't get me wrong we obviously have a lot of hidden sugar in the American diet you know and again for those of you that are really new to this like functional integrative medicine world I remember for me when I was younger I used to I would definitely classify myself as the person who didn't eat sugar like I was not a pastry person I wasn't constantly like needing something sweet after I ate but I remember like one day reflecting back and thinking about what I drank I was never soda person juice person but I got into coffee at a really young age and then I got into lattes and what's crazy about it is like when you go and you get those lattes even if you get just like coconut milk latte from Starbucks or almond milk latte like those milks have a ton of sugar in them so I just remember I asked them at Starbucks once when they came out the coconut milk because I made myself a coconut latte at home and then I had one at Starbucks and I was like did you know that sugar to this and they were like no and I asked them to look at the coconut milk and i couldnt believe how much sugar was in the coconut milk so just don't be deceived by that that was a little bit of a tangent cuz that's not the point of this number three but the reason why I'm bringing this up is because your pancreas is technically part of your gastrointestinal system so like right at the bottom of the sterno and like pointing right here so right at the bottom of the sternum a lot of people have pain there and they call it indigestion and that's actually where your pancreas is but your pancreas is embedded in your stomach which is where a lot of reflux heartburn comes from so if you do have a long history of reflux indigestion heartburn chances are whatever has been an irritant in that system has now moved along the track and is starting to affect your pancreas which is then affecting your insulin which then affecting how your body regulates sugar so you might be diabetic pre-diabetic or you might just be hypo or hyper hyper glycemic but when you're talking about a pancreatic issue pancreatitis if you have elevated pancreatic enzymes if you have diabetes or you're told that you're pre-diabetic you need to consider what is happening in your gut because they are a hundred percent connected because your your pancreas is technically part of your gastro system so kind of talking about this same vicinity is a patient that we have worked with who had a lot of respiratory issues that he was constantly treating the respiratory issues but what it came down to if it was actually his gastrointestinal system that was completely inflamed pushing up on his diaphragm that was creating massive strain on his respiratory system shortness of breath inability to work out because he was wheezing so sometimes when you're even dealing with a respiratory issue and that's more symptomatic than your gut sometimes it can actually tie back to the gut because of the pressure it's putting on the diaphragm so when you're talking anatomy all of these systems are just so close in proximity and that's why you can have this trickle-down effect and have other systems that are affected so last but not least is the root cause of autoimmune conditions so that's the whole premise of this webinar specifically is really diving into these autoimmune gut conditions and when we talk about autoimmunity we are usually being told that we don't know why autoimmune conditions happen it's just the immune system turning on the body and there's a lot of theories about molecular mimicry which I'm not even going to go into and we pretty much say once you have it you just have to deal with it and especially if you have cele the solution is never eat gluten again and we're actually not being told or educated on what is the root cause of the autoimmune condition number one and is there anything else I can do other than avoid gluten or take medication and you know the in my mind I feel like it's a pretty simple concept and most of the time when I explain it to patients they're usually like oh my gosh I never thought about it that way but if you think about it when it comes to the immune systems job its job is to fight bad things it is its job is to fight foreign substances if it is toxins if it is in sections and those infections can vary from fungus to mold to bacteria to parasites you know the list goes on so if you think about the foundation of what the immune system does is fight bad things then what didn't it make sense that the system that is being attacked by the immune system is dealing with an infection so if you even just think of the premise of celiac so celiac is an autoimmune condition that deteriorates the villi so yes gluten eating gluten is a huge problem because it's creating a massive inflammatory response which is going to create a lot of irritation but when it comes to the destruction of the villi because the immune system is now apparently attacking the villi what is it the villi is just in the line of fire to where the infection is so what if the infection is in the gut embedded in the lining of the gut and as the immune system is trying to get to that infection to eradicate it now it's creating massive inflammation and damage to the villa this is not my theory this is proven but the problem is is that this research is not the research that is always being talked about talked about and publicized and I don't know why but when we think about this concept of autoimmune we have so many autoimmune conditions now there is so many autoimmune conditions even beyond the gut and we are still acting like this is a complete mystery and we have tons of inflammatory conditions in addition to that so Oh in a Mesa system responds so aka the immune system attacking something bad creates an inflammatory response so if we have all these inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and migraines and you know fibromyalgia we have all of these inflammatory conditions we have all these autoimmune conditions and we're sitting back and we're saying oh we have no idea why but what's interesting about it is if you were to get diagnosed with an infection technically that's the infectious disease specialist so unless you've been having chronic diarrhea for weeks and nobody can figure it out you're not going to an infectious disease doctor it's only when there's that severe animal of an extreme that you've had a fever that hasn't gone away for weeks or you have diarrhea that hasn't gone away from for weeks that's when you will be referred to an infectious