Is Fibromyaligia Reversible?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Oh, delighted to be here. Thanks for having me, yeah.

Kashif Khan

So high level for those that haven’t touched it in their family or themselves personally, what is fibromyalgia?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Well, so fibromyalgia is a syndrome. It’s a group of symptoms that people have in common and we give it this name fibromyalgia. But the symptoms include diffuse achy, sometimes disabling pain, fatigue, insomnia, brain fog, low moods, restless leg syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome. These symptoms are all associated with this condition called fibromyalgia, which affects, depending on who you listen to, but anywhere from six to 10% of the population worldwide. It affects females, probably 95% of those who have fibromyalgia are females. It does affect males, but obviously very much smaller percentage. And it’s an illness that really is not really well understood. And unfortunately, there’s still doctors today oftentimes don’t acknowledge it existence, even though it’s been around for 30 years. It’s been around since the American College of Rheumatology gave the criteria in 1990. So, it’s an illness that is incredibly frustrating, both for those who have it, and for doctors who are trying to figure it out.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, I think one of the challenges, like, even in the way you describe it, when you hear all these red flags, you’re like, Nope, it sounds like here’s another case, but clinically, the people are denying it exists are masking each one of those individual pain points as separate problems. They’re saying, no, you have a wound behavior issue, you have an insomnia issue you have a whatever issue, and all of a sudden you’re dealing with 10 different issues, as opposed to this one root core. So how do you go from looking at all these multitude of multifactorial problems that come out of it to saying, no, this is the root. How do you even get there?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Well Kashif, that’s the thing is where do you start. There’s so many symptoms. And I think that’s what sometimes leads some doctors, some healthcare practitioners to think that this individual is a hypochondriac. Because, how can you have all these symptoms and still be alive? And unfortunately, most of the lab work that’s being done now, your company’s changing that thank goodness, but a lot of the blood work that comes back on these individuals as normal. And so a lot of times doctors just say, well, it’s all in your head or you’re just depressed, or you need to lose weight or need to get more rest, which is crazy ’cause they’d love to get more rest, but they can barely sleep they insomnia. They they’d love to get more exercise, but they can barely get outta bed. But there’s some key things with fibromyalgia. 

If we look at it from a functional medicine standpoint, the way that you and I look at things, we’re looking for root causes. So again, fibromyalgia is just a name. That’s it, it’s a name given to describe these symptoms, but it doesn’t cause the pain, it doesn’t cause low energy, it doesn’t cause the brain fog. So there’s some underlying key things that contribute to that. One of the big drivers is low serotonin. So serotonin as you well know, as a brain chemical, it’s called the happy hormone. The higher your serotonin level, usually the higher your pain threshold, so the less pain that you have. The higher, your serotonin level, the happy you are, less anxious you are, less likely you are to have irritable bowel syndrome. You have more serotonin receptors in your intestinal tract than you do in your brain. 

So when you get nervous, you tend to get butterflies in your stomach. But really for me, over 20 years goodness, 22 years specializing in fibromyalgia early on, I’d have these patients referred to me and I’d think, oh my gosh, where do I start with these people? I mean, they’ve got so many different conditions and symptoms, they got a brain tumor, they got… Where am I gonna start? But what I found early on is if I could start to get them to be able to sleep on a consistent basis through the night by doing that would be the biggest first step forward. And really, if we can’t get that to happen, then we’re not gonna see much improvement at all. 

So that really to me, if someone’s struggling with their sleep, we know that they’re more, they’re 40% more like let’s see, they have 40% more inflammatory chemicals than if they’re sleeping consistently through the night. Obviously if you’re not getting a good night’s sleep, you’re going to be exhausted. I mean if you never sleep, you’re gonna be exhausted. You’re gonna have brain fog. You’ll be more likely to feel anxious and depressed. More likely to have irritable bowel syndrome. Start to have problems with suppressing your thyroid function because of all the stress. Your immune system is compromised. So, this deeper store to sleep is really the first step in starting to dramatically improve the symptoms associated with fibromyalgia.

Kashif Khan

The thing you said about serotonin is really interesting because, we’ve spoken of it a few times during this, all these conversations and interviews, and we keep talking about it in the context of mood and behavior, right? It’s a neurochemical, as you said, it’s produced in the gut when you’re sleeping. When you talk about serotonin, are you saying that it’s a cause or it’s more that the awareness is higher, meaning that somebody because of the inability to deal with pain or mood that maybe something that feels like four or 10 feels like six outta 10 or eight outta 10 to them, is that what’s happening?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg, right? So we know what a lot of folks, whether it’s with mood disorders are in particular fibromyalgia. They have a genetic glitch where they can’t convert the amino acid tryptophan into 5-hydroxytryptophan. So amino acids are the building blocks of every protein, and we normally get those through our diet. There’s essential amino acids like tryptophan that you have to get in your diet and your body can’t make it. But for some individuals, when they eat turkey or people probably associate tryptophan with turkey and being sleepy after Thanksgiving meal. But when they eat that protein for some individuals, they can’t convert that tryptophan into 5-hydroxytryptophan, which then turns into serotonin. 

