Hormonal Axis & Thyroid Health

Margaret Christensen, MD

Thanks, Dr. Jen. Nice to be here.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yes. Tell us a little bit about your story. We spoke about it a few minutes ago, why you kind of left conventional medicine, ob gyn and just switched to functional medicine over the years.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, you know, again, a lot of it was because I got sick myself. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I went to all my, you know, lovely colleagues, intelligent, well-educated, and they didn’t have any answers for me. I had terrible chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia. I couldn’t sleep. I also was doing you know, I’d been doing OB for six years at that point, you know, and hadn’t slept and had four babies of my own. So boom, right there, you get massive nutritional deficiencies. Anyway, I got super sick and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me and I closed my practice and you know, I basically fell into functional medicine. I’m like, I’m, you know, I’m smart here. I was started digging around. One of my dear colleagues was already involved and she said, hey, you know, check this out. And so it took eight years to figure out what was wrong. And unfortunately, my children were massively exposed and my two youngest have suffered the long term consequences of undiagnosed toxic mold exposure. And they were just let’s just call it environmental illness because there so many different exposures that our we’re all having. So anyway, that’s what I did and I started and then I started as little tiny practice and it’s grown into a very large collaborative practice. I have ten practitioners and I teach for the Institute for Functional Medicine on Women’s Hormones.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

So and I love that you shared your personal journey through the mold. You’ve shared your story with so many others and help people with it. It’s just it’s other doctors, you know, you go to your regular doctor, like you said, they couldn’t figure it out. And here it was. It took you, you know, diving into a whole different specialty to figure it out. So I’m so grateful you did.

Margaret Christensen, MD

This is and this is before Evie was you know, this was in the early years of Fonctionnaires. And but, you know, a piece of this, too, is I also had Hashimoto’s that was diagnosed after my third child. And you know, then started again, was told, oh, there’s nothing you can do, you know, here’s your thyroid medicines. And of course, we all know that pregnancy is actually very common. Postpartum is a very common time for the onset of this. And, you know, a lot of it has to do with the amount of stress we’re under and sleep deprivation and the, you know, impacting gut microbiome. And then you have massive shifts in hormones going on. And so oftentimes that can be a trigger, among other things.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah. So leading into the HPI access, I know we were going to talk about that and what exactly is that? And as you brought up, you know, after postpartum after you’re having this beautiful child while you’re not sleeping, the hormones are shifting. And it’s a lot of us it’s a lot of stress. I, I remember after my third pregnancy, I felt like I finally had it down. And I’m like, I’m good at this now. I felt like I had no hormonal shifts, like major, you know, I didn’t feel that I was detoxing well. And I’m like, well, I’m not going to have any more, but how does the access plate play into the thyroid?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, I think this is important. So stands for a hypothalamic pituitary adrenal, and that’s what we’re taught in medical school. Now, when you start doing functional medicine, you learn about the access to access which is hypothalamic that the hypothalamus is in. Our brains are pituitary gland is just below the hypothalamus and it kind of controls all of our sex hormones. The adrenal glands, of course, produce cortisol and adrenaline and DHEA are stress hormones. And then then but then you have your immune system. That’s actually also part of that. And your gut. Our gut is a huge, huge piece of where all of our hormones are metabolized and also where autoimmunity begins, especially we’re going to be talking about Hashimoto’s and the other G is for gonads. So again, you know, looking at our sex hormones, but again we are taught mostly about the access and HP. I forget to put in the T in there, which is thyroid. So again, the thyroid gland is a whole piece of this whole dance of hormones. And one of the things that we teach at the Institute for Functional Medicine is, again, looking at the order of treatment of hormonal imbalances. And the order starts with adrenal and stress. So if you get super high stress hormones or imbalanced or and or super low because, you know, you’ve been chronically stressed for a long time. However, that is, whatever those stressors look like, whether it’s a physiologic emotional, traumatic doesn’t matter. You’ve been under a lot of stress for a long time. That’s going to impact how much cortisol you produce and when you produce it and how much adrenaline that you’re making. So that’s the adrenal component. And then the adrenal glands and your stress hormones and your cortisol have direct impact on your thyroid hormone production. And also metabolism. One of the things that we’re taught here in our doc is that, you know, when people are in an ICU, in a very high stress situations, their thyroid glands on purpose slows down because they can’t run or fight. They can’t go anywhere. And so, again, high stress really impacts that. And again, can trigger autoimmunity as well. And then and then you have your sex hormones. 

