Uncover the Power Of Personal Health Coaching

Valerie Sharlin

Well, thank you, Dr. Sharlin. It is a pleasure to be here.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Valerie, can you tell the audience about your background? You have many years of experience, which builds your knowledge base and your understanding of how these chronic diseases affect people, how you work with them, and how you came to be who you are today.

Valerie Sharlin

I know when you say to a woman that you have decades of experience, that is not necessarily positive.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Well, I will probably be in trouble later tonight. But we can focus on now because you have worked for many years with a large healthcare system and sharpened your sword in terms of getting on the ball with the concerns that affect people as they age.

Valerie Sharlin

One of the things I appreciate most about myself is that I came from a farming family, and we had Alzheimer’s in our family genetically, although we did not ever view it as something wrong. It was a disease. It was a natural part of our lives that we always just looked after. Aunt Marilyn, and her grandma Ellen It was just a natural part of our lives that people were involved, and we looked after them. They were part of the family. That gives me a unique perspective. I am comfortable. I also knew, probably in kindergarten, what I was going to do with my life’s work. By choice, I have chosen to work with people with neurological illnesses and their families and support them. It is very easy for me to be in those hard conversations with people in those painful places, be empathetic, and be able to sit with them through that. That just takes lots and lots and lots of practice with people.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Well, I happen to know that another part of your experience that you brought to our clinic when you took on the role of health coach is many years of working with older adults in a relationship program in which you promoted lifestyle, whether that was bicycling. That is ultimately what took us into triathlons, whether it was travel or whether that was putting on large dances once or twice a year in grand ballrooms where people were moving and eating and dancing the night away, which is a whole other story that we can chuckle about. But these are important because, in a sense, our lives paralleled this idea that lifestyle was critical to health connection. They are something that you have always promoted that is critical to health, and we were doing all that before we framed this out as functional medicine.

Valerie Sharlin

One of the statistics that has always been foremost in my mind is loneliness. With 8 billion people on the planet, loneliness is one of the foremost issues, and it is even exacerbated when people come down with a chronic illness. They become more lonely, disengage from their church communities, their friends, and their families, and get very centered on themselves with that disease. What I work with people on is that disease is just a thing that you manage and handle. You have a life. You have people. You have a family. Let us live life.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Let us live life. We learn to put the disease in a certain place and not necessarily be defined by it, even though we recognize it. Yes, that is part of who I am. It is part of who I am. But it does not take over my entire existence.

Valerie Sharlin

It has just been working for the past hour with this woman, with Parkinson’s, with her exercise program, and with her stress management. She has it; it takes my whole day. I do not have any time left. Because I have to work with my Parkinson’s, I am, well, every woman in the world has to find a way to take care of themselves, move their body, eat nutritiously, live creatively, and manage their emotions. That is just a natural part of living. They will eventually become sick because they are not taking care of themselves. But you are not doing anything just because you are sick. This is what we do in life. Just that reframing helps people think, Yes, okay, this is not life.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Let us kind of bring this into full focus. Can you just clarify exactly what a functional medicine health coach is?

Valerie Sharlin

One of my pet peeves is the word root cause. That is what I love about functional medicine. There is no root cause. There is no, one magic thing that happened to you that made you sick. It is the culmination of your genetic history. What happened before you were born? What happened when your mother was pregnant? How were you delivered? If you nursed, did you follow in your head when you were a kid? Were you bullied in school? Did you struggle? Did you thrive? All of that is a culmination that brings you to where you are today. Maybe there is a trigger—you went through something that caused you to go out of homeostasis. But that is where we are always trying to get our homeostasis back in balance.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Finding balance in life is a huge part of dealing with this chronic disease.