And so it’s the question is, is it the fact that for whatever reason they become deficient in serotonin, that that is really the driver, the impetus that brings on fibromyalgia? Or is it the stress, so could it be a genetic link? That’s a good question for you. Or is it just the stress? ‘Cause I use this kind of an example that we’re all born with the stress coping savings account. And in that stress coping savings account, we have certain chemicals that allows us to deal with stress. So we have hormones like cortisol, DHEA and we have serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine. And then we have vitamins like pantothenic acid and minerals like magnesium that anytime we’re under stress, real or imagined our bodies releasing these chemicals, to allow us to deal with this stress, physical stress, mental stress, again, environmental stressors, things that we get in our diet that are stressful. 

If you’re not careful, you can bankrupt your stress coping savings account. So if you get under too much stress and you’re making more withdrawals than you are deposit, you bankrupt that account. And one of the main ways that we make deposits into our stress coping savings account is getting that deep restorative sleep. And that’s when the body is supposed to be repairing itself. But if that’s not happening, then you continue to stay under the stress. In fact, stress becomes more magnified and you further deplete those chemicals. So every day you’re waking up and you don’t have any… You open up the toolbox, you get under stress and then there’s nothing there, right? So it’s a vicious cycle.

Kashif Khan

I think the way you put it makes it so easy to understand and contextualizes it because often people don’t think of it that way that, you have the load and then you have the release or the relief, and it’s up to you, on both ends, you’re turning these dials of intake. Whatever it is you gotta deal with every day, but sleep is when you restore and recover. Could be supplementation, could be food that supports these things. But if you’re not doing that, then you’re starting the next day in the negative, right? You’re you’ve already breaking, you’re bringing the burden of the previous day with you. How many days can you do that before the body gives up and something like fibromyalgia pokes its noses through and says, it’s time I’m here, right? On the serotonin issue, you sort of provoked a thought, which is, we did some work with a researcher. 

So we’ve run some of our genetic testing out of McGill University in Montreal, and they have a lab there that does some awesome research, we partner with them there. There was a researcher there that was working on the gut microbiome, but very specific pathways within the gut. He wasn’t trying to do a big data dump and sequence and learn everything about the gut. He was saying there’s areas where I see red flags and I’m gonna focus on those, right? And one of the things he found is that in the gut that there’s certain strains that when they flourish, they’re excrement is highly toxic, right? And they’re flourishing because we’re eating the wrong foods. And that ends up directly correlating to women complaining about fibromyalgia or being diagnosed with fibromyalgia. 

And to me, it points to exactly what you said, that the serotonin levels being off means you didn’t take the time in your sleep to produce what you need to do. Which means maybe a layer before that we’re talking about a gut health issue, right? When gut health is off, then yes, serotonin is off. Hormone production is off. Detox is off, recovery is off, and you are getting this inflammatory in. So why was the gut detox, sorry, the gut issue there to begin with? Well maybe because the wrong flora is flourishing causing that inflammatory state. So I dunno if you’ve seen anything like that.

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Well, there’s research going on by Dr. Pridgen in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which is about an hour west of here. And this has been going almost a decade now, quite a long time. Where he’s a gastroenterologist and what he saw in his fibromyalgia patients with GI disorders, which that’s very common, 70% of people with fibromyalgia have irritable bowel syndrome. Both of those conditions, as you probably know, are associated with central sensitization, that’s a mouthful central sensitization pain syndrome where pain is more magnified. There’s an imbalance and miscommunication between the nervous system and the hormonal system. But Pridgen has been doing this research, and what he’s found in his research is there’s definitely a disruption in the microbiome. I see that as well. His research points to herpes virus as being one of the drivers of fibromyalgia. I’ve not seen that in my testing. 

And of course I haven’t been testing that for years early on I didn’t see that. I’m curious to see what’s gonna come out of that, of this 10 year study. But there’s no doubt that there is a problem with the microbiome. There’s something that’s come along and compromised it’s ability to be functioning in an optimal way. And we know that it’s all connected. You can’t separate it. We have a thing called, there’s a link between SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth in fibromyalgia. That’s some of these studies are coming out and showing that. There’s a link between leaky gut who, and of course, who doesn’t have leaky gut? Where the gut is leaking this food stuff that’s normally contained and leaking it across this one layer, thin layer of cells, and allows that food to leak into the body. The body thinks it’s being invaded and starts releasing all these inflammatory chemicals. So it wouldn’t surprise me if we start to see particular strains, as we dive deeper and deeper down and start to understand the microbiome.