disease doctor so when you're talking about the gastroenterologist that you would think is going to diagnose you with an infection in your gut that is not necessarily the way that they've been trained and if you think about the modalities the modalities our endoscope or endoscopy and colonoscopy you cannot see infections on those types of imaging you cannot it is impossible you can see inflammation you could see polyps you can see cancer but you will not see infections so I am here to tell you that you don't know what you don't know if you haven't had the right testing if you haven't had the right approach if you haven't had someone digging deeper there is no possible way you're gonna know what is the cause of your autoimmune conditions or what type of infections do you have it is not possible so I'm gonna use just a really basic example so many of us are do with indigestion and heartburn and usually we're either taking upon ourselves to take tums or take some type of antacid if it gets bad enough and we're in a ton of pain we're going to then seek out something stronger which is going to be a premise in a pilot ii nexium etc and what i find so fascinating about it and this is something that i learned through my social medicine training and then saw it over and over and over and over again in my clinical practice is that most of the time when we're dealing with indigestion or heartburn it's because of a lack of stomach acid it is not because of an overabundance so for those of you that are like well that's confusing because I feel better when I take the antacids yes you will and I will tell you why so if you have bad stuff in your gut maybe you have bacteria maybe you have a bunch of pesticides because they're all over our food nowadays I don't really know but you have something in your gut that shouldn't be there that's actually going to start to compromise your production of stomach acid also in addition chewing gum and drinking carbonated beverages will also deplete your stomach acid so if you have a lack of stomach acid what's gonna happen is you're gonna eat your foods gonna go into the digestive system but it doesn't break down fast and it doesn't break down efficiently because you don't have the proper enzymes and you don't have the proper acid anymore so if your food is sitting there it's actually going to start to almost like decompose I know that sounds disgusting but that's the reality of it so it sits and it decomposes and it gives off what you call rancid acids so as it gives off these rancid acids which are bad acids that is what creates this heartburn reflux indigestion feeling so then you go and you take your antacid and you feel better because it combat it the rancid acids so this is not about your stomach over producing this is about these ramps and acids coming from either the food that's not being broken down or it's even coming from the bad bacteria or or chemicals that are in your gut so this is something that it's just so huge because people suffer like I cannot believe how many people suffer I had a patient the other day she told me that she bought a special really really expensive pillow to prop herself up to practically practically sleep in a seated position because her indigestion was that bad and she was just had she had never had any tools to fix it and in in my world that's such an easy fix but she just was never evaluated in the right way and never had the right testing so it's definitely something that I feel so passionate about helping people to understand like you're you getting better doesn't have to be super difficult but you need to take that first step to get the better testing because otherwise you're just gonna go round and round and round and just keep dealing with these symptoms so the point of it all is stop accepting this new normal and blaming it on aging um there are so many people that I work with that are in their 30s and they're saying oh well you know my stomach hurts but it's because I'm getting older oh I get bloated all the time it's because I had a baby and oh you know I have heartburn a lot but it's because you know I drink too much caffeine that day and we're kind of always making an excuse for why we feel the way we do and I know because I used to do this in at the end of the day we're also just accepting that this could be because of the aging process and we're also comparing ourselves to our other friends and family that also feel like crap and we're just saying well everybody's tired and everybody's stomach hurts and everybody gets bloated when they eat too much pasta and that's not true and we need to stop thinking that that is true and that is gonna be our new normal or we don't want to believe that that's gonna be our new normal so as I get into these myths these are like the top points that I want it to go through and number one is addressing this idea that gut conditions are genetic especially when it comes to celiac and other autoimmune gut conditions and the other one is is that your testing is always accurate we kind of assumed that if our test said that we don't have something then we don't have it and we just think okay well that's that's not a possibility anymore which is also not true and then the last but not least is autoimmune autoimmunity as a whole but especially autoimmune conditions are irreversible so as we dive in I'm going to shed light on all of these different things so starting first and foremost with your with this concept of genetics so first of all when it comes to research dollars they are putting a ton of money into genetic testing and there's a lot of theories as to why but from my understanding is when it comes to the genetic testing they are trying to create different medications and different even vaccines which God knows how that will work but and that and they're trying to do it to manipulate genetics so that is one of the reasons why there is so much focus on genetic testing right now in genetic research but at the end of the day this is something that I feel like is very very eye-opening so one of the things one of the ways that people either try to decipher if they're at risk or if they have celiac is by doing the genetic test which is the HLA DQ tube marker and the dq8 so first of all when it comes to the literature that is done by the celiac organizations they pretty much say that just because you have a gene does not mean you're ever going to have celiac and that really comes down to this concept of epigenetics epigenetics is been you know a big topic for many