How to Keep Faith When Healing Feels Hard

Opening Thoughts on Chronic Disease and Patience 0:00

And you also have to understand that sometimes with these chronic diseases, it takes a little bit longer. The thing that's so appealing about medications is that it's a quicker fix or you see like results faster, but it's not getting to the root cause. So then you just end up right back where you are, miserable and not good, as opposed to just being patient and waiting and slow. And I still have things I'm working on too, right? We all should, always be tweaking things and working on things, whether it's diet, whether it's longevity.

Right now, my focus is more hormones and longevity because where I'm at, I'm perimenopause. Hi, it's Dr. Jenn. Welcome back to the Integrative Health Podcast. So today I'm just gonna do a solo podcast. I'm gonna do something new. I have people reach out all the time on Instagram with different stories and I can't give medical advice. So I'm just gonna go through how my brain would work if I was presented with a certain case. So this is something that I can do more of if needed. I'll let you guys give feedback on that.

But first, I'm still trying to get some reviews. I would love reviews on Apple podcasts, on my YouTube. Let's grow this. You know, only God can grow this because honestly, it's a lot of toiling. I had a breakdown. So let's just update on life a little bit. We got cows and my cow for Simon is what we're going to name her because she got loose. I was trying to spray some aluminum, which is kind of gross, but on her horns and She got out and I ran probably a mile and praise God I was in my follicular

Life Update and the Loose Cow Story 1:35

phase because sprints, but I was like I had no phone. My son knew that I ran off after her and he was driving around on four-wheeler with my daughter trying to find me. I am running through everyone's yards. probably like about a mile like sprinting and then stopping sprinting and stopping and then she stops under this neighbor that we hadn't met yet his name's Dallas under his persimmon tree and just was eating these like little plum berry looking things so I finally I got to sit on the bucket that I was chasing her with that had sweet grain in it and I just sat there and I just cried and I just cried and You know, this might resonate with some people.

I felt that I'm trying to have this mini farm. I'm trying to, you know, do all these things and I'm just like, oh, I'm failing. I am a failure. And I was like, that is the enemy. If you are doing anything for God's glory, for the kingdom of God, you are not failing. Even if you do fail, even if you are in a valley, you are not. That is the enemy. The Lord will pick you back up. And you have to hit lows though sometimes to just strip away and just know that you are fully reliant on the Lord, on Jesus Christ our Savior.

And I sat there and I'm just crying. And this was, if you guys follow me on Instagram, this was all the sty was going on, all these things. And I was just like crying and looked probably crazy. I was in jeans and then I had like knee high rain boots on and I was just crying there and this guy's like, Hi, can I help you? I mean, he probably thought I was like a psych patient ready to call the police, but you can see out in the distance this calf. So anyway, long story short, we tried to get her, rattle her up, but we could not get to the lead rope to grab it.

But I followed her and ran her all the way back and she went all the way back into the fence. So we are getting more of a semi-permanent fence. Right now it's an electric fence and I strung a third wire. She went under the two wires because she was used to going under to nurse. So very, very humbling. one of our neighbor comes back is older wise and I'm like, I just feel like a failure with this is like, Jenny, if you stopped learning, you're gonna stop failing, right? So imagine that. So if you're listening to this podcast by chance, if you've been following me for a while, I mean, you will fail at your health.

You'll try to fast, it will be the wrong part of your cycle. You'll try to fast in the right part of your cycle, in the follicular phase and you might still fail and we will fail. picking back up. It's knowing that, first of all, we are not reliant on our own anyway. We are not going to get to heaven by works. It's by grace. It's by the grace of the Lord. And we are sinners. We are going to fail, okay? Period. And if you're following anyone that says that, you know, we aren't going to fail and we're amazing and you're enough and all of this, that's not true either.

So to really fail when I was sitting on the bucket in that tree, I was just like, Lord, Help me. But anyway, so going back into why we're doing this first. Oh, I forgot. I want to read a review. I want to read a review.

