How Humans Heal

In this episode we're going to be talking about something that I consider to be the foundation of health and healing. This is what I refer to as C.A.R.E.™ or sometimes we refer to it as SelfC.A.R.E. I'm going to be describing what it is and the method that I use with my patients because it's one of the simplest things we can do for our health. In fact, it's so simple that we often overlook it. It's when we start paying attention to C.A.R.E. that we can really create a major change in our health. This is true whether you're dealing with fatigue, anxiety, depression, burnout, menstrual cycle related symptoms, fertility issues, digestive issues, hormonal issues, autoimmunity, allergies, sleep issues, infections of all different types (skin infections, sinus infections, bladder infections, viral infections like EBV, HPV and even long COVID symptoms). They all improve with these foundational steps. You can start working on your C.A.R.E. today. It’s not about perfection, it's about connecting with yourself, listening to your body, and getting to know what your body needs from you in order to heal. This is an individualized approach to your specific body needs (it's not one-size-fits-all). I will give you the guidelines here and then I want you think about how you can implement C.A.R.E. as an individual. What is C.A.R.E.? Self-care involves activities that I have been reading and writing about over the years. Specifically, what does it mean to take good care of ourselves and our bodies. And one day I realized that these activities fit this acronym C.A.R.E. These are activities that you can do on a daily basis. The C stands for Clean Eating or eating in a way that matches your physiology and supports your health. The A is for Adequate Sleep. Just like eating, sleeping is essential for us to be able to recharge and reset. The R stands for Recovery Activities. This is a whole menu of possible activities that help us counterbalance stress. And E is for Exercise. We all need to exercise at our own pace to match what our body is able to do and benefit from it. As a practitioner I am always observing and looking for patterns amongst my patients. This is how I was able to identify C.A.R.E. was common in patients that were successful at recovering from stress, improving their health, and maintaining their resiliency to stress over time. This is also the foundation of naturopathic medicine. I will also share with you how to individualize your C.A.R.E. based on your Stress Type, which is how your body is uniquely affected by stress. I talk about all of this in detail in my latest book: Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. In the book you will find hundreds of references related to C.A.R.E., which researchers have been studying for decades. Clean Eating Clean eating is about eating in a way to support your health. I was originally trained as a nutritionist, so I see food as medicine. Our bodies need macro nutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fats) as well as micronutrients and vitamins and minerals to function and survive. And we need to get these things from our food because our bodies can’t produce them. So, it's a matter of really honoring food as this source of nutrition and life for us instead of just eating mindlessly. We want to start eating mindfully and choose our food with intention and gratitude. The simplest way to start eating a healthy diet is to make sure you are having a relatively equal percentage or balance of protein, carbs, and fat. I see a lot of diets out there where they go a little bit too extreme with macronutrients, like the ketogenic diet that's very high in fat or the carnivore diet that's very high in protein. These diets can actually make us feel worse because they are extreme. Even a plant-based diet can make us feel worse. There are times when more extreme diets are appropriate, but I really encourage you to work with a practitioner who can help you so that you don't find yourself feeling worse following a certain diet. We must make sure we are getting enough nutrients from our diet. Anytime we go to an extreme with our bodies we can create more stress. What our bodies need is predictability, consistency, and stability so that's what we want to create with our eating. We want to have predictable meals that are the amount of food that we can easily digest. It is when we digest our food that we absorb the nutrients. So, we want to have consistency in the amount and the timing of our meals. Usually our bodies do well when we feed them in 3 to 4 hours intervals throughout the day. If we go too long between meals it can disrupt your digestion and create stress responses. I also find that it is best to stop eating at least a couple of hours before we go to bed. This means you would have at least 10 hours without eating if you are sleeping adequately. There can be some health benefits to temporarily or occasionally extending your overnight fast to between 12 and 16 hours but it's really important to modify your daily activities and make sure your body's ready for that so I don't encourage it or recommend it for everyone from the beginning. The first thing we want to do is eat to balance our blood sugar and create predictability in our body, so that our stress response can calm down. If we go back to macro nutrients, I find that it’s best to make sure that you have at least 20 grams of protein and no more than 20 grams of carbs with every meal. Protein can be found in animal products (beef, chicken, fish, turkey, etc.) and also in legumes (beans, chickpeas, lentils, peas, etc.). And then we want to have some carbs from healthy high fiber sources like vegetables and fruits. Then you have the healthy fats in things like avocados, nuts and olive oil (for high temperatures use avocado or grapeseed oil instead) for salads and salad dressing. We also want to be feeding our gut bacteria, but we don't want to over feed them either. Whatever we eat and whatever we digest is going to determine what is feeding our gut bacteria. If we eat too large of a meal or we're under too much stress and we are not digesting our food well, that undigested food is going to over feed our gut bacteria. When our gut bacteria are overfed is when you start to notice bloating and gas and bowel changes and all kinds of other symptoms. It is also possible to overfeed our good bacteria by having a large quantity of fruit and vegetables in a single meal. It's much better to space our meals and to pay attention to our bodies signals on how much food can you have at one sitting that you can digest well. Digesting well also has to do with mindful eating. To set aside time to eat, to take breaths to signal your Vagus nerve that it's time to eat, to chew your food well, to have a calm environment for eating, etc. This way you're allowing your digestive signaling to happen, to get the best ability to digest your food. You can support your digestion with digestive enzymes that make it easier for our bodies to process food and absorb all the nutrients. You can get a good supplement for this here. Clean eating also has to do with eating organic whole foods, avoiding processed foods, avoiding pesticides on your food and any other kinds of artificial sweeteners, fillers, preservatives that are just not necessary and even toxic. It is best to eat whole foods that we cook ourselves or maybe go to restaurants where they are paying attention to making sure we're not eating things that our bodies don’t need and that are bad for our health. If you are under a lot of stress and you are constantly suffering from bloating, gas, abdominal pain, constipation, or diarrhea you may have developed leaky gut. If you have leaky gut and food is leaking through your intestinal lining and it's triggering an inflammatory response that food is no longer a healthy food for you. It is now an inflammatory food. The most common inflammatory foods are dairy and gluten, but it can happen with things like eggs, almonds, bananas and many other foods. So, it is better to assess for leaky gut and food sensitivities, and to identify the highest reactive inflammatory foods. Then we can go through a process of healing the leaky gut and so you can get back to eating a wider variety of foods. If you want to know your food sensitivities, you can order a home test here. Adequate Sleep We need at least 7 hours of sleep. One of the first things that happens when we don't get enough sleep is our immune function decreases. When we're sleeping a lot of good stuff happens. Our immune system is helping to protect us from infections, it's helping ourselves to repair, there's a process called glymphatics which is a process of clean out in our brain. All this is not happening if we don't get enough sleep. We need to look at both quantity and quality of sleep. Also, we need to look at our circadian rhythm. Are you sleeping when it is dark outside? Maybe you have to work a night shift that affects your circadian rhythm. This increases our risk of different health issues so it's important to know and to support your body through that. We sleep in cycles of about 90 minutes. We go through a process of deepening our sleep as time passes until we reach the deepest sleep stage. We spend a percentage of time in each sleep stage and then it starts over again. It's best to be able to complete several sleep cycles in a row because each time we create the subsequent sleep cycle we spend more time in the REM sleep stage and the studies show that when we're in this deep sleep stage is when our brains and bodies get the most rest and repair. When it starts to get dark our bodies start producing a hormone called melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that's signaling all kinds of repair in our bodies. If we don't have enough melatonin our risk of developing health issues will increase, so we need to let our bodies produce this hormone by turning off all lights when it’s time for bed. There is this concept called sleep hygiene. I talk about this in my latest book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health and in my Blog too. I think about sleep hygiene in terms of our five senses. For sight we have to analyze if there is enough darkness in our room when we sleep. Maybe you need to get blackout curtains or cover any other lights like phones or chargers or alarm clocks that may be generating light through the night. Also it is best to avoid any late night light exposure, especially blue light exposure from electronic devices because this is signaling the brain that it's not time to sleep yet and this is going to inhibit your melatonin. Also, take a look in your bedroom and see if there is clutter as there's studies that show having a cluttered bedroom can affect our sleep. For smell I think of dust. Take a look in your bedroom and see if it needs to be cleaned. Is there dust in there that could affect your breathing while you sleep. Dust can also be the source of allergies so for a good night sleep it is best to have a clean bedroom. For hearing we want to be paying attention to any noise that can disrupt our sleep. There are also certain sounds that can benefit our sleep. If you're having trouble sleeping you can actually use sounds like white noise or pink noise to help with calming your nervous system. For touch think about the fabrics and materials you are in touch with when you sleep. Maybe you need softer sheets or a new mattress. Also, I always recommend buying organic sheets, blankets, pillows, and mattress. We have to make sure we have a comfortable environment for a better sleep. This includes the temperature in your room. We sleep better when there’s a slight lower temperature in the room. You can still be under a blanket but it’s better for quality sleep if the room temperature is around 67 to 69 degrees Fahrenheit. For taste we go back to eating. Making sure we don’t eat 2 hours before bed and making sure our last meal is not too large. It's a matter of keeping your blood sugar balanced so you don't want to eat too many carbs too close to bed because you're going to have a spike in your blood sugar and when your blood sugar drops it can wake you up. I wrote a whole separate book called Natural Insomnia Solutions where I go into the detail about how to help with sleep issues so if you're struggling with sleep, I recommend you definitely get that book and work through it. You'll see a big difference in your sleep. Recovery Activities There is a long list of recovery activities that help our bodies recover from stress. I am going to talk about some of the most common here. Research shows that these activities can help bring cortisol and adrenaline levels back to optimal, and that's exactly what we want. We are constantly exposed to plenty of activities that disrupt our cortisol and adrenaline levels. What we lack is activities that help correct and counterbalance those effects, so I encourage you to look at this almost like a menu and choose what interests you. It's about choosing something that you're curious about. Maybe there are things you do already that you can continue to do, or there are things that you've been thinking about doing but you can’t find the time. If this is the case, I encourage you to say, “OK it's time to bring some recovery activities into each and every day”. I want to start with gratitude. Anytime we practice gratitude and just allow ourselves to feel grateful for the things that are happening in our lives, people in our lives, pets in our lives, experiences, etc. When we go into a state of gratitude it increases our anti stress hormones like oxytocin, and this helps us to recover from stress. It can be as simple as journaling about what you feel grateful for or thinking about it before bed or when you wake up in the morning. If you would like to start journaling to practice gratitude you can get your SelfC.A.R.E. notebook here. Sometimes just being in quiet can help us reset from stress. We are so used to having a TV on, the radio on, people talking to us, etc. We're just used to constantly having something going on and so it takes intention to stop and set aside some quiet time for ourselves. It's amazing what can happen when you have that quiet time, so I recommend you create that for yourself. Meditation and mindfulness are also great for stress recovery. There is so much research on the health benefits from these activities. Some people can be kind of afraid or confused about how to do meditation, so I encourage you to just start simple. You can start with 5 minutes. Meditation is really about becoming more aware of your thoughts and becoming the observer in your own body. So much of the time we're just immediately responding to sounds and triggers and what's going on and what's next that we lose track of our ability to be the observer of our own experience. I think about it as simply taking a couple minutes to just breathe and allow yourself to notice the sounds, the feelings in your body and your thoughts but without reacting, just be with them. It’s about a greater awareness for our thoughts and our feelings and our body in each moment. Meditation and mindfulness can make an amazing difference with healing not only our nervous system and our brain but our whole body. Breathwork or any kind of deep breathing can have a huge impact on stress recovery. There are a lot of books and videos out there on how to use breathwork for healing. Also, Yoga has a lot of research on how yoga can help us recover from stress. And Yoga involves mindfulness, breathwork and movement. Very intentional movements and positions of the body that help us just be present. Spending time with pets has also been shown to increase the release of oxytocin which is an anti-stress hormone and we start to go into stress recovery mode. Also, spending time in nature has shown a positive impact on stress recovery. Even if you're looking at pictures of nature without even going outside. I really encourage you as much as you can to get outside first thing in the morning. Just a 5-10 minute walk is enough. Then in the middle of the day another 5-10 minutes just to be able to observe nature. Now you're combining mindfulness with your time in nature to observe the plants and the sounds and the colors and the smells. Our human bodies respond to all of these things, and they help us recover from stress. Listening to music or playing an instrument, singing, dancing, spending time with our friends and family, laughter, sex and intimacy, reaching out and just talking to someone who you care about or working with a therapist and being able to talk about your experience as a human in your life are all activities that can help us recover from stress and trauma. There are also many plant substances that help us recover from stress, including psychedelic medicines. Find more information on many of these forms of stress recovery in episodes of How Humans Heal. Exercise Exercise is one of the activities that has the greatest ability to improve our resilience to stress. When we are exercising, we're preparing our body for stress exposure both in terms of creating a healthy response to stress and a healthy recovery from stress. That's one of the reasons why it's so important to find ways to integrate exercise into your life and into your daily routine. On the other hand, we have to make sure we don't overdo it because if we go too intense or for too long, we end up increasing our cortisol levels and that works against us in terms of our health. So, it's important to exercise but to listen to your body and to be aware of what's the right amount and intensity for you and even what time of day is best for you to exercise. For example, we know that with exercise there's strength training which is anaerobic exercise and cardio which is aerobic exercise, and we need both. They both help us to become resilient to stress and recover from stress. You can choose from so many different activities but it's important to choose activities that match your body, your current activity level and also your interest. I encourage you to choose something you enjoy and that you like to do so it is easier to integrate into your daily routine. If you are just about to start to exercise, I recommend you start small, you can start with 5 minutes a day, then work up to 10 or 15 minutes a day. The study showed that we can get the benefits from exercise even in short periods of time, and then you can potentially repeat that in a couple different times in a day to add more time to your exercise routine. For those of you with joint hypermobility like me it's important to be really cautious with exercise and not overdo it because you're more likely to get injured than the average person. Even if it's Yoga you might have to do a little bit less than other people. One of my favorites is Pilates because it's helping me to gain strength and correct my body posture and position for my joints, which I find to be really helpful for the symptoms of joint hypermobility. Again, the important thing with exercise is to know where you're starting, there's no reason to try to push yourself beyond what feels good to you. Always listen to your body during and after exercising. If you feel too tired and exhausted that means you overdid it. Also, make sure you're staying hydrated and that you have enough protein and enough sleep for your body to be able to recover. Implementing SelfC.A.R.E. According to Your Stress Type Your stress type is how your body is affected by stress, specifically related to cortisol and adrenaline levels. What I found in my research is that we don't all react to stress in the same way. We don't all have high cortisol and high adrenaline. So, it's important to know what's happening with your cortisol and adrenaline levels because your cortisol and adrenaline levels will influence what's the best C.A.R.E. for you. What I find is when you fine tune your C.A.R.E. based on your stress type you're going to benefit even more from it. To find out your stress type you can do the stress type quiz right on my website. You can also find the stress type quiz in the book Master Your Stress, Reset Your Health. It's a quiz that you can do in less than two minutes, and it shows you what is your stress type out of the five most common stress types: stress magnet that tends to have high cortisol and adrenaline at some point or all day, sluggish and stressed who has high cortisol with low adrenaline, tired and wired that has the high adrenaline with low cortisol, the night owl who is like a stress magnet but they have high cortisol and or adrenaline at night, and blah and blue that has low cortisol low adrenaline all day or part of the day. Once we know your stress type, we can then use nutrients and herbs to bring your cortisol and adrenaline back to optimal. C.A.R.E. helps you get your cortisol adrenaline back to optimal and it helps you keep your cortisol and adrenaline at optimal going forward. To me the ultimate goal is for a good health is resiliency, is our ability to be exposed to stress and still do things we love, whether that's traveling or different sports or activities or being a parent or grandparent or building a business or project. We want you to be able to do these activities while being resilient to stress so that it doesn't have a negative impact on your life. If you want to learn more about how stress and trauma have affected you and how C.A.R.E. can help you recover so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. If you’re ready to start rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, to help your adrenals reset after stress exposure, you can start by ordering this home test kit. And you can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Online Program to guide you here. If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol. Keep in mind that 50% of people with leaky gut, have zero symptoms, so the only way to know for sure is to do the food sensitivity panel I recommend. If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do without affecting your daily routine, you can check out my 14-Day Detox Program here. The Detox Program includes a gluten-free, dairy-free meal plan, along with a protein shake (the protein shake is included), as well as videos to guide you every step of the way. This detox program includes a plant based or bone broth based protein powder. One of the key things we do in the 14-day detox is help you to understand how to integrate C.A.R.E. into your life so you can then continue on that path going forward so you can be your own best health advocate. If you are interested in how C.A.R.E. can help you fend off HPV, you can find my HPV Recovery Guide here. If you would like more help getting HPV to negative, and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for the upcoming 5 Days to Heal HPV Workshop here (We start Monday September 18th at 7PM Eastern Time) or my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here. If you would like to start journaling as a recovery activity you can get your SelfC.A.R.E. notebook here. This is the perfect tool to keep track of your C.A.R.E. as you're working on integrating it and fine tuning it to really create a self-care routine that's going to work well for you over time. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, where you'll receive a newsletter from me every Thursday with the latest episode and additional resources and tools for your success with achieving optimal health. For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. Be sure you sign up and subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of How Humans Heal. I love having you here with me and I would love to hear from you on other topics you'd like to learn more about. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Additional Resources:    If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.    If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).    If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).   You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).    Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)   For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.  