So your estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and also your insulin all are all part of looping back. And this is a big old dance that happens. So it’s never just one thing that’s out of balance. And whenever I’m looking at somebody, I don’t intend, for example, that they’re coming in, tell me they’re hyperthyroid. I don’t just look at their thyroid gland and I don’t just look at its age. I’m looking at their I want an adrenal stress index, usually salivary saliva testing for that over a 4 to 5 hour. I mean, 4 to 5 units in one day. I do adrenal stress index along with the complete thyroid panel TSA treaty three pretty for thyroid antibodies and a reverse t three along with your sex hormones and insulin and fasting blood sugars, insulin levels and then estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. So it’s a dance. And you have to understand that when you change or move one, you’re going to impact all of them. And doing things like taking even birth control pills or synthetic hormone replacement therapy can impact. And as we know for thyroid and there’s so many nutrients that are involved in thyroid hormone production. And so that has to be looked at as well. So you got to look at your stress hormones. You want to look at your of a complete thyroid function and you want to look at your sex hormones kind of when evaluating the whole thing and trying to see what’s going on in the HPA axis. Yeah, yeah, I mentioned insulin, but I think in so often with thyroid issues, you may have weight challenges as well, but a lot of that has to do with the insulin resistance that develops. You get kind of like a pre-diabetes when you have super high levels of cortisol and then your thyroid is just not working right either.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah, it’s definitely a dance and they all have to dance together perfectly. You know, you can’t just have one person out there doing a different dance. You know, all everyone’s well, everyone’s doing a slow dance. Someone’s doing rap. I don’t know. But you can’t they all they all have to work in harmony. And that’s the important thing, is getting everything back into harmony, whether it’s simple, like blood sugar. I’m finding a lot of people, a lot of patients wearing continuous glucose monitors. We just slap one on. Now, I used to wait until their labs and now I just go based on their symptoms. I’m like, Let’s just get it started. And then they have this aha moment that when they’re feeling tired or or extra stressed, it’s because of what they’re eating and they’re crashing and they’re on a roller coaster. And then that’s going to affect your adrenals and affect your thyroid. So and affect your hormones. That’s how you see losses. It’s, you know, it’s all about blood sugar and balance. So, you know, I understand that when you were practicing as an ob gyn, you would get all these different patients in and you would not just put them on birth control, which is great, and you would actually investigate what was going on with them. And not just check a test, but check, like you said, saliva, cortisol and all the other hormones that play together.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yeah, well, and I think another really important piece to understand, particularly when you’re talking about thyroid and thyroid hormone in the thyroid gland and you know, how does thyroid hormone work in the body and that’s for a lot of people really don’t they don’t even understand that. And certainly many of our colleagues don’t understand that thyroid hormones, purpose and how it works is it tells our mitochondria and mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Is the batteries in the cell that you know, burn up our food sources for energy? So thyroid hormone works to tell your mitochondria, hey, make some energy. And it also tells the nucleus of the cell, make more mitochondria. So if you don’t have enough thyroid hormone around to tell you to make energy, and that’s one of the reasons that you can get fatigued. But another really big piece of this is that it might not it might not be just your thyroid. It it may be that you have mitochondrial damage from from bio toxins, which is one of the areas that I really like to talk about is, you know, how many toxins that are fat soluble, that are in our environment and that are in our food supply and that are in many medications and in common things that we give our children that are required to go to school, that shouldn’t be there. 