many years but unfortunately I feel like it's not always getting the press that it deserves because epigenetics pretty much allows us to know that our genes will express differently based off of our choices and our lifestyle so when it comes to a family filled with thyroid conditions or gut conditions there are those select few people that have zero issues that are potentially more conscious of their diet or doing things differently so just because you have a gene does not mean the you are doomed to developing the condition but honestly even more fascinating is one of the markers that I used to look at a lot was the HLA marker that was for mold and when you're talking about the HLA family which is called a human human leukocyte antigen this is the family of genes that is part of the immune system that is designed to tag foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria so think about that we're looking at this HLA family to dictate and we're at risk for an autoimmune condition and I just discussed how these autoimmune conditions are correlated to infections that are in the tissue that is being attacked so doesn't that make sense that if the HLA marker is one of the markers that puts us at risk for different types of autoimmune conditions then that would be correlated to a foreign invader such as a bacteria a virus a parasite etc so I want you to understand this because no matter what your genetics look like you are in control and if you take it a step further and understand do you have infections in your body which I will tell you we all do then you will be able to actually take control of your fate and take control of your health fate I should say so bringing me to this prep patient presentation so I had a patient that I was working with he had gastrointestinal issues for he had gastrointestinal issues his whole life but they were really really really bad within the past five years so he actually came in and he's like it's so bad at this point that I can't really leave my house for until four hours after I wake up because I'm pretty much in the bathroom for a good four hours and one of the really interesting things is we have a lot of unique technologies within our practice we do traditional testing we do blood work we do stool samples we do all of those things but we also use some other advanced technology to really truly understand what's going on down to the DNA level and also to pick up on things that are not picked up in traditional testing so on the bioresonance is one of our very unique technologies which I'm actually gonna show you a video so you can see what that looks like but what was so interesting about this patient is that when I was going through his bio resonance scans specifically and I was kind of piecing the puzzles together for his case I kept seeing a drug allergen come up so pretty much what that means is this drug was something that has created a lot of stress on his system but the drug which is called as Ito thymidine is actually a tuberculosis drug so we didn't talk about tuberculosis in his consultation we did not talk about ever having it we didn't talk about respiratory issues so I was like okay maybe this is gonna be far-fetched to ask him if he's ever been exposed but at this point I've seen the drug reaction so much that I need to ask so what I when we came to our second visit and we were going through his results I asked him I said so by any chance did you ever get exposed to tuberculosis in anybody in your family habit etc and he's like no absolutely not and I was like okay I was like did you ever have the skin tasks where it bubbled up and it didn't go away for a few days I always have to ask things in many many ways and he looked at me really funny and he goes hold on and he texted his mom he's in his 50s by the way so he texts his mom and she goes oh my gosh I can't believe you're asking me that I'm surprised you remember when you were in camp around 7 8 years old we actually had to take you out of camp because you tested positive through the skin test for tuberculosis and we had to treat you for it so this was like at this point his mind's blown my mind's blown what was crazy about it was two parts of the puzzle for this guy he had he definitely had some infections going on and has got that was part of the puzzle but he also had this drug that actually negatively impacted his gut from when he was a child that was actually still creating residual effects and number two he also was tested for celiac but he had non-celiac gluten sensitivity so he pretty much was told after doing the celiac test oh you don't have any issues with gluten keep eating it but he had an issue with gluten he just didn't have celiac so the having gluten sensitivity and having celiac or not synonymous they are not the same thing they are very different so you can easily have a gluten issue without having celiac disease so I want you to understand that because you might be thinking that gluten doesn't bother you but in fact it is and gluten by the way does not always create gut issues there is very specific reactions that can happen that create massive neurological issues so if you're someone who is constantly getting fatigued after you eat carbohydrates or you're feeling foggy the next day that is an indicator that you are having the neurological manifestation of the gluten sensitivity not necessarily gut manifestation so number two is your testing is always accurate and there is limitations with almost every test that exists hence why when I do testing I piece together five to six different avenues of testing because I do not rely on one type of test because you will fall fall short if you try to rely on one thing but one of the things I want to talk about is the limitations on the celiac testing I do want to talk about limitation is on even stool testing blood testing parasite testing and also colonoscopy and endoscopy so I'm gonna just kind of dive in and show you this so celiac testing when we are talking about celiac so on the left what you are seeing is going to be your traditional LabCorp panel your quest Diagnostics which is the other major lab it looks the same but you're looking at literally six different markers that they are testing when it comes to celiac so if you look on the right then that is going to be the celiac panel by a company called C rex labs big difference huh so when you're talking about do I have celiac do I not have celiac do I have gluten that actually affects my brain do I have a gluten sensitivity that affects my