Period-related Pain, Blackouts, and Fainting
Episode 240
In this solo episode of Integrative You Radio, Dr. Nicole Rivera dives into an often-overlooked but critical topic: pain-induced blackouts or fainting episodes associated with menstruation. Drawing from her personal experiences and clinical insights, Dr. Nicole unpacks the complex interplay between gut health, inflammation, and the vagus nerve. She shares her journey of uncovering hidden parasitic infections, the impact of environmental factors like mold exposure, and the surprising ways they influenced her reproductive health. This eye-opening discussion highlights the importance of addressing the root causes rather than just managing symptoms. Dr. Nicole also provides actionable insights, from understanding the anatomy of the pelvic organs to exploring tools like parasite protocols for gut health optimization. Whether you're experiencing these symptoms or just curious about the fascinating connection between gut health and hormonal balance, this episode offers invaluable perspectives for anyone on the path to integrative wellness. Don’t miss the practical tips and empowering takeaways designed to help you reclaim your health! Listen to the end in to learn more! What you’ll learn: Gut Health Impacts Menstrual Health: Parasites, infections, and inflammation in the gut can significantly affect the uterus, leading to pain, blackouts, and other menstrual issues. The Vagus Nerve Connection: Inflammation from gut issues or head injuries can disrupt the vagus nerve, triggering vasovagal responses like dizziness, fainting, and vision loss. Root Cause Matters: Addressing underlying issues like infections, mold exposure, and inflammation is key to resolving symptoms, rather than solely focusing on hormone management. Quotes: "The pain that's associated with gut health is some of the most ungodly pain that you can ever imagine." - Dr. Nicole "To have a parasite that is two feet big, it has to be in your system for 20 years or longer."- Dr. Nicole Find Integrative You Radio On
Topics: health, pain, inflammation, unknown, blackouts, fainting, integrative, nicole
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## Integrative You Radio: Period-Related Pain, Blackouts, and Fainting
- Gut health is intrinsically linked to menstrual health; imbalances like infections and inflammation can directly influence uterine health and trigger severe symptoms.
- The vagus nerve plays a critical role, and its disruption due to inflammation or trauma can lead to vasovagal responses like fainting and dizziness.
- Focusing on the root causes, such as parasitic infections, mold exposure, and systemic inflammation, is essential for resolving period-related blackouts, moving beyond symptom management.
- Understanding the anatomy and interconnectedness of pelvic organs and the nervous system offers crucial insights into these complex health issues.
Pull quotes
This is the place where you become limitless. **Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion, around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior.
We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare.
If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place, but buckle up because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive. **Unknown:** This is Integrative U Radio.
Transcript
**Unknown:** Welcome to Integrative U Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and yours truly, Dr. Nicole Rivera. This is the place where you become limitless.
**Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion, around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. We are also covering how those topics affect the human and family dynamics. We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare. If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place, but buckle up because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive.
**Unknown:** This is Integrative U Radio. What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Integrative U Radio. I am Dr.
**Unknown:** Nicole, and I am flying solo today because I am talking to you about periods. Not necessarily Dr. Nick's favorite topic, but hey, here we are. So I'm talking about this because, one, I have had first-hand experience with this topic.
**Unknown:** Secondarily, I've actually had five different women with this, quote-unquote, "mystery condition" in my practice, and I was just reminded of it because I had a very dear friend come here to Italy and visit me. And as she was here, she was describing a very similar circumstance. And so let's break this down. So the topic that we're talking about today is pain induced blackouts or fainting with periods, or with leading up to your period.
**Unknown:** And the reason why I'm calling a blackout different than fainting is because in some situations these women are losing their vision, some are even losing their ability to hear, more often losing their vision, and not fully fainting or losing consciousness, and some are losing consciousness. And so this could be very scary for an individual that's experiencing it. And the pain that's associated with this is some of the most ungodly pain that you can ever imagine. And so the pain alone can be very alarming.
**Unknown:** What is wrong? Do I have a tumor? Do I have cancer? Like, what's happening?
**Unknown:** Did I have a cyst burst or a fibroid rupture? And very often it's not any of those things. Of course, you should always go get checked to, uh, rule that out, but there is a different association, especially for women that this has been happening consistently. So I'm gonna really start with my personal story so that you can have an understanding of what it looked like for me, and then obviously we're gonna talk more about the different iterations that I've heard from other women.
**Unknown:** But honestly, it's all pretty similar. So when I was in my ... Trying to think. I was in high school is when it first started.