Faith, Failure, and Learning Through Hardship 5:00

Thank you to King Jesus' daughter for five-star review. I enjoy listening and learning from Dr. Jen. She helps me think through what is usually not on mainstream media. Love her platform of even pro-informed consent. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and perspective. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that review. And this is harder to reach people when we are not Talking about what is on mainstream and I will do another solo podcast specifically on hormones what I'm seeing lately with this. Then it will not be shared it will not be in your face if you have things that are in your face that you did not seek on your own.

probably not good information, probably something else. And I could do a whole, I could do my PowerPoint if you guys want, leave some comments on this on my social media, but I can post my Rockefeller PowerPoint that I did when we had friends over last week. So let me know. Okay. So let's go. Some back history. This person that is looking for some help and, you know, this is not medical advice for anyone. I'm just going to talk, think through my brain, two decades of being a doctor, how I would approach this with the integrative lens plus my conventional lens, right, which is like the good marriage here.

Okay. So this person used to be a chronic drinker, but it was under control. She never drank during pregnancies or nursing and then quit nursing the youngest a few years ago and then started drinking again and then quit again after she felt convicted, you know, in last year. and she's in her 40s and also had some flesh struggles, it seems, as vanity and stuff and had, you know, done things like Botox, hair dye and stuff like that. So then things kind of toppled when she got Lasik on her eye for the vision and she had an epithelial tissue tear and all of that.

So she got real dizzy and was puking and then that kind of escalated more of like POTS symptoms. For those that aren't sure what POTS is, so it is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. So it is when your heart rate goes low and then when you stand up, it jumps up really high. Also can have blood pressure fluctuations with this. Now for me, POTS is a symptom. Now, we know in conventional medicine, we look at symptoms and we say, oh, here's a bunch of symptoms. We're going to name them a disease instead of going for the root cause.

Because from my standpoint and over the last decade, practicing solely root cause integrative medicine, when there is a symptom that is God's gift to us,

Reading a Listener Review and Introducing the Case Study 7:50

that there is something else. This is not a disease. We're not meant to be broken. We're not meant to be diseased. People here, yes, we live in a broken world and there will be sickness, but chronic disease? A lot of these chronic diseases, it's because we've done it to ourselves or, you know, a pill for every ill mentality and then there are side effects and we're never getting to the root cause, so that inflammation disease is just festering into things like cancer, blood pressure problems, etc.

So when we look at pots, you know, what is the root cause? Now, when we also look at root cause for pots during the pandemic and all of the nonsense, you know, going on for that with the actual virus and with the other stuff, I was seeing a lot of pots and long haul and all of that because there was a root cause and then it was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back was that was what was going on during the pandemic with those two things, the actual virus and then the other thing that people were forced to get and coerced into getting.

Now, but the root cause was like mold or chronic EBV or gut health or chronic stress, lots of things. So think about that too. We also, when we look at stuff, yes, it seems like the, you know, when we look at it, the red herring might be what was going on right then. But if we look at chronic autoimmune disease, it's two years before sometimes that that happens. So what happened two years before. Sometimes it can be 20 years before and it's festering, but usually it's like two to four years. So you want to look at that too.

Also for root causes, teeth, cavitations, you know, gut health, environmental, mold, you know, tick bite, Lyme, EBV with your immune system chronically suppressed from Y, from mold, from stress, you know. So you have to look at all of that. So this is kind of where my mind is like, you know, people are talking or I'm reading this, I'm like, it could be all this stuff. And that is actually where you can tease out if you're actually seeing someone with good training or not. I've noticed that some people say, oh, I go to a wellness doc or integrative or functional, but they have no training or experience or good mentorship.

So their brain is not going to compute like that. Or they went straight from nursing school to nurse practitioner school and there was no time for them to develop gestalt or anything and they're just jumped into this. Or another big problem is they're not humble. They're not still learning. They're not saying, wow, I was wrong back then and now I'm doing it better or I'm going to continue medical education.