In today’s episode I want to introduce you to Dr. Lindsey Elmore. She is a pharmacist (PharmD) and wellness expert. She's also a speaker, author and podcast host. She specializes in helping women to take full ownership of their health from wellness in the physical body, to stability in mental health, to robustness of spirit, to freedom in finances. Today we talk about what options there are for people who may want to try a more holistic approach for their health instead of the medications that pharmaceutical companies produce and commercialize. After suffering from an injury to her anterior cruciate ligament, Lindsey ended up attending an acupuncture session which opened this whole new world of homeopathic and holistic medicine for her. She then started accumulating knowledge about traditional Chinese medicine, started going to integrative medicine forums, hanging out with shamans, and learning more about indigenous medicines. Lindsey eventually got a reputation of knowing as much about alternative medicine as western medicine. She became very practical about the integration of the two because she believes that to embrace natural medicine does not mean to deny western medicine as they are not mutually exclusive. Do Pharmacists Get Training on Natural Approaches vs Drugs? So, pharmacognosy is the study of plants as medicine and if you back up 150 years, a pharmacist was nothing more than someone who was there to put the medicines together using herbs and natural substances from plants that proved to work for certain illnesses. They understood the application of plants as medicine. In our modern world this is not so much the case. Now you have to go out in search of it and that is because the division between western and alternative medicine became very bold after the Flexner Report came out about 100 years ago. They basically dismissed any kind of medicine practice and even schools that were not based in drugs and surgery. Nowadays, if a doctor does only prescriptions, it is most likely because they don’t know any better. There is no medicine out there, even the over-the-counter ones or supplements, that does not have any side effects. Over the counter medications can cause significant harm and have major drug interactions so be sure to know your medicines and know your pharmacist. Your pharmacist should be able to talk to you about your medications and to teach you about the safety of those medications and the alternatives out there. There are so many alternatives to prescription drugs and surgery out there that are less invasive and have less harmful side effects. It is the responsibility of your health care provider to let you know what they are. How To Navigate This World of Alternatives to Conventional Medicine and Drugs You can start with anything you would like to try to get healthier. Sleep 20 more minutes each day, get up and get your circadian rhythm kicked off by going out into the sun first thing in the morning, lifting weights, eat one plant based meal, increase your water consumption, meditate, etc. Lindsey names eight root causes of disease: stress, toxins, allergens, infections, dysbiosis, nutrient excesses and deficiencies, sedentarism, lack of sleep and then there’s the sociogenomics. One place to start is with stress. There's no disease that stress does not make worse and no disease that stress does not cause and so it's really important that we figure out how to mitigate our stress by intentionally crafting safety for ourselves. The harder situation comes when you’ve been doing everything that you’re supposed to do to feel good, but something is still wrong and that's when you start getting into things like lab tests, blood work, allergen testing, hormones, or maybe some more sophisticated interventions like imaging, but we have to start with the basics. Going back to stress, it’s not about having zero stress. Some amount of stress is necessary and even healthy. It's about how do we help ourselves recover from all the stresses and toxins that we're exposed to. We need to start simple with lifestyle changes that can allow for that space of recovery. What About Choosing the Right Probiotics and Rebalancing the Microbiome? One of the most popular ways to feel better and healthier recently is getting the right probiotics and addressing the microbiome. There's so much research now helping us understand how important these hundred trillion bacteria living in our gut are to our health. The microbiome is so critically important, we cannot live without our microbiome. Our microbiome helps us to metabolize foods, extract energy from complex and digestible sugars, they also ferment our dietary carbohydrates and fibers to produce what are called post biotics, it uses our food to produce vitamins, it helps with mineral absorption, and they also metabolize our bile acid which helps us to regulate our cholesterol levels. The microbiome has this huge metabolic function. It also has a protective function where it creates layers for our immune system to be educated as well as to provide a barrier function for bad bacteria to be kept away from our system. Our microbiome can also help us turn genes on and off. It strengthens the gut barrier, it changes fat deposition, it influences our growth, it influences changes in the body. We also have this really important system called the gut-brain axis. We have this interplay between good bacteria and bad bacteria, good viruses and bad viruses that are just part of how we educate and train our immune system. The gut-brain axis modulates our response to stress, mood behavior, it governs our food cravings, it manages our circadian rhythm, etc. The gut-brain axis plays a very important role on our mental health. The microbiome is critically important for brain development in early life, and it also helps with the education and regulation of the immune system. Between birth and age 3 the microbiome goes through a maturation process and this maturation process is very important. This is why it’s critical not to over sanitize our children because this leads to allergies, chronic disease, immune disorders, etc. Early in life the microbiome is teaching the immune system how to operate correctly, then later in life the microbiome and the immune system continue to communicate, and this is what helps to balance out pro and anti-inflammatory responses. We are getting more and more sophisticated in our knowledge of different strains of bacteria and what they do in our bodies. We can look for a specific strain that reduces cortisol or one that helps with constipation or one that helps with digestion. We get to be very specific about what's the intended end point for what we hope to happen by taking a specific supplement. We now have all of this research and new information about how important the microbes living in our bodies are to our health. There are more and more products being developed to support balancing our microbiome and benefit from it. And the products we choose will depend on what we are looking to achieve, not everybody has high or low cortisol, not everybody has constipation or digestive issues, or anxiety. We're on the path of becoming way more specific when it comes to choosing the right product for the right purpose. When Taking the Wrong Treatment Makes Things Worse: Bacterial Overgrowth Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth as well as small intestinal fungal overgrowth is very important to address. Many people are told they have IBS or heartburn and given a medication that doesn’t actually resolve the issue. When someone has chronic heartburn or gastroesophageal reflux for example, they tend to take antacid medicine, but this medicine is not safe to use for long periods of time because it depletes our bodies from nutrients, it affects bone health, it affects your ability to digest. You actually need acid in your stomach to correctly digest food. So, this is not a real solution to this problem because again with drugs you are not addressing the root cause of the problem; you are just treating the symptoms. What is typically happening with heartburn is a small intestinal bacterial or small intestinal fungal overgrowth, and as a byproduct of the bacterial/yeast metabolism, they generate hydrogen gas, and this gas is going to be forced to go upwards and will bring with it the gastric juices. The problem is sometimes people already have an overgrowth of bacteria and they start supplementing with probiotics and prebiotics and they get sicker. It's worse because there were already too many bacteria. What we have to do is work to bring the microbiome into balance so that we have the correct distribution of good and bad bacteria. If you know you have a small intestine bacterial overgrowth, it’s important first to use a prokinetic to make sure your bowels are moving well. Then use digestive enzymes to make sure you are digesting well. Then you can work on restoring your microbiome. If you would like to learn more about what you can do to balance your microbiome you can watch Episode #169 of How Humans Heal here. Naturopathic vs Conventional Medicine Approach and Pharmaceutical Companies Abuse A good analogy to understand the difference between a naturopathic or functional medicine approach and conventional medicine and drugs is when a western medicine doctor walks into a room that is flooded he says “Oh my gosh the room is flooded, let me mop it up” and a naturopathic doctor or functional medicine practitioner walks into the room and says “Oh no the room is flooded, let me turn off the faucet”. And so, we're trying to look at where the faucet is to turn off versus just mopping the floor because mopping is not going to do anything. Everybody's looking for magic but what we really need to be looking for is our simple, down to earth, grounded decisions that we make each day that will ultimately lead us to finding the miracle that is being healthy and being well. We have to stop looking for the magic pill. This whole concept of evidence-based medicine being the only kind of medicine and the only way to inform guidelines and the only way to practice is simply not true. There are so many conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical manufacturers and the evidence they produce. If you send in a paper to the New England Journal of Medicine and they send it out to 10 people for peer review and they send it back and say yes, this is good enough to be published it gets published. The problem is nobody is required to go back to the pharmaceutical manufacturers and actually verify that the data that they presented in the paper is factual. Take valdecoxib for example. Merck outright knew that valdecoxib was causing massive amounts of heart attacks and they did not care. They lied about the data, got it published in journals and now fast forward we know that thousands of people died from the side effects of it. We need to have a much higher transparency in evidence-based research if we are going to live in a society where we live and die by treatment guidelines. The people that write the guidelines cannot be the same people that are doing the research for the pharmaceutical companies and manipulating the data in order to say this is what we recommend. We have to be able to rely on the fact that we are going to get actual tangible information out of pharmaceutical manufacturers or we're simply putting patients at risk for harm. We don't have governmental oversight of drug pricing, and this generates a problem because pharmaceutical companies can charge whatever they want. And a lot of times the medicine could be a natural substance and then pharmaceutical companies will just add colors and fillers so that they will be able to patent the substance and probably raise the price on it. There's a lot of ways that these companies go about manipulating patent laws in order to keep drugs on patent. An example of this is the antidepressant citalopram where pharmaceutical companies made a simple chemical manipulation of the extraction to change the name to escitalopram, which is the S-enantiomer of citalopram. Another example is the pain medication oxycontin, where the Sackler family convinced the FDA to allow onto the label that oxycontin was non-addictive and had an effect that lasted 12 hours vs other drugs that lasted less hours. We have to do the research ourselves; we have to go deep into the factual data before taking any drug. We have to educate ourselves and become more aware and learn more whether through a pharmacist or health care provider before even bringing the substance into our home. We need to be empowered owners of our own health. If you want to reach out to Dr. Lindsey and learn more about how she can help you, please make sure to check out her website. She is also on social media as @lindseyelmore (Instagram and Facebook) and @doctorlindseyelmore (Pinterest/TikTok). Her functional medicine wellness platform is called Wellness Made Simple where you can find many resources to improve your health. If you want to learn more about how stress and trauma affect us, and how to recover so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. In the book, I describe what I refer to as SelfC.A.R.E. based on your Stress Type. C stands for Clean Eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, and E for exercise. I share the research behind how C.A.R.E. works in a daily routine to help us process stress. To know your Stress Type, which is your unique cortisol and adrenaline levels based on how stresses have affected your adrenal function, you can take the quiz I developed. You can find the Stress Type® Quiz in the book and on my website. Then, if you’re ready to start rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, to help your adrenals reset after stress exposure, you can start by ordering this home test kit. And you can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Online Program to guide you here. If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do without affecting your daily routine, you can check out my New 14-Day Detox Program here. In the Detox Program I teach you to connect with yourself, and use mind-body tools, such as biofeedback, to process emotions. For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Additional Resources:    If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.    If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).    If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).   You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).    Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)   For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.

Dr. Doni, a medical expert specialized in birth control pill effects on health, discusses risks including HPV-related cancers and nutrient deficiencies. She emphasizes the importance of understanding birth control pills before making decisions about health. The podcast also explores optimizing ovary function, the interplay of hormones and neurotransmitters, natural approaches for menstrual symptoms, and the connection between birth control pills and HPV.

