The Fibromyalgia Puzzle, Putting The Pieces Together

Introduction to Fibromyalgia as a Puzzle 0:00

Hi. Welcome to the freedom from Fibromyalgia seminar. I'm doctor Roger Murphy, your host. Thanks for joining us today. Your fibromyalgia is really kind of like a puzzle, right? I mean, there's so many different parts to this, this thing called fibromyalgia, this fibromyalgia syndrome. There's so many different symptoms. Where do you start? What do you do? And it's really like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle back together. And what I found over the years are some some key pieces that if you get those right, it starts to pull the puzzle together.

And if you, you know, if you're if you're a puzzle enthusiast, you know that putting a jigsaw puzzle, one of the, to successfully put the jigsaw puzzle together, one of the key things is, is to find the corner pieces right? Once you find the corners, then you can start to, put this thing together. But if you're just putting pieces all over, you know, you can get lost in the shuffle, right? You can't really put this thing together. Don't really know where the end is and the ending or the beginning.

Right. I find that the four key things for laying the foundation to get over fibromyalgia, the four key things that start to reverse the symptom is correct them wrong causes, the fibromyalgia or deep restorative sleep, replenishing your stress coping chemicals,

Four Foundations for Recovery 1:29

in particular serotonin or any hormone deficiencies. Any vitamin, mineral, amino acids, essential fatty acid deficiencies that are creating the symptoms that are, creating the deficiencies that then create the symptoms of fibromyalgia, correcting adrenal fatigue. So you're not normal to fibro flares. That's super important. And then the last one, which we talk several people talk about, especially Doctor John Dempster, is all about GI health. If you're not correct, your gut and any kind of GI gastrointestinal problems, you're going to find it's going to be really hard to get healthy like you'd want to be, to be able to overcome your symptoms of fibromyalgia and that can mean that you have, problems with malabsorption or reflux or heartburn or irritable bowel syndrome or leaky gut, whatever it is, if you're not digesting and not absorbing and utilizing the nutrients that you're eating, you're really gonna have a hard time getting healthy.

Or if you're eating foods that are generating inflammatory reactions or you have leaky gut that's creating inflammatory allergic reactions that can attack any tissue in the body that can be contributing to your low pain threshold and your pain, as well as brain fog, low mood. Heard about other symptoms we see in fibromyalgia? It's going to be really hard to get this puzzle together, but once you get these four corners, together now you can start putting the puzzle together. Then it's really about paying attention to your symptoms.

So when I'm when I'm doing a consult with a patient and I'm looking through their new patient questionnaire, I'm looking for clues about where they're broken down. I'm looking to see if they have funny reactions to medications, or they have elevated liver enzymes and or have had elevated liver enzymes in the past in their blood work,

Using Symptoms as Clues 3:25

or are strong odors, strong smells, chemicals give them problems. I'm thinking they may have a sluggish liver. If they have a sluggish liver, then that's causing them probably to accumulate toxins that can be driving a lot of a lot of the triggers that we see in fibromyalgia. If I hear that, are read in their questionnaire, I hear this in the interview that I'm doing with them that they every time they eat, a food that they feel drowsy, you know, after lunch or that they have had problems with losing the lateral third of their eyebrows or their hair's thinning out, or they have brittle nails.

So I'm hearing some of these things. I instantly think, oh, they probably have low thyroid. It's a matter of picking up on these clues. Sometimes they're very subtle. One of the patients I recently had was a patient that had been doing really, really well. She was working with me in a program, a six month program where, take them and do testing and interpret that test, put them on a specific protocol for their specific diet. Is something that program helped them to slowly wean off any potential, medications that are giving them potential side effects, or medications that are helping them.

But she was doing really well. And then I get a call from her that says that she is back to square one. Now, I've got to really start doing my detective work and figure out what was going on with Joanne. And what I found out was, we had treated her for, various things. We'd gotten her sleeping. She was doing so much better. She had slept well in 6 or 7 years using natural supplements. Five steps of melatonin, a product called Delta Sleep, which allowed her to be able to get back to sleep. She was finally sleeping. For the first time in years.

She'd been able to come off her prescription sleep aids and didn't miss those one bit. That felt much better off of those. We had had gotten her on the right supplements. Her adrenal glands, her stress coping glands were working better. She was able to handle stress.

Joanneu2019s Progress and Mold Trigger 5:39

Had more stamina, resiliency. She could do more. She was back to work. She had worked in three years. It was part time work. It wasn't real stressful, but she was able to go back to her church and start doing some some work, which she thoroughly loved. And, we had we had shored up any nutritional deficiencies. She had deficiencies in magnesium. Because of that, she was getting restless leg syndrome. She was constipated. And magnesium is in 300 bodily processes. One of the things that it does is a natural muscle relaxer.

So it helps to relax tight, achy foreign muscles, but also relaxes tight colons. So when you're constipated, that's oftentimes a sign that you're deficient in magnesium. A stress coping mineral that anytime you get under stress, your body's releasing magnesium. So the puzzle was coming together. And one of the things that I found in testing is that years ago, and she'd shared this with me in the interview that years ago she had been exposed to a water damaged, moldy building that she was working in, and any time she was at work, she really felt like her symptoms were really worse than when they were home and gender religion.

And that didn't really add up until I started quizzing her about it. But sure enough, what we found in testing is that she did have some oral toxins that showed up, and a Michael tox test. We're very clear that out. She was doing well, no problem. And then she ended up traveling overseas to visit some relatives over there. And she ended up staying in a, a basement apartment, you know, like a, below ground apartment. Very nice, she said, but but she could see in the back closet of this facility, there had been a lot of water damage.