**Unknown:** So I was always an avid runner, and I would go for runs, and I would definitely have abdominal cramping sometimes that I would have to run to a bathroom, um, if I went for a long run or an intense run. It didn't happen all the time, but it, it definitely happened. And this is something that you hear about with runners, cross-country runners, that in some circumstances they can lose their bowels or have sensitive bowels from going long distances or doing very, um, intense runs. So fast-forward, I was running in my neighborhood, which was something that I did on a regular basis, and it was barely a mile.
**Unknown:** It wasn't a very long distance. I was halfway through my run, and I started having really, really bad abdominal cramping, so naturally I'm just thinking, "Oh gosh, get home because you clearly need to go to the bathroom." So by the time I reach my lawn, I am doubled over, almost crawling through the lawn to get into the house. At this point, my temperature is rising and I am ... I'm burning up.
**Unknown:** So I'm in so much pain at this point that I'm just ... Find the bathroom, and I'm laying on the cold tile trying to bring my temperature down because the pain is so intense that I'm in the fetal position, and then I start to actually lose my vision. Never lose consciousness, but lose my vision. Fast-forward a couple of minutes, I have to have a bowel movement, and this is something that relieves a minor amount of the pain.
**Unknown:** And really now at this point, it's a waiting game. Uh, one of the things that as this happened to me in the future that I found was a remedy was sometimes I needed to throw myself into a cold shower in order to buffer the pain, which in reality was just changing the amount of blood flow that was going to my organs. So of course the first time this happens, it's kind of like, "Whoa, what's going on? I need to get to a doctor." And I go to the doctor, and the result is comical because they barely examined me.
**Unknown:** They said, "We don't really know. Maybe you had a twisting of your uterus when you were running."Really? That, that's what you got for me? No recommendations, just, "If it happens again, you know, you will have to do, uh, further testing, and you might be a candidate for surgery, depending on what those results yield." Okay, great.
**Unknown:** I was never someone inclined to wanna cut my body open for any reason, so of course I'm like, "I'm gonna take this into my own hands and figure it out." So as time goes on, I start to realize that the... this is not happening all the time because, again, I'm an avid runner, I work out often, and it's only happening sometimes. And what I realize is it's happening leading up to my menstrual cycle. I was like, "Hmm, interesting.
**Unknown:** What is the connection here?" So years and years and years go by. I'm in school, um, I'm in undergraduate college. It was happening a little bit, then it started to happen a lot when I was in chiropractic school. And it actually started to...
**Unknown:** I was starting to have, um, bleeding, vaginal bleeding, not period-associated, with the onset of the pain, and it was happening very frequently. So my theory, uh, and this will make sense as we talk more about what was actually revealed when I finally did more functional integrative testing, but throughout my undergraduate years, I was living in a very toxic environment, um, of mold. So the home, or the house that we were living in, um, through college, I- it was my sophomore year to my senior year, there was a lot of water damage. At one point, I walked into my bedroom, which was on the ground level because it was a renovated garage, and I say "renovated" very loosely because it was the, um, worst possible renovation you could ever imagine.
**Unknown:** Um, they never even put insulation in, so I practically lived in an outhouse. So minor details. Uh, but yes, I walked down the steps into my bedroom to squish, squish onto my carpet, and later down the line when I was finally moving my furniture out of that house, there was black mold underneath the couch that was in my room. So there was a very significant exposure to very, very toxic black mold.
**Unknown:** And for those of you that don't know much about mold, we're gonna talk about it on a high level today and how it connects to this topic, but if you want to dive into mold more, I highly recommend, uh, listening to some of our other podcasts. Uh, no matter if you're on iTunes or Podbean, just type in mold and you will find a variety of different podcasts that are associated to mold and all different conditions. Okay, so getting back to what the hell was going on. So as I mentioned, fast-forward, n- no one knows what's going on.
**Unknown:** All I know is it's getting worse. I have these ways to buffer it. As mentioned, don't run, uh, leading up to my period. Don't do any crazy physical activity.
**Unknown:** And then also, if the pain does onset, throw myself into a cold shower and have a bowel movement, and that would relieve the pain. So fast-forward, I finally start to break into the functional and integrative medicine field, and I start to learn about this idea of gut infections, parasitic infections. And ironically, if you asked me many years ago, "Do you feel like you have gut issues?" I would've easily answered no. And that was primarily because most of the symptoms that I experienced were intermittent.
**Unknown:** They were not all the time. Nothing was too intense that I couldn't function and live my life, and also most of them just became my normal. Getting bloated after certain foods? Oh, just avoid those foods.
**Unknown:** Normal. Um, having stomach aches occasionally? Normal. You know, having to run to the bathroom after certain drinks or foods?