In today’s episode I get to introduce you to my friend, colleague, and mentor Dr. Tori Hudson. Dr. Tori Hudson has been in practice as a Naturopathic Doctor for almost 40 years in Oregon. She is a nationally recognized naturopathic physician, speaker, educator, researcher, clinician and the first woman in the United States to become a full professor of naturopathic medicine. She is also the author of the Women’s Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine: Alternative Therapies and Integrative Medicine for Total Health and Wellness, and has served as a Medical Director, Associate Academic Dean, and Academic Dean at the National University of Natural Medicine (NUNM). Most recently, she has released her new book: The Menopause Companion. In addition to founding and running her own clinic, A Woman’s Time, Dr. Hudson is the founder and co-director of the Naturopathic Education and Research Consortium (NERC), a non-profit organization for accredited naturopathic residencies. She currently serves as the program director for the Institute of Women’s Health and Integrative Medicine. Dr. Hudson also co-founded Vitanica, a supplement company offering formulations based on her decades of clinical experience. Today we talk about women's health later in life and how we can help women in new ways using a naturopathic approach and natural medicine. How Has Women’s Healthcare Evolved Over the Last 20-25 Years? There's been a considerable shift in menopause management. Specifically, the rise and fall, and rise again, of menopausal hormone therapy. Natural medicine started to gain more recognition in the late 80s’. Dr. Michael Murray was very influential in bringing to light the botanical medicine research out of Europe and other parts of the world. Dr. Tori attributes to him the initiation of an awareness of the world of botanical medicine research and the influence it has had on naturopathic practice and the development of integrated physicians. The shift began in using supplements to both reduce the risk of disease and treat disease. Women's health in particular is seeing an immense expansion of options, which can be fantastic, but also more confusing to navigate. People are now able to research different approaches online and they're able to access different practitioners. So, women are more likely to say “I want something different” or “I don't just want a cookie cutter suggestion”. Today, patients are more informed and have more opportunities to be informed. They come more often with their own thoughts, ideas, and opinions. Most the time that can lead to a collaborative process of determining their treatment plan. Women today have a lot more tools to help themselves. They have new ways to get what they need from their healthcare providers, and they have a lot more ability to question if they really need a treatment or procedure. Dr. Tori loves when a patient comes in and asks for a second opinion. Recently, she had a patient asking her if she really needed a particular surgery for her bladder and she was able to reassure her that surgery was the necessary next step. Naturopathic doctors are trained to recognize the value of conventional medicine and how to incorporate that into a natural approach and a naturopathic medicine context. It’s important to recognize that every paradigm has its strengths, and every paradigm has its weaknesses. That’s what is unique about the modern naturopathic physician - we can really help patients navigate the best opportunities for their healthcare. Naturopathic Medicine as an Individualized Approach for Menopause Perimenopause starts at least a decade before the period ends and then comes post menopause. So, for women living till their mid-80’s it’s really most of their lives. It’s a lot of years of our lives to be navigating hormone shifts, and potential symptoms and health issues, and women really do need help navigating that. Especially because there's still not enough research, and the information that is available is not always consistent and can be confusing. Dr. Tori reminds us that there's rarely a one size fits all approach, which is the beauty of naturopathic medicine. We try to individualize the approach for each person. If there are 10 different women who have hot flashes, there's going to be some recommendations that are common for them all, but there's also the nuance of suggestions that match for the rest of their health. So, hot flashes occur in a context of: does the patient have arthritis, what's their risk for diabetes, do they have high blood pressure, what's their risk for Alzheimer's? There is the quality-of-life issues which can be fairly simple to resolve, and then there's the disease prevention issues and the disease treatment issues which need to be addressed. A naturopathic doctor should help you look at the big picture and then help gather the information to help you make the best decisions possible about what to take and how to support your health. Navigating The Ladder of Intervention in Women’s Health Dr. Tori’s new book outlines what changes might be happening in your body, how to ask the right questions of your health care provider, what might be problematic in the world of tests and treatments, and more. She compares it to a map, as opposed to a strict sequence. There are many options for how to get on from point A (where you are starting) to point B (feeling better). This is important because we are all coming to the table with a different set of cards, and we may all have similar pathways to navigate, but at the end of the day, each of our approaches needs to be individualized. It is tempting to talk to other women and hear a particular intervention that worked well for them, but your menopausal journey will probably look very different from your friends’ or even your family members’ journey – and what may have worked well for them, may not have the same impact for you. It's great to share stories and share experiences with other women, but no one else’s experience will be your exact prescription. That’s where the ladder of intervention becomes helpful. On this ladder you can consider where you are starting and what makes sense in your case. Consider what symptoms you are experiencing, what your family history predisposes you to, your own medical history, and what you’ve already tried to help you see where you should begin. The beauty of this process is to determine the most minimally invasive intervention we can introduce that will lead to the intended improvements. It’s not just a hierarchy for all circumstances, as in we do not always start on the first rung of the ladder. Each person or situation will have their own hierarchy. Maybe you’ve already been implementing diet and exercise but still experiencing night sweats, or hot flashes, or have osteoporosis. In these cases, we move up the ladder of intervention to see what steps are needed to produce the necessary changes. Multitasking Herbs for Menopause Since our body is an ecosystem, symptoms do not usually occur in the singular. Taken together, the totality of symptoms can provide a more complete picture of what herbs might be most helpful. Dr. Tori refers to these combinations as twofers, three-fers, and four-fers. For instance, if a woman is experiencing hot flashes we will also ask, is she struggling with her mood, does she have achy joints as well, or is she experiencing memory issues. Then we look for herbs or formulas that will cover the most issues for a specific patient. Black Cohosh, for example, has by far more research than any other single herb, but that doesn't mean it's going to work for everyone. Maybe curcumin will be the remedy for someone who has hot flashes as well as joint pain. Better Understanding of Hormone Replacement Therapy Is hormone replacement therapy right for you? Women are often hesitant about hormone replacement for one reason or another, as it can feel drastic. There's newer research that's helping us, even as providers, become more comfortable with hormone replacement therapy. If you have been following a treatment plan, and you’ve tried herbs and formulas that can help with perimenopausal symptoms, but you’re still experiencing night sweats or vaginal dryness and your symptoms are not improving, then we can start talking about some form of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. It's important to understand the benefits and the risks of menopausal hormone therapy. Age will be one of the most important determining factors. How old is the patient, when did she become menopausal, does she have other coexisting health issues or what other coexisting health problems does she have, and what are her risks for what Dr. Tori calls the big three: Osteoporosis, Heart Disease, and Alzheimer's Disease. Additionally, there are three buckets of information that are important to evaluate: what are your quality-of-life issues, what diseases are you at increased risk for, and what conditions or diseases do you already have. All of that informs the decision making on the benefits and the risks of menopausal hormone therapy. If you're within the first ten years of your last menstrual period, less than 60 years old, you haven't had breast cancer, a stroke, or clot, or DBT, then the risks of hormone replacement therapy are negligible. There are a few other risks to consider, like fatty liver, but those are the fundamental considerations. From there we can determine whether menopausal hormone therapy is safe for that person. The risk of breast cancer from going on menopausal hormone therapy is very low if you’re in the group just described. In fact, it is much more likely to get breast cancer if you drink alcohol every day, smoke, you don't exercise and you're overweight. There are very few women for whom systemic menopausal hormone therapy is actually contraindicated. There are cautions on delivery methods, for instance if you have a gallstone, we shouldn't give oral hormones, and if you have fatty liver or elevated triglycerides, we shouldn't give oral, but we can give transdermal hormones instead. It’s important to work with a practitioner who understand all the options, delivery methods, and ways to customize your dose based on your health. What About Local Estrogen for Vaginal Health? Vaginal estrogen can be a miracle worker for some women. Vaginal estrogen for the purpose of local vulvovaginal problems doesn't increase the risk of anything if it's done properly. Typically, it is prescribed for local dryness, itching, irritation, painful sexual activity, and/or leaky bladder. In these cases, it’s often a waste of time to attempt vitamin E, moisturizers, or lubricants. You can skip up the ladder of intervention to vaginal estrogen since it is still very minimally invasive. There are, of course, still instances where caution should be exercised, for instance if breast cancer is or was present. In that case, a non-hormonal option would usually be the beginning recommendation. But even gynecologist societies and menopause societies say you can use tiny doses of vaginal estrogen safely in a breast cancer patient for vaginal symptoms in many cases. A low dose of vaginal estrogen has also been found to be helpful for women who tested positive for HPV and have abnormal cells on their pap smear. With vaginal estrogen, you're improving the vaginal biome and that means you can prevent bacterial vaginosis or vaginal infections. We're finding that the vaginal biome and the species of lactobacilli living in the vagina help fend off HPV as well. Vaginal estrogen gets you a healthier ecological environment and balance of microorganisms. A healthy vaginal biome relies on healthy estrogen levels in the cells. We might first notice vaginal dryness most acutely during sex, but vaginal dryness can be an indicator of other health issues and affect more than just your sex life. Local estrogen can be a preventive medicine that can help with vaginal dryness and a range of other health issues as well. The dryness and discomfort put you at an increased risk for vaginitis, urinary tract infections, possibly HPV, bladder leakage, and overactive bladder. You can prevent those things from happening most of the time by using a small dose of vaginal estrogen twice per week. So, it's not just for sexual comfort, it's related to your overall bladder and vaginal health as well. What Are Some Good Supplements for Menopause and Women’s Health? As we mentioned before, Dr. Hudson co-founded Vitanica, a supplement company offering formulations to support women’s health. Some of my favorites are: Black Cohosh: The most effective formulation I’ve ever come across for hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms. Chaste Tree Berry: An herb that supports ovulation and helps with symptoms of premenstrual syndrome, breast pain associated with the menstrual cycle, infertility, and perimenopausal menstrual changes. Slow Flow: A formula of herbs and nutrients for heavy menstrual bleeding. CCDG Blend: Tried and true for HPV cases, CCDG contains curcumin, coriolus mushroom, DIM and green tea, all in one. Cranstat Extra: Herbal and nutrient formula for bladder infections. Candidastat: To support a healthy biome and prevent yeast overgrowth. I’ve been working with these formulas for 23 years (Dr. Doni speaking), and I’ve seen time and time again how helpful they are for women. That’s why I recommend them in my practice. As always, I am here and would love to help you wherever you are in your health and menopausal journey. I’m licensed to help with hormone replacement therapy in several states. Please feel free to reach out with any questions so we can get started on improving your life and your health, together! If you want to reach out to Dr. Hudson and learn more about how she can help you, please make sure to check out her website. Also be sure to check out Dr. Tori’s new book, The Menopause Companion, to learn more about how to navigate this process of perimenopause and post menopause, from finding the right practitioner or set of practitioners who can guide you along your journey, and the right questions to ask to take steps in the best direction. If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to addressing HPV, including why healing leaky gut is essential, you can find my HPV Recovery Guide here. If you would like more help getting HPV to negative, and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for the upcoming 5 Days to Heal HPV Workshop here or my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here. If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do without affecting your daily routine, you can check out my 14-Day Detox Program here. The Detox Program includes a gluten-free, dairy-free meal plan, along with a protein shake (the protein shake is included), as well as videos to guide you every step of the way. If you want to learn more about how stress and trauma have affected you, in terms of your cortisol and adrenaline levels, and how to recover so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. To know your Stress Type, which is your unique cortisol and adrenaline levels based on how stresses have affected your adrenal function, you can take the quiz I developed. You can find the Stress Type® Quiz in the book and on my website. If you’re ready to start rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, to help your adrenals reset after stress exposure, you can start by ordering this home test kit. And you can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Online Program to guide you here. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, where you'll receive a newsletter from me every Thursday with the latest episode and additional resources and tools for your success with achieving optimal health. For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Additional Resources:    If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.    If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).    If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).   You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).    Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)   For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.  