Valerie Sharlin

Early in life. Even just in breath, I always recommend my clients read a book called Seven and A Half Lessons on the Brain, which talks a lot about homeostasis, and she uses the example of the body budget. You think about your body as a checking account, and if you keep making withdrawals and withdrawals and withdrawals, you do not eat. You work too much, you are not creative, you are not getting enough sleep, you do not drink water, and you have caustic relationships. Those are constant withdrawals from your checking account of your body. By the time they come to see us, that is it. I am an accountant looking at this overdrawn account, and then we start helping people. Let us identify what the deposits are and start putting them back in nearby. First of all, let us learn to breathe. Every inhale that you take goes to the sympathetic side of your nervous system. Every exhale initiates the vagal nerve and oxytocin. Just breathing can bring you back into homeostasis. That is why, when you are stressed or cannot remember something, take five deep breaths, and then the brain will reengage. It is so simple. Drink water.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Drink water in the Brain Tune-Out program that we have in the office. Patients co-owned one of these round robins where they come in and spend a couple of hours with me. We are going to go through their medical history, their tests, their physical exam, and their functional medicine timeline. They will have lab tests done, but then they are going to see you, and they are going to spend an hour initially with you because of their subsequent visits. But can you kind of take me through that? How do you coach patients with a chronic neurological disease? Can you kind of take it from the beginning? If I came to see, what does that look like?

Valerie Sharlin

I think one of the most important parts is the time that they spend with you. Because you said and you will listen to the patient’s narrative, you will see them and you will hear them, and you will let them completely share with you that narrative in their story, in their heads, because they have had experiences now of happy medicine where they were not heard, they were not seen, people are rude to them, or they will just say, You have Parkinson’s and there is not much we can do, get ready for disability. That becomes the story in their head, and their brain is going to take that data, that new story, and then just start creating the story that they are not comfortable with. Then that story leads to all these emotions that just start draining their energy capacity and their battery. I always just read your notes and their story and then allow them to share that story, making sure that they feel seen. Then I hear what they are saying, and nothing can happen before that happens.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Okay. That is step one, right?

Valerie Sharlin

Almost 100% of the time you put in your notes that there is a limbic system stress response. 100% of the time, I will ask what the major complaint is. It is that I have no energy. I want to be back to normal. Then I have my toolbox,  you have your toolbox. Nutrition has its fitness. My toolbox does a lot of great work helping people manage their emotions, their thoughts, get control of the way that they view the word stress, and identify how much of the time they are spending in these low emotional states of, well, they might be angry that they have the disease. There might be shame in associating with it. Sadness and grief. This is not what I signed up for, right?

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Right.

Valerie Sharlin

When you live with those emotions, you are not even willing to name them or talk about them. It just drains your capacity and your battery. Just experiencing those emotions. As Midwesterners, we see a lot of Midwesterners; we are only taught three emotions: glad, mad, and sad. We are always told, from the very beginning, to suck it up. No,  Arizonans begin six months. Now, it is time to move on. We never gave ourselves the chance to process these emotions so that we could move on to the more positive side. One of the tools I use is a very scientifically researched product called Heart App. This is biofeedback where I can see their stress response, and now they can see their stress response by using their smartphone. It is a matter of teaching people to breathe in, go into homeostasis, balance, and emotion with these more positive emotions of gratitude, peace, and love, and just a higher vibrational positive emotion. The more that you practice breathing and practice bringing that emotion off, the more you practice playing piano scales. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Then it starts becoming subconscious. Then you start creating wiring from neurons and dendrites, and it is so much easier for you to get over this positive state. Now they use heart rate variability as the science. 

The heart is an electric motor that produces an energy field around your body. Nobody would deny that you can see this energy on spectrograms. They are using EKGs to monitor the way that the heart beats and the timing. Every single heartbeat has a different timing. This is never the same because we respond to your movement, your emotions, or your language. Our heart is the emotional center that is always responding. What they noticed on the EKG is that if you are living in these lower states of emotions, even if you are not naming them, you get this very erratic, incoherent pattern on the EKG. that shows up in red or blue when you start reading your bill to invoke these emotions. You start raising your battery levels, and you all go into the green, and you get this very beautiful, loopy, cohesive pattern. Then just teaching people to bring themselves to that place. When your heart sends a message up to your brain with those blue, green, or negative signals, it goes straight up to the amygdala. The amygdala says we are going to die. We start pumping cortisol out, shutting down the vagal, our gut, and all the vital organs so that we can run and save our lives. People just spin. They are in that cycle with that cortisol going merely because they are experiencing these emotions; they might not be aware. By practicing coming to the more positive side, you can teach yourself and walk to the place where you have more energy capacity. They had the biofeedback. It is an actual teaching method.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

You find that, because you mentioned and certainly I see this as a clinician as well, one of the most common complaints we see in chronic neurological diseases, whether it is Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or MS, is fatigue or lack of energy. We begin to address that deep within that energy you describe very holistically, but it certainly manifests in different ways. It manifests as electrical fields and so on, and thoughts that the energy levels improve.