Understanding POTS and Root-Cause Medicine 10:20

I'm going to keep learning. I'm going to keep sharpening. So yeah, there's a lot. So there was an incidental finding of Chiari malformation and that is something that deals with the brainstem. And then also there was some genetic mutations with methylation, which I will say a lot of, also a lot of these like practitioners, they're like, oh, you all have MTHFR and you know, everyone probably does. Everyone has like a small slowing down mutation SNP, single nucleotide polymorphism and MTHFR. So should you buy supplements off of it?

Should you be obsessed with it? No, probably not. There are so many other things that we need to fix. Yes, it contributes. Yes, some people have more slowing and I have Instagram posts on this, but you know, a lot of things I'm seeing right now are just to get people to buy stuff or blame how they are on something. No, like, no, we can do better than that. So that's another thing. So reading through this again, once again, seeing a lot of different doctors, saw a cardiologist, echocardiogram came back normal, so many things kind of, and I see this so much just going to all these different specialists and they're saying, oh, this is crazy and we've never seen this before.

Okay, so still getting nausea dizzy, tingling hands, got an MRI that was normal, gaslit them, told them it was anxiety. Okay, let's talk about this. This happens all the time. We don't know what's wrong with you, so it's anxiety or we can't find this because it's not a conventional medicine bucket. So you have anxiety, you have mental illness, so you get an antidepressant or in this case she was given Xanax and did not do well and then given Klonopin. And it gets worse because this is not the root cause.

We don't have a deficiency of Xanax. which if you have anxiety while you're working on the root cause, DHHB is good. I have that on my website, healthybydrjen. Also L-theanine is good. Also the true Vega-vegal nerve stimulation is good, especially for POTS patients. So there's so many things you can do. She was doing some other stuff, you know, spending a lot of time and money on this, eating anti-inflammatory, low histamine, no processed food, no sugar, gluten-free. All of this, okay, and was actually doing well for a couple of months after going to an intensive neurological institute for wellness.

And that's the thing, sometimes we will get relief in things, but if we don't have the root cause it will come back. So this came back. And this is interesting. So her ferritin was low. So when we see low ferritin, I'm seeing this a lot post pandemic is that it has to do with chronic inflammation. So it's like anemia and low ferritin of chronic inflammation and lacto ferritin should help with that while we're working on stress and parasympathetic system. So anyway, this is very interesting. Now, keep in mind she's in her early 40s and what happens perimenopause.

So I also see a lot of shift with perimenopause and this is why the Lord told me to write the book The Perimenopause Reset because so many things are shifting and We're more vulnerable, well, to spiritual attack because we are weak at a weakened state. We're having more emotional attack. We're having progesterone go down, right? So we're having the spirit and then we are having physically and it's stress on our body. And I mean, you could like interview women. You know, I mean, I've just seen this with hundreds and hundreds of women in my practice.

This is a time of stress. This is a time when, you know, kids are getting older, parents are getting older. You're trying to decide, you know, if you stay at home, if you should have a career, you are volunteering.

Hormones, Perimenopause, and Symptom Patterns 14:20

You are also just not feeling like yourself as much if you are not getting the right treatment, right? And most are getting gaslit by their doctor. That's about all of it that I was sent. Okay, so she's still having problems. But the interesting part of all of these pieces that I was given is that her symptoms are worse during the late luteal phase and also around ovulation. So this might be hormonal. And when we look at hormones, we also want to look at all the hormones during perimenopause. So, you know, looking at this root cause whole person, we would definitely want to look at hormones day 19 to 21 a cycle.

What is progesterone? And I've had cases where POTS patients, while we're working on the root cause, I've given some progesterone. I talked about a case in my book about this and really just helped them get over the hump. Like they were not able to operate as a mother. or warp and then gave a little progesterone while we were working in that case it was mole toxicity and then they were able to get better and now they're doing great. So what are the hormones? But hormones also, what's the insulin and glucose balance?