Kashif Khan

So I think what I’m hearing from you is what I’ve experienced also is that, we believe that there’s gonna be answers from the gut, but the science is a little premature. Like we don’t have the right tools yet.

Dr. Rodger Murphree

And that’s what I would say about epigenetics is that, it’s there, we look around and we see, what fibromyalgia definitely runs in families. So we see that and we can explain it, those who of us who are experts have been dealing with fibromyalgia for over 20 years, we see it just in the history of these individuals. So many of them come from a very toxic environment. So they’re raised in a, can I be an abusive household, but it could be just, maybe they had an illness when they were younger. It was a very stressful environment to grow up in. And these individuals lose their plasticity to stress. So as they get older, something comes along, whether that’s college or first marriage or a first child, an illness, whatever it is of surgery, something’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back, Kashif that, it just sets them off. And they start developing these symptoms. Is there something genetically that is preceding this? I certainly suspect that there is.

Kashif Khan

Right. Yeah, I think, often these conversations get to the same place where, regardless of the condition, there’s kind of this threshold you get to. It’s this inflammatory in cell threshold where the cells just give up which condition. There’s some co factors that can point to which condition you may get. And some people it is fibromyalgia, but the story it’s the same story over and over again. It’s the environmental toxin factors. It’s the internal antioxidant factors is all. And to look at the genetics of it and why it would do so many women, why the percentages much higher in women than there are men, well there’s a whole other load of toxicity women have to deal with that men don’t, which is their estrogen toxicity. Not that men don’t have estrogen toxicity, many do, but even then the estrogen levels are so low that it’s a drop in the bucket versus what women have to deal with. 

And this is where to look at what you said, it runs in families. What’s genetic about it, well, it’s very easy to look at the hormone cascade genetically, and to know what you net out. What bucket do you fill. Are you estrogen dominant androgen? And then what do you turn those estrogens into? Are they clean, are they highly toxic? And we can discover that again, without ever speaking to a woman. Then you can look at the epigenetic factors, like, what do you eat? What are your environmental exposures? What chemicals do you use in your home? That may cause some redundancy or exponential value to that estrogen toxicity, ’cause now you’re overloading it. 

So it sounds like, again, it’s that teetering on the threshold where you start to get these symptoms and then you cross the threshold and all of a sudden you’re ill. And clinically we’re treating the illness, which is only ever trying to suppress you back beyond the threshold. And on the other end, like you said, that bank account isn’t being treated properly. What got you there in the first place? And you’ve discovered all these things by dealing with these women. So is it, the treatment protocol, does it start with a pill or does it start more with like an audit of what they’re doing wrong and removing stuff from their lifestyle?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

It’s a good question. Unfortunately many of these individuals have been to numerous doctors. They’ve been to Mayo, they’ve been to Cleveland clinic, they’ve been all over and oftentimes they’re kind of, they’re eventually just told they just have to learn to live with it. And that’s a terrible thing to hear when you’re in your 30s or 40s or even 50s, and you hear that you’re gonna have to live with chronic pain and fatigue, exhaustion, poor brain fog, all the things that we associate with fibromyalgia, you just have to learn to live with it. Really the only way to overcome fibromyalgia, this sounds so simplistic, but it’s so true doing this for 22 years, the only way to overcome fibromyalgia and you can, you can overcome it, is you gotta get healthy. But then to answer your question, where do you start? And obviously I think, people associate being healthy with eating healthy And it’s true, I mean, you are what you eat. Eventually that, the foods that you eat turn into your hormones and what you look like. 

Do you look healthy, your skin, your nails, your hair, but that’s the long game. That’s the long game. So what we look at is really there’s a disruption in the body’s ability to regulate itself. So there’s a disruption between the hypothalamus, which are a cluster of nerves that are in the brain. So the hypothalamus, and then the pituitary that sits underneath that and the adrenals, this is the HPA axis. But this coordinated system helps to interpret any kind of information that’s coming into the body and any kind of information that needs to go out. It regulates all the different systems in the body. We don’t have to think about taking 12 breaths per minute. We don’t have to think about pumping blood through 60 miles of arteries and veins and capillaries every minute. Our body through the autonomic nervous system is able to regulate this. But when the hypothalamus in particular gets under too much stress for whatever reason, then it starts to become dysfunctional. And then, because it can’t function, it can’t provide the communication to these different systems like it’s supposed to. 