In today's episode we talk about gluten. What it is, the symptoms that it can cause (and how it may be involved in health issues you may be experiencing), how to know if it's an issue for you, and what to do about it. Gluten has been something that I've been researching and learning about for more than 20 years. When I was in my training at Bastyr University in the 90s, it wasn’t well known that gluten could cause so many health issues. At the time, I, myself was dealing with health issues, including severe allergies and migraines, and I was trying to figure out the cause. I really wanted to understand how my diet and the food I was eating were influencing my health, and so I tried every diet and did every kind of test on myself to try and figure out the cause of my health issues. It wasn’t until after having graduated from Naturopathic Medical School that I finally did a test that was able to identify that gluten was an issue for me. And so, I started avoiding gluten and immediately started feeling better. My allergies decreased, the migraines lessened, and I started to feel better in general, so discovering that I have a sensitivity to gluten really helped me. As of now, I have been avoiding gluten for over 20 years and have helped thousands of patients to discover that gluten is an issue for their health as well. I became an expert resource on the topic of gluten and gluten sensitivity, lecturing at professional conferences across the U.S. and being interviewed by the media on numerous occasions. In the process, I learned so much more about the trouble that gluten can cause. And in helping my patients I discovered that it is not just important to identify gluten as an issue, but also how to recover from gluten exposure. This is important because many patients come to me saying they are already avoiding gluten, but they haven’t started to feel better yet, and so it’s key to know how to do a full recovery from gluten in order to reset your health and to heal. What Is Gluten? Gluten is a protein that is found in certain grains, including barley, rye, spelt and wheat. This protein acts as a binder in recipes, to hold foods that we make with these grains together, and to make them chewy, like the dough in the process of making bread for example. Without gluten, the dough would just crumble and fall apart easily. Gluten is made up of two smaller protein molecules: gliadin and glutenin. I find that it's helpful to understand that these protein molecules are made up of amino acids, just like all protein. When we ingest protein, in general, it is broken down by our pancreatic enzymes into amino acids which can be absorbed into our bodies. The issue with gluten is that humans, in general, are not able to completely digest gliadin (in gluten) and the related prolamins (from wheat, barley, and rye) due to their high glutamine and proline content. That means that when we consume gluten, some amount of it will not be digested, and can become a trigger to our immune system. It's also important to know that there's a whole spectrum of possible reactivities to wheat and gluten, and to understand that we don’t all react the same. A person’s immune system might be more reactive to gliadin than glutenin, for example, or vice versa. Some people may be equally reactive to both. Others may be more reactive to wheat, which is a larger molecule than gluten. It can be helpful to understand exactly what is triggering your immune system so you know what to avoid specifically. When Is Gluten A Problem? Anytime we eat a food that we don't digest well (like a larger amino acid chain or protein molecule) it has the potential of causing health issues, especially if that undigested food is able to get through the intestinal lining to where our immune system exists, ready to protect us from foreign substances. Our immune system picks up on proteins (remember that viral proteins, like all proteins, consist of amino acids!) and triggers an inflammatory response to attack the protein. This is what can happen with gluten, because we don't digest it well, and because gluten itself opens spaces between intestinal cells, and gets through to where our immune system thinks it needs to protect us from it. Our immune system releases cytokines (which are inflammatory molecules) to try to protect us. Cytokines are important because they help us heal but if our intestines are being constantly bombarded by gluten and cytokines, there will be constant inflammation, and this can end up causing damage to our cells in the long run. Damage to the intestinal cells is called intestinal permeability or leaky gut. For most people, eating gluten occasionally is not a problem. It is more likely to be an issue when we consume gluten all the time. If we're not paying attention, we could even be exposed to gluten in every meal. Some people may be having gluten for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Gluten is often added to products and recipes, even when we don't realize it. Besides the grains mentioned above, gluten is added to condiments, recipes and packaged foods that we wouldn't even think would have gluten in them. Some breads, for example, may even contain 10 times more gluten (as an added ingredient) to make them fluffier and chewier. In fact, in the United States we're exposed to more gluten than anywhere else in the world because of the “added gluten” in products, intended to increase sales of these foods. If you are wondering why gluten is such an issue now, it's because we're getting so much more exposed to it than ever before. Additionally, there are other factors, such as that most wheat, especially in the United States, is grown with exposure to a pesticide called glyphosate. Glyphosate is know to damage to the intestinal cells. When you combine the negative effects of glyphosate with the increased exposure to gluten, it makes sense why we are seeing an increase in gluten-related health issues. What is Celiac Disease and How is it Different from Gluten Sensitivity or Wheat Allergy? Let’s start with wheat allergy. A wheat allergy is when your immune system is creating IgE antibodies to wheat, similar to when someone is allergic to peanuts. Someone with wheat allergy is likely to develop symptoms within minutes to hours after eating something containing wheat. The symptoms include itching, irritation and swelling of the mouth and throat, hives, itchy rash or swelling of the skin and nasal congestion. This is different from Celiac disease. Celiac disease (CD) is a chronic digestive and autoimmune disorder that damages the small intestine. The disease is triggered by eating foods containing gluten. Celiac can cause long-lasting digestive problems and keep your body from getting all the nutrients it needs. It is an autoimmune condition meaning your immune system is not only trying to protect you from gluten (gliadin), but also from your own intestinal cells. It is thought that at first the immune system is reacting to gluten, and then begins to attack nearby proteins, including an enzyme in intestinal cells called transglutaminase enzyme or tTG. This process ends up damaging the intestinal cells, causing severe leaky gut. About 2% of the population is considered to suffer from Celiac disease. There is a genetic correlation for this disease. We have been able to identify that people who have the genes that are called HLA DQ-2 and HLA DQ-8 have an increased risk of Celiac disease. Those people also have an increased risk of non-Celiac gluten sensitivity. Non-Celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS or gluten sensitivity) means a person has a reaction to gluten but doesn't have the autoimmunity condition, so the immune system is not attacking their own cells. It is much more common than CD and is thought to occur in at least 6% of the population. Both CD and gluten sensitivity have a lot of health issues associated with them. What Are the Symptoms of Gluten Sensitivity and CD? One of the most common symptoms, especially in children, is a stomachache. GERD/reflux, gastritis, nausea, bowel changes, and abdominal pain are all associated with gluten sensitivity and CD. Headaches are also common. So, if you get a lot of headaches paired with digestive discomfort, you could be suffering from gluten sensitivity. At the same time, it’s important to consider that only about 50% of people with Celiac disease and gluten sensitivity have digestive symptoms. Many people come in saying they do not have digestive issues. In fact, with gluten issues it is much more likely to have neurological symptoms, like anxiety, depression, neuropathy, or other neurological issues. The inflammation is going from your digestion straight to your nervous system. Other symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, decreased focus, memory loss and sleep issues. Not only that but gluten can cause aches and pains whether that's joint pain, muscle pain (that might be considered fibromyalgia), and can cause nutrient deficiencies because of the damage to intestinal cells. When we have damage to our intestinal cells, or leaky gut, we're not going to be able to absorb the nutrients from the foods we eat, so we become more likely to have nutrient deficiencies. The most common deficiencies are iron, vitamin D and B vitamins. It may go as far as developing anemia. So, if you have anemia or iron deficiency, you could be suffering from gluten sensitivity. It also can cause canker sores, skin rashes, menstrual issues (including fertility issues), and perimenopausal symptoms. One of the most common issues I find related to gluten is that it increases our risk of infections of all different types - viral infections, bacterial infections, and yeast infections. If you're getting recurrent infections, whether that's sinus infections or bladder infections, vaginitis, skin infections, eye infections and even persistent HPV, it can all be related to gluten. How Can You Know if You Have Gluten Sensitivity or CD? At least one in four people are thought to have some degree of gluten sensitivity. So, how do we test for it? How do we know if we are sensitive to gluten? For Celiac disease, the standard way to diagnose it is with an intestinal biopsy so, you would need to go into the gastroenterologist to have an endoscopy and biopsy. With the biopsy, they're looking for damage to the small intestinal cells caused by the autoantibodies. There is a blood test that shows anti-gliadin antibodies and antibodies to tTG. These tests are part of a Comprehensive Celiac Panel, and can give a sense of whether Celiac exists, but for an official diagnosis of Celiac disease it is necessary to do the biopsy. For non-Celiac gluten sensitivity, the standard is to avoid gluten for a period of time (usually at least three weeks) and monitor your symptoms. If you feel better when you eliminate gluten fully from your diet, then you could have gluten sensitivity. Then you can try re-introducing gluten to your diet and see if you feel worse to confirm if gluten is affecting you. What I find really helps to identify gluten sensitivity is an IgG and IgA food panel. Not all IgA and IgG food panels are as accurate at identifying reactions to gluten, so I recommend using the lab that I have tested and found to provide the most accurate results. You can order this test through my office here. It's a finger poke so you can do it from home anywhere in the world and mail it in. With this test, we can also check for other food that your body may be reacting to – it tests for 96 foods. It is also possible to test for gliadin antibodies in a stool test. The stool test that I recommend to my patients is called the GI Map from Diagnostic Solutions. It is a highly sensitive test for gliadin antibodies in the stool and can identify if your immune system is trying to protect you from gluten. These tests can be helpful even for someone who's been avoiding gluten as they can tell you if your system is still trying to protect you from it based on your current diet. If this is the case, you may want to take a closer look at your diet so you can identify if gluten is sneaking in somehow. What Is Leaky Gut? Leaky gut is a short way of saying intestinal permeability. The mucous lining of our intestines is designed to absorb water and nutrients from our food into our bloodstream. The intestinal cells are lined up next to each other and our body grows new intestinal cells every day. Those intestinal cells can be damaged by stress, injuries, medications, toxins, and gluten. When the intestinal cells are not as healthy, the intestinal lining allows undigested food to “leak” through, causing an inflammatory reaction by our immune system. When we're under a lot of stress, our body is not able to keep up with making new healthy intestinal cells, leading to increased intestinal permeability or leaky gut. Other causes of leaky gut include surgery, physical stress, lack of sleep, exposure to toxins (like pesticides and toxins from gut bacteria), eating non-organic foods, alcohol, caffeine, and gluten. Gluten causes damage to the intestinal cells by triggering the inflammation that we mentioned. It also increases a substance called zonulin which is a protein that signals to open the spaces between the cells. So, gluten is literally signaling through zonulin to cause leaky gut. Then it gets through to the other side of the intestinal lining and that's where our immune system is hanging out waiting to protect us. So, the immune system triggers even more inflammation. And that inflammation doesn't just stay in the intestinal area, it can go anywhere in the body which is why it can cause such broad symptoms. It goes to our nervous system, our joints, our skin, etc. That inflammation then overwhelms our system, causing more stress. So, not only does the stress from our external world make us more likely to have leaky gut and a reaction to gluten, but gluten and the inflammatory response cause more internal stress. And so, it becomes this vicious cycle or snowball effect where it compounds, and you end up with more and more health issues. By doing the food sensitivity panel that I mentioned we can get an assessment of the degree of leaky gut that you may have. To me, that is the real question – is leaky gut mild, moderate or severe. Gluten can also disrupt our microbiome. We've discussed the importance of the gut microbiome in prior episodes. Microbes living in our body are important for maintaining our health in general, our immune system, our nutrient absorption, our neurotransmitters production, etc. If you would like to learn more about how important our microbiome is and how you can get yours back to balance, you can watch Episode 169 of How Humans Heal here. Are Gluten Sensitivity and HPV Related? Through many years helping people with gluten sensitivity, and also helping people with HPV, I have been identified a pattern. Gluten causes leaky gut, and it disrupts the gut microbiome. A disrupted gut microbiome leads to a disrupted vaginal biome, and this causes vaginal inflammation. Vaginal inflammation and a disrupted biome increase the risk of HPV. Also, gluten and leaky gut cause nutrient deficiencies. We know that nutrient deficiencies increase risk of HPV and abnormal cells, and decrease immune function, so it is not able to protect us optimally. Yes, we can work on healing leaky gut, rebalancing your biome, addressing nutrient deficiencies, and supporting your immune system to protect you from HPV. But if we don't take gluten out of your diet, it's just going to recur. It will happen again and again, and that's why I spend so much time in my programs and working with patients to help them successfully eliminate gluten from their diet and fully recover from gluten sensitivity. If you have tested positive for HPV and are ready to get it out of your life for good, I encourage you to join me for an upcoming 5 Days to Heal HPV Live Online Workshop. You can learn more and sign up here. Gluten and Autoimmunity There is also a correlation between autoimmune diseases, such as Hashimoto’s, and gluten sensitivity. When there’s a reaction to gluten and the immune system starts to protect you from gluten, it can also begin to attack nearby tissue. That’s what occurs with Celiac disease and tissue transglutaminase (tTG). Similarly with Hashimoto’s, the immune system starts to protect the person from their own thyroid cells. Research shows the relation between gluten sensitivity, leaky gut, chronic inflammation, disrupted microbiome, and disrupted cortisol levels all leading to a likelihood of developing autoimmunity diseases. So, if you're dealing with an autoimmune condition, then I would say it’s important to take a look at gluten sensitivity as an underlying cause. How Can We Recover from Gluten? Step one is avoiding gluten, and that's an important step. I have so many resources on helping people avoid gluten I have developed over the past couple of decades. I have written about gluten and how to avoid it in all of my books. I've created recipes and menu plans because I want you to have support. It doesn't have to be a difficult thing if you have the right support. I also like to emphasize that it doesn't need to be an overnight change. You don't have to be stressing yourself trying to avoid all gluten by tomorrow. I wouldn't try to do that. I would look at it as a learning opportunity. Start by finding replacements for common foods in your diet. It’s also important to know that most gluten-free products still contain carbs and sometimes more carbs and more sugar than the products containing gluten, and so you don't want to just switch from a gluten filled product to a gluten free product and end up disrupting your blood sugar levels. That's not a good idea either. What we want to do is use this as an opportunity to go more toward a balanced diet where you're having adequate protein, adequate healthy fats and a nice balance of healthy fruits and vegetables, which, by the way, are already gluten-free. We have a lot of food options available that naturally don't have gluten in them. We just need to remind ourselves to choose those foods instead of those containing gluten, or high carbs and sugar. I can help you to start shifting your diet so you have the support you need. I have many programs that help people with this every day. The Stress Warrior Program, for example, including my Stress Remedy 21-day meal plan, that guides you on exactly what to eat for a healthy gluten-free diet. The next step is healing leaky gut. You need to help your body rebuild your intestinal cells. Yes, our body grows new intestinal cells every day but when your body has been constantly bombarded with gluten, and if you've developed severe leaky gut and a disrupted microbiome, then it's going to take some time for those intestinal cells to heal. Often patients tell me they have been avoiding gluten for years, but they still don’t feel good. I find that is most often because they have not adequately healed leaky gut. Healing leaky gut involves getting the right enzymes, nutrients and herbs to help your body digest your food better and grow back new healthy cells, decrease inflammation and reestablish a healthy microbiome. If you want to learn more about my protocol to heal leaky gut, you can watch my FREE Heal Leaky Gut Masterclass here. If you are ready to fully heal, you can join my Leaky Gut Online Program here. It includes a food sensitivity panel and support to address your results. Step 3 is to address nutrient deficiencies. It's important to do the right blood test to identify if you have iron, B vitamin, vitamin D, and/or other nutrient deficiencies. These tests are not usually included in standard blood work, but they are tests I can help order so that you get the right information. When you get the right nutrients back into your body and into your cells, you’ll be able to fully recover from gluten exposure and improve your health overall. The last step of gluten recovery is to fully reduce inflammation. Remember that gluten is triggering so much inflammation through your whole system, and even if you're avoiding gluten, that inflammation may still exist, especially if you have leaky gut. To decrease inflammation, we need to look at the food sensitivity panel and see if there are other foods in addition to gluten that may be causing inflammation. By avoiding the highly reactive foods, while taking steps to heal leaky guy, you can drop inflammation levels for good. Taking anti-inflammatory herbs and enzymes can help speed up the process. And, of course, we need to address imbalanced cortisol levels in order to fully resolve inflammation. It's about developing a strategy that is unique for your body and the symptoms you are experiencing. We need to understand your health issues and do the right tests to find out what your body needs and how to support it in the best way possible. For those of you who have more severe reactions to gluten, including Celiac disease, and you feel restricted by having to avoid gluten so strictly, and if you potentially have other types of autoimmunity, you may want to consider something called helminthic therapy. This is something that I can talk with you about and help you with as well as it has been shown to reduce severe reactivity to gluten. Personalize Your Recovery From Gluten I want to emphasize that not everyone has to avoid gluten 100%, and not everyone has to avoid it forever. We really have to take it on a case by case basis, and understand how is it reacting in your body, and how it has affected your health, and then help you recover fully. As I mentioned, stress of all types can trigger leaky gut and gluten sensitivity, as well as autoimmunity, and then gluten causes more stress from within the body. Stress then disrupts the HPA (hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis), adrenal function, and both cortisol and adrenaline levels. A perpetual cycle of stress ensues. This is why I consider recovery from stress to be so important for reversing health issues. If you want to learn more about how stress and trauma have affected you, in terms of your cortisol and adrenaline levels, and how to recover so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. To know your Stress Type, which is your unique cortisol and adrenaline levels based on how stresses have affected your adrenal function, you can take the quiz I developed. You can find the Stress Type® Quiz in the book and on my website. If you’re ready to start rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, to help your adrenals reset after stress exposure, you can start by ordering this home test kit. And you can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Online Program to guide you here. If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do without affecting your daily routine, you can check out my 14-Day Detox Program here. The Detox Program includes a gluten-free, dairy-free meal plan, along with a protein shake (the protein shake is included), as well as videos to guide you every step of the way. If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to addressing HPV, including why healing leaky gut is essential, you can find my HPV Recovery Guide here. If you would like more help getting HPV to negative, and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for the upcoming 5 Days to Heal HPV Workshop here or my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here. To read more blogs about gluten and leaky gut, you can find them here. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, where you'll receive a newsletter from me every Thursday with the latest episode and additional resources and tools for your success with achieving optimal health. For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Additional Resources:    If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.    If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).    If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).   You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).    Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)   For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.  