We're a continuous glucose monitor. Let's see what's going on with the whole cycle. you know, do we need to rein it in and maybe do some ketosis so the brain is having that clean fuel so the body can rest, so the gut can rest, you know, maybe do some fasting in the follicular phase. That's an idea. You know, she was already removing all this stuff, but maybe doing carnivore for two weeks during the follicular phase and then during the luteal phase, adding back in some carbs. Also, if we're doing very restrictive diets, that could be stressful on the body.

So continuous glucose monitor would show that because if we're having times of stress, good or bad, hormesis is a good type of stress like a fast in the right part of your cycle. You know, sometimes we can get spikes from exercises or sauna, right? But we need to balance that because if someone has POTS, there are probably like their cortisol response might be blunted, they might have, you know, start to go into adrenal fatigue because of that if it's long term. So also, you know, having some adaptogens to support that, working with limbic system, parasympathetic activation, those kind of things are going to be important.

And, you know, some of that can be meditating on scripture, breath work, all of that. So that is really interesting, you know, also because of extreme stress if, you know, because we're still not addressing the root cause and I'll go through what some of them I think might be. But with that, the symptoms being worse in that luteal, so giving some of that progesterone because progesterone can be even depleted more from chronic stress from what has been going on. It's interesting, she also says, moorings are hardest.

Well, your cortisol is supposed to be really high in the morning and then go down during the day, but sometimes we'll have a blunted cortisol response because the cortisol is not even like registering the adrenals are dinged. And also I saw during the pandemic, a lot of DHEA patients I've had for years and years and we're just checking their DHEA as part of their blood panels to check their hormones and keep an eye on them. It's tanked and we do know that the spike protein it went you know into the adrenals well all through the body but it you know and i think that there was maybe some damage or inflammation in the adrenals during all of this so it's a different world post-pandemic practicing medicine and if your doctor denies that that is bad or that happened or just isn't studying then that's a problem too because it's a different world to practice medicine so how This breaks my heart because she says, I went from being a healthy and thriving woman at the beginning of the year to a chronically ill mother.

So we need to rebuke that, right? We need to make sure that we are not letting doctors tell us what our bodies are or name things or make us a chronic illness. And we need to repeat to ourselves, you know, we are beautifully and wonderfully made. Go to Psalm 139, you know, search me, oh Lord. you know just lament to the Lord like read through the Psalms and not that like medicine is evil or people are meaning wrong but like some of the things

Possible Root Causes and Treatment Ideas 18:40

that doctors tell patients it's like a word curse it's like they take that identity as being chronically ill and this is not what God intended okay and and from me personally Think about it. I was told, well, first I was told Hashimoto's, it's no big deal. You can't do anything about it. Your thyroid will eventually die. And we know that is not true. You can reverse Hashimoto's and I did and my antibodies are still zero, but you know, I had to have my surgery and all that. So yeah, I mean, and I'm very careful with the words I say to patients now because of that.

Okay, so first of all, that. Second of all, so the eye stuff. There are retina bioregulators. I have them on my website, Healthy by Dr. Jen. There's retina. I would start with retina, blood vessel, and honestly, pineal and thymus. You could do four bioregulators, two of them. once a day for 10 days out of the month and that can start helping things and then like I said before like get labs like let's get the hormones like figured out and then I would go through and okay what are root causes like we know that the hormones are shifting and pairing menopause this eye surgery kind of like triggered everything maybe but I don't think that is what is causing all of this.

I think it's something deeper. So mold, did your basement ever flood? Did you live in a moldy environment? We know that 40% of homes have mold in it. If you don't know that, go listen to John Du Bois podcast and also the other podcast I have too on mold, like be knowledgeable about it. Could it be just gut health? Could gut health has been broken down and the immune system is struggling, right? Could this just be a chronic gut health issue? And, you know, elimination diets, they can only do so much.

