The Fibromyalgia Puzzle, Putting The Pieces Together

So you’re not vulnerable to fibro flares. That’s super important. And then the last one, which we talk several people talk about, especially Dr. John Dempster, is all about GI health. If you’re not correct, your gut and any kind of GI gastrointestinal problems you’re going to find it’s going to be really hard to get healthy like you want to be to be able to overcome your symptoms of fibromyalgia and that can mean that you have problems of malabsorption or reflux or heartburn or irritable bowel syndrome or leaky gut, whatever it is. If you’re not digesting and not absorbing and utilizing the nutrients that you’re eating, you’re really going to have a hard time getting healthy. Or if you’re eating foods that are generating inflammatory reactions or you have leaky gut that’s creating inflammatory allergic reactions that can attack any tissue in the body that can be contributing to your low pain threshold and your pain as well as brain fog. Low moods are about other symptoms we see in fibromyalgia. It’s going to be really hard to get this puzzle together, but once you get these four corners together, now you can start putting the puzzle together. Then it’s really about paying attention to your symptoms. So when I’m doing a consult with a patient and I’m looking through their new patient questionnaire, I’m looking for clues about where they’re broken down. I’m looking to see if they have funny reactions to medications or they have elevated liver enzymes or have had elevated liver enzymes in the past. In their bloodwork are strong odors, strong smells or chemicals give them problems. 

I’m thinking they may have a sluggish liver. If they have a sluggish liver, then that’s causing them probably to accumulate toxins that can be driving a lot of the triggers that we see in fibromyalgia, if I hear that are read in their questionnaire, I hear this in the interview that I’m doing with them, that they every time they eat a food, that they feel drowsy, you know, after lunch or that they have had problems with losing the lateral third of their eyebrows or their hair is thinning out or they have brittle nails. So I’m hearing some of these things. I instantly think, oh, they probably have low thyroid. It’s a matter of picking up on these clues sometimes are very subtle. One of the patients I recently had was a patient that had been doing really, really well. She’s working with me in a program, a six month program, where I take them and do testing and interpret that test, put them on a specific protocol for their specific diet exercises, supplement program, help them to slowly wean off any potential medications that are giving them potential side effects or medications that are helping them. But she was doing really well. And then I get a call from her that says that she is back to square one. Now, I’ve got to really start doing my detective work and figure out what was going on with Joanne. And what I found out was we had treated her for various things. 

We’d gotten her sleeping. She was doing so much better. She had slept well six or seven years using natural supplements, five HTP, some melatonin, a product called Delta Sleep, which allowed her to be able to get back to sleep. She was finally sleeping. For the first time in years, she’d been able to come off her prescription sleep aids and didn’t miss those one bit that felt much better off of those. We had gotten her on the right supplements, her adrenal glands, her stress coping glands were working better. She was able to handle stress, had more stamina. ROSIN She could do more. She was back to work. She hadn’t worked in three years. This part time work, it wasn’t real stressful, but she was able to go back to her church and start doing some work, which she thoroughly loved. We had shored up any nutritional deficiencies. She had deficiencies in magnesium. Because of that, she was getting restless leg syndrome. She was constipated. Magnesium is in 300 barley processes. One of the things that it does, it’s a natural muscle relaxer. So it helps to relax tight, achy fibro muscles. But also relaxes tight colons. So when you’re constipated, that’s oftentimes a sign that you’re deficient in magnesium, a stress coping mineral, that any time you get under stress, your body’s releasing magnesium. So the puzzle was coming together. 

And one of the things that I found in testing is that years in she had shared this with me in the interview that years ago she had been exposed to a water damaged, moldy building that she was working in. And anytime she was at work, she really felt like her symptoms were really worse than when they were at home. And Chinda really didn’t that didn’t really add up until I started quizzing her about it. But sure enough, what we found in testing is that she did have some old toxins that showed up at a micro tox test. We were very clear that out she was doing well, no problem. And then she ended up traveling overseas to visit some relatives over there. And she ended up staying in a basement apartment, clean out like a below ground apartment. Very nice, she said, but she could see in the back closet of this facility. There had been a lot of water damage. It had been cleaned up, but she could see mold back there and she was there for a week and she came back to the States, came back and she had flared. She had had all these symptoms start to show up. She didn’t really put it together that it was the mold. She just you know, we’d done so many things together and found so many things in other testing that she had sheets of heavy metal toxicity issues we cleaned up. So she really didn’t put that together. 