gut do I have an issue with gliadin or do I have an issue with wheat because they are different you could easily be missing a huge part of the puzzle so when you are someone that are suffering with massive gush gut issues and you're being told no you don't have celiac no you don't have celiac no you don't have celiac we could easily be missing a huge huge part of the puzzle so this is just a really really important visual because there are labs out there that are looking beyond just you know those limited markers that is actually able to give you more answers and in addition this lab is fantastic because when you're talking about celiac so this is technically the celiac panel so if you do come back positive they actually have a cross-reactive panel as well and the cross-reactive panel is really interesting because when you look at certain proteins under a microscope so if you're looking at wheat and gliadin under a microscope and then you look at corn and you look at boats and you look at rice sometimes they actually all look somewhat similar so you can easily be having an issue with gluten but you can also be having a cross-reactive Act issue with rice or oats and I know that this is can sometimes be you know overwhelming information but if you're that person who went gluten-free and you just started chowing down on all these gluten-free grains and you still feel bad that might be why so it's really trying to understand more about your body and then being able to OB obviously have a solution for it so when you're talking about the other gold standard for celiac testing the other big one is using an endoscope which is you know a type of imaging so what they're gonna do is they're going to shove the endoscope down into you know through the mouth and get it into the gastrointestinal system and then they're going to do some biopsies so they're gonna sample some of the tissue to see if there is damaged so they're technically looking to see if the villi is damaged so the interesting thing about this and it's because I do more comprehensive lab analysis is that I've had many people that have come to me that have been told that they have celiac but what they actually have is something called autoimmune pernicious anemia so what this means is that there are very specific cells that are in your stomach that are called parietal cells and these parietal cells are the cells that allow you to absorb your b12 so there are many people that are like oh my gosh my energy my energy and then they get their b12 checked and it's bottomed out and they're they can't get it up they can't get their b12 levels up you know without taking massive amounts of B vitamins or doing b12 shots but if you have an issue with the actual parietal cells in your gut then that's not going to allow you to absorb the b12 but working with autoimmune pernicious anemia is different than working with celiac because these are two different regions of the gut and they also are creating two different cascade effects essentially so it's very very important to understand that you may have had this biopsy and been told oh you 100% have celiac but it might be being confused for autoimmune pernicious anemia that is probably the reason you cannot get your b12 levels to be at an adequate amount so when it comes to this limitation on stool testing and parasite testing so when it comes to testing for parasites you cannot test them in the blood that's just you're never gonna get a positive reading that's number one number two is the other way that you could potentially test them is through stool sampling but the way that a lot of the labs do it here in the US it has its flaws so number one if you have had a stool sample through a lab like quest or LabCorp when you they take a sample from you they are only testing for one microbe so they might take a sound sample from you and they're testing Oh does he or she have a coli so they're only testing for that they're not like they're not putting the sample on a petri dish to see if there is any organisms they're only testing for one and I don't know why that's just the way the labs are set up so if you're trying to work with a lab that's gonna look at any possibility for infection that's usually going to be some of these other private labs like doctor's dad Jenova I personally like doctors data but when it comes to utilizing a stool sample I will use it to understand someone's probiotic levels I will use it to look at bacteria but I do not rely on it for parasites and I will tell you why 20 minutes after a bowel movement leaves your body your any parasites that would have been in your sample will self-destruct it is called Auto lasing so if you take that sample and you put it in a kit and you ship it off to a lab and it takes a couple days to get there and it takes a couple days for them to process it they are not going to find parasites it's just not possible so in most other countries not the most glamorous but you're required to have a bowel movement within the office and the practitioner will actually put it directly under a microscope I don't do that I don't want to do that I do I do cut other ways of testing but the most important thing for you to understand is if you have been down this road of functional Integrative Medicine and use half stool samples and used um supplements and you've been told you don't have parasites and you still feel badly it's probably because the parasites are being missed because of the limitations in the testing so for those of you that have been tuned in all along from the beginning I mentioned that my personal health journey I had a lot of parasite issues primarily because I was a pescetarian and I ate tons and tons of fish and tons of sushi and I didn't know there was a difference between wild fish and farmed fish and I kind of thought it was all free game but for me I didn't have a ton of gut complaints I actually found that I had a lot more mood and stability I found myself being very irritable at times found myself kind of when I got irritable I couldn't get out of it and it was just a very interesting behavior because I was conscious of like why don't why am i acting this way but I couldn't help myself I couldn't stop doing it so there was this book that I was introduced to I'm told this is your brain on parasites and I literally couldn't put it down because this woman Kathleen her entire career of research was focused on parasites and her colleagues were like pretty much just bashing her saying you're stupid you're gonna waste your