A lot of heavy metals and and and exposures that we’re having. And toxic mold is probably one of the commonest ones that we have that actually damages and disrupts mitochondrial function and cell membrane function. So then your thyroid hormone can’t work mitochondrial damage is often where autoimmunity actually comes from the when when you damage your mitochondria, then they start spilling out their contents and then damages the cell and then the cell breaks open. And then the body was like, Oh, what is this? And starts making antibodies against it. So it’s important to understand that when you are talking about thyroid and energy and fatigue, you’re also talking about mitochondria.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, bio toxin illness. And this is something that some of you listening might not even have heard of this before. Like what you’re saying something in my environment can damage my mitochondria, can hurt my thyroid, affect my thyroid. And this could be something that you can’t help, that you’re just you’re going outside, you’re breathing in the air that might be polluted or you’re drinking water that has pollution in it or has things like fluoride in it, which can affect the thyroid. Or it could be things that you’re purposely taking, you know, things that have to get filtered through our liver, things like Tylenol, they can disrupt our health, damage our liver and all of these things. It’s really overwhelming. So we’re going to talk about some common ones. Okay. So go ahead. Yeah, well, a big one. I know you brought up mold and then you also kind of alluded at sometimes vaccines can cause some or the actual illness can cause some injury, too, to our mitochondria.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, let me just first would describe what a bio toxin is. So a biotoxin is a very tiny, tiny, fat soluble molecule so that it gets inside our it gets into our body and into our fat. And, for example, our brain is mostly fat. Our breasts are mostly fat. And it gets into the fat cells and gets stored there. And because they’re fat soluble and you have to really work to get them out. So common, common bio toxins would be heavy metals. So aluminum mercury and you know, just some of the things that you said where they come from, where that can come from and can toxic mold mycotoxins so the actual the toxins that that mold in water damage buildings makes and I know you’ve had somebody else talking about that is very damaging to cell membranes and to mitochondrial membranes because it’s actually inside the membranes. There’s a fat layer. And so you have to two water soluble layers and a fat layer in every cell membrane that we have in our body and every mitochondrial membrane. And there’s those little teeny bio toxins get stuck in there, and then they disrupt the function of the cell membrane or the mitochondria and its ability to produce energy. So we’re talking about yeah, like I said, heavy metals, toxic mold, pesticides, plastics and just a lot of the common chemicals, viruses and viral particles, including the spike protein. Whether the spike protein came from you having COVID or having the unmentionable. So anyway, and it’s more likely actually if you’ve had the unmentionable to have problems and so but the good news about it is, is that there are ways that we can help to get this out of our out of the fat layer, out of our fat in our body and out of the cell membranes and out of mitochondrial membranes. It just takes a lot of work.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah. So when we look at that, what can we do? Obviously, avoidance is one of the most best ways. Easiest ways is avoidance. So, you know, and these bio toxins, too, these can be things in cosmetics, parabens, all of that. I especially like you were mentioning because it’s fat, their little fat particle, they like fat the breasts. You know, we see this a lot and obviously breast cancer is this is really. Yeah. And so avoidance is really one of the best ways for these things. And I think just knowing that they’re there, so knowing that mold can be a problem. You know, I, I remember some people are like, oh, molds, no big deal or you know, we were at a hotel and there was mold. My son, the baseboard like fell back and it was black mold and we switched rooms and I’m like the probably the whole hotel has covered the whole hotel. Yeah. And it was so frustrating because like the front desk, like they switch this room, but they didn’t act like alarmed at all. And I’m like, oh my gosh, you’re probably sick. You know, all these people that work here are probably sick. And I’ve had patients that, you know, we’ve had to remove them from their job until they’ve remediated the building. And a lot of them are schools.

Margaret Christensen, MD

The schools.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah.