And we know that really stress and inflammation are the two drivers virtually every unwanted health condition out there. But to answer your question, yeah there’s some key things that if you start to get that right, you can start to reverse fibromyalgia. The first one is restoring deep restorative sleep and building up that serotonin level. That’s the key. And a lot of people with fibromyalgia are on antidepressants. And there’s a time and a place for that, but if you look at antidepressants, we know that number one, no one has a Prozac deficiency. Not to be facetious, but no one has a drug deficiency. And these medications, 70% of the time are no better than a placebo. That means that you could take a sugar pill and 70% of the time you’re gonna get the same results as you would from an antidepressant. 

We also know that antidepressants have all sorts of potential side effects, including ironically anxiety and depression. If you say you pain, they can deplete your natural sleep hormone melatonin, so they can interfere with your sleep. An antidepressant doesn’t make serotonin. Serotonin comes from an amino acid, we mentioned earlier tryptophan when combined with B vitamins, B1, B2, B3, B6, in particular pyridoxal 5-phosphate and magnesium, that’s what makes serotonin. So rather than taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, when you don’t even have any serotonin reuptake, you can take an over the counter supplement, 5-HTP combined with a good multivitamin. And that combination, now you can start filling up your brain with serotonin that’s the place to start.

Kashif Khan

That’s interesting, ’cause all of what you just mentioned in the B vitamins are exactly what’s required for optimal methylation, right? So though, that’s what methylation is. It’s a utilization of all these B vitamins to, we can get deep into it but, that’s what’s required. So, do you find that’s also a problem for typically, for women that are suffering or even men?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

I do. I see that there is a methylation issue, not a 100%, but there’s certainly a fair amount of individuals that I treat. Either I’ve seen that in testing or we can just see it clinically. Usually try to get it tested to see what’s going on with that methylation issue. But so many of them have a problem, not only with folic acid, but they have a big problem with pyridoxine. Breaking pyridoxine down to P5P pyridoxal 5-phosphate. See that in an and anxiety and depression patients with pyroluria condition where you can’t make that conversion. We definitely see that in fibromyalgia. And oftentimes getting them just on the right type of B vitamins can make a difference, at least initially in their mental clarity and their sleep and their moods.

Kashif Khan

That’s incredible. ‘Cause the cool factor that’s I mean, we already know how incredible this body is and how resilient it is. And there’s just gaps and holes and certain biochemical processes that need to be filled. And if you don’t the reality we now live in that we’re not designed for can make you sick, right? And it’s a simple tweak sometimes. And that one thing, like you said, can solve so many issues. Methylation, serotonin, who knows what else? Do you find that in the men, I don’t know how many, the work you do is it mostly, is it all women or is there any many men as well?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Can see mostly women I’d say that it’s 99% females. Now I do have some men patients and obviously over the last couple decades, but majority of them are female.

Kashif Khan

Okay. That actually points to what I was gonna ask you, is that in the men, are they unaware? Do they go undiagnosed or because it’s believed to be a female condition, which by, we know that then the number speaks to that, but there are men out there, do they, is there awareness or is there even, is it just ignore, it’s not possible, but you’re not a woman.

Dr. Rodger Murphree

I think there’s the awareness is out there, but for whatever reason it’s not broadcast. And I don’t know if that’s because men that get the illness, like you said, associated with it being in a female condition and are reluctant to share that they have this condition. But I mean, there’s definitely men that have it. The difference that I see oftentimes with men that have it and females, is that men oftentimes have a chronic fatigue syndrome, along with paired up with the syndrome and there’s some, all those there’s a lot of similarities between those two. There’s also some big differences.

Kashif Khan

Very interesting. So how, I know you’ve been doing this work for some time and you’ve helped… How have people been finding you? ‘Cause typically you go to your primary care practitioner and you’re told you need some kind of pill, and so where does it get to the point where they actually believe that there’s, they can possibly reverse this so there’s more to know?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Well, as I mentioned earlier, the sad fact, is that most people are told that they just have to learn to live with it, so they give up. And oftentimes they will try numerous different therapies and diets and all sorts of things and medications. Drug therapy alone is a dead end for sure. We know that from the surveys tracking people over a 15 year period, we see that the longer they’re on these medications, the worst they get. That’s not to step anybody’s toes, that’s not to be little traditional medicine. I mean there’s a time and a place, it’s just that you can’t drug your way at a fibromyalgia. You can’t just try to treat the symptom. Number one, there’s too many symptoms, right? I mean if you’re not careful, if you’re on a drug for every symptom, I mean, you’re on a drug to put you asleep, a drug to wake you up, a drug that speeds you up, a drug to slow you down, and you get on this medical merry-go-round, which then, you have all these side effects that start to show up. 