whole life you know your your career is gonna go down the tubes because parasites have no validity in health and they you know they have no validity in anything and what she proved over and over and over and over again is that parasites will hijack your behaviors so the first study that she did was on ants the insect and what she found is that the ants she infected a group of ants that were in an anthill with the pet with a parasite and what happened is during the day the ants that were infected as well as not they pretty much went out to the field gathered and brought things back to the ant hill but normally at night ants will stay in their anthill together so the ants that were infected actually left at night went out into the field got went onto the tippy tippy tippy top of a of grass and the reason they did that is because the parasite hijacked the behavior to put the ant in an opportune environment to get eaten by a sheep because the best place for that parasite to reproduce was in a sheep stomach whoa I almost read it and was like no way this can't be real and literally the entire book is study after study after study after study and she proved it over and over and over again it was it's completely fascinating so when you are dealing with massive mood instability you know again bipolar it can even be as Extreme as schizophrenia you have to get evaluated for parasite infections because you could easily be be being treated as a psychiatric patient and it's on a brain problem it's parasite problem so it's a very interesting concept when you are able to look at mental health differently and I'm not saying that's the case for everyone some people have very specific neurological issues but I have had people that have transformed as a person in front of me everything from the way they talked to others the way they communicate their relationships their passions and that was by helping them to get rid of some of these organisms that were in their system so another really interesting case study here is a patient who was struggling with migraines um she came in for her migraines but she asked me with her history she did reveal that she had IBS she had IBS for so long that she kind of was like it is what it is you know I don't even know that's not even why I'm here I'm here because my migraines are so bad that I can barely go to work some days so we we were talking during the full history and one of the things that she revealed is that she had a lot of pain in her right ribcage area which is actually the location of your liver and gallbladder and then the other thing that she told me was that she was lactose intolerant so the first place that my mind went was what's going on with her gall bladder so for those of you not familiar your gall bladder again located on your right ribcage but your gall bladder is in charge of breaking down fats so when somebody is lactose intolerant so they're truly lactose-intolerant sometimes they're actually just struggling to break down fats as a whole so they assume they're lactose-intolerant and that is because the gall bladder is not functioning properly and they're not able to break down those fats anymore so an interesting thing as we went through we found that she definitely had major gallbladder stress she had some mold exposure she had some parasite infections that were actually the major stressors on her gallbladder but the most fascinating thing is that we have a technology called a bio scan and the bio scan is I call it digital acupuncture and that might sound really confusing but it scans meridians and it populates a report of what is stressing the meridian so we decided to run her gallbladder Meridian the reason is because the gallbladder Meridian runs the pathway of this photo so if you look at the pathway of this photo it's pretty much the whole side of the head and even parts of the temple her complaints were her right temple and right side of her head was where she felt her migraines so when we evaluated her gallbladder Meridian that was the root cause to her migraines so we did a couple of different treatments to work on that pathway and her migraines went away so this is a person who went neurologist to neurologist you know migraine specialist etc and was not able to get any results and it's because it was never a head problem it was never a brain problem it was never a sinus problem it was always a gallbladder problem so this is again comes down to if you do the right testing you can get answers and you can get solutions if you don't ever do more comprehensive testing you will not be able to figure these things out so last but not least is autoimmunity is irreversible so reiterating for the new people that are on here is when it comes down to this concept of autoimmunity even this quote that I found online I just found it to be so fascinating so in Crohn's disease a rogue immune system attacks the digestive tract causing inflammation and tissue damage a rogue immune system attack so we're literally just settling for this idea that well the immune system just goes a little haywire sometimes and it just happens that's kind of the end of the story but if we really again go back to the foundation of what does the immune system do it kills and fights off bad stuff it gets rid of infections advice viruses it fights parasites it fights bacteria and if we have tissue that is dealing with the infection so if the infection is embedded in our parietal cells that's causing that autoimmune pernicious anemia or if the infection is embedded in our small intestine or the infection is embedded in our large intestine we are going to have the immune system attacking that infection but unfortunately creating a lot of damage to the tissue around it so if you understand the route and we understand that there could potentially be something foreign that is the culprit behind this autoimmune condition then we can actually heal from it it's just a matter of knowing what it is and also understanding what is the best approach for the for the person which I'm going to talk a little bit more about how we decipher that so at the end of the day don't be fooled because rarely does anything look like a textbook so if you don't match the textbook of what you know the telltale of you know the IBS is or the telltale of the GERD or the telltale of the celiac if you don't fit the textbook then why should your treatment be textbook and again it's about having answers but don't take those answers and then just fall back on the the cookie cutter approach