Margaret Christensen, MD

And so the common and common exposures, you know, it’s 50% of houses, 60% of commercial buildings. Dorms are notorious and you know, apartment living and you if you’re in college. But yeah you know a lot of you know older hotels and schools churches too. So you know, if you and the thing about that particular bio toxin is it’s just it’s incredibly common and then it causes lots of different types of symptoms. But if you were living in a house where you have kids that have constant runny noses, asthma, allergies, they have A.D.D. and or autism spectrum issues, mom is having terrible chronic fatigue and she’s crying every minute. And I can’t, you know, can’t find her brain anywhere in there. And Dad is just irritable all the time. And, you know, nobody has any libido and his blood pressure is going up. Then you start thinking, okay, and then ask about the pets and you think, okay, something, something, you know, environmental. It here is impacting everybody’s health. And but there’s lots to do about it. And that’s why I did the mold summit.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yes. Yes, it was is very good, very informative. So how does this how do these bio toxins affect the thyroid specifically?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, so, again, any one of these things that I mentioned before, the plastics, the heavy metals, the toxins, certainly the amount of roundup and pesticides that are in our food supply. So let’s just start with gut lining that. So we know that all autoimmunity actually has a gut component to it and we know that can if you are consuming things that are wiping out the your good guy gut flora. So you’ve had a lot of antibiotics in your life or you’re just eating the standard American diet or you’re drinking diet soft drinks that have a lot of aspartame in them. All those things disrupt good, normal, healthy microbiome and can trigger damage to the lining of the intestines or what we call leaky gut. And then you start producing antibodies. I mean, these let’s see it. 

Let’s do the undigested food components end up in your bloodstream. We start producing antibodies against those. Some of those can look like our thyroid gland, and then our thyroid gland becomes attacked. And then that’s where you get the Hashimoto’s and you can get the thyroid peroxidase antibodies and you can also get the anti thyroid globulin antibodies. Now TPO is probably a little bit more associate and more common with again just the autoimmune disruption and lack of nutrients and leaky gut issues. When I see very high antiviral globulin, I start thinking about more toxins, heavy metals in particular as part of that. But infections can it can also go both ways. Epstein-Barr virus is also very commonly associated with Hashimoto’s, and we’re seeing a whole lot of reactivated Epstein-Barr virus post, COVID and post post. The treatment for the theoretical treatment for COVID.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yes, I’ve been seeing that a lot lately. Is that like post COVID or post, you know, other things COVID related that Epstein-Barr has really flared. Fatigue is flared. I feel like COVID, it kind of brought out the worst of what was going on with people, whether it’s initiating a new autoimmune disease or bringing out something that was in remission such as Epstein-Barr, which is causing disease. So that has been very frustrating for people. But I’ve also found that my COVID patients that were treated with like Ivermectin and other botanicals for COVID, so we got that spike protein, we brought it down really quickly and cleared it that they did not have the post-COVID cycle in concern. So that was something else that I’ve noticed. So, you know, speaking of the spike protein, so that that guy, that little guy has been wreaking havoc. So specifically for the thyroid, what have you been seeing with this specific? You know.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, again, I think we’re seeing a lot of flares in autoimmune disease in general, just all of them. Again, that the spike protein does end up disrupting cell membranes. And so, you know, so, again, you know, people who had been well controlled before all sudden they’re coming back with their antibodies much higher than they had been in the past. And or they’re having more symptomatology or, you know, more chronic fatigue issues and or, you know, just exactly like you said, whatever has sort of been, you know, in remission that we’ve gotten straightened out seems to have re flared and so definitely have seen a lot of increase in the fatiguing symptoms.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah. And the thyroid does have the is to receptor site on it. So what I found that there’s also been some people that have just their thyroid labs they they go hypo or hyper when the thyroid gets a little bit irritated from, from the spike protein and from the virus. And sometimes that just goes away in a couple of weeks. Sometimes we need to do things to support their thyroid a little bit more or to clear that spike protein. So it’s been very interesting to see how these things have have come about. And I am a little bit terrified in the next five years about the level of autoimmunity that we are going to see post COVID and post COVID vaccination. 