**Unknown:** Normal. And so I know that this is normal for a lot of people. In reality, it's not normal whatsoever. It's just so many people are suffering with these types of symptoms that it's become normal, and we also, you know, do our own analysis and we say, "Oh, if I just avoid this food, or if I avoid this drink, or if I avoid this caffeine, then I'll be good." And don't get me wrong, not all food and drink is created equal, hence one of the reasons why I moved to Italy, because I was so sick and tired of spending so much money and getting poisoned.
**Unknown:** Um, but we shouldn't necessarily be living a life that we have to eliminate things out in order for our gut to feel semi-normal. So going forward, I do this functional analysis, and it turns out that I have parasitic infections. And so I did what I knew then, uh, in order to deal with these parasitic infections, and I started to realize that this, um, this pain associated with the onset of my menstrual cycle and the blacking out started to get better. Wasn't gone, but it started to get better.
**Unknown:** The pain was less intense, it would go away quicker, and I was having very, very few episodes of actually, like, having a blackout and losing my vision. So I was like, "Hmm, this is really interesting." So then fast-forward a couple of years, and I s- I get introduced to the product by CellCore called ParaONE, which is called Mimosa pudica. And Mimosa pudica is a very different product that targets parasites, and the way that it does it is when you take Mimosa pudica and the capsule opens inside of your gut, the Mimosa pudica will-Start to form a gel. And if any of you have ever used psyllium husks in order to better your bowels or re-relieve yourself of constipation, when you take psyllium husks and you mix it with water in a cup, you have to drink it very quickly because it does the same thing.
**Unknown:** It forms this gel-like substance, and if it forms the gel, it's actually pretty hard to drink. So, uh, when it comes to the Mimosa pudica, you take it, and it does this inside of you. And so what it does is it actually suffocates the parasite. And when the parasite becomes suffocated, loses all of its oxygenation, now you can actually pass the parasite, and you can also pass the parasite in its whole form, because other things that are going in, acting as killing agents, like wormwood and black walnut, they're going to disrupt the parasitic activity, and the parasites can break into pieces, and you don't always see it.
**Unknown:** It just looks like undigested, um, undigested food in your bowels, which obviously you will overlook. Very different circumstance when you go ahead and you take this mimo- Mimosa pudica seed. So I ended up passing a two-foot parasite. Two feet.
**Unknown:** And I'm not saying this to scare you guys. This is something that I see on a regular basis with the people that I work with. But just so you are aware, in order to have a parasite that is two feet big, it has to be in your system for twenty years or longer. So this has been-- this was in my system for a very, very, very long time.
**Unknown:** Not only messing with my gastrointestinal system, but also messing with my mood and mental health, because that is one of the side effects of having parasitic issues in your gut. Secondarily to that is it was creating such inflammation in my gut that that inflammation started to cascade into my uterus. So if you guys go on Google and you look up the anatomy of the intestines, the rectum, the uterus, and the bladder, you're gonna find that your uterus is sandwiched between your bladder and your descending colon slash rectum, AKA where your poop comes out. So when you have things in your gut that shouldn't be there, if you have different infections from bacterial overgrowth, parasitic infections, if you have fungal infections, you're going to have inflammation in your gut, and maybe they call that irritable bowel syndrome.
**Unknown:** Maybe they call that Crohn's disease. Maybe they call that ulcerative colitis. But this is going to then create-- inflammation is gonna create an enlargement. So if you start to have an expansion or an enlargement of your descending colon in your rectum, that's going to push on your uterus.
**Unknown:** And then in addition to this is when you go to get your menstrual cycle and you start to have inflammation of your endometrium, your uterus, because your endometrium is getting ready to slough off, that is what's coming out of you when you're having a menstrual cycle. So you have-- you already have inflammation in your descending colon and your rectum. Now you have inflammation because you're getting ready to have a period in your uterus, and now there is a whole boatload of inflammation in your pelvic bowl, and these organs are pressing up against each other. And now your vagus nerve, which I'm gonna talk about more in depth, your vagus nerve, which innervates your gut, is starting to get inflamed.
**Unknown:** Don't get me wrong, your vagus nerve is already inflamed because of the infections that reside in your gut. So the interesting thing about the vagus nerve is the top of it starts in your brain stem, and then it goes down and innervates your lungs, your respiratory rate, it innervates your heart for your heart rate, and then it innervates your gut. And it plays a very big role in your gut motility, AKA how well things are moving along the tract. But what happens is you can have inflammation in your vagus nerve that starts to create inflammation all the way up to your brain stem.
**Unknown:** And if you start to have inflammation in your vagus nerve that reaches the brain stem and even the inner ear, you're going to have a lot of issues with lightheadedness, dizziness. You can have shifts in your blood pressure, and this can induce these blackouts, the fainting. If you've ever heard of what they call a vasovagal response, that's essentially what it's creating. It's creating this vasovagal response which in severe cases can result in fainting, losing your vision, losing your balance, losing your equilibrium.