But like I do an initial console that our spin on a zoom call, I spent the same amount of time with her on this follow up call trying to figure out what had changed, what had happened. You know, anytime I hear my patients say that they’ve had a flare, they were doing well and then something happened. I’m always thinking, what changed? What is new that caused them to have this reaction? Is there anything that they’ve added to their supplements or their drugs? Anything they’ve taken away, anything they even changes they made to their diets. Are they under more stress? Houser Sleep. So I’m looking for different clues to help figure out what is it that triggered this flare. Got to talking to her, talk to her about her vacation, about going over to Europe, that being overseas, about staying. And, you know, and once I started hearing that she had traveled, she was in new environment. I wanted to know if she’d gotten under increased stress or she’d maybe had any kind of food poisoning. Had she gotten a parasite, had she you know, something had obviously happened. And then it is like a light bulb went on in her brain. It wasn’t me. I was just quizzing her and asking. She said, Dr. Murphee, do you think that the mold that I saw in this the at Renault that I was staying at, do you think this little bit of mold could have triggered my fibro flare that I’ve been in for the last two or three weeks? I said, absolutely so. So, you know, getting under stress causes the body to go into survival mode. The cell danger theory that you’ve heard about on some of the speakers, share with you if you have it, make sure you listen to some of those watching those interviews. But that’s what had happened. She got in this environment, her body reacted to this mode, thought it was in danger and started to shut down. 

Now you combine that with the fact that she was traveling overseas, which is pretty stressful with or without fibromyalgia, had come back after a two, three, I think three weeks. She went on to three weeks of, you know, very demanding trip, you know, really busy seeing relatives, going outside, seeing all these kind of things. So it was no wonder that she was run down when she came back, but she wasn’t getting over it, retest her. And sure enough, she was one of the canaries in the coal mine that just can’t handle any mold toxins. She was now had mold toxicity issues again, put her back on the supplements, the protocols. And I’m trained in binders and liposomal gluten as well already. Some of the other things to help get that mold out of her help to just kind of tone down this overreaction that she was having with some calming supplements and within three weeks she was already better. Now she was out of that environment. That was a big part of it. Her exposure wasn’t that limiting, so it wasn’t that bad, but it was enough to set her off. And I share this with you because you really want someone that’s working with you that is looking for clues and you want to look for clues. Any time you have a flare, you want to think back, What was it that changed? I get under more stress and I’m not take a certain medication. 

I’m taking our A supplements that I was taking that you may not even know they were being helpful. Did you change your diet? Did you get an environment that could have been toxic? What was it? Start kind of thinking about that so you can figure out how to either avoid it or correct it in the future. This a big part of my practice is really being at detective to kind of figure out what it is that’s driving these symptoms and looking for clues and then exploring this clues typically with testing to see where the person’s broken down and then to be able to fix that mold, as you’re learning here on the summit, is one of the triggers we’re seeing across the board. And fibromyalgia. I didn’t see mold as a trigger very often. I’ve tested for it for a number of years, talked about it for a number of years, but only into the last three or four years have I really started seeing that. Mold is one of the drivers for many of the symptoms or the driver that kind of pushes people over their over the edge, kind of like the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Don’t neglect doing your detective work. You might want to keep a journal, and when you have a flare, you can go back and see what were you doing two or three days earlier? Even better, reach out to a practitioner, can get you tested to figure out where you’re broken down, why you’re having the symptoms. It’s an investment. You know, some, you know, oftentimes the testing is out of pocket, but it’s so worth it to not miss out on life because learning to live in chronic pain and with fatigue and not being able to do things with family and friends, not being able to enjoy your hobbies or being able to work or travel, whatever it is because you’re learning to live with all this pain and fatigue and poor sleep and low moods. And you’re about again, that’s not that’s not living, that’s existing. It’s better to invest in yourself, find out where you’re broken down and fix the underlying causes. So just like Joanne, it could be anything. So you’ve got to have your thinking cap on. 

And if you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, reach out to a practitioner and let he or she help you navigate this complicated illness called fibromyalgia. I know you’re going to enjoy these presentations today. Think I say this every day, but there’s some good ones on here. There’s some good ones every day. But there really are some really good ones here today. And I want you to be can try to listen to all of them, watch all of the presentations that you can today. I’ll consider owning the series because there’s so much material. It starts to just run, you know, it’s like, what’s the house is? Okay that the house and you’re just you just can’t take it all in, right? So consider if this resonates, if you find this help or consider purchasing the summit so you have it to look at and review over and over again, to read the transcripts, to take notes, to highlight the things that you need to work on or makes sense to you and use this use this opportunity, this wealth of information to help you finally get back on track to get your life back. I think with fibromyalgia, oftentimes you kind of get off on a, you know, a path and it’s the wrong path. You don’t have accomplished. You don’t know where you’re going. You’re trying to get well, but you really don’t know how to do it. So you just going off haphazardly trying this, trying to add a little of this, a little of that, and it doesn’t get you where you want to get to, but in and I applaud being proactive. But a better way is to take what has proven to work, focus in on that and start to apply those things and then go to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So anyway, I want to encourage you to watch me these presentations that we put on here today and look forward to sharing some more information with you over the next couple of days.