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, and so, you know, one of the things that we can do, though, there’s so much that can be done. And one of the things that I like to remind everybody about is that our bodies have amazing healing capacities. And it’s about removing what’s, you know, removing what no longer serves us or what is toxic at any level mind, body or spirit that includes bad relationships, bad jobs or whatever, just as well as, you know, bad food and diet drinks you want to remove, take those out and you want to put back in what you’re missing. Are you missing? LAUGHTER Place, sleep, nourishment, meaning in life. You know Hope’s zinc chromium vitamin A, vitamin D. Those are all things that are really super important for the thyroid gland in particular.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah. And I love that you said, you know, we can we can heal. And a lot of people forget that or they get frustrated. But definitely being prepared. Being prepared by getting your home checked for mold or mycotoxins. I think that, you know, everyone is so worried about how their home looks on the outside or the inside. You know, when people walking in, oh, how does it look? Or if you’re moving into a new home, you have a mold inspector, go in there, make sure that you’re not missing anything that could be causing illness for your family. Because while our bodies can heal, this is something that you really don’t want to invite in any of these toxins.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, I was you know, I would highly recommend that people can do a couple of things. But besides, I have a morgue where you can find you can also, you know, some good information. But there’s also ISCI, dawg, International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness. And so the clinicians in that group work closely with environmental environmental inspectors who not only do look for mold, but also other, other airborne, you know, toxicants and air, air quality as well as they can do EMF testing. So electronic and electromagnetic fields is a whole nother arena of things that we’re being exposed to that are disrupting our cell membranes. And so, I mean, just, you know, learning to do some basic things. And what I would just tell everybody is I recommend that you have a high quality HEPA air filtration device in your bedrooms just to sleep with. And yeah, but dirt and mold is whole ball of wax that that needs to but just having at least some awareness that and if you have a history of chronic recurrent sinus infections it’s mold until proven otherwise. So that’s just another one to think about.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah, that mold likes to colonize up there for sure. And not everyone is going to think about that if you’re going to conventional doctors. Yeah, right. How many people there are like, oh well I’m getting referred to and you know, before they would come see a doctor like us, they’ve been to ear, nose and throat. They’ve gotten CT scans of their sinuses and it’s mold that’s colonized there and it’s in their environment.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, it took eight years for me to figure out what was wrong. So I closed my practice and because I couldn’t work anymore and my brain was so bad and was so foggy and I felt I mean, I felt like I’d been hit by a bus or had the flu every day with my fibromyalgia. And my fatigue was so bad, I could hardly get out of bed. And but it took eight years. And again, kind of all the things that I mentioned that in the family that was happening in my family, you know, so I had kids with asthma, migraines, chronic sinus issues, chronic allergies, sinus infections and and then, you know, in the adults, a lot of irritability and all that. So just something to think about.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Where was the mold that in your house? How did you actually find it?

Margaret Christensen, MD

It was in the crawl space. We had apparently a beautiful old house on one of the fancy streets in Dallas. And unfortunately, we had a water leak from the refrigerator line that was going underneath the house and contaminated everything. And it was you know, we had unfortunately, your air conditioning ducts running in that space and then around the house. So it got into the air conditioning ducts and then blew around the house. And nobody knew what was going on. And unfor and, you know, I do want to mention, too, the other consequences. A lot of bio toxins, illness, mold is at the top of the list, but is neuropsychiatric syndromes. So everything from autism and A.D.D. and ADHD to, again, schizophrenia and bipolar and alcoholism, you know, in the mid year and then certainly the degenerative neurodegenerative diseases, Parkinson’s, AOC and Alzheimer’s. Dr. Bredesen, who wrote the book The End of Alzheimer’s, puts toxic mold at the top of the list there. And a lot of it, again, has to do with mitochondrial disruption. 