**Unknown:** So the moral of the story is, is that there is a huge, huge connection with the gut and the reproductive organs in addition to the vagus nerve, which can be causing this vasovagal response, which is causing you to get extremely lightheaded or dizzy, lose your vision or faint, or all of the above. So for me, though, there was an interesting factor here because I was clearly walking around for a large portion of my life with gut infections. And don't get me wrong, I didn't just have parasites. I also had overgrowth of bacteria.
**Unknown:** I had fungal issues. There was a whole slew of things going on. But obviously parasites are large, they take up space, so that's gonna create a significant protrusion or significant expansion of the bowel that's going to put more pressure on the uterus and create more problems. But the other factor here is thatI had the vagus nerve inflammation due to my gut issues probably since I was a young child.
**Unknown:** But in 2006, I had a very bad head injury from falling snowboarding. So again, the vagus nerve starts in the brain stem. So now I had the double whammy. I pretty much had my vagus nerve inflamed from the bottom up, the gut up, because of the gut infections.
**Unknown:** Then I had a head injury, which gave me 13 staples in my head, a severe concussion, and a sprained neck. And so now I also had damage and inflammation to my vagus nerve from the brain stem level down. So after the inflammation from the top and the bottom all came together, that is really what started to kick in the issues, the extreme issues where I was having more frequent episodes, and I was also having more intense pain and blacking out. So this is really important for women to realize, because you could have just had a bad head injury that created such vagus nerve disruption that now you're having this vasovagal response.
**Unknown:** And then when you go to get your menstrual cycle, especially if you maybe have endometriosis or fibroids or cysts, you already have inflammation in your uterus, you are going to be likely to have this type of issue from the pain, discomfort, to the blacking out or fainting. Also, if you have gut issues and you have infections in your gut, knowing or unknowing, it can induce it. And if you have both, you can have the extreme that you're having these episodes. So it's really, really important for women to understand the connections, because I can't tell you how many women I work with and like, "My hormones, my hormones, my hormones." Your hormones are something that shouldn't-- You'll never be able to manipulate your hormones properly and create a symphony.
**Unknown:** It's too complex of a system. So if you think that you're going to orchestrate hormone balance through hormone replacement therapy, uh, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, whatever it is, you're always-- You might feel better for a short amount of time, but you're never going to be able to orchestrate the proper balance because there's too many organs involved. You have hormones from the brain, the thyroid, the gonads, the reproductive system, the adrenals. Like, there's too much involved, and there's so many factors and variables that play a role in your hormones being balanced.
**Unknown:** So the key is you remove the obstacles. You remove the things that are derailing the hormonal system. And really what that takes is looking at anatomy. I-- Like, a lot of times in the beginning of my career, people were like, "How do you do what you do as a chiropractor?" And I feel so grateful for my background because I had such a focus on anatomy and physiology and the nervous system.
**Unknown:** So I understand the nerves and how the brain communicates with the organs, and then I also understand the anatomy of the organs and how they're positioned, and even how the low back and the spine and the sacrum and the tailbone all play a role in the reproductive organs as well. Because you're literally the two bones on, you know, people call it your hips. You know, they're-- You have your ovaries that are anchored through ligaments on your hips. So if you've had a bunch of injuries or you fell off a horse and broke your pelvis or you've broke your tailbone, like, those are things that are also going to contribute to a lot of strain on your uterus, a lot of strain on your gastrointestinal system that's going to potentially even create some of the things that we're talking about today.
**Unknown:** So I hope this was extremely insightful, and I do want you to walk away with some tips and tools. So listen, if you wanna go ahead and do a parasite protocol, you know, you do you. But there is a method to it. There is a way to do it properly, and there is a way to do it incorrectly.
**Unknown:** And so at bare minimum, if you team up with some of the reps at CellCore, they could potentially help you with their parasite protocol. Um, if you are someone that ha- is- has a lot of complexities with your health, if you are having the fainting, blacking out, there's probably more to the story, and it's a matter of working with someone who can really get data on your body and lead you in the right direction so that you can resolve these symptoms once and for all. So obviously, you know what I do. If you're here, you can, you know, look at our website, check it out.
**Unknown:** We pride ourselves on being investigators and data junkies. We always figure it out. We always have solutions, and we always get results. So I will leave you with that, my friends.
**Unknown:** Until next time. We thank you so much for being an avid listener of Integrative U Radio, formerly known as Integrative Wellness Radio. We appreciate all of your support. We love your comments.
**Unknown:** Please visit us on social media as well as our website to see all of the fun things happening behind the scenes and the new amazing content and courses that is being rolled out on a monthly basis. We hope to see you there.
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About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
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