Valerie Sharlin

To call it resilience. If your cell phone is not plugged in and has a lot of apps open, it is just spinning and running. The battery gets low. You can go out in 100-degree heat and have a flat tire. It is an emergency. If you cannot get somebody on your phone, you die. But if you shut down those apps and plug them in and it has full battery capacity, then it is not a big deal. You can get help. That is a high resilience factor. We try to get people to have that energy capacity and that resilience so they can respond to regular life. That is the way I kind of knew people when they came in. They are just dead batteries; they are checking accounts overdrawn. Let us start putting the energy back into the deposits. It is not one-and-done. You do not come in and take a pill; you are fixed, and you can go back and live life just the way you had it. Every single day. It is learning to take care of yourself, put those deposits in, and bring yourself into homeostasis, and then being able to learn how your body feels when you are in that homeostasis place, and you have that energy that you wake up in the morning with zest and that you are excited about the day because it is an adventure. That is helpful. I also use some positive psychology that Dr. Martin Seligman developed. He has his 20-strength assessment, which has been used millions of times. It is a very strong science, but people will have strengths that they use. it is you and I. My top strength is spirituality, gratitude, and all those airy, fairy-tale emotional things. Your strength is honesty. You cannot tell a lie. You are straight and honest. 

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Well, my nose would grow a lot,

Valerie Sharlin

But that is. I know where you live on those strengths. I help people identify what their strengths are and their lesser strengths, which is not necessarily a weakness. I just have not lifted that weight for a while. One of the things I immediately identify with many people is that leadership is low, and when people come into health care, they view the doctor and the health care people as the authority, and they just become very submissive and do what they are told. Functional medicine, they are paying me. I work for them. You, Dr. Sharlin, work for them. just explaining that we have tools that you are paying us to share with you, but you are the leader of the team. If you do not choose to use those tools, nothing happens.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

As the patient.

Valerie Sharlin

That is an a-ha moment for them.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Well, I would even say that because this is a discussion, we have a lot to say that the only thing that conventional medicine asks you to do is sort of take the pill, as you said. That is very disempowering, or the alternative is that there is sort of this ego barrier and you go home and you Google it or whatever, and then you do not do it? It is either all in or I am all out. Then, in my situation as the doctor, I will see you back for a three-month follow-up or a six-month follow-up. I am interested in what was accomplished. Now, by the way, we see people more often in functional medicine. I am talking about a conventional neurology visit.  But my point is, six months pass, and I see the patient, and they are, well, I took that for two weeks and decided I did not do it. Here we are six months later, and nothing has been accomplished. Not that everything gets accomplished with a drug. But my point is that we are talking about a completely different type of medicine where health care is patient-centered; the patient is not only engaged in the process, but they are also in the driver’s seat, and they are the creators, aren’t they, of their process, in their journey? It would be almost counterintuitive for them to go home and just abandon it because it was their idea, to begin with.

Valerie Sharlin

I think, one of your gifts is that you are an amazing explainer. You thoroughly understand what is going on, and you have an amazing way of explaining the processes and the choices. People spend hours on the Internet getting information that may not be true, which is negative. With all of the staff here, we can explain exactly what is going on, to the point that when we talk about it so much here, we think everybody knows it. But we have to kind of go back to the beginning and ask the patient, How is it that you understand this? Then I will help them understand what robust health looks like and how to get there when it is not one and done that your emotional state is every bit as important as the food that you take or the movement that you do. 

Dopamine for Parkinson’s is the very neurotransmitter that causes you to want to do things. It gives you that desire. That lack of energy, those low dopamine stages, feel they do not have the desire to move or do anything. That is very scary to them, very frustrating, and Dopamine, if you had a bathtub full of Dopamine, you would have these low negative emotions, and all this stress is acid eating into that bathtub, further draining the precious Dopamine that you have. Being able to manage those emotions and be in a more positive state protects the Dopamine that you have.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Without naming names or giving such details, that would violate someone’s personal health privacy. Do you want to just share some recent conversations or encounters you have had with some of your patients or clients in the sense of what you saw? What did you observe? I met so-and-so, and the first thing I noticed was this, and what we did was this. what? What has been the outcome that you have seen?