So if you poison your mitochondria, it just depends on what organ is being affected. First, we know that the thyroid gland is probably the most environmentally sensitive of all the organs in terms of it’s the first one to go. And so if you’ve come down with Hashimoto’s and I also go back into your prenatal history, you know, where was your where were your parents living when you were conceived and were growing up? You know, again, what is your parental health look like? Anybody else in what area of the country did you grow up in? There is areas with iodine deficiency, but there’s also areas where, for example, when they did all the the nuclear bomb testing out in Nevada, I mean, theoretically, it was all done underground, but all that stuff still spewed up into the atmosphere and depending on the prevailing winds and where things blew. If you are on the Pacific Coast, we had, you know, gosh, but what was it that the big nuclear plants that melted down in Japan, Hiroshima.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah, yeah.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yeah. The Fukushima. Yeah, yeah, a Hiroshima. That was another one. But you know, the Fukushima was more recently in the past ten years. And we know that a lot of radioactive iodine was released in that and it gets in the water currents. And so, again, you know, more likely up in the upper Pacific Coast. So there’s a lot of different factors. But again, the good thing is there are many, many things that we can do to help restore health. And that, number one, is, is to work on whatever we can do to help lower our stress hormones, whatever that is, prayer, meditation, play, get out in the sun, have fun, have purpose and meaning in life that is, you know, so important. And then there’s a lot of things we can do for adrenal support and then we can support our thyroid. Also nutritionally, I’m sure somebody is talking in your summit on all the different nutrients needed to optimize thyroid function. You’ve got to heal a leaky gut, get off, you know, I mean just go on a paleo diet for right now plant based you know, mostly plants not not not all, you know, beef and butter, you know, plant based paleo diet, but also gluten off a dairy, obviously off of corn. All that stuff is genetically modified. I mean, the role of genetically modified foods in creating hormonal disruption at all levels in autoimmune and neuropsychiatric center is unbelievable. So organic for a reason. If you don’t know enough about it, please learn more responsible technology. Talk is a really great resource for understanding what have genetically modified foods done to us, and then we’ve had a genetically modified treatment that has been given to everybody or, I don’t know, 80% of the world’s population. And so, yeah, we’re going to see massive amounts of autoimmunity, but we can reverse it by taking care of the things that I just said about.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah, and I love that you said, but we can reverse it and.

Margaret Christensen, MD

And we can reverse it. No buts.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