In today’s episode I'm excited to introduce you to Chauncey Harrison. Chauncey holds a license in Creative Arts Therapy, specifically specializing in Movement Therapy. Additionally, she has completed her Masters in Social Work and is working towards her License in Social Work. Chauncey’s passion is helping people recover from severe and persistent mental illness, substance use disorders, mood disorders, trauma, and interpersonal issues through creative arts therapy. Her therapeutic style is to meet clients where they are and use a strength-based approach to empower clients. She is collaborative throughout the therapeutic process, working with clients to achieve their goals by using both verbal and non-verbal (dance, movement, art, and drama) tools to help them recover. Today we talk about dance movement therapy and how this type of therapy can help people process emotions and recover from stress and trauma. I especially enjoyed talking with Chauncey based on my experiencing both a researcher of stress and as a dancer. I have found dance to be an amazing medicine for me. Psychotherapy That Goes Beyond the Mind Psychotherapy can be more than just working on the mind. A lot of times what people experience in terms of mental health support ends up being focused on the mind, and being aware of our thoughts, versus what could be stored in our body. There is a connection between the body and the mind, they are not two separate things. We are whole beings in body, mind, and spirit, and when one of those is not aligned, or is out of balance, the others will be affected too. It's a beautiful practice to look into our thoughts and understand them. That’s an important part of therapy, in general. In today’s modern world it’s unavoidable to be bombarded with so much information that it can end up being overwhelming. Our minds are always racing with new thoughts that we sort of forget that we are living in a body. So, it’s important to take the time to return to the body. To unwind and practice mindfulness focusing on the body. When you're returning to the body it can be a practice of mindfulness in itself of bringing you back into the present and what's really going on and tuning in. Your body really does keep the score. It really is aware. It's where we store emotions and so tuning into that can be an incredibly impactful and empowering tool for people to start to understand and work on this connection to the body. It can really help bring back more clarity and connection to a full integration of self. Many times, we are not able to really listen to our body with compassion and to create healing from that place. There can be real disconnections between the mind and the body. People are surprised when they find out that our bodies can be part of therapy. This can also feel incredibly vulnerable because typically we've formed more unconscious ways to defend ourselves with our words. It feels more exposing for many people to be considering what our body has to say, so trust is such a huge part of the work here. How Does Dance Movement Therapy Work? Part of what we're doing in dance movement therapy is 100% play. There's a lot of therapy in play. There’s also a lot of exploring what’s possible and trying to expand the full range of movement. That's huge for people. A lot of times people are really quick in their movements, or quite indirect in their movement, and they stay in a very small kind of sphere. In that case, we can start playing with what it’s like to feel bigger. To expand that sphere and expand in the space where we’re moving. This also impacts our experience as humans and the ways that we relate to one another. If we're always relating in one movement repertoire, it can be limiting. Typically, it's helpful to have a full range of movement options. We might not even be aware that we're just moving in that one repertoire. Dance and movement have been around since ancient times. It has been used for entertainment, storytelling, religion, and healing. There's so much research on how healing it is to our nervous system to move in general. Many people can relate to the experience of being in a bad mood and going for a walk and starting to feel better, or going to the gym and feeling less angry about that issue was bothering you, or having a little dance party in your room and realizing it's not that big of a deal. This has to do with the release of endorphins and neurotransmitters that are activated by that movement. There is a lot of people where stillness is really present in the movement, where it feels really painful to move. And dance therapy is about meeting people where they are. You don’t have to do a specific amount or way of movement. It’s about being present and listening and observing how things develop without any kind of judgement. And then to maybe explore and just start playing with it and expand it when it feels appropriate. It's about following what someone is bringing into the space and really watching and seeing what's appropriate for them. You can get these insights into a person's patterns simply by looking a little bit more closely to what's going on with their response to the movement. And there is so much restoring movement too, whether it's memories or what it brings up for you in that moment. Certain movement patterns that have been more codified can be restored in people's bodies, energizing or relaxing them for example. Movement plays so many different roles in our lives. Is Dance Movement Therapy a Kind of Somatic Therapy? Somatic therapy, sometimes known as body psychotherapy, is a therapeutic approach that places importance on what we experience in the mind and the body, as well as the connection between the two. Again, with dance therapy, it’s very important to meet the person where they are and where they are coming from. Certain diagnostic labels can be really helpful, and sometimes not so much. It’s about exploring feelings and emotions through movement while not being attached to a specific label. And as we mentioned before, mind and body are one whole thing, and they influence each other. If someone is suffering from gastro-intestinal issues because of anxiety, it's real. A lot of our emotions reflect in our stomach. This shows us how mind and body are connected. It proves that we can feel emotions on a physical level. Sometimes people are led to believe that something's only “in their head” or they’re making it up and it’s not real. If you feel it or experience pain or discomfort of any sort, it's real. We have to acknowledge and validate that, because it’s a crucial part of the healing process. We have to be able to connect with our feelings and emotions and how these relate to what we feel in our bodies. A lot of the time we suppress our emotions. We aren't taught how to have awareness for them and how to just be present to be able to process them or just be present with them. If you want to learn more about this you can watch Episode 165 of How Humans Heal - Emotional Healing: A Pathway to a Better Life here. Part of what dance movement therapy and creative arts offers is this nonverbal processing of feelings and emotions. You may not even know what you’re feeling, and it could be very uncomfortable, but we can start with a sensation and maybe we can put that into an image. What would this image look like? Can we draw it on a piece of paper? Is there a sound that goes with it? And this can be so helpful to process our emotions and get more information about what they are related to. This can make people feel vulnerable, even just asking for help can feel vulnerable, let alone trying to listen to what your body wants to tell you. We don't know what we're going to find out, so it feels vulnerable in that way. The important thing to keep in mind is that this is a process that is unique to each individual and that everyone has a different pace and process. It’s about going at your own pace and discovering little by little what your body is trying to communicate. It's not like you will come out of the first session in shock and lose track of your original existence. You’re discovering information slowly and then you can integrate that information into your daily life. It’s about providing a safe space and empowering people to tune in and listen to their bodies and connect with themselves. Dance Movement Therapy and Yoga The body has so much information for us, we just have to learn how to listen and access it. Some of Chauncey’s original connection to dance therapy was through yoga and what it did for her. And yoga is a form of movement that is used for healing not just on a physical level but a mental and emotional level. It’s also a way to experience the mind and body connection. There are so many different types of yoga and different ways to enter the practice. For some people it could be through the physical practice and for others through reading the books and doing self-study or meditation. It’s always about what moves you and what speaks and resonates with you and where you are in life. Speaking about movement, some of the movements and postures in yoga can create a space for a lot of healing and release. There’s so much research now backing up just how impactful yoga is for health, not only mental but also physical, including reducing inflammation for example. It’s not just about flexibility and balance. With all this neurological research, we also have a lot more proof of the mirror neurons and the impact of them. In dance movement therapy, there’s this technique called “mirroring” where you bring someone else's movement into your body, so that you're sharing the movement together and it’s so impactful. There’s definitely some overlap between yoga and dance movement therapy but there are also beautiful differences in those practices. There are a lot of dance movement therapists who are yoga teachers and there are a lot of yoga teachers that seem to have a dance background or a dance movement therapy background too. Using Dance Movement Therapy to Treat Chronic Illness and Pain We know dance movement therapy can help with anxiety and depression, but it can also help with physical pain and trauma. As we mentioned, the body and the mind are connected and there are many chronic illnesses that can be traced back to unresolved trauma and stored emotions. Using the movement therapy lens, there might be unresolved traumas and things held in the body. Someone can come in because they think they’re depressed and then there's a lot more that we're unpacking and we're looking at during therapy. Likewise, if someone comes in with a chronic illness or chronic pain, they can process and explore and find out what the source of the illness is through dance movement therapy. So often in the mental health field what people hear is that there's a chemical imbalance and that they need medication, not to say that medications aren't sometimes appropriate and necessary and helpful, but it’s important for people to know that there are other tools that they can use to heal. It’s about opening up the possibilities for people so they don't feel stuck. Whether it's through movement therapy, talk therapy or a mix of both. There are also art therapists, drama therapists, music therapists, etc. There are many creative arts therapists out there, it’s a matter of finding what works for you. And there’s research behind all of these different techniques that show how they are all therapeutic and can help us heal. Recovery from stress and trauma can help with so many health issues, including anxiety, depression, fatigue, pain, digestive issues, autoimmunity, and recurrent infections, as well as HPV, and can help decrease risk of cancer, heart disease, dementia, and more. If you want to reach out to Chauncey and learn more about how she can help you, please make sure to check out her website or her Instagram @refresh.psychotherapynyc. She and the other clinicians in her clinic offer both in-office and virtual sessions. if you want to learn more about how stress and trauma affect us, and how to recover so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. In the book, I describe what I refer to as SelfC.A.R.E. based on your Stress Type. C stands for Clean Eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, and E for exercise. I share the research behind how C.A.R.E. works in a daily routine to help us process stress. And why it’s important to choose C.A.R.E., including movement/exercise, that matches for your body. To know your Stress Type, which is your unique cortisol and adrenaline levels based on how stresses have affected your adrenal function, you can take the quiz I developed. You can find the Stress Type® Quiz in the book and on my website. Then, if you’re ready to start rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, to help your adrenals reset after stress exposure, you can start by ordering this home test kit. And you can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Online Program to guide you here. If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do without affecting your daily routine, you can check out my New 14-Day Detox Program here. In the Detox Program I teach you to connect with yourself, and use mind-body tools, such as biofeedback, to process emotions. For the most comprehensive support to recover from stress and trauma, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Additional Resources:    If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.    If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).    If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).   You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).    Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)   For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.  

In today's episode we're going to be talking about joint hypermobility. This is a topic that's important to me both clinically and personally because I was diagnosed with it a few years ago. What I find is that joint hypermobility is much more common than previously suspected, and there is so much we can do to help with the symptoms of pain, anxiety, fatigue, and more. Joint hypermobility is sometimes referred to as joint hypermobility syndrome (JHS) or hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD). It shows up a little bit differently in each person and is not well known by practitioners, which means that many people with hypermobility have seen numerous practitioners without receiving a diagnosis. When they do receive a diagnosis, they are often told that “there is no cure,” which can make it seem as though there is nothing that can be done to help. That is simply incorrect. I’ll be sharing more why that is my perspective in this episode of How Humans Heal. First, it is important to understand the various potential symptoms of hypermobility, so that you can start to understand how they are interconnected and unique to each person. That will also help us to understand why the approach needs to be individualized as well. Mainly I want listeners/readers to know that I’m here as proof that it is possible to feel good, to be out of pain, and to thrive even when you tend toward joint hypermobility. What is Joint Hypermobility? Joint hypermobility is considered a connective tissue disorder. Connective tissue involves our skin, joints, ligaments, tendons, and fascia. Hypermobility syndromes are associated with joint instability and chronic pain. If you or someone you know has been experiencing joint pain and/or muscle pain for long periods of time, this is something to consider and to talk with your practitioners about, especially those who are experts in hypermobility, so they can help guide you. Although it has been improving in recent years, still there is very low awareness for joint hypermobility amongst practitioners. I believe that is for two reasons: 1. it's a relatively newly identified condition. It was first described in 1967; 2. It’s considered to be a rare condition, otherwise known as a “zebra”in medicine, meaning that if someone comes in with joint pain, practitioners are more likely to think of the most common causes for joint pain before thinking of hypermobility syndrome. Research indicates that about 3% of people have joint hypermobility, but I actually think it's higher than that and is more common than we realize. Now, joint hypermobility may or may not be part of another diagnosis called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) which includes joint hypermobility, with unstable joints that dislocate easily, as well as stretchy skin, easy bruising, wounds that are slow to heal and leave wide scars, hernias and organ prolapse. There are thirteen different types of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, some of which involve the blood vessels and digestion. To be diagnosed with EDS requires a genetic analysis to identify collagen-related gene variations. The important thing is, if you feel joint pain or discomfort, you should start taking action now, regardless of it being hypermobility syndrome or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. You have to start taking steps to protect yourself and prevent it from causing further health issues. To me the awful thing is that so many people who are diagnosed with joint hypermobility or with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome are told it's a genetic condition and that there’s nothing they can do, or that all that can be done is manage the pain. To me, that is unacceptable. As a naturopathic doctor, and as someone with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, I can tell you there are so many things that help me feel better, and that help me prevent symptoms and health issues associated with hypermobility. There's so much you can do about it. I'm not saying that there's a cure, but by understanding it and by being proactive, you can get yourself out of pain and prevent health issues associated with hypermobility. How to Know if You Have Joint Hypermobility Our joints and a lot of other parts of our body are made of collagen. Collagen is so important for joints, bones, ligaments, tendons, blood vessels, intestines, and more. We all make collagen slightly differently. If the way your body makes collagen makes it a little more stretchy, then you may have very flexible collagen and hypermobile joints. But remember, it's a spectrum so not everybody with hypermobile joints can do extreme movements. The best way to identify if you have joint hypermobility is to do a Beighton score test, which is a nine-point scale related to range of motion of joints in the body. The higher you score, the more flexible your joints are. The Beighton test starts with evaluating if you can touch the floor with your hands with your legs straight; this gets you one point. Next is evaluating if you can hyperextend your elbows. If your elbows can extend beyond making your arm look straight, then you get one point for each elbow. Same thing with your knees, so when you stand if your knees bow backwards, that's hyper mobility of the knees, and that's one point on each knee. Then there's the fingers - a classic is to measure if your thumb can reach all the way to your forearm and another is if you're little finger can point back more than 90 degrees from your hand, these are one point each. And there are other signs too. If you notice other joints that can move more than other people's or they move out of position easily (or dislocate), that's also a sign that you may have joint hypermobility. What Are the Symptoms Related to Joint Hypermobility? Anxiety: There are other symptoms that can be related to joint hypermobility like fatigue, anxiety and even depression. Anxiety is highly correlated with hypermobility, research shows that 70% of people with hypermobility have anxiety, and people with anxiety are likely to have joint hypermobility as well. Neurodivergence: Hypermobility is also correlated with depression and what's called neurodivergence. Neurodivergence is associated with differences in social preferences, ways of learning, ways of communicating, and ways of perceiving our environment. It is often associated with autism, ADHD and Tourette's syndrome. Neurodivergent individuals may be more sensitive to our environment emotionally, chemically, and physically. The nervous system is more sensitive and perceptive, and that can relate to being in chronic