You know, do we need to step it up with some peptides like lorazetide or BPC-157-KPV? KVV might be a really good thing to layer in here because it's very anti-inflammatory. If there's mold going on, that could calm things down. What about low-dose naltrexone, LDN? That would be great for POTS patients to calm down that inflammatory storm going on and either maybe stay on it chronically if we have cancer history in the family or to prevent breast cancer. New research is coming out with that. Do we just use it as a tool while we're getting to the root cause?

Could this be heavy metals? Could this be lime? So it could be so many things. So this is why you have to work with someone that actually knows how to peel off these layers, okay? And the other thing is, is you want to work with a doctor that has plan A through Z. And it's stepwise too. And you also have to understand that sometimes with these chronic diseases, it takes a little bit longer. The thing that's so appealing about medications is that it's a quicker fix or you see like results faster, but it's not getting to the root cause.

So then you just end up right back where you are, miserable and not good, as opposed to just being patient and waiting and slow. And I still have things I'm working on too, right? We all should always be tweaking things and working on things, whether it's diet, whether it's longevity. Right now, my focus is more hormones and longevity because where I'm at in perimenopause. So like this complicated case, there's so much for me like low hanging fruit, you know. Peptides, let's look into gut health and root cause a little bit more.

Use the bioregulators, let's get the hormones, you know, fixed. I mean at low 40s, I mean progesterone, you're probably low unless you've really like nailed down some things before. So yeah, I mean, I hope that is helpful. I want to do more of these because I think that going through case studies is important. It's like a cookie. It's like how I cook, honestly. I don't, sometimes I don't follow a recipe. I'm just like, especially I've been making dressed eggs because we have lots of eggs to take to things.

You know, I got a little mustard, a little garlic, a little salt, and I just put bacon on them on top or some pickles. chopped up, but I should probably write it down. But it's probably I don't write things down when I make things because this is how I practice medicine. It's not cookie cutter. Some things are and you know and that's what with the practice of medicine it's a practice it's not like it shouldn't just be a blind you know you're following

Why Integrative Medicine Requires Time and Skill 23:15

exactly the same protocols because we're all unique and we're all different so with integrative medicine and functional medicine The patient will kind of give you major clues on what's going on if they're just talking to you, but you do have to ask the right questions. You do have to be a detective. You have to use just stall based on seeing other patients based on your training. based on your continual training and reading, and also based on mentorship too. And it's very complex. So just like how everything else gets ruined by greed and money, I feel like we're going back to that too.

it's swinging that way with this type of medicine too. So you have to be careful. You have to look at training. You have to look at board certification on board certified and integrative medicine. You have to look at all of these different things. So yeah, so I loved doing this. This was so fun. Just kind of picking apart pieces and little clues. And like I said, I was just using a bunch of messages that this person sent to me and you know me not asking any questions i'm just talking about it because i'm not giving medical advice and they are not part of my practice but if they were in a state i practice that would be very fun so you guys listening i really appreciate you i love doing this i love teaching i love talking and i really hope you like this podcast if you want more solo breakouts then Please leave a review, please leave a comment.

If you'd rather just me having guests talk, that's fine too. So I'm open for it all. This podcast was done actually during the pandemic because I just wanted a place to learn and talk.

Closing Reflections and Listener Call to Action 25:15

I appreciate you guys and have a blessed day and I hope you enjoyed the rooster crowing. He attacked Cyrus like a few times so we were told to like hold him by the legs upside down for just like a few seconds and have him do that so that's helped. So if anyone has any tips on if a rooster turns kind of mean what to do because if he He just like scratched Cyrus. Like if it would be anything else, he would have been gone, but we might have to rehome him if he gets bad, but he doesn't do anything to me.

So all the farm tips I'd appreciate, and I will give you guys all the medical tips. We can do a swap. Have a great day. Have a great week.