Valerie Sharlin

I have them; we will see them in functional medicine, and then they will come and do packages for me just to coach you. One of the topics is: Do I want this purpose in life? I find myself with this client’s disease, and yet I still want to be a functioning person, have a purpose, and give back to society. Several clients are doing that now with Parkinson’s, and I do not try to take them out of the big picture. I start with the basic building blocks and go. Tell me what you want to do in a day. What time do you get up? What are your meditation practices? What are your movement practices? Until we own it down to the actual hours that they are willing to give up. Then what brings them joy in those hours? 

Maybe they just want to feel well enough to be with their grandchildren, or maybe they want to travel, or maybe they want to start a business, or maybe they want to volunteer somewhere. We work it to the very detailed point of how are we going to accomplish that. What is it you want, what hours are you willing to give to it, and refocus this whole mindset of illness? I am an amazing human being, and I have things to share, and this is how I am going to do it. I can take care of myself. I can manage this in a day, and I have time to give back. That is a big shift in people who do not want to spend their whole day thinking about themselves.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

I remember a patient that we worked with very early on together. She does not have Parkinson’s. She had a family history of Lou Gehrig’s disease and was very worried about getting Lou Gehrig’s disease. She just came to us to say, What can I do to maximize my odds of remaining healthy and not succumbing to this disorder? Your role in her life was to make a very major shift from a professional career perspective, wasn’t it?

Valerie Sharlin

I have gotten over the years more and more comfortable with walking through the experience with someone with ALS, just as Parkinson’s has devastated ALS and a horrible story in a horrible story. The shift there is that you have developed this story that health care told you of this horrible thing that is going to happen, but yet you are sitting with me here, alive, breathing, and healthy now. Why do we not just live now? Do you have any guarantees about what is going on? Why are you living in that story, wasting all your energy? You are just eating up all your energy. With this fear of this story, let us be here now. How can you be with someone you can talk to? What relationships can you develop? 

I have been on a lot of end-of-life deathbeds, and no one’s ever said to me, I wish I would have worked more. They always say I wish I would have had a better relationship with my daughter, or I wish I would have been in love. I wish I would have been able to give back. That is what is valuable to people. How can people articulate that and put that into motion so that they are fulfilled in their lives, and then maybe that is even helping them develop community? Many people have a wonderful church community, but I cannot tell you how many times I will ask somebody, Who is your best friend? Do you have a best friend? No. Your best friend? No.  Community? They are just doing this experience on their own. Helping people make those connections, developing a community, and even having your best friend is life-changing.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Thinking about a fairly recent patient of ours, a husband and wife. They have a business that they co-own. They developed. They are not from the United States. We have people who come from all over the world to see us. She played a very active role in this business. Her Parkinson’s started to limit her. This is something they feel very passionate about. It is a good, earth-friendly business. I am just wondering how you have worked with her to sort of navigate her disease. But at the same time, she remains involved in a business she feels very passionate about.

Valerie Sharlin

We look at the parts of the business that she finds joy in, and I just have people write down on a piece of paper the kind of assistance that I have to do, and this is the stuff I have to do. This is the stuff I can delegate, and I could let this go, just articulating all the pieces and then finding a way to delegate those pieces to someone else, or maybe she is just wasting time on some of it and just focusing in on what is important to her and brings her joy, and how many hours of the day does she need to spend on it? It is honing in on what is important to you. I just set people down with a paper calendar or their electronic calendar, and I go, Let us go. In all of this self-care first, the stuff that gives you joy. Do you meditate in the morning? Let us put that in there. You are to go to the nature center and walk, that gets scheduled. I want to have a conversation with a friend; I can fill that in or spend time with my daughter, and then you go in and see what is left. Then you schedule other things to do. 

But the priority is that I have to nourish myself. I have to put money in my body budget and take care of myself first before I can give anything else away. Just breaking it down and showing people we give them an exercise program, and they are. I never have time to do this. Well, then we talk about habit stacking, so you do not have to just take an hour and go exercise. Maybe we can stack these with things that you are already doing in your house. We joke about the bills for the dog food, If you are going to feed the dog, I will pick the kettlebells up, do a farmer’s carry through the house, and send it back down with a deal. You got it done because you were already doing something else. Setting up your environment, where you stack it with other things that you are already doing, does not become such a huge task. It becomes organic and natural. The biggest part of coaching, I think, is just listening to people being very curious and asking questions. They will sort of figure it out. They already have the answers. We do not have the magic answers. They do. But helping them clarify and articulate what those answers are is sometimes very difficult for people.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

What are you sensing as outcomes as a result of all this Energy? 