because if the approach is specific then and you will actually be able to get better but also you will be baffled on how much faster you can get better from something that you thought that you would have to live with forever so kind of thinking about this old model versus new so when it comes to deciphering conventional medicine from functional medicine from integrative medicine yeah it's a lot of information it can get confusing but I want to actually focus on this concept of functional and integrative medicine because there are probably many of you that are listening that are not new to the game you've probably done some research there's tons of information out there you've probably been to a few doctors and you're kind of looking at us as iwg being like why are you different what are you gonna do differently I've had a bunch of fancy tests and I want to say that I personally in my own journey as a clinician and also in my own health journey I kept changing growing and evolving because I was frustrated and what I mean by that is in the very beginning I was following this functional medicine approach I was doing I did my testing spent on boatload of money on all these fancy tests and then I found myself doing a boatload of supplements very expensive supplements and being on an extremely restricted diet getting up juicing smoothie you know it was just be very very time consuming very life consuming and I just kind of sat back and I'm like I'm cool to do this I'm cool to to take the supplements and to you know be really good with my diet but I felt like am I gonna have to be this extreme forever because I felt like my progression and my healing process was kind of slow and I still was up and down and my patients when I was practicing that way was going through the same thing and I just was like there has to be a better way there has to be more to the to the story here more than I don't know and that's where I really said read and started to come into this concept of integrative medicine and for those of you listening that know dr. Kling heart dr. Klink heart has been a huge mentor to me one of the things that he said to me was do not call yourself integrative and our practices integrated wellness group he said do not call yourself integrative if all you do is dive in supplements and I was like wow that is so true and it made me think beyond and it made me realize there's more to the story here we need to first of all expand our type of testing to understand more about the body and then secondarily we can't ignore somebody's stress levels we can't ignore somebody's meridians we can't ignore you know somebody's emotional state we can't ignore you know the amount of physical stress they're putting on their body because maybe they're a carpenter or a contractor like there was just so many things that needed to be taken into consideration you know how well were there deep toques pathways working when you take supplements by the way you are supporting mainly your liver and gut detox pathways when it comes to the other systems that detox is your kidneys and your lymph nodes you need to support those other systems otherwise you just take a bunch of supplements and you're trying to detox things out and they're just kind of circulating in your lymph nodes and getting stuck so it's really a matter of looking beyond and giving more strategic approaches so that people can get the results that they're looking for and creates sustainability that is the absolute most important thing to me and working with my clients is I want to create sustainability I want to have you feel so much better within the first you know 12 weeks that you then can potentially sustain that for maintenance or just sustain it without being crazy strapped and being able to go out with your friends and be able to have dinner you know out at a restaurant and be able to have a glass of wine I want to create that sustainability because we're able to fix the root and able to look at you as an integrative whole so let's talk cash dolla bills y'all I mainly put this in here because I am so I don't wanna say I'm so tired of hearing how women especially beat themselves up about taking care of themselves but honestly it's kind of a global concept like we think that taking care of ourselves makes us selfish that you know investing money in ourselves is selfish like it's just it's such an interesting concept because if we don't take care of ourselves how are we taking care of others and especially if you're in a profession like mine and your profession is to take care of others maybe you're a psychiatrist maybe you're a doctor maybe you're a social worker maybe you're a teacher you know if we can't function how well are we actually serving others and how well are we serving our families so I really feel like getting away from this idea that in this guilt of if we actually get better testing and take care of ourselves that we're selfish for doing that because you know it's being a little selfish I don't think it's a bad thing number one but number two is it's really just a matter of if you feel your best you are going to be able to care for the people that you want to care for even moreso than you ever imagined so for us that integrated wellness group you know the biggest thing when it comes down to serving is we serve you we don't serve insurance providers and I know that that sometimes is a bummer for people when though you're out of network but I will tell you right now is we're able to do what we do because we are out of network otherwise I would see you for 15 minutes and I would not be able to dig deep I would not be able to do more better or more elaborate testing I would not be able to piece your puzzle together and actually give you answers so being out of network is not a bad thing because we have the ability to really look at you as a whole and give you the answers that you deserve and obviously give you a solution the nice part about it is we do take FSA's HSAs so there is obviously options when it comes down to getting your testing covered which I'm going to talk a little bit more about so another thing that I find comes up a lot is again we feel guilty about investing in ourselves but we also get a little nervous of what are people gonna think about us and this is such an interesting thing because I've heard it a million times oh my you know my spouse is going to judge me you know my family is gonna judge me if I have to go to family gatherings and I don't eat certain things now and what I've actually