So I think that, what’s happened over the last decade is that in conventional medicine doctors initially thought, yeah, we’ll find a drug or a combination of drugs that are really gonna help these people. And their intent was it was real. I mean, it was empathetic, they wanted to help. But what they saw was after trying people on Gralise and Lyrica, Neurontin, Savella, Cymbalta the drugs that had been approved for fibromyalgia and even the ones that are commonly accepted as potential helpful for fibromyalgia, they’ve seen that their patients don’t get any better. So they come back every three to six months or no better. And usually they’re worse.

And that doctor, he or she comes to the false conclusion that, well, there’s just nothing we can do for these people. So yes, I think unfortunately a lot of folks just give up and in my case, how do they find out about me is summits like this, my books and lecturing for a number of years. When I first started out, I lectured all over North America and that kind of, 20 years ago, and that kind of got my name out there internationally, but it’s tough. It’s tough for those individuals ’cause they really don’t know that there are some options. And fortunately people like yourself and others in functional medicine space, we’re giving them some hope. I hope we’re giving them some hope.

Kashif Khan

I’m sure you must have faced some resistance. ‘Cause what you’re talking about is this thing that people, that clinically we believe you have to live with, and you’re saying no, let’s work on reversing it. So did you find that there was some reluctance sort of from your peers to accept your work?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

I think my peers really don’t understand fibromyalgia and on my fibromyalgia summit, I had several fibromyalgia experts on there. And one of them was Ginerva Liptan. She’s a bestselling author of, I think two fibromyalgia books now. But she’s recognized internationally ’cause she goes and speaks it quite a bit. And we had this conversation about what do doctors even think about fibromyalgia? And she was like me, when we get around them, they really don’t understand it. A lot of ’em just dismiss it as being a real illness, partly because they feel so helpless, they don’t know what to do. And they hate that feeling. Other doctors that I talk to would say, well, when I would see them on my schedule, it would ruin my day. It wasn’t that the patient was a bad person, it’s just, I didn’t know what to do with ’em. And I felt helpless. Ginerva Liptan, Dr. Liptan I asked her point blank, I said, how many doctors do you think are out there today that really understand fibromyalgia and are having success for fibromyalgia patients? 

Now, Kashif thought it was gonna be, you know what? What would you think? Couple of hundred, thousand? I mean, how many thousands of doctors are there around the world? So I’m thinking, a couple of thousand doctors, but that’s still just a minuscule amount, right? She said, I think probably six counting you, mentioning me. And I was flattered. I really was flattered, but I’m not sharing it because of that, I’m sharing it because it was so disheartening to believe that there’s only a handful of doctors. This is someone that speaks all over the world to other doctors, that there’s only a handful of us that really understand how to help those with fibromyalgia. When I talk to my friends, colleagues that are in traditional medicine have a lot of those friends that are still on the other side and we’ll have conversations and they’ll ask me kinda and when we first meet each other, what do you do? And I share with them about fibromyalgia and have to kinda educate them about that. And I share with them about functional medicine. 

They’re very intrigued. They’re very interested. It’s not that they’re not interested, they wanna know more, but they have a very busy practice. And they’re doing what they know to do, and that’s really about all they can do. For me, I’m not… I know very little about genetics. I’m having to learn it. Because I see the benefit of knowing more and being able to share that if nothing else, with my patients in my community, so that they can get tested and we can drill down and find these little things that we’re missing that are probably holding us back. But I’ve got a very busy practice and it’s very easy sometimes to have the blinders on, and not open up and to go, oh yeah, well that may, I need to learn more about that, yeah. And so to their defense, they wanna know they just don’t have time, and–

Kashif Khan

Yeah, it’s true. It’s the model is designed around that efficiency. Like you have to think of it from the other perspective. What is that doctor trying to achieve? And not only helping you, but helping their practice survive so that you’re there available for you. And a lot of it has to do with efficiency. What can they do in a minimal lot of times they can see everybody ’cause it’s the volume. And then the toolkit is limited. You can’t offer a solution that doesn’t exist in your toolkit. If there’s no hammer, you’re not hitting a nail, right? So if that’s, you’ve never been trained, taught on it. So, and it takes people like yourself, and to put that into perspective, I mean, there’s about 35,000 functional medicine doctors from what I understand. There’s about 450,000 primary care doctors in the, I was talking about the United States. 

And we’re saying that there’s six, including you. We’re blessed to have you here today. There’s six that actually get it, but that’s what it takes. It takes pioneering something, and having the arrows on your back of all the naysayers, because you’re doing something differently and that’s where it starts, right? Then eventually when the efficacy gets so high, it’s hard to deny this what’s anecdotal in nature, all of a sudden becomes sort of scaled and in volume and those anecdotes become big numbers of anecdotes and you can’t deny it that, and it takes again, the work of people like yourself. So, thank you for doing that work first of all, it’s a blessing that you and Dr. Liptan are doing this and I’m sure a lot of women are sort of relieved and once they meet you and get to experience it. 