pain. Chronic pain: The reason for pain is caused by joints being slightly out of position, triggering muscle spasms and fascial restrictions. With hypermobility, it is harder to identify where our body parts should be in space because the joint range of motion is greater. Our nervous system also has a different perception because our joints are more flexible and it’s not so clear when motion should stop, making it less likely for our joints to automatically or naturally be in an optimal position. We have less of an internal guidance system. Luckily it is possible to learn proprioception (where your body parts are in space), and by practicing body position and posture, we can prevent joint dislocations. For someone who has collagen that's not so stretchy, this is easier because their joints are not allowing for further movement. If you have hypermobility, your joints will not tell you where to stop and so we have to train ourselves to know where our body is healthiest in space in order to decrease our pain and other symptoms. Muscle strength can also help keep our joints in place. Bruising & Palpitations: Now, with joint hypermobility, and especially with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, you could have symptoms of easier bruising, palpitations, and/or a heart murmur, such as mitral valve prolapse (which is when the heart valves do not close properly between each beat, allowing blood to flow backwards). Digestive Issues: You may also experience issues with the digestive tract, like constipation or diarrhea, and it may be considered IBS or irritable bowel syndrome. You may be diagnosed with IBD, which is inflammatory bowel disease such as Crohn's disease or other forms of colitis. Hypermobility also makes it more likely that you will have Celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. Dizziness: Joint hypermobility and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome can also be associated with dysautonomia. Dysautonomia is a disorder of autonomic nervous system function. The autonomic nervous system is in charge of involuntary functions, such as breathing and our heartbeat. It also has to do with our response to stress. Dysautonomia involves an imbalance in the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) parts of the autonomic nervous system. It can cause dizziness, fatigue, and weakness, especially when under stress. It can also be related to POTS, or postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which is a condition in which a reduced volume of blood returns to the heart and brain after standing up quickly. When you have hypermobility, you have very flexible collagen, and this makes it harder for your blood vessels to get the blood to your brain, so you feel dizzy for a few seconds until your body can catch up by increasing your heart rate. It can make you feel like you are going to faint, or actually cause you to faint. Symptoms from Stress: Also, stress makes all these symptoms harder to manage. If you've been under a lot of stress, maybe going through a loss or stress at work, or stress in your relationship, or trauma of some sort, then your autonomic nervous system will be affected and not work smoothly. The sympathetic nervous system carries signals that put your body's systems on alert, while your parasympathetic carries signals that relax those systems. We need a balance of the two. We need our bodies to be able to do a stress response and protect us from danger, but we also need our bodies to be able to turn off the stress response and go back to calm. When we're under constant stress, our bodies have a harder time flexing between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. That's when the autonomic nervous system starts having a harder time, and we start becoming more susceptible to infections (HPV, EBV, etc) and toxins, especially for those of us with hypermobility. Mast Cell Activation: Another issue related to joint hypermobility and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is mast cell activation syndrome or MCAS. Mast cells are present throughout our bodies and secrete chemicals during allergic reactions, histamine in particular. Symptoms include episodes of abdominal pain, cramping, diarrhea, flushing, itching, wheezing, coughing, lightheadedness, rapid pulse and low blood pressure. Mast cell activation (and histamine) can also be related to headaches, like migraines, as well as neuropathy, symptoms of vulvovaginal pain, vaginitis and urinary/bladder pain. Autoimmunity, like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, and other inflammatory conditions, like ankylosing spondylitis and SAPHO, are also related. MTHFR and Methylation Issues: A recent study associated hypermobility with MTHFR gene variations. MTHFR is the gene that manages the conversion of folic acid into folate, and folate is the active form of vitamin B9. Of course we all need B9 along with all the other B vitamins to help us in so many processes, including having healthy connective tissue. If we don't have enough folate, and if we don't have healthy methylation, this is going to affect the way our body creates collagen. If we know that MTHFR is associated with hypermobility, and we know that not having enough folate and effective methylation affects your connective tissue, then we can do something about that. We can make sure you have adequate folate, and we can make sure you have effective methylation, in order to help protect your connective tissue and prevent pain and other health issues. If you want to learn more about this, I encourage you to go listen to Episode #145 of my podcast: Efficient Methylation and its Impact on Our Health as well as my Free MTHFR Masterclass. What Can We Do to Help Our Bodies if We Have Joint Hypermobility? It is possible to help your body rebalance and correct where it needs help. To me, it's about understanding your biochemistry, and understanding your body's tendencies, and giving your body what it needs to heal and rebalance, which usually comes in the form of dietary changes, nutrients, supplements and herbs. A lot of people feel stuck with their symptoms and the need for medications. With joint hypermobility, the main issues are joint and muscle pain, so one of the first treatments recommended is a pain medication, like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). While offering temporary relief, they have a lot of side effects and can't be taken long term, plus they're not really solving anything, in fact, they might be making things worse, so that's not really a solution. Neither are steroidal drugs for pain as they also have negative effects on our bodies. Additionally, medications prescribed for hypermobility symptoms, such as anti-depressants and benzodiazepines, create dependency and have withdrawal symptoms. To me, it's not enough to tell people with joint hypermobility that the only option is pain management. There is so much more that we can do. There are ways to manage pain by actually decreasing inflammation and using natural substances that don’t have side effects. It is also possible to start helping your body alongside the use of medications when you are working with an expert who understands the interactions and is able to guide you. Physical therapy, massage therapy, myofascial therapy, acupuncture and exercises for posture and strength (such as Pilates) can help reduce the symptoms. It is important to make sure the practitioner or trainer understands what joint hypermobility is and the special needs that your body has because when you have joint hypermobility, you are more likely to suffer from injuries. The approach needs to be completely different. It’s not about increasing flexibility or increasing intensity too much. And It’s also NOT going to help to stop exercising all together. It IS about doing the right type of exercise, in the right amount and frequency, for your body. For me Pilates has been extremely helpful. It helped me to learn joint position and posture, and to gain strength without causing injury. Ballroom dancing also helps with posture and strength. Myofascial release therapy has been hugely helpful as it can release the restrictions in the connective tissue. If you want to learn more about myofascial release therapy you can watch Episode #166 of How Humans Heal: Myofascial Release Therapy - Bringing Your Body Back to Alignment. Also in Episode #170 you can learn about how to get rid of joint and muscle pain using natural remedies. Acupuncture and especially acupuncture that's using electrical stimulation can also help address the trigger points and motor points in the muscles, so it is a great option too. Paying attention to your body, your posture, and your strength every day is a must if you have joint hypermobility. You can’t just get a massage once a year or go to physical therapy only if you get injured. You have to have a weekly plan to help relieve the symptoms and prevent injuries. If you don't keep up with that routine of managing your body and your joints, that's when you are more likely to find yourself in pain and at a greater risk of injuries. Dietary changes to reduce inflammation, testing for food sensitivities, healing leaky gut, addressing the gut biome are all things that can help. If there is leaky gut and imbalanced gut biome, you have a source of inflammation from within your gut, and that's causing inflammation through your whole body which is going to increase your likelihood of pain. Our biome is so important. It's not just about having a bunch of bacteria or probiotics. It's about having the right balance and how these bacteria communicate with our immune system and our nervous system. If you would like to learn more about how to balance your microbiome you can watch Episode #169 of my podcast: Getting Your Microbiome Back on Track. It is also essential for anyone who has hypermobility to measure your cortisol and adrenaline levels. Hypermobility makes it more likely that your nervous system and adrenal gland function are disrupted by stress. It's more likely that you're going to have neurotransmitter imbalances, and either too high or too low cortisol and adrenaline, or what I call the stress types (the five most common disruptions of cortisol and adrenaline). That's what I wrote about in the Master Your Stress Reset Your Health book. If you want to find out if your cortisol and adrenaline are out of balance, you can order my home test kit here. You can also take the Stress Type Quiz online and sign up for my Stress Warrior Program to guide you to optimize your cortisol and adrenaline (adrenal health) here. We also need to do specific blood work so we can understand exactly how hypermobility is affecting you and if you have nutrient deficiencies. If you have hypermobility and inflammation and nutrient deficiencies, it could snowball into various health issues. This is why we need to look at the big picture, see the interconnections, and then guide your body through the steps to heal and prevent more health issues. The best treatments for hypermobility are from what I would consider a naturopathic approach. It has to do with giving your body what it needs to heal in terms of food, nutrients, plants, herbs and other natural approaches. We need to make sure you are consuming adequate amounts of protein – learn more about that here. We can support the body to heal itself by working on the root causes of problems and solving them. If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol. Keep in mind that 50% of people with leaky gut, have zero digestive symptoms, so the only way to know for sure is to do the food sensitivity panel I recommend. If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here. If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here. You can also subscribe to my newsletter where you'll receive a newsletter from me every Thursday with the latest episode and additional resources and tools for your success with achieving optimal health. For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Additional Resources:    If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.    If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).    If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).   You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).    Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)   For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.  

In today’s episode I get to introduce you to my friend and colleague Dr. Josh Levitt. He is a Naturopathic Doctor who graduated from Bastyr University like me and also holds a degree in physiology from UCLA. He is also the author and creator of several popular books and is a clinical preceptor for the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Levitt draws upon the science of both conventional and natural medicine and artfully combines the two into a “best of both worlds” treatment strategy. He employs a unique blend of nutritional therapy, herbal medicine, and physical medicine to treat a wide range of common and complex medical problems. Today we talk about musculoskeletal health, especially what people experience in terms of joint pain and not only why they're experiencing joint pain, but also the frustrations navigating the medical system related to joint pain and joint issues. His interest and passion in helping people with their musculoskeletal health, and pain in general, comes from being a surfer and skateboarder as he was growing up in Southern California. Being in casts and braces of various sorts and going through lots of X-rays and lots of broken bones he developed an early interest in orthopedics and musculoskeletal health. Later in life, after going through a very serious skin infection while travelling through Europe, he discovered a new world of natural and herbal remedies and was instantly drawn to the naturopathic health world. Conventional Medicine vs Naturopathy. Are They Mutually Exclusive? Like so many things in life, health and medicine exist on a spectrum. Within that spectrum there are different domains, you have nutrition and herbs, and surgery and neurosurgery, medications, laughter, community, love, gratitude, etc. There is a long list of things that qualify as medicine in that context and conventional medicine and naturopathy should not be seen as mutually exclusive. In Naturopathy, the philosophy is to use the lowest amount of force that's necessary in order to promote healing. That is just one way of looking at medicine and what it means to heal. Using the least invasive or the least forced therapies for what a person needs is what Dr. Levitt uses in his approach to treating orthopedic and musculoskeletal health issues. What Are Some of the Most Common Joint or Muscle Issues? The most common complaint in primary care offices across the country is low back pain. We can go from there and say low back pain, mid back pain, and neck pain. So, pain in or around the spine is a big one. A common diagnosis is a bulging or herniated disc. It might be causing sciatica, and it might be degenerative disk disease in the neck or back. These kinds of spinal complaints are the things that people might go to an orthopedist for, but also might go to a chiropractor or an acupuncturist or a naturopathic doctor. Other common causes of joint pain are rotator cuff problems in the shoulder, tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome in the upper extremity, hip pain, knee pain, foot pain, and plantar fasciitis. There are so many different diagnoses in musculoskeletal category, but they all relate to people who have something that hurts and are looking for a way to heal. What Is the Conventional Medicine Way to Treat Joint and Muscle Pain? There's a very like predictable pattern of prescriptions that happen for people who are in pain. It starts with over-the-counter pain relievers or anti-inflammatory medications. It goes up from there to injectable forms of those drugs, to steroidal medications and corticosteroids, to some kind of surgical intervention. That's just a very common and predictable pattern we see in conventional medicine. A lumbar fusion, a microdiscectomy, a laminectomy, an arthroscopic knee surgery, or a full-blown knee or hip replacement. There are hundreds of thousands of surgeries being performed in this country on spines, necks, backs, knees and hips that are outright unnecessary or totally inappropriate, and that's a tragedy. In naturopathic medicine there are so many options and tools that could prevent the need for medications and even surgery. Why use such a powerful invasive tool when another less powerful, less invasive, less toxic, less forceful intervention would do the trick? A knee replacement in the appropriate patient and circumstance is a beautiful thing. In fact, it's almost miraculous, but only when done on the right person in the right situation. If you do it on a person who doesn't need that level of intervention, that's almost criminal. When we look at people who are in their 40s who do not have back pain and take MRIs of their backs, you will find that 40% of them have bulging discs in their lumbar spine. Same with knees with meniscus tears or chronic degenerative meniscus tears in the knees - 40% of people have those and their knees feel great. And then you go up every decade from there - in their fifties it’s 50%, in their sixties it’s 60% of people who are feeling good have evidence of degenerative problems in their spine and/or joints. As soon as they feel some kind of pain and they go to a doctor they get that MRI and then the pain is immediately linked to that degenerative problem. This is simply not true. There are other things that can be causing the pain and they need to be evaluated. For example, excessive inflammation, muscle tension, strength versus flexibility imbalance, fibrosis, and also the psycho-emotional part of it. When we address these things comprehensively people get better and can avoid the need for medications or surgery to heal. What Is Inflammation and What’s it’s Role on The Body? Inflammation is named after fire in Latin and so inflammation and fire are really similar. We need them both. Fire is very important, as we know we use it to cook and we use it to stay warm. Fire is part of our lives, and when it's contained and controlled it's great but when fire escapes the fire pit or the candle, you have a big problem. It becomes maybe one of the most destructive forces in nature. Inflammation is very similar; people think of it as bad and want to suppress inflammation, but it is absolutely fundamental to healing. It’s our body’s response to help us heal. But just like fire, when that inflammation is excessive, it becomes destructive. It can be a major driver of chronic disease and painful syndromes. If you get stung by a bee or stub your toe, you want an inflammatory response to start the healing process. You just want it to be normal and not excessive, because that's when it starts to be a wildfire. Our diet, physical activity level, stress exposure, environmental toxins, and lifestyle in general are all factors that affect our body’s ability to produce a controlled inflammatory response. Then if a person is having an excessive reaction that persist, we can use therapeutic herbal medicines to get it back to normal. Herbal treatments and diet changes are a long run fight. The person needs to understand that dietary changes, supplements, herbs, and nutrients are going to make that person less likely to have problems in the future. Now, if someone shows up with a knee the size of a grapefruit, they will need to feel better right away because they are in terrible pain and that’s where conventional drugs might work. But it’s also proven that when you suppress inflammation aggressively, like with steroids or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, especially for extended periods, the problem will be worse over the long term. They will be more likely to require more medication and more interventions over time. It's like winning the battle but losing the war. There's a parallel in fever. If we suppress the fever, we will feel better, but so will the virus or the bacteria and it will likely take us longer to heal. It's very similar with the inflammatory response. What Natural Tools Do We Have to Drop Joint and Muscle Inflammation? There are many natural remedies to drop inflammation that can avoid the need for non-steroidal or steroidal drugs that work for joint pain: 1. Curcumin: This is the active ingredient in turmeric. When you dry the turmeric root and put it into a powder, about 2% of that powder will be curcumin. Curcumin targets many of the different actors inside the inflammatory cascade and modulates the inflammatory response in a very powerful way. This herbal medicine is extremely safe, very well tolerated and powerfully effective. It also has a quite broad dosage range. You can go very high without getting yourself in trouble. 