found this little blurb today and it was from a dear friend of mine Stacy Martino who runs a relationship development group and I just saw this and was like this is just so perfect because it's compromising who you are to please others has never created a magnificent relationship it's just never created a magnificent lights in general we constantly are living in this age that there's social media you know everybody sees everything we're always trying to like put on this facade and at the end of the day who cares it what K what matters is if we're happy it matters if we're happy and our families are happy if we have quality relationships and it is not fair to you to not serve yourself and not take care of yourself or not think that you deserve to feel good because of what other people are gonna think and especially I know a lot of this comes down to family because there is in-laws and there's different family members and everybody's got an opinion there's gotta love feelings that they want to share but being able to kind of step in and just say that's great I get that that's your value system but it's not mine so we're gonna kind of leave it at that so that's something that you know I know it took me a long time to learn but but really at the end of the day is just don't compromise what you know you deserve and what's best for you for others so at the end of the day when it comes to health care I think we forget that it's supposed to be about answers and solutions I think we get really caught up in you know this concept of health care just being the band-aid and we forget that we're actually supposed to be figuring out what's really wrong and get a long-term solution and we've settled for the band a defect or the band-aid approach I should say so it's really starting to kind of demand more out of what you deserve out of health care so when it comes to all the fancy tasks that we do because I know I've mentioned them a few times of you know some of these more elaborate things that we do I actually do want to kind of hop over and show you a quick video on the bio residents scan because that is personally one of my favorite technologies in the office so as I show it to you I am NOT going to be able to speak so you'll be able to take a peek at it and then I will explain what is going on in the video it's just gonna be about 10 seconds so let me just show that to you guys really quick all right so obviously looking at that video these photos that you're seeing are obviously not photos of the patient but they are photos of their stock photos but the icons that overlay are actually representative of the patient so that technology works all through signaling and picking up on DNA changes because when you have inflammation or you're dealing with an infection or you're dealing with some type of pathology in a tissue it is going to change down to the DNA level so when you're able to pick up on those DNA changes through the technology so get really really fast so I wanted to actually show some of the unique things that we can look at because if you saw it was the heart and it was also the vascular system of the head so we can run all different aspects of the gastrointestinal system as well but I find it so fascinating when there are so many limitations and testing when it comes to looking at the brain looking at the cardiovascular system you know we're really limited to you know EKGs were limited to MRIs we're limited to stress tasks we're limited to you know cat scan CT scans so when you're looking at a non-invasive way to get some answers the bio resonance is just one of my favorite technologies for that purpose and it is always uncovering the most amazing information that always ties back to the clinical representation of the patient so outside of that we also are doing a lot of different tasks when it comes to understanding like chemical allergies environmental allergies food allergies and that is just so so important when it comes to people that are suffering with gut issues because you're usually ripping your hair out thinking like I have no idea what to eat anymore I'm getting bloated from water and that's because you know you could obviously have different things in your gut that you don't know are there that are causing those problems but obviously you could also be dealing with these different food allergies and sensitivities so part of our testing is to figure that out another thing that a lot of people don't know is you can have a lot of heavy metals in your gut as well and when you're talking about heavy metals in the gut on the heavy metals once they kind of get into the gut and they are living side by side with bacteria it's very hard for you to get rid of the bacterial infection so when you're really trying to understand the true root cause of the gut you cannot dismiss heavy metal toxicity you can't dismiss pesticide toxicity either so these again are all things that we're looking at in our testing and when it comes to the blood work we are obviously looking at celiac markers we are looking at a sign matauri markers we're looking at all those things as well but we're piecing it together with all the other tech so we really really have a clear clear answer on what's going on so the autonomic response testing some of you may have heard of this some of you may not have heard of this but it's a pretty complex type of testing that we do at the office but the one thing that I wanted to shed light on is when it comes down to this concept of it's not about what you do it's about how you do it this is extremely important because one of the things that I feel like truly sets us apart that truly allows us to get the amazing results that we do is the fact that when we do your testing we're not just testing you for what is going on in your body clinically but we're also testing for what is your body gonna do the best with just start your recovery process so we actually test to see what supplements are the best for you to start getting better if that means the supplements that are going to help you get rid of your infection if that's the supplements that are gonna help you decrease your inflammation so there's no wasted time there's no wasted money on a bunch of fancy supplements that are very expensive and then even in addition we can test prescriptions and see if they are providing value or not and then last but not least is therapies we can actually look to see do you need other types of therapies in addition to a supplement protocol and a dietary change do you need