One thing I should ask you, ’cause I heard this over and over and, there’s all these co-factors, all the stuff you’re working on, it sounds like to me that the longer you let it go, the more rapid the progression may be because there’s so many co-factor. And because the co-factor, aren’t straightforward, they’re all sort of inflammatory in nature. So estrogen toxicity, environmental health gut. So to all this stuff, right, that’s happening, and then they compound on each other and as you age there’s so much more of them. So is that what you’re seeing? And maybe that’s why the medication isn’t working. Because it can’t keep up with the root cause that inflammatory load.

Dr. Rodger Murphree

That’s a really good question, good observation. Yeah, I mean, it’s like anybody has a chronic illness, the longer it goes on, the hard it is to reverse that. And a big part of that is we’re just so toxic. I mean, we’re just incredibly toxic. Most of us don’t have a… And this is not step anybody’s toes or pointing anybody out, but I mean, most people don’t eat healthy. They don’t have no idea what… They’re eating margarine and I can’t believe it’s butter and things that… They never got the memo about trans fatty acids inflammation, increased risk of heart and stroke. So, they’re eating sugar that drives inflammation. They’ve got genetic disorders that they don’t even know about. That have already kinda set them behind, that’s their weak link. And, even though that they can get around that, if they change what they’re doing, but they’re in an environment that’s incredibly toxic. 

And yes, so to answer your question, I see that the longer the folks have fibromyalgia and are not taking steps to clean up their lifestyle and their diet and really to look for alternatives to prescription medications because the medications oftentimes create so many more problems that then we put underneath the banner of fibromyalgia. It’s not even the fibromyalgia, it’s the medications. And I’m not saying there’s not a time and a place there is, but there’s just so many potential side effects of the common drugs used for fibromyalgia. And many of those drugs, if you look at the potential side effects, they’re mirror of what we see of the symptoms of fibromyalgia. poor sleep, brain fog, anxiety, depression, irritable bowel, chronic pain. Pain medication, and I’m not anti pain medication. If you need pain med, you blow your disc man. Hook me up to a drip, whatever, get me some steroids and some pain meds. 

But what we do know the longer your own pain medication, the more likely are to create more pain. You build up a tolerance to the medication, but also the pain receptor sites become more pronounced. What’s crazy, you hear somebody in their 20s that are taking, they have a durogesic patch. Or taking fentanyl for pain with fibromyalgia. Where is this 20 year old gonna be when they’re 40? What’s gonna be left? They’re already giving them an endstage medication, something that you would use for cancer. And again, I understand we wanna be helpful. We wanna get people out of pain, but there’s so many other things that can be done if you just take the time to look for some other options and assure the patient that, we need to try some other things first.

Kashif Khan

Yeah, you remind me of something I heard, there is a clinician in Alberta, who he’s actually on the regulatory board that deals with the sort of it’s… I’m in Canada, so we have healthcare that’s government delivered, right? It’s a single payers per province. And the province of Alberta where Calgary Edmonton, has their own independent healthcare system. And so he’s on some of their regulatory boards, helping them with policy and that type of thing. And he said something to me, well, he’s actually a pain specialist. So he’s dealt with a lot of fibromyalgia. We had a discussion about our genetic insights and how we can find root cause. And then his clinical insights, which we didn’t have, ’cause he’s seen so many patients. And as we were talking, he had this light bulb go off. And he said, I just realized that pain the way he was seeing it, isn’t the disease. Pain is my body signaling me that I need to go on a discovery mission. 

That there’s something wrong. And if I treat the pain, which is what he had been doing, I haven’t even figured out yet. I haven’t even done step one of what’s the problem, right? Pain is my body, and when, fibromyalgia often gets bucketed into a chronic pain disease, right? There’s some people call it a hormone condition. Some people call it a mood and behavior condition. Some people call it a chronic pain condition. Depends which clinician you talk to and what they’re good at, right? So he’s a pain guy. So he saw fibromyalgia as a pain condition. And this is what he said, which everything you’ve been saying adds up to this, right? 