Valerie Sharlin

I would say energy is what they are after. I think symptom management helps them learn how to manage their symptoms. Sometimes they take medication, and sometimes they can have less medication. But finding ways to manage those symptoms, with Parkinson’s, just means helping people understand that bicycling is so important for them. That is a good way to get their heart rate up. Aerobic exercise is very good for the brain and brain plasticity. They can be on that bike when they get off. All of a sudden, they are walking steadily. It is quite magic.  

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Right.

Valerie Sharlin

Finding those ways to help you feel safe in your environment is critical. The outcome, I think, is mostly engaging with the world and having the energy to do it.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Feeling more connected to foundational lifestyle factors of sleep, nutrition, movement, and stress resilience I would call it stress, resilience, and connection. Through coaching, we may get some help navigating the first three, but the real strength of that coaching, where it shines through, is in developing stress resilience. That connection may be navigating the narrative in such a way that as the shift happens, I was going along and then I was not expecting this thing that is Parkinson’s, and maybe that is suddenly hitting a wall saying, Whoa, this is changing where I thought things were going, where I planned for things going. You just hit that wall, and how do you move forward? Through coaching, we can work through that and shine a light, help that patient shine a light, and show them that there is life for them beyond that diagnosis.

Valerie Sharlin

We have a lot of tools and positive psychology. One of them is just reframing the word stress because there is an amazing research study with 3000 people where they asked them how they viewed stress. People viewed it as very dangerous because it was going to break down their bodies. It was to be avoided. The other half of the group said, Well, I have a purpose in my life. That stress sort of motivates me forward. I see it as a positive thing. At the end of 20 years, when they went back and looked at it, who was thriving? It was just the way they looked at the world. Helping people reframe what they are experiencing helps a lot. 

Going back into those stories can change. It is just a story in your head—your memories and stories. If you have ever had brothers and sisters and you talk about a memory, everybody has a completely different view of that memory or seeing a car accident. There are five different opinions, so reframe what happened so that your emotional response is not so triggered. You can also look forward to your story by projecting those positive emotions: that you are going to have robust health and energy, interaction with people, and purpose in your life. When you have those positive emotions about the future, then that is what the brain locks on to and says, Okay, we will do that. But imagine if you just lived with this fear. The brain gets a hold of that, and it will give you that. helping people understand how important you are. Bernie Brown has a book called The Atlas of Emotions. She says people think that we are very intellectual. We just think through things, and we just push. We do not have any emotions. Be patient. Dan, she is; in fact, we are 100% emotional beings, and we have rational thoughts. Every once in a while. This helps people use these emotions because all actions that we take in life are the result of an emotion. We have the passion to go forward, but we also have the fear of getting stuck. Yes, that is life-changing for people to just be comfortable with learning how to manage those emotions.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Absolutely. Well, Valerie Sharlin, is a Functional Medicine Health Coach, Life Coach, and Brain Tuna Program Coach. You see people from all over the world. We see them in person; we see them via Zoom. People come to work with the entire team, but you also see clients of your own as well. Again, that can be done remotely. If people want to learn more about you and find out how they can work with you, we are going to send them to our Web site, FunctionalMedicine.Doctor, where they can sign up for a consultation. They can reach out directly to you. You have a page on our website. Is there anything you would like to share with people who might want to work with you?

Valerie Sharlin

I only work with patients who have Parkinson’s. They work a lot with spouses and children, so people who are caring for people in this situation can find it extremely draining, emotional, and stressful. They spend so much energy taking care of their spouses that they do not care for themselves. I have groups where I will bring caregivers together or work with them one-on-one so that the whole family structure gets comfortable because there is just one person who is ill, it is like throwing a stone. It affects everyone around you. It works for years and years and years with caregivers.

Kenneth Sharlin, MD

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us today at the Parkinson’s Life Summit. I hope you found all of this tremendous information valuable. We are here to help. Valerie is here to help. If you would like to reach her, check out the website functionalmedicine.doctor. Until we see each other for the next interview, It has been my great pleasure. Thank you again, Valerie Sharlin.

Valerie Sharlin

You are so welcome. Thank you.