to do some type of detoxification do you need lymphatic support do you need your Viridian worked on so our specificity on your treatment protocol is is there and that allows us to really really see transformational changes so when it comes to the limitations in treatment you know I've kind of already said this but it's conventional is the options are immunosuppressants when you have autoimmunity it's oh the immune systems overactive let's shut it down antibiotics surgery when it gets bad enough and at the end of the day we're just masking the symptoms never figuring out the route and honestly going back to this concept of the old model of functional medicine moving into this integrative model I moved into the integrative model cause I was tired tired of doing supplements for myself and my patients that I assumed would be good because at the end of the day when you're talking about medicine it's extremely subjective I'm not talking about me I'm talking about as a whole it's what the doctor thinks is the best protocol what the doctors training was what the doctor has seen success with in the past so it's not very specific and the same thing goes for dietary changes there are a million in one diets out there how do we know which ones good for you so we test we test and we figure those things out so when it comes to the value in testing there is first of all I should say that when you're talking about all of the tests when you get into the functional medicine world if you're going to do a stool sample if you're gonna do bloodwork if you're gonna do saliva test neurotransmitter test like it wraps up they've racks up to a couple thousand dollars and that's another reason why we moved into doing a different type of onboarding process to get people testing in a fraction of the cost because I felt it was really unfair for you to be a couple thousand dollars deep before you actually know what's wrong with you my biggest goal is obviously just help people get better so I wanted to really shift what we were doing but you know when it comes to the value it's hard to say what the value is and the reason I say that is because depending on you depending on your goals and what you can achieve is priceless because if you're the person that has no clue what to eat and everything makes you sick you knowing what you should and shouldn't eat this priceless to you if you're the person who has been you know just like doubled over in pain and you literally are missing days of work and then you finally get the one you know protocol that's gonna help to stop that that's priceless to you so everyone is going to bear very on what they find extreme value in so with our arm boarding price I know many of you're probably like well what does it cost our onboarding price is 1425 so 1425 covers all of your testing though so it's gonna cover your consultation it's gonna cover your reported findings which is when I tell you what's wrong with you and how to fix you and it covers your bio resonance scan your bio scan your autonomic response testing your blood work your heavy-metal testing it covers all of those things so honestly you are getting an insane amount of information about your body at that price and I know for some of these are brand new to this world a functional integrative medicine your public wow that's a lot but I will tell you that a lot of times people go into the world of functional medicine and they go for a small fee which is a consultation fee and you will walk out of that office with anywhere between two to six thousand dollars worth of kits that you need to do to test your body so just understand that you know when you're talking about the the value the value is huge the really great thing that we started to do is we did start to offer family discounts so if you do come in and if you ever decide to bring a family member in they come in at a fraction of the cost which is 597 for all of the same testing which is pretty amazing um but I will tell you this this is not for everyone and you have to apply we do not necessarily accept every patient but secondarily to is we want to make sure that you are going to embark and and do what is needed for your program as well so it's definitely something that we make sure that we are gonna benefit you as much as you're going to benefit from our office so if you do want to apply check out the link on the side it will be there until I am finished with the PowerPoint um also if your long distance don't worry about that all of your testing can be done from afar and I will say because if you remember from before um a lot of our testing is DNA based you have DNA in your hair so when you send us your hair sample we will do some of your testing on your hair because we're able to scan DNA in the hair we will talk about that more on once you decide if you want it to kind of be part of the operating process but but everything can be done from long distance which is really really amazing all right so time for questions so I'm gonna hop in here oh no questions guys all right well I guess I did a good job then so um so again questions come up we're gonna be doing this again next week so definitely feel free to hop on but otherwise I'm gonna kind of close this thank you all for being here but I really want to just tell you that this whole webinar is really just an educational process and an educational experience but when it comes to actually figuring out what's going on with you and actually knowing what you need to do to get better that's truly when the breakers happen so I just want you to know that taking that step to really understand more about yourself is it's just so huge and it's really just so life-changing and I could confidently say that because I know it's changed my life personally and I see it every day with all of our clients so check out our website um for those of you that were interested in that podcast about the gut-brain for those of you that are dealing with chronic constipation that is up on the website if you do want to link up with our client services team just kind of learn a little bit more about the process and what it looks like to work with us and how does it work to work with us when you're far away um go to integrated Wellness Group comm and sign up to chat with one of them there are links all over the site so you can pretty much find it anywhere but I thank you for being here or we're gonna be back next week talking about the gut so I hope you've had a tremendous amount of value and I will see you guys next week all right