Is that, “The pain that I was treating “wasn’t even the disease. “The pain was the body screaming, “here’s the red flag go find the problem.” Right? So it sounds like, again, going back to all that stuff you said, that’s just where we need to start. That’s just the red light, the switch has been turned on. And then the work that you’ve been doing. So I guess, is it a bigger number of people that come to this as a pain condition? Like they’re coming to you with their pain meds? Or is it more like they’re coming with as a hormone condition, that I have a female hormone problem?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Probably more pain meds. Although, in the environment today, over the last four or five years of seeing less patients on pain medication, just the pullback from everything that happened with the abuse of pain medication, definitely a time and a place thank goodness we have them. But to be on those at an early age at, just to start out atomic bomb of pain medicine, rather than starting with non-line time inflammatory, and work your way up. Although most people do it that way, but yeah, you’re so right. So, this is the question is where’s the pain coming from? So we know with fibromyalgia, as I mentioned earlier, they have central sensitization pain syndrome where pain is magnified. 

There’s a disconnect between the nervous system and the hormonal system, that’s creating this what’s called allodynia. Which is low pain threshold. So for those of fibromyalgia, men and women, their pain threshold is much lower than it should be. And we know that they have more of a hormone called substance P that’s in their spinal canal. And as substance P hormone goes up, pain threshold goes down, pain goes up. Now what block substance P? Serotonin. So as we get that serotonin level to go up, we see that their pain threshold goes up. The beauty of that, this is something I learned early on, was that then it didn’t matter where that pain was coming from. So yeah, thinking like a detective, where’s the pain coming from? It could be coming from osteoarthritis, wear and tear arthritis, osteoporosis, bone loss, scar tissue, an autoimmune disease like rheumatoid or the beginnings of lupus, it’s not showing up in blood work. It really doesn’t matter where that pain is coming from if we can raise that pain threshold, then we’ll see that pain no matter where it’s coming from, goes down. And that’s the key for me, that’s in my protocols. That’s really what it’s all about.

Kashif Khan

That is awesome. ‘Cause we’re not talking about, it’s not a cancer we need to get it out of your body, right? It’s not a cholesterol buildup where it’s gonna cause your heart to stop ticking. It’s an inflammatory issue leading to pain. So really the pain is what you don’t want. And it’s a unique condition where if you get rid of the pain, you’re okay. Still having this thing, right? Again, based on all of what you said and sort of what drives this and why you get there, are you seeing a trend where the sort of onset age is getting earlier? I’m just thinking, because of all the environmental factors and everything that’s going on, if this is the root, I’m just figuring the new reality getting worse and worse. I’m figuring that younger women may getting this earlier.

Dr. Rodger Murphree

That’s a great, great question. And first thought would be, yes. And I have patients that are 12 years old to 81 years old, so it is a whole gamut. I think there was a time there where you were seeing more adolescents and young adults getting the diagnosis than you are now. And partly because fibromyalgia really is a diagnosis of elimination. So we have to eliminate any kind of autoimmune disease that’s out there first. Whether that’s rheumatoid, lupus, MS, whatever, that can have some symptoms like fibromyalgia. But once all that’s ruled out, what are you left with? Not much. They put the rubber stamp on your forehead that says fibromyalgia. What I tell my patients is I don’t treat the diagnosis, I treat the person. 

It really doesn’t matter. What I wanna know is what’s driving the symptoms. But I would say, that, yes. I mean, there’s a lot more younger patients that seem to have fibromyalgia that oftentimes run in families. That I didn’t see even 10 years ago, it seems like, oh, well, my mom’s got it, My grand mom is got it, even my daughter. I mean, you can just see it, the generations of these people that have this condition. Which points to this genetic connection.

Kashif Khan

So that, to me, anyone listening should be paying really close attention to what you just said. ‘Cause what we’re saying is, you may be genetically predisposed to something, but why is it that we tell you, you got a 80% chance of fibromyalgia based on your genetics, not a 100%. Because you have to make the wrong epigenetic choices for it to get to that level of threshold where it causes you a problem. And this is why you’re seeing women younger and younger, probably even men, stepping up to the plate a little earlier saying there’s something wrong. The women haven’t changed, the genes haven’t changed, what you passed on hasn’t changed, it’s what they’re exposed to and the choices that they have to make it’s what that’s, what’s changed. 

So major major thing that sticks out is all of what we’ve talked about in all these various talks and conversations comes back to your cellular health, right? What problem you’re gonna get? We can dive clinically into why this problem versus another problem. But just the fact that you’re saying that, younger and what younger women are seeing it. Yeah, you got the stack of cards or deck cards that your mom had and your grandma had. The reason it happened to you earlier ’cause there’s so much more you gotta fight, right? So understand that’s the problem. So I’m working with somebody like you that can identify what are those things that you may be not aware of or need some coaching on. Do that as opposed to asking what pill you need to take. Because that pill isn’t a solution. The pill is a mass to the pain point that you’re complaining about as we said. Why it happened, you haven’t even got to that yet.

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Right.