It had been cleaned up, but she could see mold back there. And she was there for a week. And she came back to the States. Came back? And she had flared. She had had all these symptoms start to show up. She didn't really put it together that it was the mold. She just, you know, we've done so many things together and found so many things in other testing that she had sheets of heavy metal toxicity issues. We cleaned up. So she really didn't put that together. But like I do an initial consult that hour I spent on a zoom call, I spent the same amount of time with her on this follow up call, trying to figure out what did change, what had happened.

You know, anytime I hear my patients say that, they'd had a flare, they were doing well. And then something happened. I'm always thinking, what changed? What is new that caused them to have this reaction? Is there anything that they've added to their supplements or their drugs? Anything they've taken away, anything they can, changes they've made to their diet? Are they under more stress? How's their sleep? So I'm looking for different clues to help figure out what is it that triggered this flare?

Got to talking to her. Talk to her about her vacation, that going over to Europe, about being overseas, about staying and, you know, and once I started hearing that she had traveled, she was in new environment. I wanted to know if she'd gotten under any kind of stress, or she'd maybe had any kind of food poisoning. Had she gotten a parasite? Had she? You know, something had obviously happened. And then it just like a light bulb went on in her brain. It wasn't me. I was just quizzing her and asking.

She said, Doctor Murphy, do you think that the model that I saw in this, the the Renault Renault that I was staying at, do you think this little bit of mold

Detective Work, Testing, and Avoiding Flares 9:19

could have trigger, fibro flare that I've been in for the last 2 or 3 weeks? I said absolutely. So so, you know, getting under stress causes the body to go into survival mode. The cell danger theory that you've heard about, some of the speaker share with you or if you have it, make sure you listen to some of those, watch some of those interviews. But that's what had happened. She got in this environment, her body reacted to this mold, thought it was in danger and started to shut down. Now you combine that with the fact that she was traveling overseas, which is pretty stressful with or without fibromyalgia, had come back after, through, I think three weeks of another three weeks of, you know, very demanding trip and, you know, really busy seeing relatives, going out, sightseeing, all these kind of things.

So it was no wonder that she was run down when she came back. But she wasn't getting over it, retested her. And sure enough, she was one of the the canary in the coal mine that just can't handle any mold toxins. She was now had mold toxicity issues again. Put her back on the supplements. The protocols. And I'm trained in binders and, liposomal glutathione as well. Already some of the other things to help get that mold out of her help to just kind of tone down this overreaction. That was she she was having with some, some calming supplements.

And within three weeks, she was already better. Now she was out of that environment. That was a big part of it. Her, exposure wasn't that limiting. So it wasn't that bad, but it was enough to set her off. And I'll share this with you because you really want someone that's working with you, that is looking for clues, and you want to look for clues. Any time you have a flare, you want to think back. What was it that changed? I get under more stress and I'm not take a certain medication I'm taking or a supplements that I was taking that you may not even know they were being helpful.

Did you change your diet? Did you get in an environment that could have been toxic? What was it? Start kind of thinking about that so you can figure out how to either avoid it or correct it in the future. And that's a big part of my practice, is really being a detective to kind of figure out what it is that's driving these symptoms and looking for clues and then exploring this clues, typically with testing to see where the person's broken down and then to be able to fix that mold, as you're learning here on the summit, is one of the triggers we're seeing across the board in fibromyalgia.

I didn't see mold as a trigger very often. I'm tested for it for a number of years, talked about it for a number of years, but only until the last 3 or 4 years have I really started seeing that mold is one of the drivers for many of the symptoms or the driver that kind of pushes people over their over the edge, kind of like the straw that breaks the camel's back. Don't neglect doing your detective work. You might want to keep a journal. And when you have a flare, you can go back and see. What were you doing 2 or 3 days earlier?

Even better, reach out to a practitioner. Can get you tested to figure out where you're broken down, why you're having the symptoms. It's it's, it's an investment. You know, you know, oftentimes the testing is out of pocket, but it's so worth it to not miss out on life, because learning to live in chronic pain and with fatigue and not being able to do things with family and friends, that being able

Closing Advice and Summit Takeaways 13:01

to enjoy your hobbies or being able to work or travel, whatever it is, because you're learning to live with all this pain and fatigue and poor sleep and low moods and irritable bowel. Again, that's not that's not living, that's existing. It's better to invest in yourself, find out where you're broken down and fix the underlying causes. So just like Joanne, it could be anything. So you got to have your thinking cap on. And if you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, reach out to a practitioner and let he or she help you navigate this complicated illness called fibromyalgia.

I know you're going to enjoy these presentations today. I think I say this every day, but there's some good ones own here. There's some good ones every day. But there really are some really good ones here today. And I want you to if you can, try to listen to all of them, watch all of the presentations that you can today, consider, owning the series because, there's so there's so much material, it starts to just run, you know, it's like, what's the hose? Just open up the hose and you're just you just can't take it all in.

Right? So consider if this resonates. If you found this helpful, consider purchasing this summit. So you have it to look at and review over and over again. To read the transcripts, take notes to highlight the things that you need to work on or make sense to you. And use this, use this opportunity, this wealth of information to help you finally get back on track to get your life back. I think with fibromyalgia, often times you, you kind of get off on a, you know, a path and it's the wrong path. You don't have a compass, you don't know where you're going, you're trying to get well, but you really don't know how to do it.

So you just going off haphazardly trying this, trying that little of this, little of that, and it doesn't get you where you want to get to. And I and I applaud being proactive, but a better way is to take what has proven to work, focus in on that, and start to apply those things and then go to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So, but anyway, I want to encourage you to watch as many of these presentations that we've been on here today and look forward to sharing some more information with you over the next couple of days.