And yeah, yeah, yeah. GMOs. Yeah. Do you animals are creeping everywhere and not just you have to look at also what if you’re eating the meat. What are what’s the meat eating. So we want to have, you know, grass fed. But GMOs. Yeah, if you get organic, you’re going to be covered. Also, you can look for things that are specified non-GMO. The other nice thing is now they are requiring on the labels that the products have to say this contains genetically modified ingredients. And so you can also look for that. And that’s reading the labels that are going to save your gut because the glyphosate sprayed on the GMOs that is guaranteed way to leaky gut.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, unfortunately, 90% or more now, 95% of our food supply is genetically modified materials. If anybody’s ever read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, great book, it talks about how our entire food supply is based on corn because corn, genetically modified corn, is being and is being fed to the, you know, the pigs and the chickens and the cows. And, you know, the genetic modification itself. You’re splicing together a gene that comes from a plant, together with a gene that comes from a virus, together with a gene that comes from a bacteria. And you’re putting all those together into the plant so the plant doesn’t die when you spray it with Roundup or other pesticides. So in the meantime, you’ve got this very bizarre, unusual genetic material that is now in the corn, in the soy, in whatever is being then turned into food and it’s covered in Roundup. So we’re getting this double whammy of this very bizarre never before seen donate in nature DNA that our bodies are responding to with going, Oh, I need to make some antibodies against this. And that’s again, the auto and auto autoimmunity along with the roundup in the pesticides which decimate the microbiome. And those pesticides are neural neural hormone disruptors. They’re sex hormone disruptors and they’re microbiome disruptors. So if you wonder why we’re seeing all the illnesses that we’re seeing and why our children are so sick, it has to do with the our food supply and the level of toxicity often that we are directly giving them because it’s being required to go.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah, it’s definitely like a scary movie. And I think that we have to sit back and realize that what makes money? What makes money disease makes money. I mean, I still work in the hospital system and I see it. It’s not about health. So healthy people don’t make money. They’re not buying pharmaceuticals. It’s unfortunate, but this is where we’re at. It’s it’s drug companies and whatever promotes the drug companies. So you have to kind of go against the grain and be the weird one. Right.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Right now. And, you know. Yeah. And to that, I mean, the medical schools have now been co-opted by all the you know, by the drug companies and, you know, big food, big pharma, big ag, big energy, big media, you know, big money. All are who control our it doesn’t matter which political party you’re talking about, it’s to say there are two arms of the same head in the same body. And that’s why it’s so difficult to have traction and change and but it’s from the popular movement, you know, it’s it’s, you know, it’s us educating and you guys listen to your intuitive knowing. That’s what I would say more than anything else. Listen to your body and what your body is telling you. And if something is not right and you know, if you have cognitive dissonance, again, what you’re being told doesn’t doesn’t line up with your personal experience, go with that gut feeling. And unfortunately, we’ve had so much cognitive dissonance and so much really, you know, mass psychosis happening in the last couple of years. So we’re seeing this, again, very rampant increase in all autoimmune anti and and, you know, particularly those who work with those of us who work with hormones and we’re seeing it in thyroid.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

So we can fix it.

Margaret Christensen, MD

We can fix it.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

It. So if your lifestyle experience.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Yeah. Start local communities, you know, you know, start doing a start doing a home, you know, growing stuff at home or being part of a co-op for your food and, and help to educate your local school board to about air quality as well as why a lot of the things that are being required are completely unnecessary and have actually never, ever been studied in long term. So you are giving us those recommendations. And the folks who have studied the long term effects are being silenced.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Yeah. So be your best advocate out there. You know, make sure that like I liked what you said about if it doesn’t sound right, if it doesn’t make sense, then, you know, just take a step back and look at the big picture and always look where the money is flowing to. I’ve noticed. So your health is up to you. No one is going to care about your health but you. So in the end, doctors like us, I really care about my patients. And so do you. Yeah, well, a.

Margaret Christensen, MD

Lot of doctors are waking up now because, I mean, they understand that again, the way that we’ve been trained to stand out a pill for every illness is doesn’t work. And, you know, fortunately, enough of us have gotten sick and not get not been able to get better with how we were trained to wake up and recognize. Oh, okay. And then, you know, and then I’m very grateful to my chiropractic and naturopathic colleagues who taught me so much things that we never learned in medical school. And so I’m appreciative.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

That’s absolutely so. Fine. Fine. You’re healthy tribe and. I know. I’ve had to do that in the medical community and in my home community. So, Dr. Christensen, thank you so much for your time and expertize and I also appreciate just how bold you are and passionate. So could you share with everyone where they could find you? Your practice is in Dallas, but where else do you hang out online and anything else you have going on?

Margaret Christensen, MD

Well, yeah, but my practice name is CarpathiaCollaborative.com. I know we have an Instagram thing too. I’m not. I’m not a big social media person I need to be but also molddetoxdiet.com. And you can get a lot of information there. At Carpathia Collaborative, we have a number of practitioners. They’ve all trained with me and under me and just we have an amazing range of abilities men’s health, women’s health, cardiovascular brain health, everything else to be able to care for as well as, you know, hormonal health.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, FACEP

Great. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I really appreciate it.

Margaret Christensen, MD

And a pleasure.