Kashif Khan

Right. So, yeah it’s a blessing that the six of you exist, out there doing good work, and I’m sure that will spill into a lot more as the knowledge expands itself. So, top three things, if somebody feels like this is them, I know you said sleep is one like, what’s the quick and dirty sort of easy stuff you should be doing right away? You said sleep. What are the other two things you think people should do?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Four. So, Kashif four things. This is called the based on the Murphree method. Not very original name. But it’s finding and fixing the underlying causes of fibromyalgia, and there’s some key causes. And then once you address those, then it can be anything. It’s kinda like a puzzle. You have a thousand piece puzzle, you throw it out on the ground, where do you start? Well we know if you’ve ever been a puzzle person, you get the corners right. Once you get the corners, it starts to come together. But if you don’t get those corners together, you could be sifting through this forever, for days. So top is to fill up that stress coping savings account with deep restorative sleep and then making sure that you’re getting serotonin supplementing with 5-hydroxytryptophan, and then a multivitamin that’s got the key synergistic ingredients in there. Meta B vitamins appropriate P5P, so Pyridoxal 5-phosphate, methylcobalamin, I’m leaving one out, what did I lived out? Folic acid, right? Folic acid. And then along with that magnesium. 

And then there’s also other things that help to build that synergistic cohesion there. But 5-HTP with these synergistic supplements. And then second thing is adrenal fatigue. So I talked about earlier about there’s a disruption in the hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenals. So not only have they bankrupted their stress coping savings account, they’ve bankrupted their stress coping gland, the adrenal gland from releasing hormones like cortisol DHEA that they need. So that needs to be repaired because if you don’t do that, they had these things called fibro flares. Because stress has become more magnified little things that you and I would never think anything about bright lights, loud noises, crossword puzzle, even thinking about going and meeting friends for dinner. I mean these little stressors that you and I, for them, it could just send them into a flare where they’re bedridden for days. We have to build up that stamina and resilience distress by fixing the adrenals. 

And then last, certainly not least, the nutrients that they’re eating. As I mentioned earlier, 70% fibromyalgia have irritable bowel syndrome bloating . The first step in correcting that is just taking an over the counter digestive enzyme. You start there ’cause yeah, you are what you eat, but just as important you are what you absorb. You can be eating a healthy diet, but if you have malabsorption syndrome or irritable bowel, these things that are going on, you’re not gonna reap the benefit of that healthy food. So there’s really four things. There’s the deep restore the sleep, saturating your cells with high doses, but the right doses of vitamins, minerals and amino acids and the essential fatty acids, the building blocks that allow the body to work like it’s supposed to. And this is sometimes a thousand times stronger than the RDA. 

Which the RDA, the recommended dietary allowance, which is about 80 years outta date, I call it recommended disease allowance, right? ‘Cause it’s just enough to keep you from getting scurvy or beriberi. But instead of 1.5 milligrams of B6, I mean, you’re gonna need easily 50 milligrams to make a difference to saturate those cells. So the sleep and the serotonin and the saturating cells with the vitamins and minerals, fixing the adrenal glands and then last fixing these GI issues, starting with digestion to make sure you’re not developing further problems like SIBO, yeast overgrowth and leaky gut and food allergies and all these things that can create inflammation and trigger pain.

Kashif Khan

I’ve talked to a lot of people about fibromyalgia and there’s been a lot of interesting information, but I don’t think anyone has nailed it like your Murphree method. You gotta trademark that pretty soon, right? It’s awesome. It’s actually true, if I look at all the pieces and of the puzzle, like you said, that I’ve been hearing from different people, you just package it up into really the key components of what people need to do. So, before we go, if anybody wants to work with you, do you work with patients or is it coaching or how do you do that?

Dr. Rodger Murphree

So my practice like a lot of people now, of course my practice has been this way, telemedicine for probably the last decade. This is something that just kind of grew out organically going around lecturing throughout North America and overseas and my books people would contact me. But, so I work with patients all over the world by telemedicine or Zoom consults. There’s quite a bit of free information on my website, yourfibrodoctor.com, all sorts of free videos and blogs. If any that’s resonated with you, if you wanna know do you have fibromyalgia or if you do have fibromyalgia you wanna know information, there’s quite a bit of free information or resources at that website.

Kashif Khan

That’s awesome. Thank you for the work you’re doing people like yourself, Dr. Liptan being the pioneers, right? ‘Cause we need that. It’s something that’s so misunderstood and this is why people deal with it for so long, ’cause nobody’s telling them what to do. And the fact that you’ve been reversing it over and over and over and over again, I believe that eventually that will become standard of practice, people just need the exposure. So thank you again and thank you for joining us.

Dr. Rodger Murphree

Thank you so This is great, thank you.

Kashif Khan

Awesome.