2. Boswellia Serrata Frankincense: This is made of a resin from a from a tree and it is also anti-inflammatory. It targets inflammation in a different way than curcumin and can work in resurfacing cartilage and improving the integrity of cartilage surfaces that have been damaged by wear and tear. 3. Bromelain: This is an enzyme that is extracted from pineapple and it's antifibrotic. It’s the active ingredient in meat tenderizer so when you sprinkle meat tenderizer on a piece of tough gristly meat it chemically digests fibrin in that tough steak and makes it more tender, and so bromelain does the same thing in your body, it gets absorbed and will have a fibrinolytic effect in your body and that's a good thing when you have fibrin or fibrosis that's restricting blood flow, nerve activity or range of motion inside of a joint. 4. Magnesium: In terms of addressing the muscular part of the pain, there's a lot of things that can be done like acupuncture, stretches, strengthening exercises, etc. But if we talk about what can you take orally for muscular pain, magnesium is very effective. Magnesium is not an herb; it's a mineral and it is a very important for physiology for all kinds. It works by decreasing muscle tension and increasing muscle relaxation. Specifically, magnesium glycinate or malate are the types that will work best for muscular pain and not so much other forms of magnesium like citrate and oxide. Magnesium can be used topically too in the form of lotion or Epsom salts because it absorbs through the skin and can work for muscle relaxation or healing injuries. Another good resource for someone that has for example joint hypermobility and tendency toward pain is acupuncture with electrical stimulation. This is a procedure in which mild electric currents are applied to certain spots on the body and can control pain and other inflammatory symptoms. Myofascial release therapy can also be very helpful in combination with these approaches. Also, cannabis in the form of CBD and THC is a good resource that is being used in recent years to treat muscle tension, pain, and inflammation. It can be used both topically in which case it doesn’t give you that psychoactive component, just the anti-inflammatory and antispasmodic effect. There’s a lot of literature for cannabis being used to treat all kinds of different medical problems so it is a good alternative when used in the right patient in the right circumstance. What Else Can Be Done to Avoid Going Through Surgery? If you have tried the all the natural methods described here (diet changes, addressing stress, using herbs and nutrients, stretch and exercises, physical therapy, acupuncture, etc.) and you are still in pain, you might want to consider going to the next step. There are other tools out there for treating joint and muscle issues before you go through surgery. For example, prolotherapy, stem cell injections, PRP (which is platelet rich plasma injections), hyaluronic acid injections are all regenerative therapies that are absolutely resources to try before surgery. Unfortunately, these things, generally speaking, are out of pocket expenses in most places and can cost thousands of dollars, so we have to evaluate about whether or not these treatments fit into our budgets. What About the Psycho-Emotional Part of Pain? Physical pain can have a psycho-emotional source. You have to be able to really ask yourself what is going on in your life now that can be triggering that pain. This becomes very clear when you start taking a closer look at what is going on in your life, what is happening and what emotions are coming up in this process of analyzing it. We’ve talked about the spectrum between alternative or natural medicine and conventional medicine, and the spectrum of inflammation and here again, the body and the mind are not two different things, they are the same thing, they are part of this big spectrum called the “human body.” And so, it's impossible to have a physical malady, arthropathy, a degenerative meniscus tear or a bulging disc in your spine without having a psycho-emotional and even spiritual component to it. We are physical, emotional, and spiritual beings and so any impact upon any of our systems will affect all of the others as well. There can be blockages or restrictions or suppressions from other things in our lives that can affect various parts of our body and they will manifest as pain. When you have a problem in your knee or your back it hurts, it's just pain and pain is a messenger. It's a messenger that tells us that something is wrong and that that our behavior needs to change, because if we don’t then something worse is going to happen. This change could mean changing something in our posture, physical activity, diet, stress exposure, toxins exposure, nutrient deficiencies, and the psycho-emotional part of our lives. The problem is that very often those behavior changes can be counterproductive if we do not go through the pain of understanding the process we need to go through to really heal. If we just shield ourselves away from the pain either in a psychological, physical, or structural way, we could end up perpetuating the problem. A lot of the work that needs to be done for musculoskeletal pain, especially chronic, ongoing long-term pain, is to help patients understand that in most cases, it's not dangerous; it just hurts. This is hard because pain feels dangerous; it feels scary, but we need to be able to pull back from that and really own the pain in order to heal. If we take the time and the space to just be curious and present, and instead of being in fear and running away from pain, stay with it and learn from it, and listen to our body, it can be very liberating and it can show us what we need to do in order to start the healing process. If you want to reach out to Dr. Josh and learn more about how he can help you, please make sure to check out his website Upwellness or find him on social @drjoshlevitt on IG and @upwellness on TT. To find highest quality supplements mentioned in this episode, you can go to Dr. Doni’s online store. To understand my approach to helping people recover from inflammation and pain, you may want to start by reading my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected your cortisol and adrenaline levels. It’s by knowing your Stress Type that we are able to know which herbs and nutrients best match what your body needs in order to heal. You can also take the Stress Type Quiz online. And if you’d like help implementing my Stress Recovery Protocol, you can follow my Stress Warrior Program online from anywhere in the world. If you’re interested in a safe and effective body, mind and spirit detoxification that will actually make you feel better and that you can do even while keeping up with your usual schedule, you can check out my 14-Day Detox Program here. In the Detox Program I teach you to connect with yourself, and use mind-body tools, such as biofeedback, to process emotions while balancing your blood sugar levels, dropping inflammation, and avoiding toxins. It’s the perfect reset that you can start at any time. For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Additional Resources:    If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.    If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).    If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).   You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).    Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)   For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.  

In today's episode we're going to be talking about the gut microbiome. Why it's important, how to know what's going on with your microbiome and how to optimize it. The microbiome consists of microbes that are both helpful and potentially harmful for us and our bodies. Most of these organisms are symbiotic, meaning they and us benefit at the same time, but some are pathogenic, which are those that cause trouble, produce toxins, and increase inflammation. When we are healthy, both symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms coexist without problems in a perfect balance and without causing us to get sick. The problem comes when this perfect balance is disrupted, causing our metabolic and immune function to be negatively affected. That’s why it is so important to identify and to get your microbiome back on track. Today we will focus mainly on the gut biome, although it is now well known that it is important to have a healthy balance of microbes in all different areas of our bodies, including the skin and vagina. They all relate back to the gut, so let’s focus there. What Is the Gut Microbiome? I'm thinking that a lot of you probably have heard about the gut microbiome, also known as the biome or the gut microbiota. Essentially, it's referring to the microorganisms that are living in our digestive tract. This group of microbes living inside of us fluctuate on a daily, weekly and monthly basis based on our diet, physical activity, medications we take, toxins exposure and stress exposure. The important thing here is to try to have a healthy balance of this microbes as much as possible. When there's a healthy balance, the good bacteria counterbalance the potentially harmful bacteria. When our microbiome gets out of balance, it’s either that there are not enough good bacteria, or too much of the potentially harmful bacteria. And that’s when health issues start. Research is showing that if the gut microbiome gets out of balance, it can increase the risk of many health issues including infections (bacterial, yeast, and viral), autoimmunity conditions, metabolic disorders, even weight gain, anxiety, depression, menstrual irregularities, PCOS, endometriosis, fertility issues, osteoporosis, kidney diseases, heart disease, diabetes, and dementia. Having a healthy balance of microbes in the gut is essential for our health. What Is This Gut Microbiome Doing for Us? As you might suspect from the various health issues that I just mentioned, the microbiome communicates and supports our immune system and help protect us from infections and autoimmunity (which is when our immune system gets confused and starts trying to protect us from our own self) so, by having a good balance of microbes in your gut, you're helping your immune system stay on track and protect you. These microbes also communicate with our nervous system via the Vagus nerve and other mechanisms. These guys are sending messages to our brain and our nervous system, they're communicating about what's happening down in our gut, they can cause us to crave some kinds of foods in order to feed them. They can affect our mood, our memory and our focus. They also make certain nutrients like B vitamins (including activating B12), vitamin K and short chain fatty acids (which are protective to the colon). Furthermore, they participate in making neurotransmitters such as GABA and can influence the production of serotonin and dopamine in our nervous system. What we're learning from research is that they help us recover from stress and toxin exposure! As you know I specialize in how humans are affected by stress and what we can do to recover from stress, and so I would say that optimizing the microbiome has a huge impact on our stress recovery. How Do We Maintain a Healthy Microbiome? So, we now know they're important, but how do we take care of them? It’s like having a pet, you must know how to feed them and how to take care of them so that they can be healthy. What we eat is what feeds our gut bacteria. Of course, they're living in our gut so what we swallow is going to influence them and what's going to feed them potentially. Our gut bacteria can ferment foods what we as humans are unable to digest, like fiber or complex starches for example. They can ferment fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds. Foods and fibers that feed our microbiome are called “prebiotics.” Fructooligosaccharides in garlic, onions, leeks, asparagus, artichokes, kale, dandelion, as well as bananas, contain the highest amount of prebiotics, or super food, for our gut bacteria. It’s important to know that it's possible to over feed your gut bacteria! In fact, I would say that it is much more likely to overfeed your bacteria than to underfeed them. I see a higher percentage of patients with overgrowing bacteria rather than with too few bacteria. Going back to the pet analogy, we have to know how to feed our gut bacteria correctly. Symptoms of overfeeding your gut bacteria include bloating, gas, cramping, bowel changes, weight gain, and burping. Consuming prebiotics in excess or eating too much fermented foods (yoghurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, kombucha, etc.) can cause overgrowth. We want that optimal amount and balance of good and bad gut bacteria, so just be aware and cautious and listen to your body. If you are consuming a lot of prebiotics, high fiber foods, fermented foods and you start to feel bloated or have bowel changes or gas, or even if you have infections (sinus, bladder, vaginal) or joint pain, inflammation, headaches, skin rashes, these are all symptoms that you may be overfeeding your gut bacteria. How Can You Know if You’re Overfeeding Your Gut Microbiome? What you can do is a stool analysis. For many years we have had stool cultures. The culture is when you send in a stool sample into the lab and they allow it to grow over several days. The problem with cultures is that some bacteria are anaerobic, so they don’t grow in a lab environment. Then, about a decade ago, they came out with a DNA analysis of the gut bacteria. This is DNA sequencing so no matter whether the bacteria are alive or not, they can identify them based on their DNA. This is a much more accurate way of knowing which bacteria are thriving, or overgrowing, in your microbiome. There are now consumer versions of these stool tests that you can order online and send in your stool sample. They may make suggestions in terms of how to change your diet to feed the bacteria that are too low, and not overfeed those that are too high. It's important to consider that, while making certain diet changes can help, I have not found that decreasing or increasing specific foods is an effective solution to adjust your microbiome (and I have tried it with hundreds of patients). That is because many of the same foods that feed the good bacteria, also feed the bad bacteria. It doesn’t work to manipulate your diet, in terms of eating specific fruits or seeds, in order to make minor adjustments in your biome. A much better approach is to choose a variety of foods in your diet. If you’re eating the exact same foods every day, it is more likely to cause an overgrown of bacteria (or yeast). In that case, increasing the variety in your diet and eating other kinds of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds each day, or alternating through the week, will help to improve the diversity of bacteria because you’ll be feeding a greater number of types overall. When it comes to our gut microbiome, we want diversity. There are over 1,000 bacterial species that have been identified with about 160 species being found living in the gut of any individual so we don't want to just feed certain ones. Now, if your gut microbiome is really needing more help and you have symptoms of overgrowing bacteria, or a health issue related to the gut biome, then some additional steps need to be taken. There is a clinical stool panel called the GI MAP that I find has helped so many of my patients by showing exactly which bacteria, yeast, protozoa and/or parasites are present, so we can tailor a specific protocol to address them. I can order this test through my office for you and then we can see who's living there in your gut. It will also tell us if there is inflammation (calprotectin) or antigliadin antibodies, and how well are you digesting your food. We can see quite a lot about your digestive system in this type of clinical stool panel, and from there I can get way more specific and design a strategy for you so we can get your biome back on track. What Can We Do to Rebalance Our Gut Bacteria? When we're constantly under stress, we don't digest our food well, and this will cause an imbalance in the gut bacteria, let alone many potential health issues. If our food is not digested well, we're not going to be able to absorb the nutrients, so it's not going to feed us, and instead it's going to overfeed the bacteria and other microbes. So, how do we support our digestion? Well, we can start by taking the time to slow down and consciously eat. Take your time and sit down, breathe, chew well, etc. This way you are sending signals to your Vagus nerve communicating that it's time to make enzymes and digest. You can also take pancreatic enzymes if needed to help you digest food while your system is healing. This is something that will show on the stool panel. Also, if you're not making enough bile, we can support bile production for fat digestion. If you're not making enough stomach acid (hydrochloric acid) we can add that to help with protein digestion. We can support the digestion of your food in many different ways, including herbs that stimulate digestion or even just eating plants that are bitter (like arugula), which help with digestion. If there's overgrowing pathogenic bacteria, referred to as “dysbiosis,” I would guide you through a protocol of using antimicrobial herbs that are effective at addressing the bacteria that are overgrowing, without wiping out all your good bacteria. That's a very specific protocol that I developed and tested over the years and one that works for the majority of patients. In addition to antimicrobial herbs, I also recommend using probiotics that contain the bacillus species (such as Megaspore), which I consider to be the traffic directors of the microbiome. These bacteria are able to rebalance your gut biome by supporting the good guys and telling the overgrowing or pathogenic bacteria that they need to go. Once we get the balance back then we can shift our strategy to maintaining the balance by eating a healthy, balanced, and diverse diet, along with potentially using a maintenance probiotic, which is going to contain lactobacillus and bifidobacterium in the range of 25 to 50 billion per day. It’s important to consider that when trying to rebalance your gut microbiome, it’s better to do it slowly. An aggressive change can cause the pathogenic bacteria to release toxins as a defense mechanism, and this can make you feel worse. Starting with very low doses of bacillus and antimicrobial herbs and listening to your body in the process is key to a good outcome. It's also important to think about the environment. If there’s leaky gut, unhealthy cells, and inflammation, then the good bacteria will not thrive, so we need to be paying attention to making it a happy, healthy environment for the healthy bacteria and microbes to live in. What Are the Causes of a Disruption in the Microbiome? One of the main causes of dysbiosis, and one that I have been helping a lot of patients with through the years, is leaky gut. With leaky gut, the foods we eat “leak” through the intestinal lining because the intestinal cells have become damaged and there is more space between the cells. When undigested food leaks through the intestinal lining, the immune system responds in an effort to protect us, which leads to inflammation that can spread throughout the body. At the same time, the intestinal cells are not able to absorb nutrients from the foods we eat and, of course, our microbiome is disrupted. A poor diet, overconsumption of alcohol, smoking, stress and exposure to environmental toxins are all factors in developing leaky gut. The best protection is a healthful diet high in natural fiber and low in added sugars and processed foods. Another cause of dysbiosis is taking some types of medications like antibiotics, antacid medications, such as proton pump inhibitors, and many other medications. These meds will kill both good and bad bacteria, so we need to counteract this effect by taking the right probiotics. This is also why it is important to avoid the use of medications whenever possible. Stress is a major factor in the disruption of our microbiome. Stress includes psycho-emotional stress, trauma, as well as physical stressed and injuries. If you know you've been under stress, you're going to want to be proactive to help your microbiome to recover. We also know that gluten (in wheat, rye, barley, and spelt) disrupts the bacteria and decreases the levels of various kinds of healthy bacteria. If you're consuming gluten, and even if you don't have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease, there's a chance you're disrupting your gut bacteria. Also sugar, refined carbs, processed foods, non-organic foods, a low-fiber diet, pesticides, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors and colors added to foods, all cause gut biome disruption. Exposure to toxins, such as toxins in our environment, our food, water, air, and exposure to mold toxins (such as if you’re living in a water damaged building), all affect our digestion and they affect our microbiome. When it comes down to it, our gut biome is potentially being disrupted every day. It’s by raising our awareness, and being mindful about what we eat, and how we recover from stress, that we are able to keep our gut microbiome optimized. What Are Some Products Out There That Can Help Rebalance the Microbiome? There is another new stool panel that not only tells us about the balance of bacteria in your biome, but then also offer custom probiotic formulations based on your results. So if you're low in certain strains of bacteria, then that's what they're going to put in your individualized probiotics. That company is called Flore and I can help you with that through my office if you're interested in trying that out as a way to re-optimize your gut biome. There's recent research that's identifying individual strains of bacteria and how they specifically help us with our health. I think we're going to see more and more products, such as supplements or beverage products, that contain these specific bacteria based on research that shows how they're potentially beneficial for our health. For example, there's one type of bacteria called Bifidobacterium 1741, which is considered a “psychobiotic” because it’s been shown in research to help with stress recovery, specifically to bring cortisol down. So, in terms of the Stress Types I identified, this would be especially helpful for a Stress Magnet, or Night Owl, or Sluggish and Stressed type, who have elevated cortisol levels. If you want to find out your Stress Type, you can do my free online Stress Type Quiz here. Bifidobacterium 1741 has also been shown to help with mental health in terms of cognition, focus and memory. This type of bacteria can be found in products like Zenbiome - Zenbiome Cope and Zenbiome Sleep. There's also Bifidobacterium 35642 which has been shown to modulate inflammation. This would be especially helpful for someone who is experiencing a lot of inflammation and pain. Zenbiome Dual contains both Bifidobacterium 1741 and 35642. https://doctordoni.com/product/zenbiome-dual-60-capsules/ There's also quite a lot of research on the bacteria related to the vaginal biome and how it is completely related to the health of the gut biome. This is so important because if you're having vaginal symptoms or recurrent vaginal infections, like yeast, BV, or HPV, we know it is important that we heal your gut biome in order to help heal the vaginal biome and prevent those infections from happening. If you want to learn more about the vaginal biome related to the gut biome you can watch Episode #168 of How Humans Heal here. If you’re interested in a probiotic that is specifically formulated to support a healthy vulvovaginal microbiota you can find one here. And another here. https://doctordoni.com/product/ortho-biotic-womens-30-capsules/ More examples of specific oral probiotics to benefit areas of the body and for certain purposes are: * Bifidobacterium HU36 - shown to help with carotenoid and the skin. https://doctordoni.com/product/sereneskin-30-capsules/ * Lactobacillus rhamnosus DR7, which has been shown especially to be helpful for mood and stress recovery or bacteria that has been shown to help with our neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. *Bifidobacterium BPL1 which has been shown to help with weight gain around the waist. One more approach that is being used, especially in cases where there is the need to control an infection called Clostridium difficile, or C. diff (which is a pathogenic bacteria that a lot of times is hard to treat and get rid of) is something called a “fecal transplant.” A fecal transplant is a procedure to collect feces from a healthy donor and introduce them into a patient’s gastrointestinal tract. Research shows that a fecal transplant can restore healthy bacteria in the lower intestine, which can help control C. diff and keep it from coming back. In some cases this can be more effective than antibiotics for keeping C. diff in check. Still, even after using a specific probiotic, or having a fecal transplant, we will need to come back to rebalancing and maintaining the overall population and diversity of bacteria based on what we eat and supporting healthy digestion. How to Integrate Microbiome Optimization into Your Overall Health Plan? No matter what, I think it's important to keep in mind that we need to take into account all of the root causes of our health issues. Yes, we can take a bacteria-containing supplement, and we can learn to consume an optimal amount of prebiotics to feed our biome, and all that can help, but we also need to work on our recovery from stress and anything else that was thrown out of balance by stress. We need to ensure optimal cortisol levels because cortisol determines the signals to our digestion. We need to optimize hormone levels such as insulin and blood sugar levels, thyroid, as well as leptin and the sex hormones. We need to address nutrient deficiencies and toxins. We have to address all the underlying causes to really shift the imbalances permanently and achieve our best health and resilience to stress going forward. If you really want to heal there needs to be a whole protocol put into action for your specific body. This is why I encourage you to refer to my overall stress recovery protocol because I'm addressing all the potential imbalances, not just the microbiome. Yes, the microbiome is hugely important, but we have to also think about all the other potential imbalances along with it because then everything can help maintain resilience together. So, as you can see, there are many solutions - many ways to help you rebalance your microbiome. I've worked with some of the most challenging and complex cases - people who were put on the most strict diets and worked with many other practitioners - and I've helped guide them back out of it to heal their digestion, optimize their biome and help them feel better. That's where I get my confidence to say it's possible to get your microbiome back on track again. If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol. Keep in mind that 50% of people with leaky gut, have zero symptoms, so the only way to know for sure is to do the food sensitivity panel I recommend. If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here. If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here. If you want to feel better by rebalancing your cortisol and neurotransmitters, start with this home test kit. You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here. Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health. In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online. For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Additional Resources:    If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sign up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program (https://doctordoni.com/leaky-gut-program) where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol.    If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here (https://doctordoni.com/ddpp/hpv-guide/).    If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here (https://drdoni.lpages.co/hpv-12-week-program/).   You can also sign up for my Stress Warrior Program here (https://doctordoni.com/stress-program).    Also, if you want to learn more about how to recover from stress so that you can get back to feeling your best, you may want to read my book Master Your Stress Reset Your Health (https://doctordoni.com/master-your-stress/). In the book, I also share the quiz I developed to help you identify how stress has affected you specifically by knowing your Stress Type. You can also take this Stress Type Quiz online (https://doctordoni.com/quiz/stress-quiz/)   For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here (https://doctordoni.com/work-with-me/)   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.  

In today’s episode I get to introduce you to my friend Dr. Betsy Greenleaf. She is the First Board Certified Female Urogynecologist in the United States. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of the American College of Osteopathic Obstetrics & Gynecology, a Premiere Women's Health Expert and a Motivational Speaker. Dr. Betsy was in private practice for almost 20 years and now she's building online experiences for women to heal themselves in the urogynecological area. Urogynecology is the area of medicine that covers the diagnosis and treatment of conditions that affect the bladder, reproductive system, and rectum, including pelvic floor disorders. Urogynecologists can be urologists or gynecologists trained in female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery. Today we talk about urogynecology and general pelvic and vaginal health. What is a Pelvic Organ Prolapse? A uterine prolapse occurs when the muscles and tissue in your pelvis weaken. This allows your uterus to drop down into your vagina. Our pelvic organs are open to gravity because we don’t have bone structures at the bottom of the pelvic floor. All we have is muscles and ligaments, and those ligaments are not even that strong, so anything that causes a lot of pressure, and the pelvis can rip and tear those ligaments. Then the uterus may not stay up where it's supposed to be, or the bladder, or the rectum, and then those three organs that are very close to each other and lean on each other can end up pushing each other out. Most commonly women who've had long and difficult pregnancies or have given birth to a large baby or multiple babies are at risk of a prolapse. Also, women who are chronically constipated, or do effort constantly like lifting heavy objects or gymnastics, or even people with asthma attacks or chronic bronchitis where they're hard coughing all the time, all these things are going to put a lot of pressure on the pelvic floor. How is a Pelvic Prolapse Treated? Surgery is an option that has been around for long, using the mesh as in hernia surgery, but they found out overtime that when you put mesh in the pelvic floor it doesn't work as well as it does when you put it in for hernia and there were some women who ended up developing problems over the years, so unfortunately there's not great surgery for this. Furthermore, these surgeries have shown to not be permanent so once you've had one surgery you're at higher risk of it dropping again and having to get another surgery. Some non-surgical options that are available include a device called a pessary which folds up inside the vagina and they just wedge in place so they can hold all the organs. Another option is prevention by strengthening the pelvic floor. Here is where Kegels which involve tightening and then releasing the muscles in your pelvic floor to strengthen them. We start losing 8 to 10% muscle mass every decade of our lives so if you don't start strengthening those muscles it's definitely going to be a factor of prolapse risk. Other exercises include sitting down and putting a ball or pillow between your legs and squeezing your knees together. Physical therapy can help too. It is important to start this therapy as soon as possible. For example, in France when women give birth they automatically get put into a physical therapy program after birth and not surprisingly France has the lowest rate of incontinence and prolapse. What About the Relationship Between the Pelvis and the Microbiome? There’s now something called next generation sequencing where we can swap the vagina and we can see everything that's there and so we're getting a better understanding of what's going on with the microbiome of the vagina. With this advanced testing we're discovering other bacteria and so the exciting part about this is that women can now understand why some conventional treatments are not working for some issues. What they're finding out with these newer tests is that there's many more bacteria that are interacting in our bodies. In Dr. Betsy’s case what happened was she was getting chronic yeast infections and the yeast medicines were not working. Then she started looking into the gut microbiome testing and finally found out that her gut was filled with yeast. So, a lot of times when you're someone getting vaginal symptoms it's really a symptom of a larger problem going on with the microbiome of the gut. So, in this case we need to balance the gut out to get the vagina healthy. What’s even more interesting is that scientists are finding that there's this like microbiome connection between the vagina and the brain through the vagus nerve. So, if the bacteria in the vagina is off that is going to dampen our sex drive and a lot of women are going to their doctors thinking if they don’t have a sex drive it must be hormonal, but it may be a microbiome issue. We have also seen evidence of more problems with infertility when the microbiome in the vagina is off. It really is exciting because it gives more treatment possibilities, it helps us to see and so women don't have to be just struggling with infertility, low libido, or chronic infections, when we can actually be detectives and identify the imbalances both in the urovaginal area and the gut. There are also natural ways to rebalance the microbiome in the vagina. We want the healthy bacteria to stay there and get the bad bacteria out. One way of doing this is balancing the PH in the vagina. The vagina is naturally very acidic and so in a very high acidic (3.5 to 4.5 acidity range) the healthy bacteria thrives, and the bad bacteria doesn't. One of the products that’s out there is Boric Acid. Boric Acid will balance out the vagina whether it's yeast or bacteria. Are There Good and Bad Products to Use Vaginally? When it comes to cleaning, plain water is the best option. If we want to use soaps or other products, we should definitely look at the ingredients and stay away from sodium lauryl sulfate which can be very irritating and polypropylene glycol that is in a lot of woman's products that is a mucosal irritant. And avoid fragrances, dyes and detergents. Also, it’s a good idea to avoid the use of lubricants because they can throw off the PH balance in the vagina. There are also some products out there that promote acidity in the vagina like lactic acid products, the only thing is if you have a milk allergy you kind of want to stay away from lactic acid. Also, there are some vaginal probiotics that come in suppositories that are over the counter that promote healthy bacteria growth. When it comes to vaginal douching we have to be careful because if you have a bacterial infection douching can spread that bacteria into the uterus, the fallopian tubes and into the abdominal cavity and that can make you really sick. The best thing to do to promote vaginal health is to also address your gut health as there is evidence that these systems are connected. The more you improve your gut health, drop inflammation, and get your digestion working as well as your gut bacteria the more you’re going to see a positive impact in your vaginal microbiome and overall health. We can also see how the gut health is related to HPV, when you have a persistent HPV case one of the first things to do is to get your gut health and gut bacteria on point, this will in turn improve your vaginal acidity and microbiome and make it harder for the HPV virus to thrive. What About Regenerative Medicine for Pelvic Health? This is something that's changing every day. We're coming up with new options and treatments that could be done at home or at practitioner’s offices. There’s PRP which is when platelet-rich plasma is injected where stem cells multiply and grow new younger tissue. PRP can regenerate the vaginal tissue. This procedure works by stimulating stem cells to grow healthier vaginal tissue. There’s also laser or light therapy to rejuvenate tissue using devices in the vagina that work on light energy, penetrating the tissue and making a little hole. Then the body reacts to heal that hole and it floods it with growth factors. There’s radio frequency therapy using sound waves to generate heat to cause the tissue to regenerate. We're kind of entering this world where anything that's being done for rejuvenation purposes cosmetically is now being applied to the vagina and other areas of the pelvic floor too. Doing all these things in combination can give people better results because they work on the tissue in different ways. If you want to reach out to Dr. Betsy and learn more about how she can help you, please make sure to check out her website or her Instagram @drbetsygreenleaf_. You can also check her upcoming Happy Vagina Rally which is an online women's summit where 40 speakers will be talking about vaginal health, general pelvic health, HPV, hormones, hair loss, gut health, bladder health, energy levels, etc. If you’re interested in learning more about my approach to healing HPV you can find my new HPV Recovery Guide here. If you are tired of this virus and are really committed to erasing it from your life forever, you can sign up for my Say Goodbye to HPV 12-Week Program here. If you want to work on your gut health and microbiome you may want to sing up for my Heal Leaky Gut Program where I teach you how to heal leaky gut with my proven protocol. Keep in mind that 50% of people with leaky gut, have zero symptoms, so the only way to know for sure is to do the food sensitivity panel I recommend. For the most comprehensive support, even with the most difficult health issues (physical or mental), it is best to meet with me one-on-one, which is available to you no matter where you are in the world (via phone or zoom). You can set up a one-on-one appointment with me here. We're here to help you! Connect with Dr. Doni:    Facebook HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/DRDONIWILSON   Instagram HTTPS://INSTAGRAM.COM/DRDONIWILSON   YouTube HTTPS://YOUTUBE.COM/USER/DONIWILSONND   Weekly Wellness Wisdom Newsletter: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/WWW     -   Books and Resources:    Order My New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Master-Your-Stress-Reset-Health/dp/1953295576   Stress Warrior Book (FREE)  HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/STRESSWARRIOR      Stress Warrior Stress Resiliency Facebook Group (FREE)  HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/GROUPS/STRESSWARRIOR     7-day Stress Reset (FREE)  HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/STRESS-RESET     HPV & Cervical Dysplasia Guide (FREE)  HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/HPV-AND-CERVICAL-DYSPLASIA-GUIDE/     -   Personalized Solutions:    If you’d like to meet with Dr. Doni one-on-one for your health, request a Health Breakthrough Session: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/BREAKTHROUGH     To get an idea of more comprehensive options, read about Dr. Doni’s Signature Consultation Programs: HTTPS://DOCTORDONI.COM/SERVICES   Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are product links and affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission at no cost to you. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.